Education

Bertrand Russell

3h  ·

“Education should have two objects: first, to give definite knowledge — reading and writing, language and mathematics, and so on; secondly, to create those mental habits which will enable people to acquire knowledge and form sound judgments for themselves. The first of these we may call information, the second intelligence.“

— Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda (1922)

AsAbove SoBelow

1d  ·

/ Isaac Asimov /

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"The only function of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing. What's more, formal education stops; self-education never does."

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"Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth, he linked this distant future to the Robot stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories."

W

Honorary vicepresident of MENSA community of prodigious kids and people.

Native name: Yiddish: יצחק אזימאװ ‎

Born: c. January 2, 1920, Petrovichi, Russian SFSR

Died: April 6, 1992, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.

Occupation: Writer, professor of biochemistry

Nationality: Russian (1920-1922), Soviet (1922-1928), American (1928-1992)

Education: Columbia University (BA, MA, PhD)

Genre: Science fiction (hard SF, social SF), mystery, popular science

Subject: Popular science, science textbooks, essays, history, literary criticism

Literary movement: Golden Age of Science Fiction

Science Past, Science Future (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1975), p. 208

Perhaps the best known and most influential example of this argument comes from Alvin Toffler who decried the “Industrial Era School” in his 1970 book Future Shock:

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.

The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throw-back elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions. Children marched from place to place and sat in assigned stations. Bells rang to announce changes of time.

The inner life of the school thus became an anticipatory mirror, a perfect introduction to industrial society. The most criticized features of education today – the regimentation, lack of individualization, the rigid systems of seating, grouping, grading and marking, the authoritarian role of the teacher – are precisely those that made mass public education so effective an instrument of adaptation for its place and time.

https://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model