Posts Tagged ‘village of Umarkot’
Do kids need 13 formal years of schooling? Think again
It is becoming evident that modern schooling system is principally a big detention center for the youth in order to keeping them “away from the streets”.
Kids do not need 13 years of schooling before going to universities or learning practical skills and talents to earning a living by the age of 15.
In the 19th century, with the advent of the mass “Industrial Age“, kids were readily put to work, and the capitalists offered many excuses as to particular capabilities and abilities in kids to being more productive in certain tasks…
Kids in these chain work processes didn’t survive to be twenty. And you have to wonder: “If kids were good to work two centuries ago, why they are considered to be that limited today?”
Most probably, modern technologies can bypass not only kids to work, but over 15% of the adults in any society adopting the capitalist system, in mass production, open world market, a “free trade”…
It is not knowledge that kids are learning, but regurgitation of consensus information, of system rules, regulation, and what to expect.
Reflective learning and self-learning are not appreciated on the ground that kids are not “ready to discuss, ponder and ask the right questions…”
Kids, by the age of 15, should be able to earn a living from skilled maintenance professions (electrical, plumbing, carpeting, painting…), before considering higher education in fields of their interests…
In general, in almost every society, you have about 15% of the population deemed unnecessary for producing and contributing to the development of the” system”: They are confined in ghetto quarters to fend for their survival and are basically the ones incarcerated in order to show “statistically” that the police force is doing its job…
David Simon, the director of the series “The Wire” (2002-2008) that described the US system through this typical City of Baltimore said:
“The critical key to comprehending how the poor quarters in the US cities got to mushroom is that school materials are intrinsically linked to the street culture. We can demonstrate the linkage between the decline of the industrial age and the deficiencies in public schools, schools that are smokescreen institutions in the non-favored quarters. The Wire recounts the stories of that section in the US society and communities, which were left on the side road, and nobody care to remedy to them…”
Eduardo Galiano recount this short story: “Muhammad Ashraf never set foot in school. Up before dawn, he has been working since the age of 6. Muhammad is 11 year-old, and his job is cutting, perforating, patching, and sewing soccer balls. Soccer balls are produced in the Pakistani village of Umarkot and seen in every soccer field around the world. Muhammad also has to glue a sticker that read “This soccer ball was not made by kids”
Another way of differentiating between a failure and a mistake is offered by Seth Godin: (sentences in parenthesis are mine)
“A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something, and the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal.
A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris… that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.
(Occasionally, it is worth repeating a previous “failure” on the ground that a minor “variable” was not controlled or not considered worth including, and later experiences implicitly demonstrated its value…”
We need a lot more failures, I think.
Failures that don’t kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won’t work, while opening the door to things that might.
(Thomas Edison never considered his hundred trials for finding a solution as failures: The combinations of alternatives solutions eliminated the possibilities that do not work…)
School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.” End of quote
Note 1: I have started a series of restructuring projects of school system, medical profession and practices, health care providers, engineering and design profession and practices…
These projects are labelled “Daydream Projects” because they are well-thought out with details and the various controversies that conventional professional orders and syndicates might vehemently object to, on the ground that a wide range of businesses are simply relying on the old system to profit…
Adonis Diaries 