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SHIKSHANTAR: The Peoples’ institute for rethinking education and development |
Some Aspects of the Culture of
Schooling
The
Culture of Schooling...
1) Labels, ranks and sorts human beings. It
creates a rigid social hierarchy consisting of a small elite class of ‘highly
educated’ and a large lower class of ‘failures’ and ‘illiterates’, based on
levels of school achievement.
2) Imposes uniformity and standardization. It propagates the viewpoint that diversity is
a problem, which must be removed if society is to progress.
3) Spreads fear,
insecurity, violence and silence through its externally-imposed, military-like
discipline.
4) Forces human beings to violently compete
against each other over scarce resources in rigid win-lose situations.
5) Confines the motivation for learning to
examinations, certificates and jobs. It suppresses all non-school motivations
to learn and kills all desire to engage in critical self-evaluation. It
centralizes control over the human learning process into the State-Market nexus,
taking power away from individuals and communities.
6) Commodifies all
human beings, Nature, knowledge and social relationships. They are to be extracted, exploited, bought
and sold.
7) Fragments and compartmentalizes knowledge,
human beings and the natural world. It
de-links knowledge from wisdom, practical experiences and specific contexts.
8) Artificially separates human rationality from
human emotions and the human spirit. It imposes a single view of rationality
and logic on all people, while simultaneously
devaluing many other knowledge systems.
9) Privileges literacy (in a few elite languages)
over all other forms of human expression and creation. It drives people to
distrust their local languages. It prioritizes newspapers, textbooks,
television as the only reliable sources of information. These forms of
State-Market controlled media cannot be questioned by the general public.
10)
Reduces the spaces and opportunities for ‘valid’ human learning by demanding
that they all be funneled through a centrally-controlled institution. It
creates artificial divisions between learning and home, work, play,
spirituality.
11)
Destroys the dignity of labor; devalues the learning that takes place through
manual work.
12)
Breaks intergenerational bonds of family and community and increases people’s
dependency on the Nation-State and Government, on Science and Technology, and
on the Market for livelihood and identity.
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21 Fatehpura • telePhone: 294-451-303 •
FAX: 294-451-941 EMAIL: <Shikshantar@yahoo.com> www.swaraj.org/shikshantar |