Education

gemini://sdf.org/icemanfr/23-04.gmi

> The deepest problem is that Emmanuel Macron and his government see school as an enterprise to produce docile workers. PISA ranking, in which French do badly, is the excuse ...But is it really a good ranking for everyone or everything? I don't think so. When I talk to young people, I can certainly say that it is bad for most of them. For France, and of course for the rest of the world history. Bad at dates and bad at explanations. Unfortunately, this new history curriculum won't change that fact.

This is not a new practice; the Prussian education system has been widely imitated. When done right it offers free schooling for poor citizens. The "curriculum inculcates a strong national identity" which could yield civic pride, or may promote exciting world wars against terrible and/or inferior foreigners, or exciting problems with internal outgroups (those with the wrong skin color, wrong orientation, wrong age, wrong wealth, …). Jekyll when it goes well, Hyde on the other side. The schooling is efficient and does reduce illiteracy. And if the population is going up, lots, you may need to stack 'em deep and teach 'em cheap.

"Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto (1992) points out problems of the Prussian model as implemented in some parts of America, and one can probably find other critiques. I probably need to re-read it, as it's been a few years. One might find that collective state shooling goes back, at least in America, to some time before the Prussian model was a thing.

dumbing-us-down.pdf

Similar claims for the sorry state of education in Britain are made by Mark Fisher in "Capitalist Realism". So this is a rather international affair, and one that has been around for a while. Bertrand Russell also had thoughts in "On Education" and was not always positive about the public school system.

Alexander the Great meanwhile had Aristotle for a tutor, and look how that turned out. Maybe there is a goldilocks zone somewhere between that and the Prussian model?

/blog/2023/09/12/on-education.gmi