Piscina Podium - Redesigning education

A New Order: Family and Education

I believe that we have our society’s order quite literally arse over tit. Rather than suppressing the healthy young body’s impulse to breed when it is best able to produce quality eggs and sperm, we should facilitate reproductive urges with community and family support. Children mature, physically and emotionally, at different rates, some are less hormonally driven than others and some have intellectual artistic or physical preoccupations that require a continuous path. However, the vast majority of adolescents become preoccupied by their hormones, diverting so much attention to their physicality that it is a testament to human intelligence they achieve anything else. My model proposes an educational system based upon Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, whereby the child’s learning patterns, strengths and weakness are identified early and their education is designed to nurture talent and reinforce lesser capacities. There is a panel of responsible adults, parents, teachers and doctors that assesses the individual throughout development. On achieving physical and emotional maturity, there is some ritual celebration of passing into adulthood similar to the Jewish Bamitzvah. The young adult then becomes an active participant in their life, with the option of following an academic or skills development pathway, doing their National Service. If they choose to find a partner, they can begin a family that will be supported by family and community.

In this ideal order, post puberty education is a matter of choice and appropriate timing. Each individual has some twenty years of publicly supported education to be accessed as they choose over a lifetime. Someone with a talent requiring a continuous path, such as mathematics, music, or dance, would remain in education. Another whose hormones were more urgent might find a partner and complete secondary education part-time while having a family, then work for a while before undertaking tertiary education when they find something that interests them. There is a two-year commitment to National Service component to be completed at any time before the age of thirty, done in one session or periodic stints, and also a matter of preference. If an adolescent is proving difficult, their guardians might advise some National Service program that includes a disciplinary element, such as the military where they will also gain further vocational training, but this should be a matter of agreement between all parties. The options for National Service provide a wide variety of options, from military service to living in kibbutz-style accommodation and working on land or sea rehabilitation projects, or participating in local social or cultural programs, all with an educational component in the science and skills of the task. The educational allotment allows a quotient for mature career change or development, with which an individual might take a sabbatical on a basic living stipend to pursue a new private or professional interest, or advance an existing one. This system would then preclude the terrible waste of human potential currently still blighting our civilisation.