If you give a man a fish, he has to come back when he needs another fish. If you teach a man to fish, he has to come back when he needs to learn something else. Why not teach the man how to learn?
Related: School Funding: Finish the job, THEN get paid
When we organize schools around the teaching of a collection of particular subjects, over a particular stretch of time — something the state defines as an ‘adequate education’ — we make children teacher-dependent, rather than self-reliant.
This undermines the very idea of education. (As Yeats said, education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.) It’s also incredibly expensive to hire people to teach students things that the students could — and should — be learning on their own.
But it sure does create a lot of jobs!
