“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”
A novel written in the 19th century, scarily things are the same a hundred and twenty years on. Schools now tend to focus on English, Maths, Irish and then four to five other subjects yet nothing prepares young people for the savage side society comes out with. There should be as much time on encouraging people to
-Network with other people
-Cognitive behavioural therapy
-Develop empathy
-Good emotional intelligence
Rather than creating an automoton , then again perhaps the status quo may find this goes against them....
In France philosophy is a cornerstone of the educations system,children learn about Plato right through to Sartre and everything in between, they learn to understand why people have an opinion, what shapes it and how it can be viewed. Look at the flip side of things and the Irish education system. Irish people learn via rote learning with teachers second guessing (but with good guess work) questions that will come up on the Leaving Cert and then encouraging the children to learn via rote learning so that it can all be regurgitated over two weeks in June. Traditional subjects that require some analysis and argument like English (interpret a poem) or History (qualify a particular view point with evidence) are now coming to encourage children to learn vast passages of interpretation, it does not allow them to freely think. The net result of all of this is children come into the university system or into the working world with no critical thinking and are unable to come to a viewpoint as to how they may ameliorate a situation or look at various angles as they have been indoctrinated. Am I alone in thinking this? Critical thinking would have stopped this social malaise of indifference that we are experiencing at the moment...
From http://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/cen...tire%20doc.pdf
See
page 13 and the following paragraph...
Persons with no religion (including Atheists and
Agnostics) had higher
levels of education than the
general population, as illustrated in the graph
on the left.
They were more than twice as likely to have a
postgraduate
degree or diploma compared with the
general population (17.1% and 8.2%
respectively) and
more than half (56%) had a third level qualification
compared with 35.5 per cent of the general population.
What would this say to you? Im not commenting as my bias is well known but just
to open the floor for comments. ....
If we take into account that perhaps there is no link at all between the two at
all and that access to education was limited in the sixties at the peak of the
RCC golden age. Now that we are aware of the abuses of the church and that there
is a lot more people going to college it may have been a skewered interpretation
that some people took when looking at the data. Its fascinating the two topics
in themselves, the correlation between the data and what is the conclusion, does
religion itself come with a low standard of education (Its inconclusive) and the
other seperate topic of how a preconceived notion will mean that different
inferrences are drawn from the data.
