what is the point of education?

What's it all about?
Jay Doubleyou: the purpose of education: from china to prussia to the united states

Is it about training people to work?
Jay Doubleyou: neets - again
'The best engineers come from Germany' - BBC News

Is it about learning facts?
Jay Doubleyou: oxford graded reader and bbc film: hard times by charles dickens
Hard Times- Charles Dickens - YouTube

Is it about domesticating people?

Some of their most provocative ideas are in the area of education, which they believe is a form of domestication. “One of the main reasons so few animals can be domesticated is that only rare social species let humans sit in the role of dominant pack animal,” they write. “And we, too, naturally resist submitting to other humans.” They cite a study showing that unschooled workers from less-developed parts of the world aren’t nearly as productive as rich-world workers, even at repetitive manual labor that you might not think demands much education. According to Hanson and Simler, these unschooled workers “won’t show up for work reliably on time, or they have problematic superstitions, or they prefer to get job instructions via indirect hints instead of direct orders, or they won’t accept tasks and roles that conflict with their culturally assigned relative status with co-workers, or they won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before.” In the rich world, we have learned to do all those things, and mostly we learned to do them at school, where “an industrial-era school system prepares us for the modern workplace.” Hanson and Simler explain:

Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask for permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile. . . . In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its effect on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity. Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.

Having watched one son go all the way through secondary school, and with another who still has three years to go, I found that account painfully close to the reality of what modern schooling is like.

Futures Forum: Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends?
Can Economists and Humanists Ever Be Friends? | The New Yorker

John Taylor Gatto has a few ideas (from 2:08):

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Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
John Taylor Gatto: On Life and Education - YouTube

And:
Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube

And (from 2.30):



JOHN TAYLOR GATTO: "BEYOND SCHOOLING" 5 - YouTube
Against School – John Taylor Gatto | Anti Oligarch

Here are the six principles again:

Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races."

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers.

Against School – John Taylor Gatto | Anti Oligarch
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

See also:
The Underground History Of American Education- John Taylor Gatto, full.wmv - YouTube

And:

What does the school do with the children? Gatto states the following assertions in "Dumbing Us Down":
It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
It makes them indifferent.
It makes them emotionally dependent.
It makes them intellectually dependent.
It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised

Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto - best teacher ever
John Taylor Gatto - The Purpose Of Schooling - YouTube

You might try home-schooling instead:
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
BBC Breakfast Interview with Ann & Josh Newstead 11th June 2009 - YouTube

Or do it yourself:
Jay Doubleyou: can children teach themselves - using technology?
Jay Doubleyou: teaching the teachers: the future of education
Jay Doubleyou: education happens beyond the classroom
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