The machine world has progressively killed off our authentic voice. We instead struggle to fit into a machine structure that tells us who we should be rather than allowing us to become the person of destiny that we can be. We work to get marks at school rather than to learn about our world and our place in it. We end up in jobs where we give up ourselves. We are bombarded with messages that tell us what we should look like, what we should wear, who we should mate with, how to be happy, and who we should be. No wonder we find relationships difficult. How can we have a relationship with another when we have lost the core relationship with our own selves? Going Home
This quote struck me hard. I think a lot of things in society are so wrongheaded. Just stupid. What can people be thinking? In lots of ways, school is one of these things.
I’ll concede that school has some merit. I had a hard time deciding whether or not to come to college, I did, and I don’t completely hate it. But for the most part I’ve hated just as much as I’ve liked, and left the rest up to indifference. Not too compelling a reason to spend $15,000 a year on tuition.
We work to get marks at school rather than to learn about our world and out place in it. Grades really piss me off. They’re why I hate school. It’s not even that I get bad ones. It’s the debasement of my learning that gets to me, the way academics demean real enlightenment.
Because of grades I care less about what I’m learning, and all too much about the grades themselves. They undermine exploration into the subject at hand. After I get that report card, what the hell reason do I have to go back and think about things?
Now I’m sure that despite grades lots people still look into stuff they’re interested in. Just because they get graded on the subject doesn’t stop them from devouring and loving it. But too many of the people I’ve known do. Especially me.
In part it’s that schoolwork eats up my time. Never too much of it, but it takes enough time out of my day to work on my french homework that I’m much less likely to be reading a french novel in my free time. I’ll be spending that free time doing something I haven’t already needed to do for school.
Another thing is that I think I can learn on my own lots better then I can learn from school. I know myself, my learning style, and what works. The professors who know my for 16 weeks don’t. Their assumedly better knowledge of the subject can atone for their ignorance of how I work, but that doesn’t mean I’d work better independently.
All the really smart friends I’ve ever had have always fulfilled their requirements in school with a minimum of effort, leaving copious amounts of time to do whatever they wanted. My entire peer group worked like this, as long as I can remember.
We have better things to do. More fun is to be had outside of school. All kinds of fun. Games, friends, parties; but equally books, ideas and thought. Lately I’ve thought a lot about what it’d have been like to be home-schooled, besides the fact that I’d have driven my parents off the wall. But that’s for another time.
And we all scoffed at the kids who worked hard to satisfy the requirements, those who felt having a 4.0 would do them well in the future, those who thought their numbers actually mattered.
When I think about what school would be if it were completely up to me, I come up with something along the lines of a neighborhood group, kids who live close together. Not a big group, thirty kids tops. They play together, but their play is also their school. They find hard problems – fun problems, and work to solve them, with any necessary instruction coming from their parents and other adults who happen to be around. Their entire education becomes one of pure exploration.
With the internet today, nearly everything they would need is already their homes. With the addition of a public library, countless books are at their individual behest.
Public and traditional schools do work. Look at the society we have today, it’s completely amazing. But just as much as it’s amazingly good, its amazingly bad. Notice how above I just said amazing. I don’t think I could live with a computer now that I’ve had one my entire life. Yet it’s killing me to live under the government of my country today. I sure couldn’t live without nature, yet to get the computer I so covet contributes directly to the destruction of the environment.
Society just seems so wrongheaded to me.
I’ve hated school for a few years now, but have decided to trudge on. Today it hit me that I can’t just quit because I haven’t concretely answered why I think school is so wrong. Everybody does it! How can it be that bad?
Today I finished my first real semester of college (I have the credits of a sophomore, but earned most of them while I was in high school). Sure, I learned some interesting stuff. But in the 4 months of the semester, I’ve only read one book. Over the three months of summer break, I read 15.
I think the thing I most hate about college, or any institution of society, is that it gives the easy way out. I could have decided to travel the world, but that would have been way harder then signing some forms and going off to college. It’s criminally easy to stay within the bounds of the acceptable, so much so that nobody ever leaves them They just let themselves be ushered along.
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