EULA

Ustwo: Schooling forces you to learn. I think that hurts people more than it helps. After writing my research paper about Poulenc (that I had to do); I found out that the knowledge I got out of it had only kitch value: he had a silver spoon all of his life, he was bisexual, and member of "le six". I worked on that paper and its research for almost a week if you add up all the hours, and that is all I got from it. No thanks.

Schooling operates like this: we are going to pound this information into your head for three months, you will take the test, and two weeks later you will forget 95%. If you'd ask me, I would say that that system is inefficient, expensive, and insulting to students, because there is an underlying assumption that "...if the school didn't make you learn, you wouldn't, you ignorant, lazy fuck."

But you could take the unschooled approach of only studying what you are interested in at the time. Pick it up in a week and retain the majority of the information for most of your life. And oh, the fun you will have! True, you might not come across Geography until 5 years after you would have had you went to college, but I think the unschooled approached is the preferable one.

Even while I was in college, I read about different things I was interested in at the time outside the bounds of school and my major. Guess what? I learned and retained A LOT.

There is a kind of chicken and the egg component to learning attitudes in America. Yes, if your average American finishes high school and doesn't go to college, he will not do any signifcant learning throughout the rest outside of his everyday experiences.

Some would say that's just human nature, but I would disagree. What I think is happening is that after 12 years of compulsory schooling, most people are taught that reading, writing, and learning is a punishment. Many times this is made completely explicit, because writing a book report is a part of a punishment for getting in a fight, getting out of your seat, etc. Following the rules is probably more important than the curriculum.

While in school, there is a privation of experience of dealing with people of different ages, of exercising creativity ("Sorry, Jimmy, but it's time for math" etc), and of just being plain-old curious. Without school, we would have a more intelligent, creative populace that learns, because discovery without compulsion is joyous in itself. "I read a book about Fascist Germany last week, and it was fun!"

When I was in k-12, I maybe read 5 books on my own. That's it. And thinking back, it's no wonder I was such a bad writer; the only reading I did was the garbage that passes as school books. In my mind, reading is what you did at school. When I went to college, it was the same old crap, but one day, in some freak chance I went with a friend to Barnes and Noble, I picked up a copy of Rogue States and I read for two hours. I was completely taken aback. I like reading. Who fucking knew?

Schooling is designed around a completely flawed understanding of why people learn. John Locke invented tabula rossa, and because of that I doubt he had any contact with children in his lifetime, or he was just plain stupid. Learning isn't shoved into people's brains, it grows inside them out of conscious choice and interest. Even learning to read is easy, but enormous problems arise when you make children learn how to read, or they are desperate to learn how to read in order to escape the humiliation of illiteracy.

Some would say that a government/industrialist conspiracy to keep people stupid was responsible for the schooling system we inherited, but even if there wasn't a conspiracy, things are exactly as they would be if such a conspiracy existed.

I could say more, but I must stop.