Week 6: Education

In this week’s text Blum talked about why students hate school so much. She discovered that it’s not the student’s fault that they don’t flourish in school. The entire education system is flawed. Instead of focusing on teaching students real-life topics that also interest them individually, schools place their students in a rigid system in which they constantly have to navigate their way through it. They don’t study because they actually care about the topics. They study because they want (or have) to pass the test (cf. Blum 3–4; 10). This is what school is like for many students around the world. This education system completely disregards that not all students learn the same way and not every topic is of importance to every student.

It destroys individuality and only benefits those students, who tend to learn best by the traditional school model. Those students who get ‘bad grades’ are forced to take low-paying jobs or jobs they have no passion for after graduation. In a way, students are deprived of all the joy of life before their brains are even fully developed. But as Blum already showed, it is difficult to change the current education system as “[s]chools mirror and replicate social inequalities but do not create them and have been shown for a hundred years to be unable to reduce them” (Blum 6). This means that change can only happen if we change the foundations on which our society is built and eliminate inequality. Of course, we will never be able to eliminate all social inequality, but I think that we must try at least to reduce it as much as possible.