Category: Ideas

Simon Sarris shares his views on the U.S. education system in his latest article School Is Not Enough. What a pleasure to find someone else has eloquently written down the thoughts floating around in my mind.

Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:

Mass schooling attempts a systematization of skill and knowledge transfer. The results are predictably mediocre—systems at scale must function with and cater to the lowest common denominator, and the process of standardization loses all sensitivity to context. Since everyone must do the same things, it is difficult for any student to do exceptional things. This is alarming on its own for wasting people’s youth. But even worse, in having so many years of life monopolized, people come to inadvertently believe that skill and knowledge transfer are primarily the domain of school rather than a normal consequence of meaningful work.

Simon Sarris