The noose of schooling is tightening

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This text is part of: "Problem of Schooling" by Piotr Wozniak (2017-2024)

School damages your brain. School destroys people.

However, hardly anybody in society understands the mechanism by which the optimization process used in education inevitably leads to the tightening of the mortal noose.

Here is the feedback loop that inevitably leads to an increasing damage done by compulsory schooling:

  • rapid social and technological change leads to an increase in the demand for knowledgeable individuals. The value of expertise keeps increasing
  • with an increase in the value of expertise, the value of schooling increases (based on the immortal myth that "school is good for learning")
  • students and parents fight for the admission to "better" schools. Students, parents and teachers fight for "better" educational outcomes
  • as most of outcomes is based on short-term memory evaluations, the actual long-term outcomes are not part of the optimization process
  • due to the measurement methodology, the shortest path to passing exams involves an increasing dose of cramming
  • with more pressure, more volume, and less time, cramming becomes more prevalent, encouraged, and massive
  • as cramming detaches knowledge from its value, it undermines the link between knowledge and the reward system that motives learning
  • as a result, school quickly destroys the learn drive, and leads to learned helplessness
  • learned helplessness increases addictions, and its prevalence is reflected in mental health and suicide statistics (see: Limits on freedom lead to depression and suicide)
  • with a helpless mind, the learning process becomes automated, and devoid of knowledge valuation. This undermines comprehension which undermines the coveted expertise
  • with more emphasis on school results, we get a faster decline in the quality of learning, in mental health, and this adds to the obsession for "better" educational outcomes
  • as all reforms attempt to resolve obviously observable bottlenecks, in the process, they provide temporary relief that only makes it possible for the noose to tighten up
  • the acme of that optimization process is Finland, which is the admired model of friendly education. In Finland, students are deprived of their learn drive, and personality in small friendly increments! See: Finnish paradox
The optimization criteria used in reforming education inevitably lead to its increasing harmfulness

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure", Goodhart's law

Figure: Wrong reasoning about schooling generates an unhappy society: At the bottom of the picture, we can see how the coercive pressure of schooling converts a happy, carefree child into a well-performing student. Educational systems around the world aim at maximizing testing performance, e.g. as in the PISA benchmark. In the middle, we can see that coercive pressure has a bad impact on overall learning, primarily due to the fact that it undermines the learn drive, and only passionate learning brings optimum outcomes. At the top, we can see how the battles with school coercion can either break a student or make a rebel. Instead of actual learning, a student can learn helplessness, or learn to hate the coercive system. That hate can spill to many areas of life and culminate, in extreme cases, in terrorism, murder, or other forms of violence. In the end, by employing coercion, instead of living in a happy world of free learning, we live in the world characterized by apathy, helplessness, psychiatric disorders, addictions, hate, and violence. The remedy is trivial: respect for human needs!



For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru