Hi Joanna. A helpful and digestible piece and I share the concerns you have expressed here and elsewhere. I take the point that for at least a generation now the official education system has been based on the assumption that the future will be different and that we must try to anticipate what it will be like. This amounts to a dangerous undervaluation of the human mind. Old fashioned education was also keen on the inculcation of values but at an academic level taught students the importance of study and critical appraisal - a completely different process than teaching critical theory of course. On this basis students were sent out to face whatever the future threw at them - it was their responsibility as adults to deal with change as it took place. Instead, the adults of today have imposed their ideas as if the future was going to work out exactly as they think it will (or should do). This is patently absurd, the sort of notion that we would expect to find in the satire of Voltaire perhaps. The arrogance is shocking. Who in the past would have believed that British ‘socialists’, once great advocates of education as a liberating and transformational force for the individual and the community, would end up preaching and enforcing conformity as if that was the highest good that humanity could aspire to.
Hi Joanna. A helpful and digestible piece and I share the concerns you have expressed here and elsewhere. I take the point that for at least a generation now the official education system has been based on the assumption that the future will be different and that we must try to anticipate what it will be like. This amounts to a dangerous undervaluation of the human mind. Old fashioned education was also keen on the inculcation of values but at an academic level taught students the importance of study and critical appraisal - a completely different process than teaching critical theory of course. On this basis students were sent out to face whatever the future threw at them - it was their responsibility as adults to deal with change as it took place. Instead, the adults of today have imposed their ideas as if the future was going to work out exactly as they think it will (or should do). This is patently absurd, the sort of notion that we would expect to find in the satire of Voltaire perhaps. The arrogance is shocking. Who in the past would have believed that British ‘socialists’, once great advocates of education as a liberating and transformational force for the individual and the community, would end up preaching and enforcing conformity as if that was the highest good that humanity could aspire to.
Spot on.