THE INDIVIDUAL AND ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

Schooling teaches that knowledge is a commodity that can be packaged and marketed, and that if one wants to obtain that commodity, then school is the only place where it is available. Skills and knowledge picked up outside of schooling are not granted value or importance. The question "What is your educational background?" really asks for your schooling history. Further, school teaches that the key to prosperity and status is an ever-increasing consumption of the school's product - "the need to he taught". The schooling industry and the attitudes that underlie it are very much a part of the "consumer society". Knowledge is not seen as something we can develop or pick up on our own, nor can our knowledge be recycled and informally passed on to others. Knowledge is considered to be the product of formal teaching, and teaching is a professional process that is carried on only in accredited schools. The fare that is offered by those schools is based on the needs of the schooling industry, not on the needs of those it was meant to serve.