(*information obtained from the book “A More Beautiful Question”)

Schools in many industrialized nations were not, for the most part, designed to produce innovative thinkers or questioners – their primary purpose was to produce workers. As Seth Goldin says, our grandfathers and great grandfathers-built schools to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy which we can see worked well.

To create good workers, education systems put a premium on compliancy and rote memorization of basic knowledge – excellent qualities in an industrial worker. As Matt Groening puts it, it seems the main rule that traditional schools teach is how to sit in rows quietly, which is perfect training for grown-up work in a dull office or factory, but not so good for education.

So now we must ask ourselves and our government, why have not schools evolved?

• What are schools for?
• Why are we sending kids to school in the first place?

Schools have been designed to do a specific thing; hence why they are so against home schooling. Schools have been designed to product a certain result; it is like the students are the raw material. They are given numerous tests to see if they are ready which is the same thing that happens at factories. If they are not ready, they will continue to test them and to those that are ready they get benefits such as honors classes, off-campus lunch, etc.

Dominic Randolph described many of today’s schools as product driven.

Teachers are put under pressure to improve test scores, which turns into instilling a businesslike efficiency into a process designed to impart as much information as possible to students, within a given time frame – which leaves little to no time for student inquiry.

Why don’t we reinvent the educational system? How could we do it?