[UPDATE: See, “Last Thursday, I Lied”. be sure to Read the Whole Thing®.]
[Note: I have family members who are REAL teachers and know at least a few more REAL teachers. Heck, I have even known three–THREE–pubschool administrators who were actually worthwhile uses of the oxygen they consumed. Really! Still. . . ]
Pubschool isn’t entirely “prison for kids”. . . but it’s usually the next worst thing. Pubschool certainly was no picnic for me. People kept interrupting my learning to “teach” me things that were on THEIR schedule. . . *heh*
From a Salon article, School is a prison — and damaging our kids:
“. . .the more scientists have learned about how children naturally learn, the more we have come to realize that children learn most deeply and fully, and with greatest enthusiasm, in conditions that are almost opposite to those of school.”
Well, especially for boys, for whom pubschool is often a kind of prison camp designed to make them into girls 1, or ANY kid who’s in the second standard deviation above the norm or better on any standard IQ test. “Odds” of all kinds find pubschool to me mind-numbing torture as they are REQUIRED to fit into the box. . . and find the box to be far, far too small.
But. . . the problem is this, though: how can a society educate 2 its population in such a way as to maximize the number of useful, productive citizens? Assembly line “prisons for kids” has been the answer for many years, though good teachers–REAL teachers–do everything they can to minimize the “prison” and “assembly line” aspects and encourage real learning. Oh, but that’s another problem: where does one find REAL teachers in numbers great enough to overcome the disadvantages of the system itself, the “millstones” of pubschool administrators *gag* and the plethora of remote-educrat-meddling they implement?
Education 2 ain’t what it’s cracked up to be. . .
1Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys. From a review:
“Sommers, a philosopher by education and a mother of two boys, shows that the trend she identified in the late 1990s to see boys as defective girls and therefore somehow in need of retooling has continued, and its effects have spread.”
2“Educate” has come to mean, more and more, simply “propagandize, brainwash.” Real education leads from darkness to light. What is created by the system of remote educrats promulgating rules for pubschool administrators to use cutting oxygen from the brains of teachers and students alike being implemented in a system of regimentation, indistinguishable from a prison regime, INTENDED (see Dewey, et al) to turn children into useful little cogs in an industrial machine is a kind of software lobotomization that seems to be designed by a conspiracy of dunces to make the lowest common denominator universal. *sigh* I am in awe of teachers–REAL teachers–who can do battle against this monstrosity day in and day out–actually bringing light to some students!–without going out of their everlovin’ gourds. Such people are amazing.