Tony O’Neill – 3509064
Kristin Reimer
Final Assignment
Introduction
Knowledge is prodigious; learning is transcendent; teaching is Truth, but what is education? In Canada, what education is and what it should be stand in stark contrast with each other. Education should be the embodiment of learning, knowledge, and teaching; however the current trends of society would suggest otherwise. Any important question we need to ask ourselves is: is education a reflection of society, or is society a reflection of education? Most would argue that it is the former; however, I believe that society reflects current trends of education, which means that the world we live in is a product of how and what we are taught.. We currently live in a society that values consumption, materialism, and secularism (closest I could think of for an antonym for spirituality), why is this so? Why are our youth concerned with worldly pleasures and not with the nature of their reality and it’s relation to the self and the environment? Has our education failed in some way that it is actually promoting these trends? Or was the system designed to keep our students from pursuing higher knowledge, from being critical thinkers, and self-directed learners so that they are unable or unwilling to challenge themselves into thinking about such topics? If this is so, why would a system that was designed to enhance the overall efficacy of a society, in a free and democratic nation, do such a thing?
As Canadians we identify ourselves as being democratically free and we value that freedom above all else. We have the freedom to think and to say and to believe anything we choose; then by argument, if we are a free society then we must also have educational freedom. We are lucky to have mass education at no cost and the perceived purpose of our schools is to further ones knowledge and to develop autonomous, happy, and self-aware individuals who will go on to lead fulfilling and meaningful lives. If this statement were true, and society is a reflection of education, then we would not see the alarming inclination of anxiety, depression, and disillusionment that plague today’s culture.
The idea that education is linked to freedom is nothing more than a veil; an illusion; a mask that covers the eyes of the public, obstructing our vision as democratic and free citizens so that we are unaware of educations true purpose: that education and schools have been designed to serve the agendas of the political and economical elite. The trends of society we are witnessing today are a product of our education system, and we are being taught, through a system of control, to ignore spirituality, autonomy, and cognitive freedom.
Canada’s education system serves the purpose of educating the collective rather than the individual. It is a system that mimics the process of an industrial machine; a fast, efficient, and well designed method of producing a mass of one specific product, a commodity that serves only...
