Schools - dehumanising exam factories

Dr Anthony Seldon, master of Wellington College, who has written biographies on former prime ministers Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major, said

"The more deprived the social background of the child, the more important school becomes as that chance to develop all the different intelligences and aptitudes that lie within a child. For too long we've had this brutally frank and ineffective way of measuring schools, and measuring teachers, and what it has done is it's rendered schools ultimately into exam factories, a kind of sausage process machine whereby all that seems to matter is this end result. This is dehumanising and it's not good enough."

As SOYMB has said, in the present society the main aim of education is to provide the knowledge and skills base necessary for employment in capitalism - a workforce educated according to the demands of the profit system. There is a conventional mythology surrounding the noble ideals of education. Schools are said to be places where young minds are nurtured. The reality is, of course, much different as even apologists of the capitalist system such as Seldon fully admit.