Thursday 30 June 2005

School sucks

Tibor Machan wonders why so many kids at so many schools seem so sick:
The varieties of Attention Deficit Disorders in records boggle the mind, even as many of us have managed to pass through the system reasonably unscathed. Or have we? There are those who do not buy into this medical approach to assessing the problems with contemporary education. I am one of them.
He sure is. Tibor doesn't think the problem is medical, so much as political. What do you expect, he asks, when you force the incredible diverse student population of today into a one-size-fits-all coercive model of education? Here's one example just yesterday. You try and force these young, impressionable, diversely shaped pegs into one-size-fits-everything holes, and then wonder why you need to start feeding them Ritalin. Who exactly are the idiots here?
So, upon doing so such students are declared sick, suffering from ADD of whatever, then plugged full of some drugs or sent for counseling or therapy, instead of the much-more-reasonable conclusion that they are being totally miseducated, mismatched to the system in place. It’s like beating someone to a pulp and then complaining that he is sick—what else do you expect? Whose fault is this? Is their malady natural or artificially induced?
What do you think?

1 comment:

Berend de Boer said...

My kids aren't in public education. Is that an answer?