An Argument AGAINST School

Think about this. Do you know anyone academically successful; that became academically successful because of their attendance at school? I know I can’t think of anyone.

To be successful, you need to be educated (i’m excluding bizarre events such as winning the lottery). Say I wanted to be a successful physicist. I physicist whose name would escape the lips of every person who concerned themselves with science. I would have to be pretty good. Very good. 
How do I achieve this greatness? Well I would certainly need to have extensive knowledge of physics, of course.
How do I acquire this knowledge? School? HA. Pity anyone who thinks that Albert Einstein became Time’s Person of the Century because he listened to his teachers (he was apparently actually disrespectful to them). I would aquire this knowledge through diligent study unperturbed by any annoying, idiot children or uninteresting teachers.

What about success in school? Success in school is aparrently determined by effort (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids). Let’s say I got 50% on a science test and I was bitterly disappointed, so disappointed that in the subsequent tests I wanted to get 90% +. How do I achieve this? Paying careful attention in school? No. I would be devoting the necessary time to studying at home because this is what will get me an A+ - human nature.

Let’s take this fact: The capital of France is Paris. This is uninteresting to me, I am bored and distracted due to idiot classmates – typical class. The teacher says this fact and says this fact is going to be on the test. I want to get a good mark on this test so I need to learn this meaningless piece of information. Would I have learnt this in school? Unlikely. I would have needed to concentrate and study hard at home.

Say I get 100% on the test. Now what? The school has given me this meaningless piece of information and they expect me to retain this for the rest of my life – to be an outstanding member of society? I will, like most other people, forget this meaningless fact.

Human nature is a bitch. But we currently can’t do much about it. Especially school.
 

(Note: The previous example is just an average; of course someone might form a meaningful connection to that fact so that they would retain it forever, but most people won’t. By the way, that fact is just an EXAMPLE; of course it’s going to be a bit more complicated in real life, idiot)      

An Argument FOR School

Through the sophisticated means of communication that is MSN Messenger, I have stumbled upon an argument FOR school that I believe is widely held by many of you naïve school advocates.

“thats basically wat it comes down to, even if ur at home, if u wanna learn, u learn, if u don’t, u don’t”

Allow me to dissect the intrinsic nature of this frail, feeble and flaccid argument.

School is like searching for the word “futile” in Collins’ Concise Dictionary, by going through each and every page. Sure, you find out that “futile” means “having no effective result; unsuccessful”, but look at how many pages you’ve gone through! That would’ve taken ages, especially considering how large this dictionary is. People learn things yeah, but you are NOT educated and you are NOT intelligent if you have only learnt a few words out of the thousands and thousands of words that reside in Collins Concise Dictionary.

You waste LESS THAN TWO DECADES in school, some more, some less. And what do you take out of school? Little to nothing. It is atrocious and despicable how school suffocates your desire for inquiry and leaves you with people that we commonly see today. Just look at the state the world is in.

Some of may be thinking ‘Huh well, David you certainly bespeak intellectual supremacy and unyielding sex appeal, but wouldn’t it be worse if there was no school?’ Well, young one, if there was no school (and I am not suggesting that we should Ctrl + Alt + Delete school leaving a blank page, but instead a page with a good plan written on it) those who “wanna learn” would now be able to do it in the comfort of their own home without disturbances. Just think of how many geniuses would emerge when you don’t have to think about ridiculous history assignments or absurd excursions, when instead that genius could study physics (oh, didn’t Einstein study physics by himself?) by themselves. Many of those who don’t want to learn still have a brain, and with a human brain comes an overwhelming desire for patterns so to predict things (http://ru.youtube.com/watch?v=IDi2NlsA4nI) and what you find is that if people want to get a job they want, they would need to educate themselves (or find themselves predicting travesty in their future) and getting people who would not consider to read a book to choose to read in the hope that they will become smarter – that is one of the greatest gifts human society could ever hope to get.

Observing the multitude of hordes that occupy school, who don’t want to learn means that school is NOT doing a good job, so alternatives need to be considered.

Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can’t make him think - Finley Peter Dunne

Because school is futile.

Quotes

Just some quotes giving you a feel for other peoples views on school. Some, if not all, are people who are only known because of how they think (Clue: really proficiently).
I hope these will be thought provoking and that they will get you to consider that school is futile, if you have not done so already.

Albert Einstein: It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

Albert Einstein: It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.

Albert Einstein: Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

Alexander Dumas: How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.

Anatole France: Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

Anatole France: The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

Annie Sullivan: Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.

Aristotle: All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

Benjamin Franklin: Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

Bertrand Russell: I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: ‘The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that’s fair.’ In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.

Bill Beattie: The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think – rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.

Circero: The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

Confucious: Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

Edith Hamilton: It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated.

Ethel Barrymore: You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.

Finley Peter Dunne: Ye can lead a man up to the university, but you can’t make him think.

Friedrich Nietzsche: In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad.

George Bernard Shaw: What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

George Santayana: A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Henry B. Adams: Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

Henry Ward Beecher: There is no greater crime than to stand between a man and his development; to take any law or institution and put it around him like a collar, and fasten it there, so that as he grows and enlarges, he presses against it till he suffocates and dies.

Jim Rohn: Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Correction does much, but encouragement does more.

John Dewey: Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.

Lou Ann Walker: Theories and goals of education don’t matter a whit if you don’t consider your students to be human beings.

Maria Mitchell: We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.

Mark Twain: I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Mark Twain: First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards.

Mark Twain: Many public-school children seem to know only two dates–1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.

Mark Twain: All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Mortimer Adler: In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits. I would have the studies elective. Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest in knowledge. The wise instructor accomplishes this by opening to his pupils precisely the attractions the study has for himself. The marking is a system for schools, not for the college; for boys, not for men; and it is an ungracious work to put on a professor.

Robert Fulghum: All I really need to know … I learned in kindergarten.

Robert Green Ingersoll: It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.

Roger Lewin: Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

St. Francis Xavier: Give me the children until they are seven and anyone may have them afterward.

Will Durant: Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Sir William Haley: Education would be so much more effective if its purpose were to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they don’t know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.

Teaching

Teaching is the main component of school. In a traditional school, there is a man or woman teaching a group of young students a certain subject. I have already stressed how poorly the information is absorbed by students, so I will not talk about it. I will however discuss how teachers are teaching.

First of all, good students go out of their way to study a certain topic of a subject at home (not at school) if they want to get high marks, which means that teachers aren’t doing much. Why go to school if you are just going to open up your textbook later at home and learn it there? 

Second of all, some, if not most teachers, teach their students by opening up the same textbook and copying it down exactly on the whiteboard all the while explaining it exactly as the book does. Surely children, our future, are competant enough to be able to open up a book and read? If a student doesn’t ‘get’ what the teacher is talking about and then asks a teacher for an explanation, the teacher would (usually) just repeat what he/she just said or in different wording. Then, the student either figures it out due to their own intelligence (and might unfortunately attribute it to the teachers expertise) or doesn’t ‘get’ it at all and continues to not understand until he/she either fails the test or does some diligent study outside of school.

Third of all, I’m sure you’re aware of how numerous “poor” students are. You know the kind – don’t do work, don’t study, no effort et cetera. They are plentiful and demonstrate the effectiveness of “teaching”. The object of school is to give education, which in turn means “the act or process of acquiring knowledge”, so how are “children and young people” “acquiring knowledge”, when they get 20% on a mathematics test or failing an english test for not knowing what a verb is?

Because teaching is futile. Because school is futile.

Learning

Learning is to school as software is to computers. Schools wouldn’t exist if no-one learnt anything and I don’t deny that schools provides a large amount of information to be learnt. But how effective is school in teaching? Truth is, it’s not as good as you think.

I’m sure you’re aware that a very large majority of young people in school are bored. Seeing teenagers yawn and stretch in a classroom is a common sight as well as day-dreaming. I’m not sure about the rest of the human population on Earth, but when i’m bored or day-dreaming or both, I tend to ignore certain information coming through my eyes/ears; specifically what’s on the whiteboard or the sounds coming from the teacher.

Here’s a list of things young students do whilst they’re “learning”, some are more prevalent than others, but whatever:

• Day dreaming
• Sleeping
• Talking
• Wagging
• Doing work from home
• Playing games
• (Recently now) Listening to Ipods.
• Fiddling with stationery
• Annoying other people  

This is by no means a complete list or a list applicable to every school, but it’ll do. Now let’s say that at least 2 people satisfy each category for each class of about 25 students, so overall there are 18 (varies but it is usually higher) students who are not learning or learning very poorly in each class, every class, every day. 18 out of 25? That’s 72%! So around 72% of young students aren’t learning! That’s ridiculous.

What about the boredem? How does this interfere with learning? Allow me to elucidate. If you are not interested in a particular area, even though you answered all the questions and read all the text, it is unlikely that you will see that area in the A+ section of your report card. I find chemistry (I study it outside school, so I don’t become stupid) absolutely boring and so I need to read things over and over again and still it’s hard to retain. But I find biology and physics interesting, and so I can learn things about these topics while being distracted. 

Things are going to be hard to learn if you don’t have an interest in them; it’s just human nature. And let me tell you, a LOT of people don’t like mathematics, and so a LOT of people struggle with it. So those who find it uninteresting but recognise the importance of the subject need to pursue it out-of-school because school is futile.

Introduction

School. Collins Concise Dictionary defines “school” as:

An institution or building at which children and young people receive education.

My name is David Roussov and I wish to propose to you that the institution that is held in such high regard is, in fact, rubbish. I endeavour to convince you that this abominable institution causes the deterioration of intellect and is an overall hazard to the well being of children. Though I must admit, there are some benefits of school, but considering the time spent in school versus the amount gained, it does not matter. Life is short; incredibly short, and to spend an amazingly large portion of that short life in school is disgusting.
Throughout the following postings, I hope you will recognise the futily of school and how it generates issues that would stay with people for the rest of their lives. I also want to be clear that school may be beneficial and may give a person valuable tools to succeed later in life, both in social and work related environments, but the purpose of this blog is to show that school can, and does, deteriorate a person on many levels.
In the following posts, I will attempt to show to you how the defenition of school (above) is utterly false. I currently go to school, but I am not voicing my proclaimation that school is terrible with horrible consequences because I simply find it boring (I do find it boring by the way).

As with many ideas error-prone humans have had during our short existence, they seem to be without consequence and highly beneficial, but many have failed and the repercussions of this failure have been unpalatable. The theory of schooling is that young people who successfully progress though it, become intelligent, knowledgable and outstanding members of society. This is all well and truly good; in theory. Communism, in theory, is good, but it is not good, it’s terrible. Communism, like school, fails to consider various aspects of human nature which lead to its demise. Communism had a devestating impact, but never hearing about communism and only reading about it would lead you to assume that it is good. After all, poverty vanishing is great. But why didn’t it work? This theory did not consider that people would be less motivated to want to become, say doctors, if they got paid as much as janitors. This undesirable trait of humans caused communism to fail. Humans have many other undesirable traits, and many of these cause school to be, in practice, futile.