Re-Education: Part 3

“You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.”

~ Galileo Galilei

Isn't it funny where an able pianist keep failing their subject just because they can't estimate standard error in statistics? Should a national athletes be scolded for their lack of skill in counting the validity score? What about the painters who were dragged to the headmaster's office just because he can't perfectly write Proclamation of Independence text?
Ours is a ridiculous education system, where subjects are broken into smaller pieces, with an emphasis on the technical and obscure, without any obvious instrumental value. Combined with the idea that neutrality is a condition of academic integrity, it's crystal clear that our educations are useless for public good. Too many of today's students graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel what they are good at isn’t valued by schools. Too many think they’re not good at anything.

 

Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn't matter where you go (you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't). At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.
Everywhere on earth, mathematics and languages are on top, humanities in the middle and arts on the bottom in the academic hierarchy. As children grow, we educate them from the waist up. And then--in higher education like university--just the head. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. We didn’t let the students be the person they wanted to be, instead we forced them to be the person that was working for a master—in whip and carrot manner.

We should usher a radical rethink of the world's educational system, the one which subjects are interacting each others to allow us to connect education and social transformation. We should create a system where students continuously move outside the classroom to engage the world directly. The cross-disciplinary education is what we needed now, because frankly, our society had evolved much, today's education should be nothing like 10 years ago. We should create the school environment where students are passionate about their goals, an environment which allow the imagination and creativity. We should adjust our moral shift of education from 'traditional' and 'rigid' to 'flexible' and 'relevant', and NOT by breaking the subject into smaller scale for the sake of specialization, but by allowing the students to have their own 'personal space' to give birth to the dancing stars inside them.

"He is to be educated because he is a man, and not because he is to make shoes, nails, and pins."

~William Ellery Channing

END.

(PS: these three writings upon education are influenced by Sir Ken Robinson and Liz Coleman speeches on TED.)