The Future of Education

Procrustes’ bed is a philosophical concept that describes an arbitrary imposition of a given standard to the members of a community, or users of a system without consideration of their actual needs. The present reflection further expands such notion of Procrustes’ bed as the zeitgeist of present and future educational trends in foreign language teaching by assessing its scope of influence from a sheer critical-structuralist approach. We identify a contradiction amongst intention, design, and application granted the need of forcing language learners to comply with the rules and impositions of the curriculum in order for it to be successful. This standpoint does not address individual needs such as the idiolect or differences in cognitive profiles; thus little if any attention has been paid to learners in view of their continuous mechanising to serve the method or syllabus, and not, as it should, the method to serve them. We classify the inner reasons that stymie a clear communication between learners’ needs and foreign language curriculum proposals, such as commercialism vs. ethical conflicts of interest, the urge of programmes to present results with evidence of learning, and the linear presentation content that bears no relationship to the nonlinear expressive possibilities found in native spontaneous speech. This presentation highlights the cognitive bias that stems from the Procrustean philosophy ruling the educational apparatus when students are subdued to the imposed course of action established a priori by the teacher, the syllabus, the curriculum, the national plan, the Department of Education, or overseas imported criteria.