|
When did education become a competition and why does John V.C. Nye want to make it more of a competition? I stupidly thought the goal of education was for everyone to learn, but I guess the process of education is to stratify the populace. I hated, and still hate the gamesmanship that takes place with teachers/professors. The trick questions on tests, etc. I never had the patience for any of the nonsense. For things that were nuanced I understood the reason to test on details, but to just play games, always pissed me off. I was an OK student because I wouldn't play their games. During college I was a Comp Sci major and the Business Majors needed to take two computer science classes. Being the entrepreneur that I was, I started tutoring as many of the girls as their parents would pay my $25 and hour tutoring fee with a money back if you don't get a B or higher guarantee. In the first two years everyone of my students got A's. I made sure every student understood the material, their programming projects were always unique and I made the student do all the work. At the end of the class everyone of my students knew the material cold. I was so successful that they Comp Sci department and the Business department tried to ban me from tutoring, not to mention that 3 students switched majors to Comp Sci and a couple others added Comp Sci as a minor. Their argument was that I was ruining the grade distribution in the classes I tutored, I guess the Comp Sci courses were weed out classes for the Business Majors. I had letters from every parent and every student, the University President laughed in the faces of the department heads and he dismissed me from the meeting, and from what I heard he spent 40 minutes yelling at them for being stupid and degrading the reputation of the University. Of course I somehow never got an A on any programming projects again, but it wasn't payback, even as a senior when in one class I wrote everyone else's programs for them, just to prove a point, everyone else got an A, I got a C+. Education is not about learning, it'a a business, just like health care isn't about making people healthy, it's about profit and loss. |
Stratification is built in to the etymology of the word "graduate". Compare a "graduated beaker", which is a beaker with measurements printed on it so that you can tell how much fluid it contains.
Part of the problem is that schools have conflicting goals. The education goal you mention is the goal everyone talks about, but few of the students genuinely care about it. What they're mainly there for is career advancement: to be graduated above others so they can get better employment. This becomes clear if you imagine what an institution truly devoted to nothing but education might be like. Such an institution might be like a movie theater which plays exclusively documentaries. It doesn't take much imagination to realize how well that would do: it would go bankrupt because almost no-one would want to pay money for it.
Politicians identify school with education, and use that to create talking points about how everyone should be educated. But in the context of the other goal, of graduating and distinguishing people, it makes zero sense to have everyone graduate. That would be like a graduated beaker with only two measurements, "empty" and "full".