The Hope of Education

Education's aversion to distractions, from leisure books to electronic devices (pagers, computers, phones) and automation tools (calculators, AI). How to return to the goal of nurturing people should start from the legitimacy of the 'taken-for-granted' prohibition. A common saying is that objects cause people to lose the mindset for learning. Because when people see them, they think of how to use them, or how they interrupt some important continuity. Opposing voices say that the 'one-size-fits-all' approach is for management convenience, and institutions, for the huge responsibility they bear (they do not hesitate to take these responsibilities from the audience), arbitrarily expand their management rights. There is an online image saying 'The state has national laws, schools have school rules. Because the national burden-reduction policy violates this school's regulations, students are ordered to return to school on weekends for supplementary classes.' This is a conspiracy between schools and parents, placing students in a situation where they lose personal will. Parents are unable or unwilling to bear the responsibility for parenting failures, so they entrust everything to educational institutions. It seems that educational institutions are the only professional and capable authority.

To raise a child who reads, there must first be parents who read. This is a cliché, but it is never mentioned in educational conflicts. I suspect that the anxiety about education stems from dissatisfaction with one's own state, and through projection, one demands a similar self to undergo thorough transformation in a concentration camp. I am reminded of 'The Substance' and 'Severance'.

In a friend's thesis, we briefly discussed a person's objectification of oneself (the original or the avatar, the mirror image) and the separation dynamics and dependence of the objectified. Sorry, I am a psychology student.

Back to this legitimacy. The power of national laws and politics comes from the people, while the power of educational institutions comes from investors: the government, private investment, and students (parents). Therefore, they are never responsible to students, until some loan students appear at the undergraduate level. Private schools and private academies are especially so.

So I encourage students to take responsibility for their own education, to strive for education rather than become products of the educational assembly line. But this is also sad. It means that students need to reach a nearly transactional agreement with their caregivers: only excellent people deserve the efforts of their loved ones.

Then no matter which path, we must address the caregivers' anxiety about educational failure.

This is not their problem; it is a social problem. As long as we do not have enough hope for the future, we will gradually lose the ability to achieve that hope.