The Business of Education

In our society, where everything seems gratuitous and a given, it’s become harder to discern service from business. In an industry, the sky is the limit for profit and expansion which is not present in a service. Where there have been corporate scandals, there have been revolutionary changes from within the industry. Where there were ruins of corporate giants, there grew the seeds of even bigger giants. With education, there has not been that significant change that came to revolutionize the domain. In electronics, it was the manufacturing of a screen using magnets. In the automotive industry it was the gas engine. In retail, it was the gullibility of the North Americans. Yet in education, you only see how it feeds off other areas to weakly better itself. If you argue that is perhaps because education has perfected itself to its maximum capacity in concordance with society’s advancement, I urge you to look at your latest report card and see if all of your grades are at 100%. If they are, you’re probably rich from doing other people’s homework and can afford to manage your own enterprise without having to be in school.

It is possible that education cannot be perfected since everyone understands things with different points of view. But when you have a provincial math average for the first exam of the year that ranges around 60 to 70 per cent and you find this normal, there is either a gaping hole in your way of perceiving education or there is a gaping hole in your cranium. The first step to making progress is realizing how ignorant one is. In education, this first step has been overlooked to the point of being nigh impossible. They’re all too busy clapping themselves in the back to notice that the fantastic piece of paper they took ages to write (and got paid an unholy amount of money to write) got processed and re-written, and eventually failed to be applied in an effective manner.

Could I be wrong about the people behind all the school programs and school learning material? Are they really all, nice, objective, excessively educated people who put our collective best interests at heart before theirs? My experience tells me quite the opposite. If I were to look into any of my school books, I could find unnecessary space for small questions, repetitive topics, lack of real information or imprecise/outdated graphs and even some propaganda in some cases. The propaganda that I’m referring to deals more in subliminal messages and subtle suggestions. Something this refined is disappointing to see when you think that the same effort that was used to make these half-truths so hidden could have been used for a second or what, occasionally, would appear to be the first time they did bother to do a spell check.

The problems in our system are much too big to be tackled all at once, but perhaps attempting to see if it is possible to completely reform the way of managing the system rather than the ways of teaching would be more effective. Besides, even if it isn’t, at least they can claim they tried it and now know it won’t work.

Lime