I would like to share with you a speech written by my daughter, Meryl Faith, which she delivered in her freshman college class. Faith stopped school after 10th grade. We got some homeschool material for her but she ignored most of it and basically just spent the next 2 years pursuing her interests, video-editing, graphic design, dancing, drawing and going out with her friends.
She chose her own college and major, took the online admission test, and got in without much fuss. We’ve had some conversations about traditional schooling and I guess what she wrote below is telling of what she got out of those conversations. So here it is:
School is a prison.
Prison is a place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty. Inmates wear uniforms and follow a daily routine set by the warden. They are let out of their cells, eat, exercise and do other duties on a fixed schedule. Basically they are told what to do and are punished for failure to comply.
Now let’s look at school. Students wear uniforms and follow a daily routine set by the principal and their teachers. They are let out of classrooms, eat, play and do other activities on a fixed schedule. They need to follow rules set by the school and are punished if they fail to comply.
Notice the similarity?
Worse, children have committed no crime other than being “too young” or being “of school age” so we force them into schools.
Our society is very strange. We frown upon the idea of force yet this is what we do to our children. Teachers get mad at students when they can’t answer the questions. “Why didn’t you study?” they would say. How can we expect children to retain all this mind-numbing information when we as adults can’t even remember most of it. We were forced to learn cursive because when we grow up, this is how we’re expected to write.
Tell me, besides your signature, when have you ever been expected to write in cursive for normal use? Aside from a few exceptions, majority of the people don’t have time to think about fancy-ing their ‘f’s or even write on paper. We live in a digital age where people take their notes down on their phones and laptops. There are plenty more lessons that they deemed useful for adulthood when in reality it isn’t. But I guess it’s also important to know that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Just like how prisoners don’t get to choose their meals, students don’t get to explore what they want to learn. Everyone is given the exact same material and is expected to learn it at the same pace. They are called stupid if they don’t. When prisoners question authority, they get punished. In a similar manner, students are expected to ‘do as they are told’ and to not question it because they are simply just children and they do not know anything. How are we expected to learn and progress when we are not allowed to question why things are the way they are?
To be continued next week.
Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.