Mentally Drained

Howdy doody, yo and watsup. In today’s lesson on the futility of school, I will (metaphorically) drill a fairly large hole in your head and pour an entire cauldron full of interesting and thought-provoking information on how this prison of intellectual expansion that we call ’school’ causes unfavourable traits in children – our future.

Ahh, teenagers. Useless pieces of crap, yeah? I know I can’t stand them. And they can’t stand themselves either – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-468866/Why-children-today-unhappy.html. Just about everything about teenagers is deterioating: their health, their intellect, their behaviour. Children seem more preoccupied in attending ‘the most rad parties’ then focusing on their education and mental well-being (which is at its worst since ever). Apart from the skyrocket of obesity, their mental health seems to have been violently raped by tapirs (who have the largest penis to body ratio).  

And school is not doing anything about it. ‘But that’s not the schools problem’, you may say, but it seems that everything is the schools problem; from safe sex to sport, school tries to control every aspect of a person – programming them… But when it comes to stopping someone from killing themselves, schools put their feet up and drink some coffee in the teachers lounge and ignore the entire issue. Maybe there are schools that are fighting it, but that doesn’t mean they are defeating it and that isn’t good enough.

To sum up, there are very little teenagers that would choose to read a book. There are also very little teenagers that would choose to go for a run. There are very little teenagers concerned about their future. There is very little time before the world ends because the people running it are to mentally incompetent to think rationally and abandon primitive urges.
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For me, it should be homo excors et molestus, instead of homo sapien. Excors means stupid and molestus means annoying; I’m not sure if I wrote it correctly though – my Latin is a little bit fuzzy.

Sleeping

Another dastardly aspect of school is yet another assumption that everyone is a ‘morning person’. I’m not. And neither are many, many other students. Though I am not aware of any scientific study, I think the image of a sleeping, tired teenager, dozing and day-dreaming at his or her desk is so ingrained into the minds of everyone, that it would be fair to say that everyone is not a morning person.

But what does being a morning person have to do with anything? Well, if you are, like so many others, not a morning person, you would be aware of the struggle that our kind have to face being up so early. This struggle is both physical and mental. Meaning that in the early portion of the day, I am not too thrilled with doing equations or learning about dinosaurs.

Looking at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; (kind of a table that shows the order human beings generally want something) one would see that physiological needs have to be satisfied before anything else. So if your genes predispose you for a sleeping pattern that consists of sleeping in the early morning, and if you don’t satisfy this urge, your mind is going to be thinking about this particular urge and not about your performance at school (self-actualization need) (see Ancil Keys’ and colleagues’ (1950) experiment on semistarving volunteers).

What I’m saying is that different people operate differently during the course of the day and having children who don’t function that well in the morning will cause their marks to deteriorate. And also, children aren’t getting enough sleep these days and by just saying ‘go to bed earlier’ will not really make anyone go to bed earlier because many people have commitments, television programmes they wouldn’t miss for the world, etc.

Kicking and Throwing Balls

Today, I shall be talking about how sport plays a negative position in the field of a child’s being. I am not denying the suggestion that sport in school is important to team work skills and all that crap, (though it does seem VERY fishy) but I once again bring up the profound point that time is precious and that wasting so much of it for little would be a terrible air-ball.

Now don’t think that I’m some obese guy whose worst fear is a diet, but the time to play games should be outside-of-school. School should be about learning and expanding yourself mentally, so games should be conducted in leisure times. 

I also find fault with the idea that sport in school is being used as a tool to fight obesity. I can see how people can think that it would be good, but it really isn’t. Those who are active (not obese) usually play sport outside of school and therefore satisfy the ”valuable” teamwork and co-operation garbage and those who are the problem (obese) would first of all not be very excited by the game (otherwise they would have played outside of school and therefore not be obese) and they wouldn’t be active. If, for example, there is a soccer game, the healthy, active children would dominate, while the unhealthy children would do little due to lack of expertise.
Though the amount of time devoted to sport in schools varies considerably, the little time that is devoted to it usually won’t knock off a few kilograms of anyone (assuming that the heavy child is actually doing something). Some people have to exercise hours a day for months and months to lose considerable weight, so I seriously doubt an unfit child is going to be fit by just exercising for around two hours a week, more or less.
Also, whether you’re going to be heavy or not is determined by your genes (source: Exploring Psychology by David G. Meyers, Penn and Teller: Bullshit!) so persecuting someone that is heavy by saying that their mentally inept for self-discipline is wrong; it’s just their genes which they can’t help. So, those programs – sport and all that rubbish being implemented in school to combat obesity is futile.
And oh, last time I checked, the nation is getting fatter; so much so that it’s now apparently the fattest. Boy those programs work like a charm.

Another reason for the implementation of sport is that after a while, energy gets built up and children need to expend it in order to perform better and or settle themselves mentally.

This has to be a joke.

Children waste what, six to eight hours in school? Yeah, I’d imagine children exploding with energy and causing catastrophe if they didn’t get to play some games. Because wow, it’s not like they get any breaks in between classes and before all classes and after all the god damn classes and it’s not like children get a whole damn, enormous fucking break after a whole heap of classes (holidays).

Jesus Christ.

Another reason for the implementation of sport is that after a while, all the lack of socialisation from being in a class would mean they would become psychopaths, or something like that.

There is more chance of a humungous, black dick growing from your forehead then there is of children being socially incompetent due to a lack of a two hour sport session. Holy piss mixed with vodka! Don’t children talk enough in class (not all schools, just the majority) and at home and after school and on Messenger and God knows where else.

And finally, playing sport doesn’t mean you would acquire many friends and be popular and have fun, etc. People assume that by forcing¹ children to participate in activities, they will meet new people and be friends. Usually, that won’t happen. What will happen instead is that the people who ‘hang out’ with each other otherwise, would still do so. Assuming there is no bullying, you will be mixed with your own group or people due to the similarities that caused you to be friends in the first place (when playing games like a soccer game and you’re asked to form a team, children will usually pick their friends and therefore only socialise with their friends).

Surely our leaders are not that stupid; they’re probably just ignorant. So if someone were to go undercover and check out what’s happening, maybe they’ll reconsider this idea.  

¹That’s one small step for the ‘improvement of civilisation’, and one giant leap to a dystopic, totalitarian society. Forcing people to comply with their (irrational) beliefs – sounds…Orwellian.

*I meant, as always, what I said in the general sense. Meaning there may be children who have benefited, but something like 1% isn’t worthwile.

Classical Conditioning

What is classical conditioning?

Classical conditioning is a type of learning which is exhibited in humans (as well as animals). This is when we associate something with something else. An effective way of explaining this would be Pavlov’s famous experiment. In this experiment, Ivan Pavlov conditioned a dog to secrete saliva when a tone was rung. He did this by playing a tone whenever the dog was exposed to food, and so eventually the dog associated the tone with the food (and therefore salivated). So when you have something that emits a response from you occuring simultaneously with something else; that something else will eventually get you emit the same response.

How is this relevant?

This is relevant because it explains the apparent “[strangulation] [of] the holy curiosity of inquiry” (Einstein). Children that attend school obtain a vast quantity of experiences that are negative. During these negative experiences, (such as bullying) children then subconsciously associate school and all that school supposedly stands for as a chore – a chore which they are eager to discontinue. 

Humans society needs to be educated so that cataclysmic events would be avoided, and if people leave school with the state-of-mind that holds learning as an obstacle, how educated do you think the world is going to be?

I know that when I have to wake up early, I’m very grumpy. What would I (and everyone else) see as the cause to my unhappy state? Ask a teacher or parent, and you’re likely to get the answer, ‘You get up early to go to school – to learn, of course’.

Your Age Does Not Reflect Your I.Q.

A predominate feature of the structure of school is their need to place children with the same age (sometimes a year or two older) in the same class. The mistake in this monstrously stupid idea is the thinking (or lack of) that a child of seven years has identical intelligence to that of another child of seven years. In case you like school too much to notice what’s wrong with this assumption, I’ll be clear. It is ferociously rare for a child of seven years to have the exact same intelligence to that of another seven year old.

So what’s the problem Dangerous David? The problem is that within a class where there are contrasting intelligences, the material being ‘explored’ is all the same. Therefore a more intelligent person has to deal with work that is not challenging because some child is not smart enough to comprehend harder work. This is particularily noticeable in the early years of schooling, but it does not fade into non-existence in the later years, and this should not be acceptable.

But hey Dauntless David, wouldn’t the smart kids just do challenging material in their own time? Yeah, I’d like to see that happen. Only one to two percent of children would study at home of their own free will, I think. And due to the lack of mental nutrition that accomodates their presence in school, their skills will deteriorate to the level of the stupid kids, so it evens out nicely.

Now now Daring David, these smart children will just be put up a year, wouldn’t they? No. They won’t. And it’s not a good idea anyway. Especially what with the supposedly valuable social skills the would be lost. Somehow you learn social skills by doing crap with people your age. But how is a thirteen year old going to cope being in a class that contains fourteen year olds, or a six year old in a class of seven year olds? Chances are that child will not fit in and therefore not get these social skills.

Overall, schools (even though damaged beyond reasonable repair) should learn that being seven years old does not mean you have an I.Q. of seven like every other seven year old.

But schools are stupid, so they won’t learn. So they’re futile.

Stress

Stress kills. Don’t believe me? Check this out: http://www.livescience.com/health/080115-stress-kills.html. Do you know where you can get a large dose of this killer? Yeah, that’s right, school. So, taking the facts (1) stress kills and (2) school gives stress, gives us (3) SCHOOL KILLS. 

From some stupid test, to worrying that you’ll get a detention for forgetting something you were supposed to bring, there is an overwhelming amount of elements that school procures to cause “deteriotation in everything”. We all felt stress at some point in our “education”. Some more than others, but it remains that stress is a predominate component of our “growing up” and it increases as we progress through school, which in turn decreases our test results. 

I wouldn’t have devoted an entire post for this issue because stress is common in an adults life and school would be basically giving practice for this situation, but when you are an adult and you are stressed, there’s good reason. Like meeting a deadline, but not knowing what to write can result in you being fired. What about school? What possible reason is there for increasing the chance of you aquiring “the common cold to cancer”? Getting a good mark in that astronomy test? Even though I know everything about astronomy, assuming I didn’t, I wouldn’t risk my well-being over a Seyfert galaxy or a supercluster.

Of course, near the end of your schooling, those test results matter, but they shouldn’t. School should be about self development, not forcing inert facts down a childs mouth, who, if doesn’t remember it, gets pushed down the metaphorical hill to privation.

Big Bad Bullies

Bullying in school is common, and the victims of bullying are often left with horrible problems (like hey: school shootings). Despite the efforts of schools in trying to prevent bullying, it always exists in some form. If you’re a teacher and you’re thinking ‘Gosh David, there’s not bullying at my school, get your shit together’, well wipe that ugly smile of your face and face the facts. No matter the policy the school supposedly maintains, there is going to be bullying. Even if it’s little things like exclusion from games or the occassional tease, but these things don’t seem that little to the child that feels like he’s been fucked ferociously in the nostrils.

To sum up this particular problem with school, it’s basically the mingling between the good and the bad that I find unacceptable. Because sometimes the good wants to model the bad. Other times, if the good don’t follow the rules of what’s cool and hip, they get to see videos of themselves on YouTube being bashed senseless.

Another Problem with School

“Oi, Little Tommy, take this man, you’ll be so coooool”
“What is it?”
“A cigarette; all the cool kids are into this. You do want to be cool?”
“Umm, I’m not sure, aren’t those kinda…unhealthy?”
“How do you think you’re going to get invited to all the cool party’s if scaredy-cat Little Tommy is too wimpy to take a few intimate whiffs of this beauty”
“Oh well, OK, I guess. I do want to be cool”
Little Tommy takes the cigarette, and then dies 15 years later (aged 28).

What I just described is another aspect of the horrific nature of school. Though that example may not be applicable to every school, or its severity, It is prevalent in a some form.

WIthin school, there exists children. Stupid children. They are everywhere and as if their existence isn’t torturous enough, they try to bring down nice children into their realm. In school, nice children (nice = good mark, good manners, etc) and nasty children (nasty = bad marks, bad manners, etc) have to be in the same vicinity as one another and due to the gregarity and garrulousness that define human beings, those nice and nasty children start chattin’. For some reason, nasty children are seen as ‘cool’ and so because humans have an overwhelming desire to be popular and that sort of thing, nice children will begin to model nasty children: not a good thing. Like we don’t have enough stupid people roaming around this planet.
The severity of this situation can vary greatly depending on a number of things. Like the culture that is prevalant in the school, the school itself and the location of the school – to name a few.

Also, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with this, but there are videos on YouTube displaying violence in which children are fighting other similar-aged children. This is called cyber bullying and if you have ever seen one, you might notice something. Something that might be a wacky coincidence (it’s not a wacky coincidence). The children in these videos seem to be wearing the same clothes: exactly the same. It seems to me that there seems to be violence thats seemingly common and seemingly widespread; in the seemingly bliss paradise of school. Hmm, it seems (ok, i’ll stop now) like children are forming a society in school. A primative society where power is allocated to brutes. A society which has principles, that, if not followed, results in those who don’t follow them violent oppression. A society that sometimes extends into the real world. Hmm.

How about those exams?

Truly a stressful period in ones life. Where your competence is supposedly measured and your future is decided. Society has constructed a method that will attempt to measure a persons sagacity in the hope that from the results, they can place the person in a suitable occupation. So the persons aptitude for success is in pugnacious competition with the demands of the job. But I do not think this method of assessment is acceptable.

I do not think that exams are terrible and that everything should be changed; I think that when people are undertaking exams, there should be many factors taken into consideration, and maybe change it up a bit. Though I cannot offer a solution to what’s wrong with exams (I’d imagine that an issue of this magnitude would be discussed by many smart people of different professions around an enormous table in coffee-stained shirts) I can however provide you with a whole heap of information about how exams are stupid.

The basic procedure of exams as I understand is that a particular student walks into a building with other students, sits down and then begins completing their paper. What I find wrong with exams is that there are many psychological factors that can interfere with the result. I also find distaste with an exam being used as a tool to measure a persons intelligence. And a nasty case of bad luck ruining a students future is also unacceptable.

I think I can safely say that exams are stressful; very stressful. I mean, it’s basically a ‘if you fail, you’re screwed’ type of situation. I remember reading a psychology book (Neuro-linguistic programming by Robert Dilts, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Judith DeLozier) in which it says that most students associate stress or anxiety with tests and that it will be detrimental to your performance. So wait a minute. Because of this aspect of human nature that causes you to perform worse than you would have, a student would get a worse result than they deserve. Upsetting I say.

How come we do exams? Society thinks it is the way to measure a persons mental capacity: how smart they are. Goodness, gracious and gosh, some silly little test is going to tell us how smart we are. Huh, that’s strange, especially considering I.Q. tests are thought to be poor indicators of intelligence by some people. But screw them, say I.Q. tests determine how smart you are, and since exams determine how smart you are, shouldn’t exams test the criteria in I.Q. tests? I seriously doubt when you walk into the exam hall or whatever that your going to feast your eyes upon a paper saying ‘Part 1: Pattern recognition’.

And anyways, Emotional Intelligence is supposedly a better indicator for how successful you’ll be.

It’s the Little Things…

Life consists of many ‘little things’ and the nature of these ‘little things’ can decide whether you find life enjoyable or absolutely agonising. It’s all those ‘little things’ that people usually base their ideas on the quality of their day; from coffee spills to getting flowers from your partner – you can say that the ‘little things’ are tremendously important.  

So how does it apply to school? Being the strong adherent of analysing the ‘little things’ of any major institute to determine how satisfactory it is I decided that through my first-hand experience I shall observe the ‘little things’ of school. And boy do they certainly diminish the already tainted quality of school!

Though I cannot possible list each and every one of them, I have, however, decided to give you a thorough description of some of the main, shocking ‘little things’.

1.  How ’bout the deviating from the topic we’re discussin’? You know. I know. How one minute we might be talking about Australian Aborigines and the next how Marilyn Monroe was smarter than Albert Einstein (is that even true???) but usually it’s something a little more stupid; like hey, stupid jokes or sports. 

Teacher: Oh dude man, have yo seen the match between the Dogs and the Cars? It was rad…
Student: Excuse me Sir, aren’t we supposed to be doing trigonometry?

(This may have been exaggerated on a miniscule scale; only the part where the student wants to do work).
  
2. How ’bout gettin’ the class settled down? Some teachers do it better than others but they always delay work (if we do work) nontheless. If you go to school and you find youself in one of the very numerous classes that contain poor students, get a watch and time how much time is wasted on silly stuff; like taking 10 minutes to mark attendance, 10 minutes to get to the classroom, 10 minutes to tell that boy to stop throwing chairs…

3. How ’bout all those fools makin’ a ruckus?  Yeah, that’s right – teenagers/children misbehave. This unfamiliar, astounding piece of information must be hard to digest, so I suggest you take a minute to settle down. Good. Now, analysing this we can come to a conclusion that there are two relevant scenarios from this phenomena. One is that the misbehaviour causes those who are trying to work distraction (teacher tell them to stop, the detention et cetera (which is wasting time)). Two is that those who are misbehaving are obviously NOT doing work and so are not supposedly learning. Merging them together means that during those brief, yet very common, episodes of misbehaviour, little to no people are working.

Analysing my voluptuous words of wisdom, would lead you to conclude that there is a lot more time wasted in school than you might have thought. Those three points were brief and there are many more points, some may be unique to the school, but whatever.

It’s the ‘little things’ that make a cheap holiday fantastic. It’s the ‘little things’ that can make life more pleasurable. And it’s the ‘little things’ that make school such a big problem.