If you have kids, or if you care about the future of our civilization, and if you have not yet watched this video, watch it now.
Tragic as the content is, tragic and inhuman as the blatantly stated intended purpose of the original design of our 'modern' (sic) educational systems are, more tragic still is knowing how this demo reel is now nearly 5 years old and we still see this farce of classrooms, SAT test, lockdowns, hall-monitors, forced detainment and personal searches, calculated consumerism indoctrination, horrific food served up in dangerous toxic environments is nonetheless paraded about as if it did work, with all of us knowing full well that it doesn't.
Producer John Taylor Gatto is not, by himself, an engaging orator, but he is prepared, he is serious and he is earnest, and if you'd like hear his research, he's put it all out online in a multipart series of YouTube lectures:
It doesn't work. Sorry, Mr Wainwright, locking the door on the kids until the end of Grade 12 does not imply 'graduation'. The education system is a failure and everywhere in every direction we have the skyrocketing disenfranchisement of youth and the plummeting economy to prove it. Confining prisoners to their cells under threat of Bill 51 does not imply happy compliance.
The question, the real and pressing question, is how we get from this mess and muddle that we are currently entrenched in and move from this place to that other place, that place where human beings once again love learning, love improving the lot of their entire species, love the place that gives them life and security, love the prospects for the future.
As one of the kids in this promo says, the Old School "Fourth Purpose" way had 150 years to prove its worth, and it didn't materialize; I'm saying we either fix it, now, using methods we know already work in the small scale, we either work earnestly to fix it, or we prepare to pay the consequences.