The Standard Child: Back to the Basics (Part 10)
Categories: Léo’s Insights 2023-2024, Back to the Basics
We have all heard the rhetoric regarding standards. While we may appreciate the expectation of standards in certain things like cars, planes boat and trains, the application of standards to students is absurd.
To expect all iPhones to meet a certain level of expectation makes sense. Children are not mechanical items like computers, yet this seems to be how the education industry views them. No doubt there is a standard monetary value placed on students by government and schools, but this has nothing to do with the children and everything to do with the standardization of the educational industrial complex. The number and type of students in a school multiplied by the funding allotment per student is how the government calculates money granted to a school. While that may be the standard, children cannot be “standardized”. And if children cannot be standardized, the idea that someone or something other than parents could be so presumptuous as to suggest a standard education program or requirements for learning loses its credibility.
When one considers there have been many multiples of billions of people who have walked this earth and that there have never been two people exactly the same, the idea of having a standard education becomes preposterous, especially when considering linguistic and cultural differences. Keep in mind that while God celebrates and excels in diversity, the enemy of mankind will push for conformity and so will falsely advance standard requirements for all children.
If we understand education to be the programming of children as if they are programmable computers, we can strive for some kind of standard. However, treating them as individual human beings in keeping with the uniqueness of each child is truly freeing as it works with God’s plan for creation rather than against it. God ways should be the only standard we strive for and we should remain focused on the individual, not on the masses.
To learn more about “standardization,” see the blog post How a Home Education Differs From a Standard Education: https://www.educationunlimited.ca/insights/index.php/2020/05/11/how-a-home-education-differs-from-a-standard-education/
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