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Schools are Factories

rigid institutions make inflexible tools

BEWARE: Opinion

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Elizabeth Simcoe Junior Public School⁠

is a 5 min walk from our house, and it’s a good public school.

However, the public education system is either [1] a widget factory or [2] a butcher shop - which one depends on your world view:

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[1] are children built-to-blueprint from raw materials and the grit of engineer educators - productive adults made-to-order, hot-and-fresh, just-in-time?

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[2] or are children like good cuts of meat, sculpted from solid blocks of flesh and thought, their imperfections carved off, fat stripped away - the will of the child hammered, chiseled, and tenderized with precision and persistence?

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But hooooold on... kids aren’t widgets OR steaks...right?

Right. They’re more like plants...or animals... or any other complex living system.

You can’t build an animal cell by cell (though science will try) - the animal’s guided by its genetics to create itself through each successive event and experience. A child needs love, support, and protection while they conduct the experiments that reveal them to themself.

The great complexity of an organic system, which is essential to its life, cannot be created from above directly; it can only be generated indirectly.

In a system which approaches the character of nature, the parts must be adapted with an almost infinite degree of subtlety: and this requires that the process of adaptation be going on through the system, constantly. It requires that each part at every level, no matter how small, has the power to adapt itself to its own processes.

The love, and care, and patience needed to bring every part into adjustment with the forces acting on it, can only exist when each detailed part is cared for, and shaped, by someone who has the time and patience and knowledge to understand the forces acting on it.

Christopher Alexander,

The Timeless Way of Building⁠

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Where does AI get its inspiration? How has it divined the pattern of the modern educational institution, where kids are just copies of the original Foob and Bort?

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How will the public education system simultaneously reduce its asset deficit and its resource/support/training deficits? We need better buildings AND reskilled educators AND more support staff.

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The current system seems to have passed a number of tipping points, where more teachers are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and lacking the bandwidth and/or knowledge to interact with children with adequate depth of emotion and acknowledgement of the power imbalance. Kids who need any support outside the barest minimum (ie, who don’t fit through the cattle chute) are tossed in the backlog and expected to fix themselves or be demolished.

Parents read books about school-induced trauma and Emotionally-Based School Avoidance while Educators use fear-based discipline and ugly reward systems to slice their steaks into neat meat piles. “Behave and I’ll give you a star. The person with the most stars gets a prize. The person with no stars will be shamed and othered. Why aren’t you behaving? I’m going to suggest to your parents that you be tested for Generalized Anxiety Disorder, for which there are a range of medications available.”

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Kids want to be safely squished between graham crackers and allowed to explore within the bounds of unconditional support.

Instead, they’re set on fire by a loveless, sparking electrical outlet of a school system - then punished for the smoke and the smell.

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Our 7-yr old asked to leave school because she no longer felt safe there. She suffered for two years until she finally got us to listen to her. I respect her for that - a story for later.

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Public school is an institution, a system. No individual or group is to blame for the shitty conditions - instead every member of the system shares some responsibility. Those few who acknowledge it are often quick to push it over to some higher authority - the ministry of education, the school board, the principal, the teacher....

I could stay to fight, join & form committees, map problem spaces, build tools of organization, shout, kick, propose solutions, tack on sub-systems, crusade, protest. But our kid needs help now and we're tired. So we remove ourselves from this system and abdicate responsibility.

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👉
`Ontario is Loafing`⁠
👈

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Schools are Factories

BEWARE: Opinion

But hooooold on... kids aren’t widgets OR steaks...right?

👉 Ontario is Loafing⁠ 👈

👉
`Ontario is Loafing`⁠
👈