Tag: school

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.

A common mistake we adults make is that when we think kids aren’t learning enough of something, then not enough teaching is happening. We think learning is as simple as adding sugar in coffee — the more sugar you add, the sweeter it will taste — therefore the more teaching there is, the more learning will occur.

Compared to us oldies, however, kids today have more topics crammed into their schoolday and have even a couple of years added to their curriculum. Why is it then, that many of them still seem not to know a lot (and some seem to know even less), despite all the additions?

The answer is simple. The equation is wrong. More teaching does not equal more learning. In fact, more teaching may even hamper learning if the teaching is forced on a student. The mild disinterest he or she feels for the subject may spiral downwards into open hate or disgust for it.

Coercing a child to learn something when there is clearly no interest or motivation for doing so may push a child further away from liking or loving whatever it is you want them to learn.

As a child, I didn’t go to a Chinese school as most of my other Chineses friends did. My parents felt I was missing something by not taking Chinese (Mandarin) lessons. So they arranged for me to have a Chinese language tutor and I had to go there every Saturday morning and spend an hour or more writing and reciting passages from a small booklet. I hated those lessons for two reasons:

1. Hardly any Chinese kid or even adult I knew spoke Mandarin in everyday conversation. Chinese people here usually speak Fookien which is about as different as Tagalog is to the Visayan language. So there was no practical application of whatever it was I was learning by rote.
2. Saturday morning was when all the great cartoons were showing on TV. I hated missing Scooby Doo and Super Friends and Space Ghost.

So after a few years of missed Saturdays, I got so fed up I finally told my dad I didn’t want to take those lessons anymore because they were useless . He was adamant at first and didn’t want to budge, but I asked why he was forcing me to take those lessons. He seemed taken aback by my use of that word, and said that he didn’t want to force me, but rather thought that learning Chinese was for my own good and that I might come to regret it someday. But that if I really wanted to stop, then he would accept that.

So I said yes, I wanted to stop. There were times after that when I was mildly interested to learn Mandarin on my own, but because of those words — that I might regret it — I willed myself not to regret it and even prided myself on being illiterate in Mandarin.

How different things could have turned out, I think, had they not forced me but rather tickled my curiosity by speaking a bit of Mandarin here and there, and left me to wonder what they were talking about, until it drove me crazy enough to spark the desire to learn.

That is the key. Without the desire to learn, no true lasting learning can occur.

Of all the years I spent in that Chinese tutoring class, I remember nothing but a single sentence from that booklet, and I only know how to speak it, not write nor read it — “Wǒ ài fēilǜbīn” — I love the Philippines.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.

One of my friends, Bryan Tenorio, had an interesting reaction to last week’s article:

“Schools teach us to conform and follow the tried and tested norms…Schools should allot half of the school time encouraging students to think out of the box. However, it is essential for the kids to know and understand the rules first before they break it. That way, there is deeper appreciation of both the orthodox and the unorthodox. 

In photography workshops that I’ve been to, it is always stressed that one should know the rules first before you break them. I find it effective so far.”

I do agree with the general sentiment but I feel the need to explain just a bit further. Whenever I talk about education in my articles, I am almost always referring to what is known as Basic Education or what we call primary and secondary education, or in short, pre-school to high school.

I am not talking about students choosing a particular course of study, or professionals taking special seminars to enhance their knowledge of a certain skill which may be a hobby or which may be essential to their profession. It is in this case that I agree with Bryan’s assertion of knowing the rules before you break them.

But when we talk about Basic Education, however, well what exactly are the rules? What is basic education for, anyway? Isn’t it to equip young kids with how to deal with life?

I mean, sure there’s reading and arithmetic and basic science and languages, but that quickly progresses to things that are not so basic like solving complicated word problems, or algebra and trigonometry, or the various layers of soil or the atmosphere, or Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion, or learning complex vocabulary words you will almost certainly never use in your lifetime, or diagramming sentences. What’s the line between basic and not-so-basic? And is it really necessary to force children to learn them before they can break them?

And how about many “basic” things that should be there but aren’t taught? Like how to talk and relate to people of all ages — not just to sit still and listen to adults. Or how to settle issues by talking and reasoning, how to voice one’s own opinion, how to cooperate and collaborate? How about how to find your own way home? Or how to slice, peel, and chop food, and then cook it? Or using common tools like a hammer, screwdriver, pliers, or a handsaw? Or how to earn a living or how to protect yourself or how to report abuse? Aren’t these more “basic” than a lot of the useless stuff they put into the Basic Education curriculum?

How about finding yourself? Knowing who you are, and finding your purpose in life? Aren’t children entitled to explore these from a very young age, rather than being forced to go through the rigmarole of school and going all the way getting elementary, high school and college diplomas, but not knowing what to do with one’s life?

In fact, children have already begun this process since they began learning how to communicate and how to move around. For a lot of these kids, school is an interruption of this process. Instead of of being a help, it has become a hindrance, and a huge one at that.

Email me at andy@freethinking.me. View previous articles at www.freethinking.me.

Originally published in Sunstar Davao.