2013/02/03

Why is there a problem with Secondary Education?

Ever since The Enlightenment we have increasingly come to identify consciousness with rationality & the ego. But rationality is a left-brain concept - and is only capable of describing half the world - while the ego is a product of the monkey mind. The other half, the creative, intuitive aspect of the human animal has no place in our modern world of quantification and control. And until that changes nothing else will change.

This is a global curse afflicting the Western thought & acts reciprocally with the nuclear reductionism of science to create a mind-lock, every bit as powerful to contemporary consciousness as voodoo to a primitive one! And since the impulse to control is one thing that unites educrats & pols everywhere I don’t foresee anything changing unless we reach some unimaginable kind of crisis. That is, unless there is someone with the necessary charisma hangs on inside the system & becomes a catalyst articulating a coherent alternative in the echelons of the pyramid. Probably these people exist. It’s just that the current archetype is so powerful that it dominates the landscape, and people are such absolute sheep that they can't /daren't oppose the dominant thought-form of the age. That’s why Gove has the wind in his sails.

The subsidiary problem I’ve come to realise is that probably only a single digit percentage of a population actually thinks for themselves - or indeed is even capable of it. The overwhelming majority (at least of the British) will willingly allow themselves to be herded into cattle pens provided they're adequately fed & watered. I see the state educational system as a vast sausage machine designed to grind out a literate compliant workforce, trained to respond to a series of ever-receding carrots placed in front of their faces. There’s a very helpful remark of Jung’s: 'Love & Power cannot coexist’ - which we might rephrase as ‘Love & Gove cannot coexist!’

People bemoan the success of private education in preparing people for leadership positions; but the one thing it bestows on its pupils (apart from a sense of privilege) is the power to think for themselves. Now this could be provided within the state system, but only by freeing teachers from central control & allowing schools to create their own culture, as private schools do. But that is the one thing pols & educrats will never agree to. The rhetoric is that Free Schools & Academies will do this. On another planet! So, there isn't an answer.

I'm not the least bit pessimistic, because - in Gershwin’s lyric - ‘I know how many many times the worm has turned.’ Humanity has an extraordinary ability to sleepwalk to the edge of the cliff & suddenly wheel round spontaneously as enough people see the disaster coming to convince the rest. Another of Jung’s dicta is that it isn't lust that is the besetting sin of humanity it's laziness. People collude in their own worst interest. [See research on why the poor vote Republican & against Medicare by Jonathan Haidt] Between elections they say the public answers polls by saying they wouldn’t mind paying more tax if they got better health & education. In practise they NEVER vote for it, & are ALWAYS swayed by the party offering tax cuts - which is invariably the ‘propertied’ party whose constituency by & large can afford not to use public services. Paradoxically, research in The Spirit Level conclusively demonstrates that in societies where a social equilibrium is maintained by an element of redistributive taxation (Scandinavian countries & Japan) every index of health, social cohesiveness and  personal wellbeing is superior to societies that permit colossal disparities of wealth (the Anglo-Saxon model).

So, the issue is far wider than education. Maybe examinitis or exammania will change in my lifetime. Maybe it won’t.

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