Formal education has evolved into a worldwide structured organization, where the process of education and material is standardizing no matter where you go. In Thailand, the business management course I study has the same components as a business management course elsewhere in the world. We even use the same US based textbooks.
The purpose of formal education is to standardize. Sometimes this is not a bad thing. Most education exists in three groups, primary, secondary and tertiary.
Primary schooling's main purpose is to teach fundamental life skills. Subjects like basic mathematics and literacy are taught because they are necessary for all future learning, be it formal or informal.
Secondary schooling however, aims to expose students to a variety of options in life, and give them a wide variety of skills.
Tertiary education provides an ending to the formal education system by educating students on skills for a specific role or purpose in society.
I think standardization in primary education isn't harmful to children, especially if it causes an improvement on quality. Primary education is considered so important, the United Nations place universal primary education at 2nd place in it's Millennium Development Goals, above achieving gender equality and reducing child mortality rates, and just behind eradicating extreme poverty and hunger.
Secondary education is a fairly recent invention. Created about 100 years ago to give children the skills needed to work in more complex jobs, thanks to the industrial revolution. Because the number and types of jobs expanded during this time, secondary schooling was also designed to train children on a variety of tasks they might need in life.
The biggest problem I feel in secondary schooling is that it is becoming a kind of preparatory school for tertiary schooling. This is creating a push to standardize testing and teaching of curriculum, leading to a favor of testable subjects (like the sciences) over hard-to-measure subjects (like the arts).
If we standardize secondary schooling too much, we risk training all members of society under the same mindset. While this might sound like a good thing, it would create a society suffering from one giant form of groupthink. When a lack of critical thinking arises, or disagreements disallowed, it creates the perfect environment to breed the ugly side of humanity.
Increasingly people are viewing tertiary education as a necessity and this is changing secondary schooling from an opportunity to explore identity and roles in the world into learning how to work the system of academia. A system that is quite unique and abstract from most other functions in the rest of the world.
Worse, some primary schools - especially in Asia - are viewing primary school the same way.
So before children have even decided what pop stars they like (or not at all), parents are guessing what their future will be 15 years in the future.
It's impossible to know what someone will want in 15 years. It's easy to even surprise ourselves. Most people look back 15 years ago and realize they would never imagine themselves as they are now.
So why would we do that to our children? Our country? Our world?
Maybe we should let children play before they get serious. Even kids get tired of playing sometime.
