Education by punishment - by David R. MacIver

Being part of society requires certain skills. Unfortunately, while we are happy to require these skills of people, we often completely fail to teach them and instead just punish people for lacking them.

Hi everyone, Something I started noticing a while ago is that our default approach to education is to punish people for lacking the skills we expect them to have. This is what I call education by punishment. Once I started seeing this, it’s hard to unsee, and I’m going to inflict that on you now. Sorry. For once when I’m objecting to education, this mostly isn’t going to be me complaining about school. School certainly has problems in this regard, but by and large school is at least trying to do the right thing here, even if it’s often failing. The basic conditions for education by…

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