Cats are cute :D

“All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others” – George Orwell

Despite its egalitarian philosophy, education systems worldwide are built on behaviourism principles and are continually creating categories that become the foundation of unequal societies. For stratification to happen, a social structure that makes categories is necessary. Our school system, with its uniform curricula and assessment systems, acts perfectly as one.

When kids enter the system, they do not have a level playing field. According to Prudence L. Carter, while affluent kids take a “high-speed elevator” and the middle-class students ride on an “escalator,” the low-income students struggle through a “staircase with missing steps and no handrails.” When students of these categories compete, one can imagine the outcomes.

In Oxfam’s survey on tackling inequality, the respondents in nine out of ten countries put free, universal, high-quality education on top of the list. When children are trained to get better grades in schools, they get access to better higher education institutions and therefore get better jobs, earn more, and become influential – is a prevalent idea in society. Unfortunately, there’s hard statistical evidence of how the gap between the rich and poor keeps widening, despite the improved access to education.

The education systems worldwide are built on egalitarian principles that all students are educable and deserve equal learning opportunities, but unfortunately through schools, they legitimize inequalities and even create it - this is quite paradoxical.

Comforting anecdotes

This makes us feel uneasy and confused. After all, we know so many stories where the protagonist’s life changed because of education. But these stories are also testimonies of the hard work of extraordinary individuals – students and teachers – who dared to move up the staircase, jumping the missing step and building the handrails all along. It may be this extraordinariness that helped them narrow the economic and intergenerational gap, if not the social ones.

The change

This leads us again to ‘what is education set out to achieve?’ and ‘how to get there?’ With the current practice of catch-up games, education cannot become the great equalizer that it intends to be. Educating is a social endeavour and can never be accomplished if it misses out on the humanistic element. We cannot let it hinge on the brilliance of a few. The system has to make quality as its foundation and replace the broken stairs with those high-speed machines. In bridging the gap, we do not want to bring the higher end down. Instead, we want to speed up things for the lower end and push it up with all the might. It requires redirecting a whole lot of resources towards education - particularly to this side of the sector. Do we have the systemic will to do that? Now, that’s something to ponder.