THE CALL FOR AN EDUCALYPSE by Floris Koot

Excerpt from Floris Koot’s chapter in EDUshifts Now! book.

What do we actually teach through the way we educate? The way we educate is a training in itself. You, as a student, have to listen, acquire government approved viewpoints. You basically learn to see things and act accordingly to the way your government and or school thinks the world works. When you succeed in doing so, you are deemed worthy to climb the corporate or government ladder, as you have shown willingness to comply to their standards, in order to be successful. Most of us consider this normal.

I met over time so many young people, really talking about their studies as if it was a portal to conquer the world. I once saw a student talk about how hard he wanted to work to get the same big car a business owner had waiting for him outside. The business owner smiled and blatantly honest told the student: “You think hard work will get you that car? You work hard, boy, and end up making me richer. And you look at the car and don’t see the price I paid for it. Two failed marriages, lost sight of my children when they grew up, and I have a heart condition. Especially not knowing my own children well really hurts.”

Meanwhile, companies around the world spend billions to make up for what has been lacking in education, on training & coaching. Students dream of important jobs, and what do they have to offer for it? Being able to give the right answers at the right time. Many students really think that the better they comply the higher they get. But the whole concept of work life being a pyramid, in which you have to compete yourself upwards, has four major problems.

• Bullying increases, where the idea of competition, and thus of winners and losers within the competition is embraced. Students will understand this as “pull yourself up, by pushing those down, who you conceive as in the way to your success”. More pressure, more bullying.
• Everyone who might become self-employed and/or start a business is not trained to think for themselves, nor builds the self-discipline to get themselves out of bed in the morning. School mostly caters to employment in bigger organizations.
• Most people just want a good job, enough income to feel safe (Maslov) and spend time with friends and family and things they care about. That doesn’t make them lesser students or people, for that matter. There’s a madness to everyone really aspiring to get to the top of the power pyramid, even at the cost of friends, health and lives of others.
• And at the same time, perhaps most important of all, some very real troubles on our planet are hardly addressed enough. We should learn how very much we are part of those, both in living habits, as in the quite possibly impacts of our work upon others and environment.

Of course, most of this happens with the best intentions, and many educational ideas of our government do make sense. Then what happens? Logical choices towards a better education are built upon logical choices that once made sense before. Together they slowly pile up into this limited (sickening?) system. To me, it’s very sad that many students don’t feel free to speak of their own dreams and rather prefer to play along. I feel we need a big change!

Thus we need an educalypse, a collapse of the old educational model and remake it into something that contributes to the solutions our world, our eco system, our society and our individual human soul needs.

[…]