Education is NOT schooling, and schooling is NOT education.
As a mentor, I've been lucky enough to get to know a Northview student, courteous, eloquent and ambitious, who has worked 20 to 30 hours a week after school at the parents' restaurant ever since the middle school, and who has always demanded not get paid for the work.
Academically, the kid is only doing OK with 3.0 GPA, and would be judged at best as a below average student by many parents here, since the kid doesn't have any interest in those AP classes. Unlike those luminous Ivy Leaguers paraded here, this kid can articulate a self perspective that the school is boring, indoctrinating, and senseless for the kid's own purpose in life , which is to start up a global fast good chain before age of 35 and go on to become a billionaire by age 45.
Please ask yourself this simple question: how many kids do you personally know who have any dreams or personal narratives other than repeating marketing slogans spoon-fed to them at all?
As an educator, I have successfully guided this rare kid, pertinent to the kid's personal dreams and burning desire, to discover the real and sensible education and learning from those gems shared by giants, such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Napoleon Hill, and Ray Kroc, and so on. . Some people may say that route is indeed a bad one in life because there is no any certainty for a guaranteed positive outcome. However, history begs to differ. Every parents have hopes or even high hopes for their kids. The question is whether or not you do know why you have the hope that you have held for your kids.
Finally, please let me quote what Noam Chomsky, a longtime MIT professor and a leading intellectual of our times, says about the thingy,
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.” |