I was searching around looking for ways to drop out at 14 in the UK and all I could find could find anywhere were just laws and more laws. This made sense at first but then I realized that every single page was full of this same information on different websites and i noticed that there does not seem to be any negativity against the school system, nothing that truly disagrees with how it is run. Then it occurred to me; could someone be deliberately making the negative posts against school very hard to find?
My views on school are that it is a system designed to brainwash people. It brainwashes you by making you think that school is the norm and it is weird to not go to school. When you think of school drop-outs you think negative. You think of people who the school really did not want to 'take care of' anymore. This is definitely not the case though considering a large number of entrepreneurs dropped out and started earning large sums of money by using skills they learnt themselves with experience. Skills they never learnt at school.
Whilst some of the main subjects at school are quite vast and cover a lot, the majority of the subjects are extremely specific. The majority of things you learn will absolutely never be needed later on unless you have specific jobs. You learn what you learn just so you can do a test on it later on. When in life will you ever need to do complex maths in your head? Every single normal person has a phone with a perfectly capable calculator app on it. If I ask my maths teacher what the things we learn will ever be used for, I am told that they may not be important later on but they are needed for the exams. These exams have led many people to suicide because of the massive amounts of stress around them. I myself do not ever bother doing homework or putting large amounts of effort into lessons or revising for exams at all and even I get stressed about exams occasionally. Why are these exams still so important? Most people have some kind of qualifications so what makes them so useful for getting employment when everyone has them and they are nothing special?
Quite literally everything that is learnt at school can very easily be learnt at home on the internet and you can find the information much quicker. You can also find a lot more information than you are taught in lessons at a school. Every person learns at different speeds but schools force you to have to learn at the same speed as a class. Also, school is not for everyone and there should definitely be more alternatives and much easier to find alternatives that you can do at a far younger age than 16.
The school system is designed to first train you to be literate (knowing how to read and write and also how to search for information) and then it trains you to be a professional in any field you wish to specialize in.
Take away the school system and there will be no one to train your scientists, doctors, engineers and other people that are vital to the society. And when this happens, the world is gonna stop in development.
The first five or six years teach you to be literate which also happen to be the most fun years. I remember the majority of people enjoying primary school (the UK has year one to year six which is called primary school here). However, once we got to high school I started to notice that everything in maths for example is very much useless unless you happen to be in an extremely specific situation where it would be needed. You would never need to do maths in your head with how far phones have come. Most people own a phone with a calculator app.
'Take away the school system and there will be no one to train your scientists, doctors, engineers and other people that are vital to the society.' I agree with that however I don't think it should be taken away what I mean is it should not be the way it is now (probably a bad choice for the title). It is entirely compulsory, or a least in the UK, up until you are 18 years old to be in education. I believe it should be optional. That is because school has a wide range of subjects (I have to do 13 subjects) but they are mostly extremely specific subjects with the exception to english, maths, history and geography. You should be able to choose from a much wider range of subjects and instead of focusing on 13 at a time, you should be allowed to choose as many or as little as you want. People who do not enjoy school should be offered much more alternatives which are easier to get.
Side note: I don't know how true it is but http://www.naturalchild.org/guest/john_gatto.html says
'prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was 98% and after it the figure never again reached above 91% where it stands in 1990.'
"A system designed to brainwash people. It brainwashes you by making you think that school is the norm and it is weird to not go to school." Indeed! Have you ever studied John Taylor Gatto? I think we will see a fundamental shift in "schooling" in the next 10 years. That does not mean it will be less "brain washing", it will probably be more (being honest). Thanks for the post.
Thank you. I have had a look at some of John Taylor Gatto's work after you wrote this and it looks very interesting. I noticed he is a teacher himself but even he does not agree with the system.
He goes very deep into THE HISTORY of schooling. I would highly suggest spending some time listening to him. :)
I do agree with you that the current school system has tons of flaws. I come from a family of teachers and I can see the limits of the system. Legal, educational, emotional, strategical limits, a real bunch of them. But I'm not sure I follow you when you take away the value of education itself. We can't just stop learning stuff because machines do them for us. We can't stop reading and thinking because one day we'll have a job that doesn't require us to. We can't stop being formed as complete individuals just because one day only a small part of what we are will be asked of us. If you only teach people whatever is needed to do the one job they'll be supposed to do, you'll raise robots, don't you think?
Some of what I wrote is badly worded. I am not saying we should stop learning entirely I just think it should be done very differently. It should not be compulsory until you 18 to be in full time education. I think everything that is taught now should still be taught but you should be able to choose from a much larger range of subjects than the very specific subjects currently taught and it should be your choice which subjects you want to do. There should not be certain subjects that are compulsory just because the government believes they are important. That is their view but young adults who are in education or are part of it are going to know what they would like out of an education more than the government would because they are experiencing it right now and they know what needs to be changed. The people that make the decisions are not in school currently.
You say only learning the minimum will raise robots but does the current system which is designed to make everyone go into the world with GCSE's because that is supposedly what is correct not raise people as robots? Everyone goes into the world with a certain amount of GCSE's knowing the samethings as anyone else with the same GSCE.
Nope, the current system sucks. I agree with you on that. We come from different countries with different education systems, so I can't really speak for what you're used to consider "school", but here in Italy, governments have been destroying the school system piece by piece in the last 30 years. I know what you mean by "brainwashing" and I agree with your views on that.
But we have to be aware what we wish. The younger you are, the more your brain is flexible and your learning curve is easy. I'm not going to be one of those parents who force their kids to learn 2 languages by the time they're six, I think kids shall be kids and enjoy their life and their energy. But when you're young, what you learn sticks with you. It's important that you keep at it. And keep in mind I'm one of those guys who hated school in their teenage years, I spent a whole year walking around my city instead of being in class. Still, I'm grateful to some of my teachers who were able to form me as an individual. And yeah, students know what they need to some degree, but there's tons they don't know, yet. That's why they learn.
I think the only solution is for the school system to be actually managed by people who care about the kids more than they care about politics and economics.
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