Submitted by Pachamama
In this article we will argue that the school system, at all levels, has outlived its usefulness and therefore can serve no desirable purpose in ‘development’. We will suggest that computers have made ‘knowing’ obsolete, that the brain of children respond negatively to the threats of punishment and examinations. That the 10,000 years it has taken us to reach knowledge obsolescence represents a much accelerated development when compared to the process of achieving bipedalism. This evolutionary state makes that which currently passes for education useless and therefore more and more unhelpful in any possible future. That the current system ignores the importance of spiritualism (not religion), basic healthy and other personal survivalist stratagems and is overly dependent on monetary considerations. That we need to design a future ‘of learning’ by tapping into the innate desires as driven by big, real world questions, a self-organized learning environment which maybe achievable through a broadband collaborative.
The current post-slavery educational system was basically established to run an empire – the British empire. Its objective was to create the very people we have today. A people who can manipulate numbers, keep records; people who after learning by rote are incapable of thinking outside those confines; who are mentally confined to a narrow way of thinking; people who are enemies to basic forms of creativity; national copiers who look elsewhere all the time for solutions to problems; people who wait for others to employ them; people who are willing to make millionaires out of any minority instead of self empowerment; people who lack the confidence to do for themselves, employ themselves, or build a national identity separate from their colonial past; national beggars who see their salvation with others, especially their former slave masters. People with a deep fear of expressing alternative ideas or committing them to words. People who live in the perpetual fear of shadows. This sounds like the quintessential Bajan to us.
Nearly 50 years after political ‘independence’ we still have an eleven plus exam. We still have credentialed people walking around with all types of degrees but no original knowledge is created or the new inventions or industries that would flow from another type of problem solving education. No ability to solve any of our current problems absent a heavy reliance from elsewhere. At the ‘primary’ level, we are still engaged in the business of developing fine motor skills as a prerequisite for writing when writing itself, as is being thought, is fast going out of usage and may indeed well be of marginal utility as a skill in the near future if now presently. The same for reading. We are not convinced that a distinct ability to read is really worth the enormous energies invested as part of the learning of a whole language which children do by age seven. Some, learn many languages by then. Maybe this skill could be a by-product of a larger problem solving oriented education starting at birth and not an end in itself. Or maybe the evolution towards computerization and voice recognition supports these radical transformations we posit.
Then you say there are all of these educated, we say mis-educated, people but we also have a hospital and a number of ‘alms houses’ full with old and not so old people with a few highly preventable or reversible diseases but there is a lack of courage to recommend simple lifestyle changes that could markedly increase quality of life in nearly 100% of cases. The national contradiction this represents could never emerge when an orgy of CXC and A-Level results misdirect our young people into a credentialism that has no meaning. For these very young people have little information about where their food comes from, how it gets to their tables and the politics of food and edible substances and the differences between these. But we say these are our ‘scholars’ who we are to spend ten of thousands of dollars to further indoctrinate with information which is largely irrelevant to our existence. When will we have secondary school age children developing drone technology, as a science project, or nanotechnology, or being rewarded for finding original solutions to problems we are currently grappling with, as a world?
We see the manifestations of this anachronistic pedagogy in the rise of the religious evangelicals. For this cultural expression is no nearer to the mark. Might we not have a national interest in a spirituality which is informed by our deeper history, where we are now and our collective aspirations for a certain kind of material future. That vision is unlikely to be informed by the commercialization of our fears as delivered by the handmaiden of slavery and colonialism. It could be a spiritualism which rests on a wider set of traditions instead of a singular and ingrained didactic. We may very well find that it is in religion were the strongest bonds to the worst of our history rest. The removal of those chains and the embrace of a more deeply rooted knowledge of self maybe helpful in the personal transformation that must come before the radical change we seek within our national consciousness. It must be at the highest levels of consciousness where we may best find our better selves.
In most places in the world education systems are failing. Privatized systems are not doing any better than government run systems. Even if you could get a highly privatized education for USD10,000 per month, like some do, we have to ask ourselves if that is the kind of world we really want to create or sustain. Should education be about the creation of societal disparities? In any event what could a prem school, on the eastern seaboard, teach that an average community college can not? Is this merely a function of marketing? The advance of technological innovation must mean that a number of people produced under the Barbados antiquated school system will never find work. It is already 20 years in the USA, for example, since people with advance degrees, even doctorates and post doctoral degrees, have been unable to find work and are smelling hell, living in their cars and so on. Who are the big brain people in our societies that think for 100 years into the future? Or are we all head and gut people? Is it now time to start planning for a different kind of future, given the state of the environments? These are questions we suggest our children could better answer.
We have attached a YouTube video of Professor Sugata Mitra. Mitra as he presents some unique ideas that maybe be helpful in developing a revolutionary approach to education:
Since adults have failed to make a better world and are in fact doing the reverse, it may well be time for our children to get a chance at saving themselves and their world. We need an inborn political anarchy within the system! We propose that all teachers with fossilized mentalities be fired forthwith. That children could be organized in groups of twelve to determined their own curricula and make changes if and when the children themselves determine. That the resources saved from the firing of teachers and the bureaucrats in a closed Ministry of Education be re-directed into creating more ‘classrooms’ with no more than 12 children each. That all the problems we adults have been fooling around with, should be given to all our children to solve as a full time occupation. Problems ranging from astronomy to zoology. That 21st century learning materials be put at the disposal of each classroom. And that our children be left alone to find solutions, organize themselves, with a bare minimum of adult intervention. We do not suggesting that these are the only ideas that maybe helpful in transforming the mis-education system in Barbados or elsewhere. Some former teaching professionals may have different arguments, ideas. Indeed, there maybe other methodologies which eclipse what Mitra posits. Our interest is to provoke what creativity we have to liberate our children from the bondage of a colonial mis-education which leaves too many behind. A misdirection from which no more human development can be derived.
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