Trained to dream small dreams

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete. 

G.K. Chesterton

Fifty years ago, businesses realized that they were facing two related problems: They needed more workers, more well-trained, compliant, and yes, cheap workers willing to follow specific instructions… 

and

They needed more customers. More well-trained, pliable, eager-to-consume customers watching TV regularly and waiting to buy what they had to sell. Dreamers don’t help with either of these problems. Dreamers aren’t busy applying for jobs at minimum wage, they don’t eagerly buy the latest fashions, and they’re a pain in the ass to keep happy.

School is a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff. These students are trained to dream small dreams.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding. 

Ezra Pound

For a really long time, I thought more drilling, more schooling, and more homework was the only way. That schools lacked rigor and were failing students by not pumping them with enough data.Then I realized that all of the people in this parade have already been through school. They’ve received the best their community could afford,  but  it  didn’t work because our effort was based on the wrong strategy.

The bad decisions we see every day aren’t the result of lack of data, or lack of access to data.

No, they’re the result of a schooling culture that is creating exactly what it set out to create.

Education was developed by Eugenicists to develop compliant adults.  It is protected by Unions to maintain the Status Quo.  It is demagogued by politicians.  And it is broken.

Read Seth Godin’s manifesto on Education.  30,000 words to inspire.  I’m serious.  It’s worth the 30 minutes.  Stop listening to the bickering about our education system and spend some time looking at a problem differently.  Life is not either, or.  There is a third way.  Understanding the origins of why we do what we do leads to new observations.

Stop Stealing Dreams

Did you read it?  What did you think?  If you didn’t read it, why not?

It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense. 

Robert G. Ingersoll