Education That Matches the Rhetoric
Dear Pedro,
Yes, we've utterly crushed the liberating and empowering spirit of education. The story you related about Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl from Pakistan, is an important reminder of what once seemed worth living and dying for.
The roots of the story are complex, and mixed. Formal education as we know it was designed either to teach the religious and lay leaders of the nation/tribe. It was designed precisely—as were specific other symbols (like particular types of clothing, materials, hats, and forms of address, etc.)—to distinguish the "Leaders" from "The Others." These differences served to mark the former as members of a different and superior species, speaking a different language (or at least dialect) with a different vocabulary and different reference points and serving as experts in the myths and often esoteric understandings that justified their anointment.
So the idea of expanding education has been a long and arduous journey. While an apprentice's education was honored among craftsmen (and in its own way leaders were apprenticed to other leaders ... princes to kings?), the two paths were long long ago divorced.
The earliest American public schools actually followed in this same dual path. While making it easier for workingmen's children to learn the ABCs (which for the wealthy was often left to tutors and nannies), that
Yes, we've utterly crushed the liberating and empowering spirit of education. The story you related about Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old girl from Pakistan, is an important reminder of what once seemed worth living and dying for.
The roots of the story are complex, and mixed. Formal education as we know it was designed either to teach the religious and lay leaders of the nation/tribe. It was designed precisely—as were specific other symbols (like particular types of clothing, materials, hats, and forms of address, etc.)—to distinguish the "Leaders" from "The Others." These differences served to mark the former as members of a different and superior species, speaking a different language (or at least dialect) with a different vocabulary and different reference points and serving as experts in the myths and often esoteric understandings that justified their anointment.
So the idea of expanding education has been a long and arduous journey. While an apprentice's education was honored among craftsmen (and in its own way leaders were apprenticed to other leaders ... princes to kings?), the two paths were long long ago divorced.
The earliest American public schools actually followed in this same dual path. While making it easier for workingmen's children to learn the ABCs (which for the wealthy was often left to tutors and nannies), that