What to do if you hate school [WIP]

[SoulRiser]

I've started it on Reddit, because that seems more likely to be able to actually get found in Google, because Google sucks. Anyway, post suggestions for what to add (preferably on the Reddit post, or here if you don't have an account)

https://www.reddit.com/r/School_Survival...te_school/

The goal is for people to find that before they find SS, and hopefully get them to come here.

[sswbm]

Maybe you could put this on the Wiki and copy changes to Reddit..

[SoulRiser]

That'd make sense if anyone ever actually edited the wiki. This may be more likely to result in something actually happening.

[craxyguy562]

School wifi says connection is not private.

[vonunov]

(12-09-2016 04:23 AM)craxyguy562 Wrote:  School wifi says connection is not private.

tl;dr not a problem

Schools, workplaces and such controlled institutions (as opposed to your home connection) will be using advanced network firewalls that have features like HTTPS inspection. This is essentially a benign man-in-the-middle where the firewall issues its own SSL certificate for the website you're visiting, allowing the encrypted HTTPS traffic to be intercepted and inspected to see if it's allowed by the firewall policy. Computers that are controlled by the institution should be forced to trust the firewall's certificate so that warnings like you see won't appear.

If you're on your own computer, there's no way that it can be forced to trust the firewall's certificate (it isn't really a valid certificate for the site you're visiting, of course, you can only make the computers in your environment believe it is). So in that case you'll see that warning. I think the best way to do it is not to do HTTPS inspection on other people's machines -- guest wifi shouldn't be doing that, for example. But if you're connecting to the same network as the school's computers (usually if you used the ethernet but not in your case it seems) then the firewall would perform the HTTPS inspection based on that, even though your computer wasn't configured to trust the certificate.

If you check the certificate details it's easy to see if this is happening. Reddit has a certificate issued by the trusted certificate authority DigiCert. In Chrome, I click the green padlock at the left end of the address bar (if you're getting the warning, it'll be a different icon). Then it says "Your connection to this site is private. Details" at the top. Again, will be different for you. Click Details, then in the new window there is a View Certificate button. There it says "Issued by: DigiCert SHA2 Secure Server CA". When HTTPS inspection is happening, you should see a different issuer, usually identifiable as the institution whose network you're connected to, but the certificate will still have been "Issued to:" reddit.com or *.reddit.com or so.

(When I say it's not a problem I mean that this is supposed to be happening -- just know that the HTTPS now is not keeping your school from seeing what you're doing because they have intercepted and decrypted it.)

[xcriteria]

Yeah, let's get some outreach going! Reddit sounds like a good place.

(12-08-2016 07:22 AM)SoulRiser Wrote:  That'd make sense if anyone ever actually edited the wiki. This may be more likely to result in something actually happening.

Yeah... speaking of something actually happening, I want to use the momentum around ASDE to get a working group together of people who want to help with outreach to young people. ASDE itself is more focused on providing information to parents (and people in general) who are at least semi-curious about self-directed education, rather than specifically doing outreach to young people stuck in school. BUT they very much see the need for this and that millions of people are suffering and they are excited for "us" to do that part of it. But yeah, there is so much to do and I want to find more people to help and coordinate our work.

On that note, Catalyst Learning Network is undergoing some changes to focus its marketing (and some services) on parents who are still immersed in the school mindset even though their kids are suffering in school (like look here.) But there's still the question of how to spread the word about school (and alternatives) to young people, and School Survival is still the only site really focused on that at this point.

So yeah, reddit... I have on my immediate todo list to write some articles about how to talk to parents about school-related issues with the goal of helping them to listen and understand, including how to introduce parents to Catalyst or other parenting coaches who understand school issues and the possibility of alternatives, These articles and services may provide a better path for unhappy students to actually change their situation, in addition to getting support themselves, since parents have so much power to influence things.

So that will at least be something to add to reddit.