School

School as a concept:

The concept of school is that a few people (it doesn't matter who) decide what ALL the children should learn. I don't like this because there's no such thing as a basic curriculum that every person needs to know. Every individual's life is different.

School in practice:

And then they force the children to attend the meetings ("classes") and try to force the children to learn everything on the list. I don't like this because it violates the children's ownership of their own bodies and minds.

And then they find that they are failing at getting the children to learn things, so they start trying to eliminiate "distractions", and that's how you get to these day-prisons where you are punished if you move about without permission, talk without permission, look away from the assigment without permission; where you're only allowed to pee and poo and eat on a schedule, someone else's schedule; where your physical fitness deteriorates from being kept like veal for the better part of 7 hours a day, 180 days a year; and your creativity deteriorates from being required to fill out worksheets according to specific, pointless, mundane procedures for hours on end; and your curiosity deteriorates from constantly being told to forget about what interests you and just focus what is in the assignment or on the test. And then you lose your ability to decide anything for yourself and you just have to wait around for some "authority" to tell you what to do.

And I don't like that. Why? Because I've experienced it, and it feels like shit.

I feel sick when I think about those years I spent in school, in a little box, being yelled at and dominated. That alone is enough of a reason to be against school: That it's all about big grown-ups dominating the crap out of helpless little children.

People think that school is somehow supposed to help you. But all it can help you do is prepare for more of the same. You get good at something by having practice in it. So, since school is just being dominated by other people and following stupid instructions, that's what it prepares you for. It doesn't prepare you for making good decisions, because it doesn't prepare you for making decisions at all.

Even if I had just replaced all that time in school with time playing on the playground, I'd be better off. I'd be better off emotionally, at least. And when I was little, I had all kinds of experiments I wanted to try and devices I wanted to build. If I hadn't been forced to waste half my time in school, I could have learned so much more, really learned things from my own experience. But I would have learned stuff from books, too. The key is for it to be my own choice, and for it to be what interests me at the time.

I'm mad at all the hours I was kept locked up like veal, but I'm also mad that I could have been learning things during all that time, but instead I had to sit in a desk, mostly just sitting there.

I think I can sum up everything I learned in elementary school:
-the primary colors of light are red, blue, and green
-a regular polygon has equal sides and equal angles
-the bigger one is a lower magnification in a microscope

High school is harder to sum up, but it was just a bunch of random facts like
-the civil war was about states' rights
-if you type this, that, and the other into the graphing calculator, you get a circle
-a neutron can decompose into a proton and an electron
-etc

In other words, it was all a complete fucking waste of time. And energy. And sanity. And money. Supposedly the government spent millions upon millions of dollars for me to spend 11 years learning practically nothing.

And if you think I'm just "irresponsible" for not committing all that crap to memory: It would be stupid of me to continue to waste brain power on information I do not need to know. I was never the one who thought I needed to know it, so I'm not to blame for the fact that I don't. That might seem like strange thinking to you. You're probably quite used to the idea of parents deciding what kids should do and telling the kids to do it and blaming the kids if they don't do it. But that doesn't make any sense. The idea that the kid should do everything the parent says is not an idea the kids come pre-programmed with. So if you as a parent fail to program that into the kid, you, the parent, failed. You had a goal, and you failed to acheive it. And the schools (or the government, or the schoolboard or whoever) had a goal to program me with all that knowledge, and they failed. They failed to get the knowledge into me. They were trying to program me like a computer, and they failed. It's not irresponsible of me to have not memorized all that information, because I wasn't the one who wanted me to know it. If I had had a goal and failed to acheive it, then you could say I was irresponsible; but that's not the case.

So. School is bad because
1) It tries to standardize individuals;
2) It tries to violate people's right of ownership over themselves and their own bodies and minds;
3) It's a disgusting worse-than-a-waste of time that degrades people's physical and mental fitness.

I guess those are the 3 main reasons. I hope I haven't missed anything, and I hope everything is clearly explained.

Growing up

When I was little, I believed that when I grew up, I would be like my parents. I would have acquaintences rather than friends; I would like complex foods, rather than one-ingredient foods; I would walk around very calmly and systematically get all my work done instead of running around following whims.

When I was in 6th grade, there was a girl who wore make-up. At first, I thought her face just looked like that. But then someone mentioned it. And I thought, why would she do that? We're not grown-ups! Then, in 7th grade, suddenly all the girls were wearing make-up. And I wondered, "Is now when we're supposed to grow up? But I don't feel like growing up right now." I asked the girls about it, and they insisted that they just wanted to wear make-up and wear those fancy grown-up-looking clothes.

And that was when I realized that I might never want to do "grown-up" things. I realized there weren't really "grown-up things" and "kid things". There were just things.

I like the Wiggles. And I think that other people my age "don't like them" just because they think they're not supposed to like them. The songs are repetitive, the skits are simple, and we are taught that as grown-ups we are supposed to like complex things. But if you realize that that kind of "growing up" is stupid and fake, then you're free to like whatever you want.

I like the Wiggles, and I also like George Carlin and Real Time. I like H2O and degrassi, and I like the cute little clothes in the kids section, and I like brightly colored shoes and I'm not interested in "neutral colors". I like to skip and run and play with bubbles and hoola-hoops.

I put off writing this post because I couldn't figure out a good way to get my point across. I don't think this is very eloquent, but, eh, you get it, right?