As so many other things, what makes education a tricky thing to manage is the many different ideologies and agendas that demand to have a say in it.
The market wants the bare minimum that creates a never ending pool of cheap labor, preferably one that cannot fight back. The right will often demand something “patriotic”, “religious” and ban loads of “subversive” content, in some cases praising military teaching as ideal (see Brazil). The left usually wants kids to learn social stuff, like sociology, philosophy, etc, things “without market value”, but which can help them realize why some stuff is the way it is. Then you have school directors who may swing any each way and individual teachers who may comply or try to “subvert” the higher ups.
One of the things that annoys me a lot about education is that, in much of the world, it still works on a assembly-line logic. Make kid pass through process, test to see if it passes minimal quality assurance, proceed to next step; if not, repeat the entire previous process (imagine redoing a whole fucking year because you couldn’t be arsed about one of the many things that are pointlessly taught at school). Maximize production, reduce costs (1 teacher per 40 kids)
“When education does not free a person, the dream of the oppressed is to become the opressor.” - Paulo Freire was so damn right that, to this day, the Brazilian right demonizes him, wrongly accusing public schools and universities of being “breeding grounds of communists” for using his method (which is bullshit, his method was aimed first at teaching adults how to read and, afaik, no public schools ask the kids to “bring their home experiences” so they can be contextualized in the teaching)
As so many other things, what makes education a tricky thing to manage is the many different ideologies and agendas that demand to have a say in it.
The market wants the bare minimum that creates a never ending pool of cheap labor, preferably one that cannot fight back. The right will often demand something “patriotic”, “religious” and ban loads of “subversive” content, in some cases praising military teaching as ideal (see Brazil). The left usually wants kids to learn social stuff, like sociology, philosophy, etc, things “without market value”, but which can help them realize why some stuff is the way it is. Then you have school directors who may swing any each way and individual teachers who may comply or try to “subvert” the higher ups.
One of the things that annoys me a lot about education is that, in much of the world, it still works on a assembly-line logic. Make kid pass through process, test to see if it passes minimal quality assurance, proceed to next step; if not, repeat the entire previous process (imagine redoing a whole fucking year because you couldn’t be arsed about one of the many things that are pointlessly taught at school). Maximize production, reduce costs (1 teacher per 40 kids)
“When education does not free a person, the dream of the oppressed is to become the opressor.” - Paulo Freire was so damn right that, to this day, the Brazilian right demonizes him, wrongly accusing public schools and universities of being “breeding grounds of communists” for using his method (which is bullshit, his method was aimed first at teaching adults how to read and, afaik, no public schools ask the kids to “bring their home experiences” so they can be contextualized in the teaching)