Quoting from an article by František Tichý: "They are in a great mental passivity, somewhere deep inside their comfort zone. When we have planned services and divided tasks at an outing, it still works, fortunately, but any personal initiative is unprecedentedly poor".
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Even the first post-Soviet ministers of education, Piťha, Vopěnka, Gruša and Sokol, spoke about the necessary connection between education and upbringing, about spiritual enrichment or that professional education should carry the moral characteristic of service to others. Instead, however, the doctrines of multiculturalism gradually began to permeate our society and, as a consequence of the weakening influence of culturally educated professionals and politicians, curricula and educational goals began to change, gradually integrating globally promoted trends. These tendencies are mainly those that adapt the requirements to the weakest pupils (programmatic distance from knowledge-based education, etc.). Once classical education, with its efforts to cultivate the intellect, was removed from the path of "progress", nothing prevented education from being reduced to the anti-intellectual instruction of the functionary.
Indeed, following the powerful model of the natural sciences, a paradigm has prevailed in the humanities that commands them to be useful seconds in the industrial manipulation of the world. This manifests itself in particular in the threat to freedom and the associated excessive bureaucracy, the "facilitating" digitalization or, for example, project planning. Over the last twenty years, a completely different world has thus emerged, centred around a caricature of humanity.
The pedagogical chaos of recent decades is based on over-optimistic and uninformed visions of modernity, whose philosophical and political collapse in the 20th century led, paradoxically, to a hasty rejection not only of Christian education but also of the last vestiges of humanist education in its original sense.
By eliminating classical education and replacing knowledge with skills without context, we are hurtling into new crises of humanity rather than a hopeful future. It seems, therefore, that the time is coming again when it will be necessary to seek and build centres of education outside the official school structures, outside the academies and outside the universities. This would be nothing new in history.
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JŠ
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