Why School Sucks

From Z Magazine via ZNet:

And this is why school sucks. Rather than do what it pretends to—educate, foster curiosity, expand our intellects, and promote diversity—compulsory schooling segregates people on the basis of how well they’re willing to do what they’re told. Licensed professionals who have successfully learned what they were supposed to are placed in charge of safeguarding the status quo by passing on screened knowledge that doesn’t require examination as much as acceptance. The majority of what we’ve been led to accept as education is little more than a social engineering exercise designed to replace our inherent curiosities with information that’s been sanitized for our own protection. Or the protection of our future employers.

Compulsory schooling is at its best when diluting intellects in preparation for lifetimes of subservience to corporate masters. Especially in low-wage service sectors, employers aren’t looking for a workforce of individuals who can readily recognize when they’re being screwed over through things like stagnant wages and increasingly crappy health insurance. The easiest people to control are the ones who haven’t been taught which questions are the most important ones to ask in the first place.

Compulsory schooling defines good citizens as those who play by the rules, stay in line, and do as they’re told. Learning is defined by how well we memorize and regurgitate what someone else has deemed we need to know. Creativity is permitted within the parameters of the guidance of licensed professionals whose duty it is to make sure we don’t get too wacky with our ideas or stray very far from the boundaries of normalcy. Rather than trust people to pursue their own innate curiosities, compulsory education replaces self-exploration with the type of structure designed to reward subservience while cultivating fear.

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Hey, that's what I've been saying for some time now. It's nice to get a little validation of my wacky ideas. School really does suck, and we're all quite doomed until people get over their cherished myths about how wonderful and important "education" is. What really sucks is that my ideological brethren, liberals, tend to buy into the public school myths even more than conservatives. I'll die a happy man if I never see another "education" glorifying film like Teachers or Mr. Holland's Opus or even an episode of Boston Public ever again--Dead Poet's Society, on the other hand, is okay because the only teacher actually interested in learning gets sacked at the end; that's pretty real if you ask me. Public schools must be recreated from the ground up, not simply "fixed." But as long as virtually everybody gets tears in their eyes whenever they talk about how important the schools are, nothing's going to happen.

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