The sentences in infant development textbooks are clear: without understanding the environment, one cannot understand the human being, nor can one develop their potential. This is a self-evident fact proven by psychology and neuroscience. However, the reality of public education we face directly contradicts this truth. Rather than considering the context and environment an individual is situated in, the system is preoccupied with confining them to an identical environment (the classroom) and churning out identical results (grades). Where does this discrepancy come from?
Violence in the Name of Efficiency
Public education is fundamentally a product of the Industrial Age. In a system designed to supply massive amounts of human resources cheaply and quickly, “consideration of individual environments” is dismissed as an excessively costly luxury. Analyzing the family environment, emotional background, and innate temperament of dozens of students in a single classroom to provide optimized education is seen as an “administrative inefficiency.” The system is optimized not for maximizing human potential, but for producing a “manageable workforce” that converges to a mean.
The Paradox of Equality: The Castration of Context
One of the pretexts used by public education to ignore environmental factors is, paradoxically, “equity.” It is the belief that giving everyone the same exam paper and the same textbook constitutes fairness. However, this is akin to forcing children standing at different starting lines to wear the exact same shoes for a race. Comparing only results while castrating environmental context is, in effect, a systemic exclusion of the potential of children from disadvantaged backgrounds. While the “maximum development” mentioned in textbooks is individual, the “evaluation” pursued by public education is collective.
The Inertia of Dealing Only with Controllable Variables
The school system lacks the capacity to control environmental variables outside its walls—such as family, community, and economic background. While textbooks state that these variables are crucial, educational administration marginalizes variables it cannot control. It is far more comfortable for administrators to focus only on variables that can be managed within the narrow confines of a classroom, such as progress, attendance, and testing. Ultimately, the attempt to understand a human being holistically disappears, leaving only the human being as an evaluative metric.
Restoring “True Education” Beyond Subjugation to the System
The reason public education does not move in the direction suggested by textbooks is that it functions more as a “sorting institution” than an educational one. From the moment the goal shifted from elevating human potential to assigning social hierarchy, the understanding of environmental context was pushed to the background.
However, as we have discussed previously, to live as an autonomous human being, one must personally recognize and supplement the “environmental factors” that the system ignores. If public education does not help maximize my potential, I must reclaim the sovereignty to educate myself by objectifying my own environment. The truths found in textbooks are, in a sense, a “courtesy toward humanity” that we must practice ourselves in our lives, even if schools fail to teach them.
If you enjoyed this piece:
Explore the “A Greenhouse for Tender Things” collection
Discover more from the Abstract collection
Leave a Reply