It seems to me that the common complaints people voice about our society today are: the pervasive and irritating displays of selfish and self-centered behavior manifesting itself in a thirst for material wealth and competitive lack of concern for almost anyone else, a lack of morality, a lack of consideration, and a lack of sympathy for the less fortunate.
Ironically these seem to be similar to behaviors that are repetitively taught in the public grade school systems in America: You must work hard to achieve the highest scores possible in comparison to your school mates. You cannot help them. You cannot be worried about them. You cannot talk to them. You cannot ask for help. You cannot get out of your chair. If someone gets an "A", they are "a good person." If someone gets a "B" they are not as "good." If someone fails, that is their problem and not yours. If someone flunks out, or fails -- they deserve it. If they flunk out, they are a "bad person"; it is as if they are dead and no longer exist. They can no longer be your friend.
In my memory, grade school was seen as the public moral standard of correct social behavior. Anything that occurred outside of the classroom, except in Church, was common and possibly vulgar behavior. Additionally as children, we had the majority of our waking hours, in the main part of our day, dominated by instruction in this forced and fairly unnatural manner of behavior. We could not help to accept this as the ideal standard of proper thought and behavior: to be concerned only for yourself and have no sympathy for the weakness of others.
Now, I doubt that any teachers were planning on inducing cruel and selfish behavior in their students as adults. I doubt they had any but the most noble intentions of teaching the children how to succeed in the modern academic and industrial world. In fact, the current form of instruction is probably the most efficient and economical way to instruct students in math and science and literature. This unfortunate side effect has probably never been considered and will likely hardly even be recognized.
However, you must remember that the organization of the school was to teach correct behavior for manufacturing and factory work. The school bell, orderly arrangement of desks, regular assignments and silence unless called upon, were all necessary behaviors for an optimally operating factory floor. They were not designed to help bring the student to the fullest realization of his inner potential. In fact almost the opposite is true. They were designed to eliminate the most unusual and unique behaviors and personal interests and teach the child to expect to conform to a narrowly prescribed set of acceptable behaviors.
In the long run the instructional organization imparts more influence on the student than the subjects being taught. This happens to such a great extent that the student, and we ourselves, do not realize how much our expectations and our personal behaviors have been pre-programmed by this system. And, we do not realize how far away from our own true nature we have been taken and how far short of our real inner potential we have fallen. We have become as robots and ciphers; mere shadows of the people we could have been and ought to have become.
It may be too late for us to undo the mental programming that induced us to be the way we grew and learned, but it is never to late to consider the way the next generations should be instructed and what it really important for them to learn. And most importantly of all -- it is never too late to reconsider the best methods of HOW they should go about this process of learning.
copyright (c) 2017
William Schaeffer
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