Enough is Enough

[mrtuesday]

SoulRiser Wrote:The people in them have little to no choice about being there. Maybe if people only went to school by choice they would behave better.

Compulsory schooling ensures that everyone has the basic skills to get a job and support themselves financially in addition to having the knowledge required to make informed life decisions. Schools discourage child labor and help the economy grow. It's an admirable goal being sought after by teachers, with a few exceptions, who genuinely care about equipping their students for the future.

Quote:It's all about choice, really. So school worked for you. Great. It doesn't work for everyone. That sucks. The problem here is that if school isn't working for someone, and they want to try something else, they get swarmed from all sides with people saying "School is good for you! You must stay in school!", and ultimately, it isn't their choice. It's their parents' choice. If they're lucky enough to have parents they can actually have a rational conversation with, they are a lot better off than most people. School alternatives exist, but actually managing to get out and pursue them is another matter entirely.

Haven't you considered that they're so adamant about it because they're right? Most of the time, the problems people have with school are bullying, friendship issues, or social anxiety. That's no reason to leave school entirely.

Claiming that school doesn't work for them is too broad. What about it doesn't work? Accommodations can be usually be made.

Quote:Also do note that different people have different definitions of "successful" and "fulfilling". This is because different people want different things out of life. For some people, money is just a tool to get them to where they want to go, and they honestly don't care if they get any more of it than what they need for their purposes. People with an entrepreneurial mindset can do just fine with no formal schooling whatsoever. Go ahead and say that those people are rare, and you'll be totally correct - but most of the people who visit this website are of a rare kind.

Should that not work, the aspiring entrepreneurs on this website are left without the necessary credentials to take a job and forge their own way. I'm pretty sure that having money/some place to live/an education are important to most people.

Quote: Abolishing school completely and suddenly would be pretty chaotic, and probably not a good idea. Most people don't think for themselves well enough to figure out what to learn about, let alone actually do it. But for the people who do know what they want to know about, and who do have the motivation to do it, there is little more frustrating than having everyone yelling at them about how what they want is irrelevant and how school is the most important thing in their lives. And sure, it's entirely possible that person could be wrong and change their mind later. But you know what? Making mistakes is the best way to learn. Preventing people from making mistakes is actually holding them back. And hey, you never know, they might have been right all along, too.

Abolishing school would be a terrible idea. Countless people would lose their jobs, kids would be faced with the nigh insurmountable task of teaching themselves everything they'll need to know in life without ample guidance, and we'd end up with complete anarchy. Making mistakes is the best way to learn, but one in a matter so catastrophic as one's education when it can be easily avoided is like putting a baby on a lit stove just so that he can learn how to not burn himself.

Quote:As far as I'm concerned, the right thing to do is whichever thing is the most compassionate towards everyone involved. Forcing people to go somewhere when they're kicking and screaming is not compassionate at all. Telling them that what they care about is not important, and that something they don't care about matters more than anything else in the world is not compassionate. Listening to them and trying to understand them, is. I cannot stress the "understand" part enough. Even if you've gone through something similar to that person, you still do not automatically understand what they're going through. Each person's situation is at least slightly different. A lot of the time, people don't want advice, they merely want someone to acknowledge their worth as a human being and actually listen to them for once. And by "listen" I don't mean give them whatever they want, I mean just pay attention with the intention to understand them.

If you know that attending school will open up opportunities for the child in life, isn't not letting them go a more cruel punishment?

Quote:This is one of the major problems with school - everyone is just expected to do all the same things at the same time and in the same way, regardless of what style of learning works best for them.

Students are given the same basic assignments, but how they go about doing them is their choice.

Quote:I was in a good school that was awesome even though it was still technically compulsory, but over time that school became more like a normal school, everyone got upset, and I decided to write about it, and School Survival was born. I had no idea that other people had it so much worse than I did. I actually do think that compulsory schooling can work, but only if it's good enough that people would go out of their own free will even if it wasn't compulsory. Learning about things like how plants work and history and all that stuff is really interesting... until we have to memorize it and write long essays and tests and things. And you know what? I don't remember any of that stuff now except for the parts I was interested in at the time. All that writing and memorizing made exactly jack squat of a difference. It's not the content of the curriculum that's bad, it's the methods that are bad. Being exposed to a variety of things can't possibly be bad. Being forced to write long things about stuff you don't care about and memorize lots of trivial details, however, is really not what learning is about.

Learning those "trivial details" provides the backbone for true education to take place. You can't just skip it. There's nothing wrong with essays and tests. Just because you forget something doesn't disqualify it from being important to others.

Quote:Also, I never memorized the grammar rules for English, but I figured it out just fine for the most part. Kids learn to speak at a really early age without memorizing any rules about language, they learn it all by themselves just by imitating other people around them. If they can do that at the measly ages of 2-4, why do we have so little faith in the older people? Could it perhaps be that somewhere along the line they lost their motivation to learn on their own? I'm not saying that school itself caused that, though, but if you have everything spoon-fed to you and everyone acts like it's more important than everything else you could possibly be doing, I think it's quite possible that people become overly reliant on other people to tell them what to do and actually give up on motivating themselves to do things... simply because they don't need to. It's easier to just go with the flow and let everyone else handle all the decisions.

People do not become codependent as a result of schooling. Everything about school, homework, essays, tests are about getting people to become self-reliant and able to continue educating themselves after they graduate.

Quote:You said school teaches critical thinking - I'm curious as to why you say that. In what way did your school teach critical thinking? My school claimed to teach critical thinking. And they did, to a point. They encouraged us to ask "why" about everything... as long as we weren't questioning their rules or orders. They didn't even see the double standards in that.

Basically, they taught about questioning everything and evaluating for yourself what's just and what isn't. You can't teach politics without teaching citizenship.