writing this like a finished collection of thoughts is hard. i am writing this to a dear friend of mine, you, so that this becomes a conversation, and i can allow myself to be less certain about things

there can be no revolution in education without completely changing the structure of our society. neither the left, the right, nor anyone else who participate in the modern world have any coherent ideas on how [[education]] works without school and [[mass education]]. the modern world is built upon ideologies, which is built upon the industrial revolution, which is built on top of the newly required human resource which is sourced through education.

so yeah, this is a realization that has been racking it’s claws at my brain for close to two years now about education. it absolutely ruined my relationship with thinking about education for a decent amount of time, but enough time have passed where i have finally accepted that maybe this is a fundamental truth and therefore anything i built in the future will have to work with this realization.

in my exploration, when people talk about education they usually talks about it from either a personal experience of how they think education should be done to help people like them, or from a macro point of view talking about the importance of education for development and how it is imperative that we educate the people to improve their living standards.

now you know that i was homeschooled so i have had my fair share of discussions about the first type. the whole putting children first, child based learning, focusing on your interest, all that thing, and i will have to talk to you about that at a later time because honestly i think [[individualized learning is a solved problem]]. but, to you, my dear friend, i ask you to think about any discussions about large scale education by anyone from any political spectrum and see if any of them ever discussed it in anything that is not talking about school or something that is similar to school.

i can’t. as far as i can tell ALL political systems (except for anarchist maybe but that’s not entirely true is it anarchist schools exist) have the exact same stance on school and that it is good and that it is necessary. now the exact implementations might be different, some might believe that a lot of competition is good, some think that giving the children autonomy is good, some think that education is just a means to indoctrinate. it doesn’t matter what political system is in power. school is here to stay.

you might be sceptical, my dear friend, and that’s fine. i would love for someone to be able to prove me wrong, but my current theory is that [[i’m starting to think that maybe ‘school’ is the ideal balance between individual and collective education]]. i mean, the idea that you had to be educated the way you have to now in order to survive is extremely new. now, i’m not here to argue about the beauty or horror of the modern world, but only that our modern world right now is built on top of the industrial revolution which is one of the many reasons for the widespread creation of schools all around the world (citation?).

pre industrial revolution, education is less about having the knowledge to be able to live, but it is something more regal. something that you do because you want to. it’s the reasons why education are usually reserved for royalty (who had the money to do frivolous stuff like spending their day discussing about philosophy), monks and priests (who is doing it for their faith), or absolute madmen (looking at you philosophers). but now education is seen as this thing that is an absolute human right. why?

my understanding is that the modern world, with all it’s complexity, only works if every single one of it’s inhabitant is educated in a certain way. hence why indoctrination become the most important part of the education system. say what you want about the importance of education in order to free a person from the shackles of the world or education being the key that helps people open their mind, in the context of mass education, be it state mandated schooling, private schools, or anything in between, all education system serve as a way for one group of people to share and disseminate their thoughts and “ideology” (a set of beliefs or philosophies attributed to a person or group of persons) to another group of people.

why is this a necessary conditions? to have everyone think the same way? well, it’s because when everyone thinks the same way, see the same way, do things the same way, they are able to fit as cogs in the largest industrial machine known as our modern world. i’m not necessarily putting a value judgement on whether this is a good thing or not, there are value in seeing things as a coherent system instead of a collection of systems (sorta like kegan 4 vs kegan 5 stuff), but the very fact that our world work this way means that we cannot truly revolutionize our education without first changing the way our society works.

and here’s the thing. i might be pedantic about this.

i think that when people try to revolutionize education what they’re trying to gesture is that the current system is an absolute mess and that they have the solution to fix the current available problems. in the context of Indonesia where one of the problem is that neither student nor teachers have that much agency in their process, it means giving the people more freedom on how they conduct their learning.

i think that’s good, and necessary, i just don’t think that’s what i would call revolutionary.