John Taylor Gatto, author of the book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling said something in an interview I recently listened to titled The Greatest History Lesson. He said that we are facing an ’Anti-Educational school environment’. So how does this fit if we are truly in a time where we are at the peak of human evolution where more emphasis is being placed on making the education system efficient than ever before? There is and have for well over a

Who has the responsibility for our children’s failures and successes when it comes to education? Is it the school-system? The government? The scientists? The teachers who see our children every day? Or is it us as parents? Read the previous blog-posts for further context on this topic: Is Equal Opportunity Possible in a One-Size-Fits-All Education System? DAY 57 Why we as Parents Must take Active Part in our Children’s Education: DAY 58 When I searched for articles on this su

In the last blog-post I wrote about a teaching situation with three boys. In the blog-post I wrote about who these three boys were very different in their ability to read and write and I mentioned an episode where one of the boys were writing faster than the others and how I tried to equalize the situation between them. Afterwards I had a conversation with a friend about the blog-post who assisted me to realize how I had, in that moment where I thought I was equalizing a poin

Teachers in classrooms all over the world are faced with great apathy towards solving the problem of bullying. In fact, very few teachers have received any form of training on how to deal with bullying and if you are a parent, this ought to be alarming because you do in fact not know the kind of environment you are sending your child into day after day throughout the years they attend school. As most parents know, it is also not necessarily the most easy to communicate with a

In this post I am going to share a secret with you. I am going to share how I hacked the education system and what I learned from it. And if you are currently a parent to a child in school or to a child that will be going to school I suggest reading the following carefully. The story that I am going to share with you is about how we as parents, even when we think and believe that what our children is learning in school is effective – actually have no clue what they are learni

Before continuing with the next part of the Paranoia of Education series I will here walk an interim point wherein I will walk a process of Self-Forgiveness on what we’ve walked so far in the previous series about the Paranoia of Standardized Testing. Through self-forgiveness we are walking a process of taking responsibility for our own creation as the Paranoia of Education as it has become, for example as seen within and as the Paranoia of Standardized Testing in the current

We have come to the 6. Chapter on our exploration and uncovering of the Paranoia of the Education System specifically focusing on the Paranoia of and within Standardized Testing as how it currently exists. In this blog post we will discuss how children’s well-being is affected by standardized testing and what possible consequences manifest when children are forced into an ineffective education system that focuses on anything but education and exists only to serve the paranoia

In this post we will be discussing the actual effects that the paranoia of standardized testing has on children in their day to day living as they attend the school system. We will continue the discussion from the previous post on how market capitalism has embedded itself into the education system. To understand the context of what we will be discussing here I suggest reading the previous posts in this series: The Paranoia of Standardized Testing (Part 4): Market Capitalism E

“What we have to face is that we have builtwar in our society’s economic structure as competition.” (Danish philosopher K. E. Løgstrup, 1972, p. 180). We are here going to explore Competition and it’s foundation in both our societies and in our education systems within taking our point of departure in the question of whether education promotes what is best for all or not: The question then is: HOW IS COMPETITION A PROBLEM IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM? For context to what we’ll b

In this post we’re a continuing with the series on the Paranoia of the Education System and more specifically the Paranoia of Standardized Testing. In the previous post we looked at how the Paranoia instigated by and of Standardized Testing has had the consequence of forcing schools to compete with each other. In this post we’re moving into the classroom and are looking more specifically at the consequence of Standardized Testing for the work of Teachers. For context to what

We are once again turning our focus towards the Paranoia of the Education System and here specifically continuing from the previous introductory blog post in the series on how Standardized Testing is a form of Paranoia implemented into the Education System causing Children to become Beings Trapped by and within the very Paranoia as it has been proselytized into them through the Education System. In the last blog post we investigated how standardized testing was born out of pa

It wasn’t until the teaching job that I am currently working in was presented that I made the decision to make education my vocational and academic focus in life. When I took the job one of the reasons why I decided to give it my all and dedicate myself to it was because I had just walked a process of writing my masters thesis in which I hadn’t been satisfied with my own effort. So when I was offered this job I made a decision in one moment to become the best teacher I could

This first blog post in the series is thematically interwoven with the series on educational philosophies and the topic of education in a corporate capitalistic system that we have been discussing in recent posts. Because the topic of this first post is: standardized testing. And in our current corporate capitalistic systems, standardized testing has become the very foundation of the educational paradigms and education systems and it is therefore affecting the very starting-p

I made this video in response to a comment I got on one of my Youtube videos from a teacher who flat out exerted that teachers have to put up with a lot of shit from students. My take on this comment and the starting-point of the commenter is that a statement such as this one can only be uttered by someone who is burned out and who has become bitter towards the teaching profession and therefore perhaps should look for another job. This point stands in stark contrast to the pr

I urge you to listen to the following video. It is done by veteran teacher Ellie Rubenstein on the state of Education in the USA. The scene Ellie is describing is one I’ve been mentioning in my blogs and vlogs. We’ve developed and accepted an education system that functions based on market forces and in Ellie’s video we are seeing the consequences of leaving the education system in the hands of corporate capitalism and consumer democracy. A teacher that loved teaching, a teac

Today I’ve heard on separate occasions from a parent and a teacher respectively sharing their perspective from within their own current situation regarding the state of the education system and themselves in it. Both were tragic tales but from opposite sides of the education continuum. The parent felt that her child since starting school had become withdrawn and competitive and even that the child had lost confidence in himself. She explained how through the eyes of the ch

In this blog post, I will start with a series of blog-posts that I will come back to now and again that specifically has to do with the challenges one face as a teacher in a free market capitalistic system and how to solve these with an offset in my own experiences as a teacher in Sweden. I’ve been working with planning lessons all night. I must say that of everything else in my work as a teacher, this is one of the most professionally challenging tasks. Planning lessons for

How are we as teachers contributing actively and directly to maintaining the status quo of society? How are teachers’ parts of the problems we are facing on earth from the perspective of being at the forefront of the brainwashing of our children, supposedly making them effective (and competitive) participants on earth? It is spring here in Sweden. It is the time of year where butterflies go about their cyclic ways from larvae, through cocoons and into fully developed butterfl

In this post we’re continuing to have a look at Célestein Freinet’s pedagogy and educational principles. We will in particular be having a look at the more practical dimension of Freinet’s philosophy; the ways he believed that a child was best taught. As mentioned in the previous post, Freinet believed that children were best educated in a space of ‘work’ and he was amongst other points inspired by his life with the peasants in the French alpes. And since most work is done in

In this post we’re continuing to look at the Reggio Emilia school system and philosophy, looking closer at each cardinal principle and what possible benefits and downsides there are in context to the system contributing to a world that is best for all. For context, please read the previous blogs in this series: Reggio Emilia: The Space of Education – The environment as the 3. Teacher: DAY 12 Education Principles and Practices: The Reggio Emilia Approach: DAY 11 One of the c