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Quote by Richard Peck

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The Teacher's Funeral: A Comedy in Three Parts

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Richard Peck
Richard Peck

Richard Peck is an American novelist, born on April 10, 1934. He is known for his works in children's literature, which have been highly appreciated by readers. more

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“Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking—get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives. The factory system doesn't work in the modern world, because two years after graduation, whatever you learned is out of date. We need education spread over a lifetime, not jammed into the early years—except for such basics as reading, writing, and perhaps citizenship. Past puberty, education needs to be combined in interesting and creative ways with work. The factory school system no longer makes sense.”

SchoolEducationCreativityAgeismIndustrializationEducation ReformAge Discrimination
Author:Robert Epstein
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“It should be obvious but I’ve never met anyone that is able to perceive incompetent managers and lack of corporate integrity as the main causes for incompetent workers and poor results in productivity. And by the way, the exact same principles apply to Universities, but I've also never met students capable of questioning their teachers as they should, or teachers that aren't afraid to be questioned regarding their own integrity. It's really easy to talk bullshit in a classroom using social status, certificates and books as backbone for credibility but hard to face accountability for the words one vomits out of his brain without ever trying to digest them with a stomach for confrontation with realism. If anything useful I learned in college, as both student and lecturer, is that my teachers and coworkers were a bunch of arrogant cocksuckers feeding on the illusion that their reputation makes them who they are. Their self-delusion makes them pathetic. And the only thing they ever produced were pathetic students.”

SchoolLearningBooksProfessorsTeachersStudyingLecturers
Author:Robin Sacredfire
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“The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing. The common school (now called a public school) was a brand new concept, created shortly after the Civil War. “Common” because it was for everyone, for the kids of the farmer, the kids of the potter, and the kids of the local shopkeeper. Horace Mann is generally regarded as the father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine— because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The common school solved both problems. The normal school (now called a teacher’s college) was developed to indoctrinate teachers into the system of the common school, ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the processing of students. If this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk, of interchangeable parts, of the notion of measurement and quality, it’s not an accident. The world has changed, of course. It has changed into a culture fueled by a market that knows how to mass-customize, to find the edges and the weird, and to cater to what the individual demands instead of insisting on conformity. Mass customization of school isn’t easy. Do we have any choice, though? If mass production and mass markets are falling apart, we really don’t have the right to insist that the schools we designed for a different era will function well now.”

SchoolEducationCollege
Book:Leap First: Creating Work That Matters
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