MAP Forum

In this article, I contrast China's Double Reduction Policy - aimed at reducing academic pressure on children - with the policies of neighboring Korea, which quite clearly doesn't give a fuck.

https://www.brianribbon.com/home/why-ch ... t-it-right

I pretty much absolutely agree with the principle but think that the practice doesn’t go far enough. Education should not be based on academic success or used as glorified “daycare”. Instead, it should focus on the interests of the learner themselves, who should ideally be able to set their own schedules and learning goals, and never be ‘locked’ or required to go to a single place to learn by their parents or the state, something China still does.

Long version: A coercive education system is one in which every person between two preset ages:

-is legally required to be enrolled in a place of education (‘school’) by or under auspicien of parents or the state;
-is at least at the place they are enrolled in receive education, coerced by other people (teachers, principal) to participate in ‘educational’ programmes organized by these people or others, regardless of the person’s interests or prior experience with the matter;
-is deprived of any major choice in at least daily schedule and method of learning.
Such systems of education have at least shown to be inherently harmful to the mental health of young people, who are often stressed out by the pressure that such systems inherently give: they have to check if all people between the ‘school age’ are participating in the system, something that is often done via required tests and attendance reports, dehumanizing the individual person and stripping them of any meaningful options. Yes some coercive education systems do allow students to choose which subjects to follow, but this is often A) with many asterisks and B) only offered at specific ages.

Recall or assume beyond this point that every person is able to learn what they’re interested in at the time, konwledge and skill acquired by interest has a better hold than that acquired by brute force, and every person has the ability to decide in which way and pace they want to learn those things they are interested in. This is VERY noticeable in both early and adult education. Given that these statements hold in those cases, they should be able to hold universally and by themselves provide an argument to abolish every law related to coercive education itself, and replace it with a learner-first, free as in Freedom system in which the ‘schools’ of today are converted into playrooms which simply attract kids to them rather than forcing kids to partake in activities. Thus, the learner (regardless of age) is able to partake in any kind of activities for which the resources that are made available, on their own or with anyone else present and willing to partake in the same activity. People should be able to move not only to and from, but also between such facilities safely as they desire, and ideally these are run exclusively by private non-profits with government support. As a final requirement for such a system, any kind of parental coercion should be absolutely forbidden and this ban actively enforced via a hotline and random patrols.