Term Papers on Society’s False Education

Term Paper Title	Society’s False Education
# of Words	1218
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	4.87

Society’s False Education

     Starting at the young age of five, we spend a large percentage of our time sitting in rows of seats in classrooms, listening to a stranger telling us what we should or should not know.  We convince ourselves that we are preparing to go out into the world where we will succeed by our own motivations, limited by nothing except for our own free will.  However, contrary to this belief, our education does not properly prepare us for this—it instead hinders us.  Society, through education aims to control our children by limiting their independence and teaching them to conform to society.
     Many of society’s laws and principles are built around a fear of independence.  Our society is scared of independence among individuals because it undermines its authority to hold order easily.  These principles are carried over into our schools in an attempt to lead our children down the “right” path.  In schools, we stifle independence and creativity by requiring our children to learn rote facts.  Granted, basic skills are important for a child to learn, but too much emphasis is placed on them.  There are few classes where independent thinking is promoted.  The students cannot choose their classes, and thus the learning material is already chosen for them.  It is not until the latter years of high school that the students can take electives, but even that is quite limited. We follow the common logic presented to us hundreds of years ago by the Bible, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Bible, Proverbs 22:6).  In this attempt to control our children through a rigid educational system we sacrifice the pursuit of creativity and independence.
     School is the primary vehicle for stifling a child’s independence and creativity as John Gatto, a teacher and author, explains, “School as it was built is an essential support system for a model of social engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a terminal of control”(Gatto, The Seven-Lesson School Teacher).  This pyramid is representative of our society.  Our schools are prohibiting our children from ever exercising their independent mind so that they will be content in staying in their social and economic place—acting as “subordinate stones”.
As an obvious result of this attempt to govern through education, we as a society develop early on a lack of independence among our children.  At such a young and influential age, children are easily persuaded against exercising their independence.  This problem prohibits us from ever attaining a true education.  James Baldwin, an U.S. Author, stated, “It is very nearly possible…to become an educated person in a country so distrustful of the independent mind” (Baldwin, “They Can’t Turn Back”).  This true education that we lack can be defined as knowledge that provides an individual with the ability to expand as a human being for the enrichment of themselves and the fulfillment of one’s own motivations.
Our society’s educational system instead teaches an education that provides us with knowledge filled with unrelated, insignificant, and depthless things.  John Gatto explains, “The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on, than with one general enthusiasm” (Gatto, “The Seven Lesson School Teacher”).  These broad topics of education that we learn are meant not to fulfill are needs as an independent person, who might rather emphasize in a specific area of study, but instead to prepare us to follow society’s already established way of living.  Our educational system figures that in eliminating chances to...

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