What's Schooling?

I have always believe that a big part of education is gaining the ability to push boundaries and go beyond the limits of convention. For this will bring forth creativity and drive innovation. For it is true human nature to be progressive and go beyond who or what we are, to make change in our lives, to be who we are and above all be HAPPY.

Hence, I found this interesting article that encapsulate a lot of thoughts and concerns about what's wrong with school. Check out full article by Dr Azli Rahman at here or here.

"What is schooling?"

Teaching, as the thinker Anatole France said, is a subversive act. It must not only inform and remind but also must excite, agitate, and ignite the fire within. It must create troubled minds and leave students with more questions and some answers. It is not a funneling process; it is not a banking concept. It is a romantic act of flowering and transforming. It is a cybernetic act of creating beautiful patterns of thinking in each and every curious mind that we are entrusted to help liberate.

If you can teach, subvert. Turn your students into subversives; ones who will challenge authority and ignite revolutions. Help them revolt against conventional wisdom. Let them question scientific facts. Let them also question historical facts because there are none. Let the children grow into intellectually radical beings who would will refuse to be turned into human cattle that know only how to graze in wastelands cultivated by the modern corporatist states. Let them become radical humanists who will throw the greedy ones out of power.

The world we live in is too damaging to the human mind. It makes us docile. It makes us “dreadful” as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard would say. It creates this mental chronic fatigue syndrome in us with information overload but not enough of it being processed. The mind cannot reflect because the conditions for reflective moments are not created. We are, as many an information theorist would say, drowned in information and starved for knowledge. Governments find it useful to have unthinking citizens. It is easier to control good workers than to control good thinking citizens.

In Malaysian public universities, we have courses in ‘thinking skills’ but we still conduct witch-hunts. In our public schools, we say we infuse critical and creative thinking skills in our curriculum, but we still produce students who think that rote-memorisation is the best form of learning. Our government wants its citizens to become ‘towering’ people but we have oppressive measures to silent dissenting views.

Teachers need to understand what is mentally ailing this nation. They must help children find heroes within themselves. They must teach what independent thinking means and to fight against those who wish to shackle the mind of the independent thinker. When one man stands up for justice and his entire political clan revolted against him, we have a classic example of what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci called ‘hegemony’. What is the use of one being schooled if in the long run the agenda is to be engineered as beings who would create and propagate structures of oppression such as militarism, structural violence, state-sponsored terrorism, engines of mass destruction and instruments of the perpetuation of Space Age imperialism?

Read on here.