Wednesday 14 January 2015

If You Want to be Rich and Happy, Don’t Go to School Summary - Chapter 4

Chapter 4: My Child Is Doing Fine

1.      Traditional education is set up to reward the students it deems smart while systematically weeding out the undesirable less intelligent, “stupid” students. It is not a system set up to educate all the people that come in to it. It is set up to look for the smartest and to educate them. That’s why there are tests, grades, gifted programs, remedial programs and labels. It is a system of classifying, discriminating and segregating.
2.      Children don’t fail. It is the system that fails because it requires that a certain percentage of children must do poorly every year, year-in and year-out, starting the moment they enter kindergarten.
3.      In our current system of education, we are teaching children that the weak become the pawns and victims of the powerful. Built into our system is a belief that if I am to succeed there must be some sacrificial lambs. Others must fail for me to make it.
4.      For those parents that their children are doing well under such education system, they believe that their children are doing fine, without considering the situations of those poor performing students in the school.
5.      However the reality is that each of us is smart in some ways and less smart in others.
6.      Because this system is based on fear, students learn to prey upon each other. Instead of the strong standing up for the weak, we teach our student to turn their backs on those who do not do well.
7.      The current system teaches us that the goal of education is getting good grades or high scores on a test. Within this system that goal becomes more important than love, friendship, loyalty, trust or even personal dignity.
8.      You may have noticed that oftentimes the very best of academia are social introverts, brilliant within the academic system but socially lacking. They stick to themselves or with others of their kind. They are the ideal smart people that school praise. Students like these conform well and abide by the rules. They learn early that to love and help your classmate is not allowed; it’s called cheating. They avoid forming close relationships where helping a friend could mean losing their own position as the ‘smartest’ in the class.
9.      I am convinced that the most profound solutions will come through changing the way we educate our children. It is possible to create learning environment where people are excited about learning and where everyone is a winner.
10.  Each person has a unique gift. The purpose of education is to inspire and nurture that gift until it blooms. These human gifts do not bloom in environments where creativity is crushed and where memorizing facts, figures and formulas that adults deem necessary takes priority.

11.  The belief that “my child is doing fine,”” accompanied by a disregard for those children who aren’t, is costly. If we do not realize soon that we are in a closed system, and that the plight of the poor, the uneducated, the criminal, the unhappy, the lonely and the unfulfilled is only there because we humans created and are perpetuating the system that results in such inequities, then we all will have lost some of our humanity. What will it take for us to learn that if one fails on school, we all fail in some way?


Chapter 5: Where Is My Paycheck?


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