Factory vs Agriculture Model of Education

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• The Crafty Classroom
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• A Reason for Science
  Hands-on Christian science curriculum for Grades 1–8 featuring experiments, teacher guides, and activity-based learning for all styles.

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👓 2 Reads Worth Your Time

• If play feels exhausting, annoying, or overwhelming… it might not be your child you’re reacting to.
  It might be the buried parts of you that were never allowed to play freely. [read here]
  

• “I turned out fine” is not proof that traditional schooling or old school parenting worked. It is often evidence of how deeply we have normalised harm. [read here]

🧐 1 Idea Worth Considering

We built our schools like factories because factories were the future.

Same age groups moving through identical stations.
Same inputs, same processes, same expected outputs.
Ring the bell, switch the task, measure the product.

It made sense when we needed workers for assembly lines.

But children are not widgets.

A factory assumes uniformity.

Every piece of metal should respond identically to the same treatment.

If it doesn't, it's defective. We still operate this way.

Same curriculum, same pace, same tests, same deadline.

A child who needs more time is "behind." A child who wants to go deeper is "ahead." Both are problems disrupting the production schedule.

Now consider a garden.

A farmer plants seeds in spring, but she doesn't expect all plants to grow at the same rate.

Tomatoes and lettuce have different timelines.

Some plants need full sun, others prefer shade.

The farmer doesn't panic when the carrots grow underground while the corn reaches skyward.

She doesn't label the late bloomers as failures or force the early risers to slow down. She tends to each according to its nature.

The question isn't whether we can afford to treat education like agriculture. The question is whether we can afford not to.

When we rushed to standardise learning, we gained efficiency but lost something essential.

We can measure factory outputs easily.

Test scores, graduation rates, college acceptances.

But can we measure curiosity?

Can we standardise wonder?

Can we mass produce the moment a child discovers they love something enough to pursue it without being told?

What if the goal isn't to make every child the same by June, but to help each child become more fully themselves?