Emily Lake
Might be a replicant
- Joined
- Jul 7, 2014
- Messages
- 6,349
- Location
- It's a desert out there
- Gender
- Agenderist
- Basic Beliefs
- Atheist
But the current educational system does not take into account individual happiness. It takes into account what was dictated by industrialism in the 19th century. Let's push those children towards careers meeting the demand of an economy based on profit and accumulation of material wealth.
As a result, so many adults have lost touch with what it means to have a career based on what makes you most happy. What they envisioned as children to become as adults was stifled via the current educational system. They are indeed being discouraged from becoming adults who will rely on their own individual intelligence, so diverse from other children, so differently interactive and dynamic and so distinct. They are to be conformed to the vision of a society where the pursuit of happiness can only be achieved via material wealth.
At the risk of creating an entirely new derail here... the idea that we should each be individually fulfilled with our careers, and that education is for that individual fulfillment isn't something that the "current" educational system has lost sight of, it's essentially a new idea being added to education. It is the idea that they should NOT conform to society that is actually the new idea here.
For thousands of years, education consisted of being taught by your parents to do whatever they had done. For the vast majority of people, that was farming. Formal education was reserved only for the wealthy and the priesthood. That formal education served the purpose of allowing the wealthy to maintain their wealth.
More recently, within the last couple of hundred years, basic education was made available to all children. This wasn't necessarily to enable individual pursuit of happiness, but to enable those children to lead productive lives in an industrial world. As we became more technologically advanced, most children did not follow int eh footsteps of their parents and stay home on the farm. Instead they worked in factories and stores, in cities. To do so, they needed to be able to read and to have a basic understanding of arithmetic.
For the overwhelming majority of human history, education, in all its various forms (including learning by example, apprenticeships, and formal education of various sorts) has been aimed very specifically at enabling each generation to be productive members of society when they reach adulthood.
The idea that individual happiness outweighs productiveness as a goal for education is a very new concept.