Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
School was so suffocating and controlling. They controlled how you moved. They controlled when you went to the bathroom. Controlled where you sat. Basically like being in a prison. I remember in highschool, in some classes we got the "luxury" of deciding where we sat. Wow!
-Lack of focus on the individual
-Dangerous
-Forced to be with a bunch of people you don't like or trust
-Told it's for your own good
For a thinking and rational individual, this is all insanity. A bunch of arbitrary rules and regulations to control the "unruly".
Mostly, though, you just can't be yourself. Your mind is forced into being in a collection of people. They can't have free thinking people in school. That might crack the whole facade.
Well I hated collage despite the fact that there was more "freedom". After awhile (Jr. year) I just realized that all the classes and never ending exams are set up that way to KEEP you in school; and this is on top of the fact that if you graduate your not distinct from everybody else which is key to making good money, so I quit and became an entrepreneur.
Collage, as we know of it today, is a business. They have janitors to professors that need to get paid on top of the fact that the collage needs to make a profit to make building renovations/expansions. Money is also needed for advertisement.
So, they're not stupid, they do the math and figure out how long a student needs to stay in "the system" in order for "the system" they created to be profitable for the college.
It does not take 4+ years to learn a specialized form of knowledge. Go work hands on for any man/woman who runs his or her own business, and if you put your heart into it, you can learn the ropes in a year WHILE you make money; they call this apprenticeship, and it's the best way to learn.
Don't be like other people who make a career out of going to collage. Either do it and get it over with or leave and don't look back.
I think a lot of kids hate school for the reasons posted here but also because they don't think most of the "stuff" they have to learn is any way relevant to them.
I never liked school as a kid. I loved to read and would swallow up books all the time. The books that I was required to read in school were-- to me-- dreadful and a chore to get through. I had no interest in the material and once the test/report was over, the material completely left my mind.
Summer readings were a nightmare. I don't think I was ever assigned a book that I liked. Why not let kids choose their own books? Had they done that, I would have been able to write/speak about the 5+ books that I read anyway over summer break because I love to read. But no, you are told "you must read this book." I just think school is a very stifling experience that doesn't nurture the individual at all.
"Schools as we know them haven't been around very long. They don't have deep roots. That's one thing in our favor as we think about uprooting them. Schools as we have them were designed at the time of the American Civil War to be instruments for the scientific management of a mass population, the cheap labor immigration was providing to factory and farm. Schools are intended to produce through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled."
"To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this. But in a nation increasingly disintegrated and demoralized, in a national order where the only successful people are independent, self-reliant, confident, and individualistic, the products of schooling are irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on telephones, make deals or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal, but they hate to be alone with themselves. As human beings they are useless." John Taylor Gatto, THE EXHAUSTED SCHOOL: "How Did We Ever Come to Believe that the State Should Tell Our Children What to Think?"
Yeah, many jobs have some of these elements, especially the lower you are on the totem pole, but even in crappy clerical jobs I got to decide when it was time to go pee (or not) and could speak to my co-workers at lunchtime, freely! There are ways around the stifling environment once you get out of elementary /jr./high school, at least. If you try, anyway.
I have BEEN TO and worked in schools that didn't look like what's described in this thread. It can be done.
I also disagree with a previous post about how kids today are so unruly that a little structure isn't going to hurt them. Speak for yourself. MY kids are respectful, well behaved, courteous kids. Why? Because they know that they cannot demand respect without showing it. They understand and practice the Golden Rule and I instilled common good manners and they understand things like acceptance, tolerance, and being kind regardless of if you like someone or not. They've understood these concepts since pre-k. They understand limits and boundaries.....and I never smothered them with stupid rules "just because". They understood the reason for my rules or my "No!", even if it may have taken them a while to see it in hindsight.
They behave wonderfully and therefore they never understood how once they stepped foot into a school they were treated like idiotic wild monkeys. Sit here, shut up, sit down, hold still, draw this (but NOT that and never in a creative color, so no purple cornucopias at T-giving), watch this video, do this buttload of homework even though you've mastered the material.. all because teacher said so. All a bunch of arbitrary bull.
Just because they were surrounded by students who were never taught how to "act right", and who are assumed to be a potential problem, why should they be lumped in with the group? That was always hard for me and for them as well. In high school, the thing I remember most is teachers and admin always preaching about how you need to "act like an adult" and how "in college it won't be so easy" but they never ever gave you any sort of freedoms and responsibilities that would lead to adult-like behavior. They wanted to preach about acting like an adult but treated us like babies.
I remember being so resentful; by the time I quit high school at 17, I had a job I'd held for years, a car, paid my own car insurance and gas, not to mention clothes and anything else, did my own maintenance on my car, tons of household responsibilities, and here they were still telling me I couldn't go to the bathroom during class! I'd even paid for my own summer school that they made me take because I was lacking credits (caused by skipping STUDY HALL!)
I still remember my oldest (now 17) after his first day of first grade, age 7. He'd previously attended a private Montessori preschool.. this was his first time in a neighborhood public school. He says to me.. "Mom, I think they think the kids are stupid!!" okay.. I ask him why he thinks that... "Well when we line up in the hallway we have to keep two fingers over our mouth and two fingers in the air. They think we are so dumb we can't walk in line quietly without doing all that!"
I found a middle ground with charter schools but even they can be just ridiculous. My 7th grader was late the other day. By THREE minutes. He arrived at 8:33, school starts at 8:30. So the school makes him cross the street to the other side of campus (busy street) to go to the office, to wait in line with hordes of other kids whose watches must be a minute or two off, to get a tardy slip. Then walk back across the busy street. Entire process sucks up fifteen minutes, easy, so he isn't in his desk until 8:47, and all of this because he is 3 minutes late to his "advisory" period which he says is nothing but a "sit and chat" period with no instruction of any kind for the first hour of each day. So yeah, he needs to not be late but good grief. It's just stupid.
I TOTALLY would have homeschooled had finances ever allowed.
-Has to focus on the individual and building your individual identities. Focus on your individual talents and interests. Not arbitrary 1 hour classes, 6 times a day, with 30 or 35 kids in class. 10 of whom are bullying you, or causing distractions in class.
If you're great at piano, why not take that half the day. If you have the competency, maybe you pick how long you should spend on it. Or mechanical work, or car repair. I think the goal should be competency at the end. Allow enough class time to achieve it.
-The draconian rules are crazy. There has to be some order and control, just like whether you're at a restaurant, concert, outdoor meeting. But people know the polite rules of society. They don't need school to clamp down on that and treat you like you're 5 years old, when you're 17 or 18 (asking to go to the bathroom, or picking which seat you have).
-Introduce different methods of learning. I think the system is so stifling, students don't really know how they learn best. It's never really been nutured or cultivated. To think that everyone learns the same way at the same speed is crazy.
-Give more help to those that don't get math early. If you don't get math early, say 4th to 7th grade, it messes up your whole self esteem and outlook on school later. Math tends to accumulate very quickly. Its much worst than history or science. Maybe worst than english.
-Subjects that aren't really relevant to the job market, to the economy, to building your own competency, its crazy, and a waste of time. That's time better spent on internships, building job skills.
-The whole goal should be competency at the end. Including summer reading, work over christmas break, etc.
I remember in highschool in the 90's, I had to read Eli Wiesel's "Night", "Lord of the Flies". They're nice books, but there's no rhyme or reason to it.
A lot of books assigned in school don't have any relevancy to students lives. The holocaust was terrible, but its not going to happen to you now. I think a lot of school work diverts your mind from what's happening now.
I think students would be better off working in a restaurant or finding what they want to give back to society. Not arbitrary 10 hours of community service. School should give you a sense of what you want to do in your 20's.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'd even paid for my own summer school that they made me take because I was lacking credits (caused by skipping STUDY HALL!)
