Post date: Nov 28, 2015 9:31:23 AM
Excellent. From a biography/blog on Elon Musk. Extract from a section on education.
"School makes things worse. One of my favorite thinkers, writer Seth Godin (whose blog is bursting with first principles reasoning wisdom), explains in a TED Talk about school that the current education system is a product of the Industrial Age, a time that catapulted productivity and the standard of living. But along with many more factories came the need for many more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around that goal. He explains:
The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow—we had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. “We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts.”
Couple that concept with what another favorite writer of mine, James Clear, explained recently on his blog:
In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 percent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”
It makes sense, right? Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it’s actually much more of a way of thinking—it’s the thinking version of painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that’s skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us on the exact opposite concept—to follow the leader, single-file, and to get really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.4
What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and squeezing it tightly into a preset shape.
And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever software was installed in us for everything—software that, coming from parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago."
Sorry guys, the institutional church is exactly the same. The systems needs tithers that do home cell on Wednesday, mission trips when they are students, and also they mustn't ask difficult questions the pastor cant answer.
Its called "Under Cover"!