School is Ridiculous. I can't get into it. It's so lengthy, awww shit, here goes!... Kids should be kids and not be doing bullshit paperwork to keep them busy and shut up. Zack loves school. I tell him any day he wants mommy will pull him out and he will know WAY more stuff if I am teaching. He wants to go because he loves the kids. Man kids suck but they love each other, and they need to go to school to learn how to interact. If you exclude some of the kids from the rest as they grow up, or even create classes of public and private schools kids don't learn about all of the kinds of people in the world. I look back on my school experience and wonder if I'd have been classified now. My mother would have said, “fuck no I am absolutely not putting my kid on Ritalin.” I had an 8 year old friend who was on it; she didn't get better, not necessarily from the meds but definitely because the mom did nothing and that's what it comes down to. Some kids need more time to do shit. They called me pokey as a kid because I was always the last kid out of a group out the door.
My first grade teacher put in her notes that I was defiant and slow, at 8 they had to call my parents in because I tested with a genius IQ and that part of my record needed to be fixed. All kids are different. I didn't find out any of this until adulthood. My mom was always super mom when it came to advocating for me as all parents should be. The teachers need help, smaller groups, and aids in the class for the kids who struggle. We need extra tutoring for kids that need it, and teachers who get paid well for doing it. The tax money is there thanks to the middle class, we spend it on administrator BMWs.
That 1st grade teacher didn't like me because she said "Jacqueline would you like to go to the board and do the problem?" And I being 6 years old and terrified of things like going to the board and basically everything in the world said, “No.” I have always been very honest. She yelled at my mom, never a good idea. My mom had to explain to her that I was the most compliant little kid ever, because I was terrified of getting in trouble, and that She Asked Me A Question. If she said, “Go do the problem on the board.” I would have said, “Okay” and done it. That is who I was, obedient. Nothing like my mom, who had written in her Kindergarten permanent record, “She displays a willingness to stand up for herself too much” in the world of women circa 1960. “Stands up for herself” is a negative?
So how do we teach children that they can change the world? Education is a fundamental principal of this nation because it sets people free. There is a reason oppressive nations try to shoot girls who go to school. The American Education Machine is severely broken. There are castes of education. There are kids segregated out, Private schools for specific religions and social classes. We should not be allowed to segregate any longer. Education needs to be universalized. Keeping children with their appropriate age group has been shown most effective because their emotional development is similar. All children learn differently though. We have a system tailored specifically to kids who know how to predict the answers adult test writers want when you fill in the little circle. I am fucking awesome at the little circle and yet I got average grades in school.
It’s a subtle manipulation that has transpired, gradually accelerating the amount of paperwork and homework with every generation. We justify our kids doing it because we did it. We never question because American schools aren’t about questioning. They are about obedience. No speaking out of turn. No getting up because you feel the need to get up and pee. “No I am not lying (asshole), I really have to pee.” Every one of us has had that experience as a kid. Nothing our children do takes into consideration their needs and their schedule. It’s all planned so we can get to work on time, so we can get them all to eat lunch on time. What the fuck is time but a social construct that we never question?
There should be 1-2 hours of formal teacher guided study in school and the rest should be tailored to the students’ interests. Everyone has unique and valuable interests. Killing a child’s spirit is a sure way to keep them from realizing what their talent is. My entire life I just wanted to excel at one thing. I wanted to have this obvious thing I should do above all other things. It turns out to be writing. But that wasn’t presented as a valuable skill in my schools. I had one teacher who taught me about science and outlines and made us to a do a writing clinic in 6th grade. Mrs. Cox I am forever grateful. One good teacher can change your life. It is interesting we don’t talk about writing as a valuable skill since everything you have to learn is written by writers. It is an important part of learning to know who wrote the text you are reading. So when you question it, you have some foundation as to why they may have seen history or science the way they did.
How can children be the future of science discoveries when they barely learn science? When they do it is with the invisible brick wall. They take you just far enough to never realize that we don’t know all the answers. They only tell you about the questions already solved. What good is a book full of already solved problems? Stimulating our imaginations is important. Some of the most monumental changes in our social order have been from fictions. In fictions we can tell the stories that no one is allowed to believe in real life, fantasies to some but realities to the mind that creates
As long as children learn to love and appreciate reading they will eventually take care of the rest themselves. Anything they fall in love with, to study it further, they will have to read about it. The faster you read the more quickly you can learn the things you want to know. There is no other reasonable way to learn things currently. Online teaching tutorials teach menial skills that are better learned with excitement from a good teacher than from the internet. You cannot learn a love of reading and knowledge from the internet that has to come from a teacher, a mentor, a friend. When you teach children the history of how we write down our thoughts they can understand why it is important to learn. We started with drawings and pictures and now we have letters to create pictures with words in our mind. You are in control of your life if you are in control of your mind. Teach them that and it won’t be a chore to get them to go to school and learn.
We take the fun out of learning with monotony and dittos. Why would anyone want to waste their time on this planet doing paperwork? Most paperwork is a meaningless time consuming representation of reality and school worksheets are the worst kind. It is about learning to follow directions. It is not at all about learning to think. Especially not learning how to think for yourself. All it takes is a couple outspoken people to change the world. We teach children powerlessness and submission. We leave them without enough adult supervision. We undervalue teachers and instead of getting their jobs because they worked hard or because they love and relate to children they get their jobs because they know someone in the administration who can get them a job.
In a severely undereducated nation there are 4500 teachers for the 400 jobs available in my state. I can tell you right now every one of those teachers is necessary and valuable. Teaching seems like a sweet “summer’s off” kind of gig, but it requires far longer hours to really create a learning experience in this world of “lesson plans”. Life is full of deviation and variation, how are we teaching children to handle life when school contains neither of these things?
If you apply math and sciences to reality they are interesting by nature. They Are nature. The world we live in and ways to possibly try and understand that. Religion is a set of questions with answers provided; if you have further questions religion and dogma are not for you. Learning is the way to continue on the quest of human development for future generations. We don’t teach them about children who were once not allowed to learn. Women and minorities were kept from school to keep us from changing the system. If children knew more of the truth instead of these myths the world would not be this bleak place it is now.
Far too many children suffer adult atrocities, but some of them don’t, and many of them maintain their hopeless optimism and imagination in the face of things adults have taught themselves to no longer imagine or face. Upsetting things and difficult experiences are what give us the power to control our own lives. When you survive something you never thought you could survive it reminds you that most of the fears holding us back are not real. They are just ideas in our mind that were planted there at a younger age.
What would it mean to truly be free? Would it mean free access to education and all information? School should consist of teaching children how to use resources to study what they love, not what we think they should know. Just like some librarian taught me about the card catalog, we should be teaching children how to use resources to find things on their own instead of force feeding them nonsense nationalist propaganda. Our technology has come so far but how we teach has not.
All children could have a tablet with the entire catalog of human knowledge on it. It is entirely possible, we just don’t do it. We would never have to cut down another hundred year old forest for dittos and handouts if every child starting at school age received a small computer of their own where they could complete all their school assignments.
School is just one more way as a society that we instill fear in children instead of love. Fear of not doing your homework. Fear of not completely the task in the right time frame or to the appropriate standards. None of these arbitrary standards of measuring a child’s worth to our world have any merit. The problem isn’t that America is full of stupid people. The problem is no one has taught us that we are all very intelligent powerful beings in our own way. Being here in life is the mission to discover what makes us tick, what are our unique and beautiful strengths? What is the meaning of life? When your days are numbered how will you have spent them? Will you think what you did was the right way to spend your time?
It has been confirmed through anonymous sources that I am a dangerous person to associate with. I might accidentally explode the truth all over the giant charade that is the American media. Artists know art. Nothing happening in journalism has anything to do with art. Facts are bland, facts don’t get people to click and pay advertisers. Advertisers love clicks. They have access to the statistics on how the human mind works and what makes us tick, but we don’t. Gossip gets people to click. So we trick them into clicking with gossip and then try and hide some facts around so they feel informed.
Really people just want their lives to be interesting. They want to know interesting things if their life feels monotonous. We focus on celebrity because we can talk openly about strangers and we are afraid to share the experiences of our friends, lest we betray their trust. We can make the things that matter, the facts that need to be told to the children who are going to change this fucked up world, interesting. They are interesting. That’s why they have to dump so much bullshit all over social media, and popular culture. If the truth was easier to find people would be very fucking interested.
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