The Menace of School

ALAN writes:
Like A. Wood, I was a school resister. But I was much dumber than him. I sat through nine years of it as an obedient little lamb. And then I became a rebel.
In “Boys Hate School” [ Oct. 29, 2015 ], you wrote: “The modern secular school is an impersonal factory.”
You are too generous. I suggest that modern secular schools are child-crushing factories.
Schooling has nothing to do with learning. It has to do with power, babysitting, and hatred of responsibility: Power over parents and children throughout an artificially-prolonged childhood, and hatred of responsibility by parents who think their children should be somebody else’s responsibility.
It was in the mid-1960s that I came to hate schooling.
In the 1930s, my mother and uncle walked to their parochial school in south St. Louis. But my uncle was not fond of school. On some days he persuaded my mother to play hooky with him. At age 14 he quit school and got a job within walking distance from their home. It was possible to do that in those years, and it was work that he wanted to do. Fortunately my grandparents had the supreme good sense not to call him a “dropout”, not to cajole him into going back to school, and not to call in “experts” or “professionals” to “help” him adjust himself to other people’s expectations of what he should be doing. Instead, they had the profound wisdom to leave him alone. They knew he was happy and was contributing to the family income. There were no problems. He got along just fine. (more…)



