I can’t help thinking that the system is flawed. I wish I didn’t and then I could just blindly comply and get on with it.
We are pushed into school at a very early age and told what to think and what to learn and even how to learn it, no free thinking permitted. I feel we are taught to conform, to accept life as it is, not to question it. We are taught that we grow up, get a job, any job, buy a house, get married, be good, tow the line, have a family and then teach them the same conformity. Letting their opinions and thoughts be drowned out by the noise of others opinions. We should be encouraging free thinking and the ability to follow your own inner voice. After all no one else knows yourself, quite like you. Teach us how to follow our own intuition and passions, so as not to have to live someone else’s life.
Imagine a world where we allowed our kids the space and freedom to find and then follow their own passions, instead of forcing them to make career and life choices before they truly know their own minds. Squashing everyone into the same small box with walls all around them is not working. Just look at our rates of depression and suicide. Why are they so high?
What if my kids don’t fit into this box, what if they don’t or can’t conform to what society expects of them? Surely it is time to realise that not everyone will. That is the beauty of human nature after all, that we are all different in many ways. So it stands to reason that not all of us will thrive in our tightly controlled world. It is time we looked at what options there are for those who don’t want to or can’t follow along. We are squashing our citizens creativity, killing their joy with this thinking and teaching and expecting far too much from some.
I don’t have all the answers, I don’t pretend to but I see unhappy and pressured kids, and bored sometimes miserable adults who are forced to work in jobs that require little or no imagination, like a rat stuck on a wheel, to simply feed and house their families, which as a basic human right just shouldn’t cost so damn much. If shelter and food was free then jobs would be about finding your passions, following your dreams and being happy. Instead we are working like slaves day after day, making millions for someone else all whilst scratching together enough money just to eat and have a home, in a job that sucks the life right out of you. Some people are lucky enough to find out their passion early in life, these people tend to do well in the system, but what about those that don’t? What do we have in place for those people? Has life really become about working for 35 years fixing machinery in a toilet roll factory just so we can be clothed, have a car to travel to that mind numbing job, put a roof over our heads and eat! Surely there is more to life than that?
I remember Bob Jones that bob jones yes when he was in election mode on education making a statement “education should be about learning how to learn”.. to me that was a profound statement, probably the only one he has ever managed to make, but nonetheless it has stayed with me to this day that he was and is 100% correct
Brilliant post and one I can’t agree with more. It was almost like you are channeling my thoughts!
The answer is actually simple AND legal. Home school your kids.
Legal yes, simple, not so much. Easier if in a two parent family dynamic and one of those parents solely earns enough income to support all others within their financial necessities and the other parent is ingratiated with sufficient personal skills and wherewithal to do the child/children homeschool justice. Nice idea though.
Imagine a world where we allowed our kids the space and freedom to find and then follow their own passions, instead of forcing them to make career and life choices before they truly know their own minds. Squashing everyone into the same small box with walls all around them is not working. Just look at our rates of depression and suicide. Why are they so high?
Suicide and depression aside for a moment, that small box you speak of has been getting ever smaller – anyone with children going through the NCEA model will be familiar with the shoehorning into boxes factory that High Schools have become. In order to achieve said NCEA, a minimum of ‘credits’ must be achieved, fair enough, achieving anything needs to be meaningful in order to be valid. The problems arise with exactly what credits and how many of them must be achieved in what specific subjects in order for NCEA level anything to be achieved at all, for instance, a minimum of 10 from numeracy and a minimum of 10 from literacy of the total minimum of 80 at level one in order a achieve level one NCEA. So what’s wrong with that? Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Yes and no… Yes, we want students attaining certain competencies in basic subjects like numeracy and literacy and yes we as a country are having consistent uninspiring statistics on it. The problem is that if a student falls short on those minimum credits in the mandatory subjects – they get no NCEA level whatever at all, irrespective of how they may have shone in other areas. Sorry kid, we know you worked really hard and you’re incredibly talented at art, creative writing, and have very high reading comprehension, but you suck at math and didn’t quite get all the numeracy credits, soooo – no NCEA for you! No NCEA = no university entry, which has been getting steadily tighter on their entry requirements and requiring ever higher credits in specific subjects. The pressure on high school kids who don’t even know their own minds yet to “decide” what they want “to do” so they can take the “right” subjects to get the right credits to get entry into university is huge and teenage kids a stressing out on it.
Two of the many things that really bother me about this is once kids are pressured into making premature life decisions, there is very little room to change their minds, and for those who struggle like the child in the example above, there is very little extra support to get them over the line, at least that is my experience with lower decile schools.
Them’s the breaks kid, hope you like the fast food industry, I hear they’re opening a new Mc Donald’s near that new cluster housing complex, you should apply there, or try one of the supermarkets, you may get a job out back.
Yep that’s life, birth, work, death, isn’t that the saying and taxes. Or you can be an artist like me and have no kids, no owned house and be mostly an outcast like Van Gogh and maybe one day after I die my life’s work will be recognised as culture…? And you know what I love every minute of what I do. I can’t stand being bored at work for a wanker who doesn’t care if I live or I die, ( I just stole that last line from Morrissey). The system is rotten and full of total bullshit.
To Samantha Anderson: Intesting article:
A fairly utopian dream – but one worth having nevertheless!
However you blame the education system whereas I would blame the outdated “free-market” based economic system to which our governments both past and present have adhered.
It is NOT a free market, it is a market that is manipulated “by the rich for the rich” – a system that governments around the world protect and promote in order to preserve the priveliged status of the “business leaders” in society.
I’m referring here specicically to “business leaders” in the property market and in the food industries, but the argument applies in many other areas of commerce too. These “leaders” make their fortunes from artificially inflated prices that gouge the rest of us in order to preserve their high profit margins and to line their own pockets at the expense of the rest of us.
You refer to ” . . . bored sometimes miserable adults . . . . . like a rat stuck on a wheel, to simply feed and house their families, which as a basic human right just shouldn’t cost so damn much.”
Basics like food and housing only cost too much (not only in NZ but all around the world) because “big business” lobbyist and pressure groups successfully lobby governments to keep profits high in the food and housing (and other) industries.
The market is only as “free” as big business wants it to be.
And to Lloyd Jordan, “Credit where credit is due”:
The idea of education being about “learning to learn” is by no means original to Bob Jones. it was around in educational insitutions long before Sir Bob arrived on the scene (it was around in the country’s universities for example. Thats probably where he picked up the idea!).
The western system is a gigantic slave camp, controlled by corporations and money-lenders, with a few opportunities for opportunists, and anyone born in a western nation is doomed to a controlled existence in the slave camp, being told what to think, what to buy, what to wear, where to go and how to behave etc.
Seeing the truth requires taking the ‘Red Pill’ (as per the Matrix) which is something the vast majority of people are not prepared to do. They always take the ‘Blue Pill’ and remain trapped in the Matrix, seeing what the Matrix wants them to see -an illusion.
Taking the ‘Red Pill’ involves doing research with an open mind, and working out that 9/11 was an inside job used to get rid of building containing asbestos and as a pretext for invading nations that were not playing the game according to Amerika’s rules (actually the money-lenders’ and corporations’ rules). Once you have the big lie worked out the other lies become a lot easier. Most people struggle with the 9/11, preferring to believe that steel buildings can fall at free-fall speed because of short-lived, low temperature fires, and believing that aircraft can evaporate upon impact with grass etc.
Other aspects of the ‘Red Pill’ involve the scam of Fractional Reserve Banking, charging of interest on money created out of thin air, and the true state of global energy supplies and the global environment.
Most people would rather keep taking the soma delivered by the corporate-own media and never discover the truth about anything (including religion). And they keep voting for Smiling Assassins; that’s the system.
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