The Forums › Forums › Ask The Community › Psychiatrist/psychotherapist/psychologist what is best? › Re: Psychiatrist/psychotherapist/psychologist what is best?
@Squirrel, the problem isn’t with your child; it’s with the structure and chronic under-funding of the school system. Not to be confrontational with your child’s teachers, but that’s the root of the problem.
The trouble with school systems in the “civilized world” is that they’re institutions, run on an institutional model, to teach children as cheaply and efficiently as possible. It’s an assembly line, using identical methods to install identical parts to create identical finished products. The assembly-line system is highly efficient and economical for making cars or refrigerators, or other lifeless things.
However, human beings are not identical. While many people may be similar, there are also many who are very different. Their brains function differently from the majority. They feel things differently than the majority does. The assembly-line system is completely unsuitable for them. But since it costs a lot more in terms of time, money, and resources to teach those “few” who can’t function in the regular system, and the regular system is so lacking in time, money, and resources that it can’t even successfully handle the kids in the majority—then those running the system will do their utmost to try to change the minority to fit into the assembly line, because that’s all they can do. The teachers are stretched to the limit, just trying to teach the standard curriculum to all the kids in their class. They have no time to devote to the kids who can’t pick it up as quickly as the rest of the class. So all they can do is keep trying to mold all the kids to fit the system.
This is like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. It doesn’t work. And it invariably leads to crushed thumbs and frustration for the person wielding the hammer, and crushed edges and pain on the poor square peg as someone keeps trying to force it into a place it simply wasn’t designed to go.
But the assembly-line model is successful enough at molding people to fit into the soulless, cookie-cutter world of cubicles and offices, where everyone wears a suit in muted tones, and keeps churning out paperwork (or, the soulless, cookie-cutter world of factories, where everyone wears a uniform and keeps making identical copies of identical things) all day long. Just as it was when it was first invented, in the Industrial Revolution. Before then, education was limited to those who could afford to pay for it—so it was one-on-one (or one-on-one family), and was tailored to the needs of the individuals. When universal education was invented, it had to be cheap and mass-produced, just like everything that was being made in the factories, so that the working classes could afford it.
But, as we’ve seen with Wal-mart and dollar stores, mass-produced & cheap is not the best way to go. Least of all, in terms of quality and safety.
The education system is an institution, complete with bells to tell everyone to move on to the next class, and forced uniformity. Sounds a lot like a prison, doesn’t it? And for those of us who are different, that’s exactly what it is. And as long as it continues to be so under-funded, it will continue in this archaic model.
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