The Negative Effects Of The Cookie-Cutter System

The Negative Effects of the Cookie-Cutter System on Our Children

In a time of such advancement where education and free will should coexist, creating an age of enlightenment. We are instead in an age where education has become a forced standard, limiting and constraining the very qualities that are possessed by the many entrepreneurs and leaders that are behind this revolution. Liberty and free flow are arguably what created the backbone for America’s Rags-to-Riches environment, where anyone could make a dream happen with hard work and good planning. The fact that this is being taken away from our children is not only harmful, but it is also disturbing and a detriment to America as a whole. Firstly, the current system is restrictive and damaging.

The starting point for an accurate description of the issue can be shown by the fact that school now is more restrictive than most adults’ workplaces, which will not help foster the behaviors and personalities necessary to sustain any sort of flow in their future environments (Peter Gray, School is a Prison and Damaging Our Kids). The fact that children are being hindered rather than prepared for their futures is a definite issue. Another difficult matter is presented when one considers the fact that liberty is denied to children due to their age. Education is not only restrictive, but it is also legally mandatory with truancy being a crime punishable by law. This is accurately portrayed in a statement by Peter Gray in his article, “Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education”, “In my system of values, and in that long endorsed by democratic thinkers, it is wrong to deny anyone liberty without just cause. To incarcerate an adult we must prove, in a court of law, that the person has committed a crime or is a serious threat to herself or others. Yet we incarcerate children and teenagers in school just because of their age. This is the most blatant of the sins of forced

The fact that the current educational system seems to have begun targeting individuality and creativity is highly alarming, as the qualities are arguably what make up a human’s personality, or ‘spark’. It is that which differentiates people from one another and creates innovation through ‘out of the box’ thinking. Individuality is massively reduced in terms of “diversity of skills, knowledge and ways of thinking” (Gray, Seven Sins). The current educational system from the perspective of (Gray, Seven Sins) is that it interferes with the development of healthy adult traits such as “personal responsibility and self-direction”. The fact of the matter is that personal responsibility is the starting point of any sort of success for any adult. It factors into things like paying bills and taxes, maintaining a family, and holding a job. Self-direction factors into people knowing what they want to do, planning how they will do it, and having the motivation to carry it through. This is arguably the essence of being a hard-working man or woman. The fact that these qualities are being negatively affected by education is unacceptable. One might ask, “How exactly are these qualities being reduced in our children?”. This can be answered by looking at how our children are being formed like clay through a conveyor belt system that tests far too heavily and harshly,