Saman.KSchooling and education are different, you need to educate yourself to survive but you need schooling because it is compulsory by the government.
To educate someone is to brainwash them, as education is a desire for knowledge that comes from one’s self.
In this essay, I will go through what is schooling and what it has done for us and for the adults of the future. I hope to encourage you to see a different perspective and take your own path in researching schooling and its effect on children.
I am not focusing on academy schools, grammar schools, foundation schools, private schools or any types of special schools, most are different flavours of public schooling and I will be focusing on that. I am also not focusing on homeschooling as they are not schools and they can function any which way the parents would like.
Schools…
Formal schooling is an institution that tries to provide teaching environments for students under the direction of teachers. In almost all countries (USA, UK, AUS, CAN and more) schooling is compulsory for children between ages 5 to 7 and above depending on the region. Most countries have 10 to 12 years of compulsory schooling that is required of all people and is imposed by the government.
If schooling was there to teach students to ride a bike, it worked in a way to keep the training wheels on the bikes for all children till the prescribed time, despite differences in their learning ability. Students who learn fast have to keep their training wheels on while wasting their time waiting for others. Meanwhile, the students who have struggled to learn cycling by the pre-prescribed time will be left on their own to catch up and they might be labelled as having a learning disability or being developmentally challenged.
Imagine if training wheels were compulsory till a prescribed age.
In a typical school class, there is a qualified teacher that tries to teach the pupils the prescribed lesson. Neither the teacher nor the students have a say in what should be taught in the class.
“When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.” – John Taylor Gatto.
Schools often have multiple classes for each topic but the level of understanding between students could be more than what can be bridged by teachers without moulding the students to the average.
Schools select teachers based on their competence to condition students to sit quietly and feed students the prescribed compulsory information. School teachers have to teach the compulsory curriculum to the students and students are told they need it for their future.
In compulsory schooling, neither teachers, parents, students nor anyone who is in touch with the classroom has any control over the direction of the compulsory curriculum. The standards of the compulsory curriculum come from somewhere far from students and the classroom, and often it does not match the short-term or long-term real-life needs or wants of the students.
The non-compulsory curriculums are limited to a pre-approved list. Students’ interests have no relevance in the eye of the school and the school wants students to follow the path that was set for them. Public schools have to follow a mandatory national curriculum and the schools that don’t have to follow the national curriculum often follow a standardised curriculum.
At the end of the school year, all students are put through an exam about the things that they have learned that year.
The results of the exams will be the only measurement of students’ understanding and students are told future employers judge the worth of the students with that.
At the beginning of every year, schools keep students separated by age and expect students of the same age to progress at the same speed, those who have got the best grade might be in the same class as the ones with the worst grade. Schools disregard their own measurement of students’ understanding but yet every year students are measured by more exams.
Schools’ bureaucratic focus on measuring students will leave no time for students to learn. Students first have to prepare themself for exams and if they have time and energy left, after their homework they can spend time learning what they are interested in.
Schooling limits students’ learning choices and makes grades of standardised tests the sole target of the students. The standardised testing industry pushes to give a uniform target to the students and it’s judged by an external examiner who is detached from the day-to-day performance of the students. This uniformity and external locus of judgement is what the dystopian novel 1984 by George Orwell was centred on.
Winston Smith wrote:
“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!” – George Orwell, 1984.
Of course, We might not have a name for the examiner who judges us all and we might not deify the judge but the standardised testing industry has created that structure, just needs a trigger.
Classrooms…
Every school day consists of 3 to 5 lessons and each lesson lasts for 1 to 2 hours depending on the school.
The number of lessons per day and the hours per lesson are fixed per school. All lessons are hosted in a classroom by a teacher. In the classroom, students are meant to sit behind a desk facing the teacher or the blackboard/whiteboard.
Each class is time-limited and breaks off with a bell ring. Students are told to focus on the task that is assigned to that period/hour and break their focus and attention to move to the next task that was pre-planned for them. Students have to understand what they are meant to do and finish their task before the bell rings, which tells them to take a break or go to their next class. If students want their focus to not get interrupted by the bell ring, they have to perform exactly the same and follow orders step by step, like a factory line.
In a classroom, students are discouraged from getting up from their seats and talking with other students. Teachers expect students to listen to the teacher and focus on the work when given work and anything other than that is considered misbehaving.
Schools’ classroom structure is more like a lab to condition children to sit still and do what they are being told. Schools turn children’s drive to explore and desire for an adventure into the condition of intolerable boredom. Students are told to not show expressions of boredom and try to engage with the topic. Students will have to give up their free will and tolerate boredom or conform to the schools’ will to educate. This suppression of control in students will change boredom to the default condition of living.
If a student is interested in the topic of that lesson and builds the concentration to work on that, they will be interrupted by a bell ring and have to move to another class and another topic and start to build concentration and interest all over. Lather, rinse, repeat… It is almost like schools are built to disrespect children’s efforts to build focus.
John Taylor Gatto summarises:
“Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behaviour.” – John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
Boredom…
Boredom is a drive to do more, it is a feeling that tells us what we are doing is not enough and that something needs to be changed. In schools, boredom is treated as a problem and a condition of being there. The burden of responsibility to entertain boredom is left to students but students are only allowed to do what the teachers tell them to do.
Schools push students to build habits that do not fulfil their boredom. Teachers often try to reduce boredom in their classes but they can’t avoid dealing with it. When children have higher boredom intolerance and they can’t contain their energy to adventure, schools label them as badly behaved or learning disabled.
Learning disability…
When students can’t conform to the methods of schooling they are often considered learning disabled (or having difficulty learning). Outside of schooling these children often have no problem navigating their life and because of those differences, they have a different way of approaching life.
What schools call learning disabilities are not the fault of the students but the rigid way of teaching. This is what Eric Weinstein called “Teaching Disability”. On The Tim Ferriss Show, Eric Weinstein said:
“I think, kids who have been labelled as learning disabled, but they’re actually super learners. They’re like learners on steroids who have some deficits to pay for their superpower. And teachers can’t deal with this. We label those kids as learning disabled to cover up for the fact that the economics of teaching requires that one central actor, the teacher, be able to lead a room of 20 or more people in lockstep.”
Schools have a rigid way of motivating, teaching and examining students on what they are compelled to learn. Schools try to teach the moderate average in the class and educate all kids equally despite their differences in ability and interest. This will push teachers to adopt a rigid teaching format which will lead to students fitting the school mould. The ones who fit the school mould get rewarded and the ones who are outcasts get pushed to the side to be treated as defective and called learning disabled.
Just with a quick search, you can find out the most successful people in history have what schools consider learning disabilities like dyslexia, ADHD, dyscalculia and dysgraphia. Steven Spielberg, Richard Branson, Michael Phelps, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Tom Cruise, John Lennon, John F Kennedy and more… the list is endless.
A good teacher…
Schools select teachers based on their competence to condition students to sit quietly and feed students the pre-prescribed compulsory information with kindness and passion. Teachers have to keep the students engaged in the curriculum despite students’ interests. Teachers often give the students baseless hope about the future if better grades are achieved. As grades are not directly linked with experience or career.
This is not the fault of the teacher but of the schooling role that pays people to teach. If students ask for more than what is in the curriculum teachers often have to tell them “that is not in your exam, you don’t need to learn that.”, “you can learn that in your spare time” or teachers themselves can’t answer questions about what they teach. No matter how considerate the teacher is, the teacher has to teach children the compulsory curriculum and disregard the child’s interests.
The child has to learn the compulsory curriculums at the best time of their day and put aside their interest and growth for another time.
Teaching roles are restricted in many ways, including how they can help, what they can teach, how much time they can spend on a student, and how many students they can have in their class.
Teachers have to make the curriculums interesting and engaging for the children. Some teachers try to have a one-to-one session with the low-performing students, but often students are not interested in that curriculum to start with.
A good student…
Schooling teaches students that as time passes they will go to the next year and working harder or smarter than their peers will result in them moving at the same speed as their peers.
Students are encouraged to sit still in the classroom, listen to their teacher and study at home so they can get good exam results. A good student will try to get the best results for their exam by memorising the curriculum that was given to them. All students are examined and graded on what they have learned but the best and the worst students might have to sit in the same classroom (depending on school size). In schools, students’ ability has no relevance as all students are categorised by age and all students move as they age (with some rare exceptions).
Categorising children by age will stop them from teaching one another based on their ability and educational growth will be slower. Age categorisation makes a comparison between children’s age with education and progress in life. When people pass a certain age, education and age have no correlation for most people. But yet we categorise our children by age and we keep them down till they can prove that they have memorised the compulsory school topics.
Each person develops differently, some fast, others slow, and some focus on one idea, others on many.
“So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a raging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage opposing winds. He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.” ― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.
Even though we reward children who exceed in examining and getting far in schooling we fail to acknowledge the children’s understanding. For those students who passed through schooling with flying colours, the only skills they have proved for certain is to be a good student in a school.
Students are not free to take their own path and take their own time in learning ideas, students don’t have a choice on what to learn in the best hours of their day. They are actively pushed to read the dumbed-down version of the topics of compulsory schooling. The best students are the ones who do average and comply with every command.
Standardised tests…
Compulsory schooling is made with standardised tests at the core, every year students prepare for the final test and in the middle of that, they get tested over and over again to prove to someone that they are good enough.
Standardised tests by definition are standard checkboxes to be ticked by the student and checked by the teacher.
Standardised tests reduce the complexity of the students’ knowledge to a single grade that could well be far from students’ ability. A desire to learn is not needed in schools as every student has to remember the same curriculum as everyone else with minimal choice on the learning path just to be measured by a factory-based checkbox test.
In some cases to teach students, the curriculum strips down the topic to a dumbed-down version and students are expected to give the dumbed-down version in their exams. Almost all examinations are is relying on the known path of getting to the answer, creativity and exploration are actively discouraged.
Examining students measure schools, teachers and students’ performance for the judgment of a third party. Schools are built to serve future employers and standardised tests are there to measure obediency in students.
As to pass school with flying colours the student has to listen to the teacher spelling out the school curriculum and regurgitate it at each exam.
Students are limited on what they can take to the exam room but in the real world, the tools they can use are only limited by their imagination.
The real world does not have rules on what tools to use and if you can get your hands on them you can use them. Whether the tools used are calculators or internet forums, the real world doesn’t care and rewards people who get the job done as fastest, efficiently and with the highest quality as possible.
School exams are treated as tools to measure ability and knowledge, but they will create unnatural environments that will not represent the real world. In the real world, the problems are not 2-dimensional lines written on paper.
And most times there is no single solution to solve real problems and creativity is rewarded. As to create new ideas and explore knowledge to find the truth we sometimes have to explore the unknown and challenge what’s out there, and that is what examining prevents.
“If you are going to do anything big you are by definition unqualified” – James Dewey Watson.
If schools were centred around education, teachers’ experience would have been determining grades for students, just like work/personal reference. In the real world, people are measured by the experience and performance they had rather than a measurement system that only works for the average with high memory retention. You can find that out for yourself, when was the last time you asked “what grade did you get?” from your doctor, lawyer, mechanic or anyone with some skills you are willing to pay for?
John Taylor Gatto was a teacher in New York City’s public schools for over 30 years and has received the Teacher of the Year award in New York State. He has written multiple books on the topic of schooling and published The Bartleby Project to destroy the standardized testing industry. You can find The Bartleby Project here:
Thought exercise…
Teachers often stand in front of the school entry as students enter the school through gates. When the bell rings students have to get themselves to the class as fast as possible. During class time, students have to be in their class.
To leave the class students have to ask for permission from the teachers. During break time, students are left to do what they want in the playground but the teachers are spread throughout the school to make sure miss behaving won’t happen and break up fights as soon as it starts.
Depending on the school, bullying is more common in school than outside. Students are not allowed to leave the school before the scheduled time. If they want to leave early they have to get permission from teachers before they can leave.
Now change the words with the rules down below and read the above writing one more time.
School => Prison
Student => Prisoner
Teacher => Prison guard
Class => Cell
playground => Open-air
Free adults are not divided by age and locked in a gated building, why should our children be?
Of course, there are differences I haven’t mentioned, but do we want this much similarity between where our children go to spend the most impressionable times of their life and where criminals go as punishment?
The problem with schooling does not end as soon as we finish school. It has and will affect our future. Can future adults act free when they are mandated by the government to spend more than 10 years of the most important years of their life in a gated building with people watching over their shoulders and telling them what to do?
“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.”― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.
Effects of schools and a better path…
Children like to grow just like trees, branching every which way their abilities and interest takes them.
This natural growth just needs the child to have the freedom to choose and change their path as they learn. This freedom is not allowed in schools, students are pressed into a mould and restricted from doing anything that is not asked of them. The schooling does not pressure children into the mould in one day but in more than 10 years of schooling, as children grow older they develop a dependency on authority watching them and telling them what to do.
“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” – John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling.
If we are trying to help our children grow up and learn to live, we have to always try to help them to do what adults do and let them make choices for themselves. Children’s choices should build their future, they should have opportunities to make mistakes and grow at their own pace.
Children’s curiosity will naturally gravitate to taking responsibility as they grow old and adults need to help children to take as much responsibility as they can.
John Taylor Gatto has identified a natural learning method and called it Open-Source learning. In open-source learning, no one is exclusively a teacher and anything or anyone can be a source for learning.
At the core of Open-Source learning, education is an internal drive to learn and not something that schools or anyone can give. Just like how in the real adult world people don’t have to learn if they don’t want to, in open-source learning children learn what they want to when they want to and curiosity takes the lead and boredom becomes a drive to avoid stagnation.
This is the best form of learning, it is the path that everyone who has created, invented and discovered has taken whether or not they went to school.
Schools prevent an essential need for children’s growth, the adult-free playtime. The adult-free playtime will help children to learn about the limits and boundaries of life.
Without any adults around to help, children will find a way to get themselves out of arguments, fights and trouble with other children and learn negotiation techniques. Lenore Skenazy the author of the book Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry, goes through the benefits of letting your kids become independent and limiting adult supervision. An antidote to helicopter parenting.
This adult’s supervision and general control over what should or shouldn’t be learned can create a sick society. We can see some traces of that in schools and universities.
Schools have started implementing safety warnings and protocols to the detriment of the children’s growth. This process will delay children’s development to become adults. As students who have had overprotective schools and parents grow older and get into university, they expect the same treatment from their university as adults and that trickles down to the workplace and further in society.
This social contagious is not distant from us. The upcoming generation of children, who are now becoming legal adults has adopted this demand for safety from their university administrations.
In “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” a book by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, has highlighted the social contagious called safetyism that has captured universities. The resulting culture of safetyism is built on three great untruths:
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
Always trust your feelings.
Life is a battle between good people and evil people.
One of the school’s selling points is that schools are a place where children get to socialise with children their age, but schools are also the only place that segregates anyone by the year they were born. Socialising and working with people of different ages will help a person see different perspectives and experiences that can bring a healthier mindset. Among adults, it is the norm to be colleagues with people of a different generation, but in schools, the norm is to be the same age.
The schooling model is a fertile petri dish waiting for a social contagious to hijack it. Social contagious are common in schools, some can be dangerous like anorexia and self-harm, and some are harmless like fashion trends and games.
The commonality of social contagious in ages and groups is not a new Idea, Friedrich Nietzsche had the same idea more than 130 years ago when he said:
“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
The book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. Abigail Shrier explores a mystery: Why, in the last decade, has the diagnosis “gender dysphoria,” transformed from a vanishingly rare affliction, applying almost exclusively to boys and men, to an epidemic among teenage girls?
Final thoughts…
I have no solution to replace schools with and that is the whole point. Children are not problems in need of solutions, they are the solution finders of our future!
We should let children choose their own paths and let them educate themself and adults should try to help them as best as they can. Each child themself should find out how they want to spend their life from the earliest age possible, but just like we don’t let under-18s gamble and buy alcohol, we should not let children do things that affect their bodies permanently, but that should be the responsibility of parents’ and not a bureaucratic system like school.
As always, this was not an exhaustive exploration but to start the conversation. Hopefully, I have given you enough resources for you to continue researching.
Saman.K
