Dear Editor:
Modern education is a false religion.
His holiness John Dewey, the most influential American educational reformer, wrote in Pedagogic Creed: "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God."
To the contrary, my "divine design" prefers critical thinking, pattern recognition and exploration to the "uncritical absorption" (more like memorization) of "evidence-based knowledge" from schools.
Furthermore, as John Taylor Gatto, the author of The Underground History of American Education, put it: "Truth and fact aren't the same thing."
Indeed, the former will always be more integral parts of the evolution of this species; no matter how forcefully authoritative institutions endeavor to indoctrinate us otherwise.
This is obviously why devout students are bored, apathetic, exhausted, sometimes depressed, and hate their curriculum altogether.
It is difficult not to laugh at the belief that students today absorb the basics of what they need to know to prepare for their lives.
Schools today are fundamentally temples of stupidity wasting vast amounts of youthful energy on absurd rituals and retarding maturity for the sake of abstractions like grading.
Besides, as any employer will tell you, training begins with them, because traditional kindergarten-to-Grade 12 schooling, even a bachelor's degree, signifies nothing.
Elias Ishak, Burnaby
