[quote=walterwhite]ren, sorry, I don’t believe you. I know you want to believe, heck i would want to believe it and probably would’ve said that about my own education 10 years ago, but in reality, that’s not what school is.
I had no issues with my schools as I was going through them. I was at the top of all my classes, the spelling bee champion, the kid who always got the “best in class certificate”, top 15% at law school, honors from college. And you know what? Education is a giant game of manipulation perceptions, of students manipulating teachers for a certain result and of teachers keeping children quiet and in their seats for the time they are responsible for them. School is about indoctrination and mind control and locking kids down.
You will not persuade me otherwise. It is all about fear and ego, school rankings, test scores, what college you went to, your future prosecpts. FEAR AND EGO, not learning. fear and ego and bullying at every level. A school is a very unlikely place learning really could ever take place.
And all this emphasis on formal education, paid education, isn’t it all part of what is the next enormous bubble to burst — the student loan debt bubble? I’m about paid off on my massive debt — but i’ll be damned if i let me kids get sucked into massive debt. Isn’t that what educators wan- to prepare you for a “good college” with a hefty amount of indebtedness? Isn’t that what the system churns out?[/quote]
Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant. I know what I experienced, you obviously experienced something very different (“fear and ego and bullying at every level”? There’s lot more that you’re not telling us), but regardless, you’re missing the point. Of course school is to keep kids locked down (although indoctrination and mind control is laughable), and of course it’s not perfect, given the wide range of learning abilities. Do you have a better solution for working parents? I suspect that no matter what the curriculum, you would still call it mind control. You’re making broad generalizations about every school, when in reality they can be very different. In any decent school, the kids are encouraged to be curious and to seek out knowledge in places other than their assigned textbooks. If they try to teach your kids something you don’t want taught (like the load of dinosaur shit that is Intelligent Design), then you pull them from that class. Ultimately, the parents are the ones who make the final decisions about education.
I’m not trying to persuade you to any viewpoint. I don’t really care that a scared, lonely, bullied child had a terrible experience in school and so thinks schools can’t possibly work – you’re in the minority. It worked very well for many of us whether you believe that it did or not.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about others, guessing that they fit your Twilight Zone world of mindless automatons. It reminds me of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. That’s one of those books you should have experienced as a child but probably didn’t. I got it from our school library. You know about those, right? Or does your theory require that they only be filled with books that fit the mind control protocol? If that’s the case, what devious programming was burned into my brain by that particular classic?
Many of us also realize that you can get a great education without paying hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just because you got sucked into it doesn’t mean everyone does. My minimal student loans were paid off shortly after college. If I need to learn something these days, I either teach myself or take an online course. However, my elementary school teachers get some of the credit for making me the intellectual I am today, a person I like very much. A few of them inspired me and obviously cared about me and my future. If you really think they were all just putting on an act, then you live in a sick world, and I’m glad I don’t share it.
