![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
On my way home last night this title caught my eye in the latest issue of Harpers as I perused the magazine rack for a stimulating read to accompany my lime Perrier: Against School.
It's of course a much longer essay but here are the closing punches.
It's of course a much longer essay but here are the closing punches.
Maturity has by no been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to politcal exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on television. We by computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye wehn Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in sc hool that America is the land of the free. We simply b uy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.Of course I don't take it all as gospel. Although it's in context the copious use of "your children" becomes really cloying. This is pretty standard in literature about education though. I was gonna provide some annecdotal evidence about my horrible experiences in public school (summary: school didn't learn me nothin') but it's too darn late.
Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, it's tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independantly. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology—all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being along, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.Mandatory schooling's purpose is to turn kinds into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day.First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out hot to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
