Rethink, relearn
3rd September 2011
These are students who demonstrate great daring, creativity and teamwork during long hours playing shoot-’em-up multiplayer video games, a much maligned pursuit that teaches any number of valuable cognitive skills. Yet in the classroom, they stare blankly at chalkboards when they’re not stealing glances at smartphones, doing just enough to avoid being singled out and punished.
Among public school teachers and their advocates, a new phrase is in vogue: “corporate education reform.” The conceit is that advocates of choice-based education reform really want to privatize public education, to make a profit off young people and embrace the latest corporate fads.
But history tells us that today’s public schools are the legacy of corporate fads from the 1900s, when large industrial enterprises were keenly interested in securing a docile workforce that recognized and respected hierarchies. The tinkering, self-starting spirit that had been a necessity in a frontier society was snuffed out by design. We’ve been taught that education is this constricted, standardized and homogenized thing that happens in buildings called schools in between the ringing of school bells.