Seth Godin Talks About Schools

Interesting comments about schools from Seth Godin's blog:

• A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
• Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount.
• Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future.
• Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
• If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.
• As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.