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Education is terrible every where because it does the opposite of what it means. It is derived from the Latin "educe" which means "to draw out" (ideas from students). We have been pumping information into children since hundreds of years as if they are empty pitchers to be filled, not vibrant souls with thinking minds.

Education has broadened my view of the world and continues to spark my curiosity. The more I learn the more I realize that I don't know and I really wish I could stick around a great deal longer to continue this educational journey. Even without the education, all it takes is determination. Most of what I've learned over the years happened after school, not during.

Self-education is the only education you can get. But being in the right environment, having someone push you to learn more makes you want to learn more. Learning on your own people (group) tend to glaze over parts they don't like or don't care about. Meanwhile an environment where someone challenges you, you will tend to learn more comprehensively.

Education enhances our ability to think better. Other things like knowledge, good behavior, manners, broaden viewpoint are just some of the byproducts of this better thinking. Even without schools, all it takes is steered to develop critical thinking. Not just feed the mind with facts. Education starts at birth, learning to be a human in a confused society. Education reveals who has the potential, and those without potential don't like it.

Feeding with the facts is not entirely wrong. Some said, "Memorizing is not an education, education is to educate the mind how to think."

Unintelligent students must memorize. No matter how good the education, no amount of learning is going to turn an unintelligent person smart. That needs to be done from the inside out. Education can't help everyone. Law of Averages dictates that some people are just going to remain idiots all their lives. Some people are expecting way too much from an education. You can't get the attention of any student unless that student is open to learning in the first place. And a few just aren't. You can't save every moron. Accept that.

It is kind a ridiculous to criticize schools for emphasizing memory. That is how intelligence works in the developing years. Children are not born with the capacity for higher projective reasoning. This is a latent skill that needs to be developed though practice and memory. Understanding the patterns and developing further pattern from templates of experience. No memory, no education.

Unless the notion is that somehow humans can recall information and structure new knowledge without the benefit of memory. How exactly does that work? Your minds are made up of less than 1% genetics, and 99% memory.

This is like when people say you can understand math without the benefit of an understanding of the history of math. No you can't. Without an understanding of math's past, you can't have any conception of its present. Math will hold no definition for such a person. It will be pretty much the same as anything else for them--science, spiritualism, magic. Which is why we often see a lot of people on the internet claiming to be discussing science but not knowing a damn thing about the subject. And then getting mad at everyone else because they failed to open up a science book at least once in their lifetime to figure out what it actually is.

No one smart ever takes a good education for granted. No one smart only ever relies on what a teacher tells them in order to learn something new. Actual smart people investigate on their own, and not even a bad education can keep intelligent people down. So ask yourself, who are these people who find no value in education and what is their true agenda? Education reveals who has the potential, and those without potential don't like it.

Education and indoctrination share a number of qualities and if we get into which qualities make education different from indoctrination we get into a Witgensteinian language game. So I think that what really differentiates the two is the purpose for which it is used.

Education in its purest form should be the training of the underdeveloped minds to explore possibilities that previously had not occured to them, provide empirically verifiable facts upon which to work and provide a rational framework within which those facts can be understood.

Indoctrination is a method of persuasion that intent is to get the underdeveloped mind to accept the view of the world that suits the indoctrinator, whether that be for good or bad purpose. Which surely is, our schools should not be operated like cults.

So my bottom line is that in practice of education that most of us experience is a combination of these two things. On the one hand there is the attempt to widen the students horizons and broaden their knowledge and on the other is the need to socialise students to be acceptable members of whichever society they happen to inhabit.

Children are naturally curious and you only have to put them in nurturing and information rich environments to have them learn organically, for the most part. But other skills must require structure and continuous training for solid amounts of time, like reading and mathematical skill development.

Technology has definitely change the role of parenting. As parents we have to try and keep up with the technology, use parental controls and keep an eye on and monitor their access. Times are changing. Right now, this feels like something rapidly changing which we need to manage. But soon, the fact that information is out of our control will become much more evident.

All this information surging at them about sex and violence isn't making them mature. It is disturbing them and confusing them because they are not mature yet. It doesn't speed up the maturing process.

There is this theory about the plasticity of the brain, where certain functions in the brain develop ONLY in response to stimuli. For example, a brain deprived of sight in the first few years fails to develop many of the areas of the visual system. These areas get co-opted for other functions. Similarly, other functions, like language, social processes also develop only in response to appropriate stimulus. It is little wonder that feral children would be drastically different from the "normal humans" growing up in a certain social context. And these differences go deep, exist at the physical level.

Happy National Education Day!