Educational Malpractice – The Child Manufacturing Process
“Asking kids to meet target on standardized tests is like making them meet a sales quota. Our kids are not commodities.” ~K.L. Nielson
In many nations around the world there is a struggle currently going on between two very different paradigms for educating children. The dominant system has been in place for over a hundred years. It is sometimes called the “factory model.” This is where schools are set up to administer “essential knowledge” to large batches of same-age children simultaneously. After instruction has been completed the children are tested, to see how much of the knowledge they were able to understand and remember.
This system is based on the way factories and scientific experiments were designed at the beginning of the last century. While on the surface this approach seems to be about transmitting “knowledge” to children there is also an unspoken “hidden curriculum” being taught. As John Taylor Gatto has written, such schooling teaches youth to obey authority, to comply with instructions, to be willing to engage in difficult activities that often seem meaningless, and to accept that society is comprised of people with different levels of talent and social status.
Over the last decades, research in education and child development indicates that the factory model is based on several faulty assumptions. It assumes that learning can be measured by standardized tests, and that all children will learn at the same rate and in the same manner. This is just not true. The fact that children learn best when something is meaningful, enjoyable and interesting for them is ignored. The importance of learning in groups and from slightly older children is also not considered relevant.
As Ken Robinson has described in his TED talk “Changing Education Paradigms“ (with Educational Malpractice – The Child Manufacturing Process | Creative by Nature:
