The Horror of School

Bryan Caplan made pretty much the same points in a book written from a libertarian perspective. Anyone can get a Harvard education – just show up at the lectures and take notes. The professor won’t kick you out, he’d be so thrilled there’s at least one person interested in the material.

Colleges like to pretend that they’re ivory towers devoted to learning for its own sake – and that’s what they should be. But you’re not going to convince people to bury themselves in debt for a degree unless you assure them that’s the only way they’ll be able to get a decent job.

Much to say about this excellent post, but will just say a couple of words on the socialization aspect. Spot on.

I recently ran into a single mom who is home schooling her son with an online assist. I said what about the social aspect, and she replied all the families around here are whackos (mostly correct), and went on to say her son is better off hanging with adults, almost using Ian’s exact words and argument.

Great post, thank you. That chart is brutal.

It’s amazing, in my research on healthy cultures, I found stories of people who grew up in healthy cultures, then were forced into unhealthy cultures late in childhood or in adulthood. When they described their respectful childhood training, they consistently said the same thing: it never felt like work.

Apache man Geronimo said, “When I was about eight or ten years old I began to follow the chase, and to me this was never work.” Sioux man Ohiyesa wrote, “I hardly think I was ever tired in my life until those first days of boarding-school.” Ohiyesa also noted, “The Indian boy enjoyed such a life as almost all boys dream of and would choose for themselves if they were permitted to do so.”

Ohiyesa’s description of his childhood training shows how dramatically different it was compared to anything in an unhealthy culture school:

> From childhood I was consciously trained to be a man; that was, after all, the basic thing; but after this I was trained to be a warrior and a hunter, and not to care for money or possessions, but to be in the broadest sense a public servant. After arriving at a reverent sense of the pervading presence of the Spirit and Giver of Life, and a deep consciousness of the brotherhood of man, the first thing for me to accomplish was to adapt myself perfectly to natural things–in other words, to harmonize myself with nature. To this end I was made to build a body both symmetrical and enduring–a house for the soul to live in–a sturdy house, defying the elements. I must have faith and patience; I must learn self-control and be able to maintain silence. I must do with as little as possible and start with nothing most of the time, because a true Indian always shares whatever he may possess…I was…alert and alive to everything that came within my ken.

When I hear people of healthy cultures describe a way of life based on sharing, where all adults are expected to stand for what’s right no matter what, cultivate a deep awareness of everything around them, and so on, I wondered – how do they raise their children to be so capable? Ohiyesa’s description helped show how radically different children can be raised in healthy cultures. Stories of girls’ upbringing are also radically different, and beautiful.

In societies that train people to hold back — that is, where people are trained for obedience, rather than upholding their own laws and standing for what’s right – boring or authoritarian schools are part of the training. In societies that train people to stand for what’s right – that is, healthy cultures – childhood training is very different. This is true in every case I’ve found.

References for these quotes can be found in chapter 42 of One Disease One Cure (1disease-1cure.com)

Ivan Illich has two books “deschooling society” and “Disabling professions” . One of his primary themes is that the school system (as well as most professions) has wide ranging effects that cause those subjected to it to be not only unable but unwilling to learn or think. They’ve been conditioned to association learning with busy work, stressful competition, and misery. Likewise, they’ve been browbeaten into internalizing the idea that the only way to learn is to have some expert tell them.

It’s similar to the proverb about giving a man a fish and teaching him to fish. The school system gives children a fish instead of teaching them how to fish. For the ruling class this is a feature. The last thing they want is a populace that will think for itself. It’s far easier to control people when they simply obey the “experts” instead of utilizing their own minds. That is what the ever increasing price of schooling is buying.

Yeah, I hated most of school, exited before finishing grade 12. Never regretted it for a second.

There a lots of ways to learn things.

Was offered what would have been good “home schooling” in lieu of normie school, but declined for access to peer group, messed up as that relationship often was.

Later, lived with a lot of college students in shared houses, second hand courses in whatever they were taking, agonized over (ht SPK) in the kitchen, late into the night.

@Ian “As for spending time with adults, well, that’s what children did for most of history. They weren’t stuck just with kids for most of the day, then just their parents. After all, you’re a kid for a lot less longer than you’re an adult, and it’s the adult world you need to know how to navigate.”

A friend lived in Sierra Leone, and she said “children are involved in everything”. Probably the time-honoured common sense funner better faster default knowledge transfer mode in all cultures; especially for kids.

More of it still in rural communities than urban, but that’s falling fast. Talked to another friend a couple weeks ago, “I don’t think there’s a kid on my (5 mile long) road that’ll ever swing a hammer in their life”.

@Ian “I’m not saying mass schooling has or had no benefits. It obviously does and did. But can we find a better way to teach children?”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with formalization and focusing of learning; again, probably a default progression in all societies.

But focused power becomes valuable to control, and we end up where we are.

@Whip nice comment.

@mago “Anti authoritarian then and now to my dying day.
If you’ve ever received physical and mental abuse from teachers and school administration for your defiance then you can relate to what I’m saying.
It’s why I always treated my kitchen employees and classroom students with tender care, even if they exploited and abused it.
Gotta be a martial artist to thrust and parry.”

See, one does learn valuable skills in shitschool..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO5dcW0P75M

“And I’ve felt torture, I’ve felt pain
Just like that film with Michael Caine
I’ve been abused and I’ve been confused
And I’ve kissed Margaret Thatcher’s shoes”— Stage 2 of Life under the Yoke of “Civilization.”

I appreciate Oakchair & Bob’s references to Ivan Ilich, he quite thoroughly deconstructed what school is, and what is known as “the hidden curriculum”, conditioning for obedience, behind it. There are Waldorf school (developed out of the philosophy of New Age Anthroposophy), and other alternatives for parents who want something better than Fordist training for their children. These are mostly known to the few parents who are economically comfortable and “alternative”, the Drone workers simply don’t know about things like this. Anecdotal evidence tells me most children and youth attending these schools are happier and better-adjusted. It may not work well for others.

Jan W. bring up the “credential society”, this is something that reached its apogee under Obama, who claimed that what Hillary would soon call “The Deplorables” just needed more paternalistic, Industrial-style “training” to “participate” as low-level drones in a rigged economy, grateful to rise to the level of bare survival. Pay for school, go into debt, in 15 years or so you might come up from underwater and do okay. Just believe in the shame “Hope & Change”, things will be fine. Oh, & black boys and young men, “Pull those pants up!”, show you are middle-of-the-road and obedient.

My dad was unsympathetic to me as I was the oldest boy and there was no way I could be a Clone of him as he expected (he grew up poor on a little farm in South Dakota, became a business “success”), so to me school was a safe haven where I was treated with respect. Naturally curious, and very good at all the humanities, “English”, Social Studies, history, decent at math, uninterested for the most part in Science which I found alienating and limited . . .

I went to a very good school in the 2nd wealthiest suburban enclave of Chicago. There was some bullying but it wasn’t severe. I was a late bloomer and small until my senior year of high school, so I took some abuse but for the most part it wasn’t that bad. When I was a High School Junior, 11th grade, PE changed from gender separation to Coed, and suddenly the minor bullying disappeared, boys evidently didn’t want to look like bullies or assholes in front of the girls.

I could never be a Silent Generation Striver like my parents wanted me to be, as I watched the US losing the Vietnam War and knew I liked the Vietnamese people better than “my side”, and at age 17 during my Freshman year of College, I was very lucky to hear Richard Hell & the Voidoids’ “Blank Generation” on the college station, about a month before the more popular Sex Pistols exposed Punk attitudes to a wider, more commercial audience. I was sold, I knew who my people were. Radio Rock’n Roll in the mid-70s started to become sappy and empty, think the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac– other boys listened to what I called dumb “cock rock”, Boston (totally phony, session museums), Kansas, dreck like that. Those people became Frat boys and went on to “Work, Death” stage 3 & 4 without a peep . . .

Dropped out of college after my sophomore year, cut off contact with my parents (dad had threatened to have me institutionalized for non-conformity, I did not know that was an idle threat since I wasn’t mentally ill), joined the working class, moved to Western Louisiana then to New Orleans, then went to Nicaragua with money from a legal settlement when a moron hit my motorcycle and totaled it, & picked coffee.

Working-class life was a new type of schooling, I had learned to be stoical and put up with it. . . . Graduated from college age 29, went to California, and taught in the mainly Latino towns south of Oakland. I subbed for quite awhile ‘coz I liked the freedom, finally coming up on age 40 I signed a Contract and taught.

When I started in 1999 full time, we had a great principle and school was actually a very pro-social and supportive place for most students and staff. But the culture changed with first the Bush and then the Obama “No Child’s Behind Left” drill & kill testing, “assessment”, “everything is data” bullshit from the Corporatized culture that was being run by the Masters, the Reed Hastings, Bill Gates, Corey Booker Privatization Charter Schools scams, so that poor kids would get a poor education, rich kids would get a somewhat relevant (if soul-deadening) one.

There were 8 school districts in my large County, when I started our district was the first or 2nd best. When I left during Covid 22 years later it was the 1st or 2nd worst. Republican Mormons took over our School Board (until years later when we kicked them out,) at one time all 5 Board members were right-wing dullards who hated the unionized teachers) brought in abusive admin who treated everything as if it was about money and compliance, didn’t even bother to do their own jobs, things became a joke.

Before I left, the Middle Schools dropped any basic discipline of students because Admin didn’t want to stand up to parents who just knew their little darlings were the best beings ever to exist, and all 3 became snake pits with vicious bullying, kids called “fags”, Jewish kids taunted over being different, etc. This culture eventually moved up to the High Schools and we’d have kids who pulled fire alarms whenever they didn’t want to take a test or the weather was nice.

Except for very devoted teachers who had some standards, it mostly became kind of like the late Soviet Union, We pretend to teach, the kids pretend to learn. (Again, at least 40% of the staff at my school didn’t join in on that, but it was kind of the majority default, that’s what our Betters wanted.)

I really only survived by getting an MLIS and running the Library for the final 12 years of my career. We babysat some kids taken out of class, we nurtured those with real interests, & I cooperated with the humanities teachers (mainly) I’d previously taught with for the preceding years. I had students who “worked” for us, but that was Pass/Fail so I didn’t have to fight with parents about grades.

Some kids did well, many did not. Institutional rot post-2000 was very open like in most other sectors of U$A. On a sinking ship, only a few boats were rising. But that’s USA, baby!!

Sorry, but in my personal experience home schooling is pure bullshit. Yes, mine was of the nutjob right wing variety, but there are entire networks of homeschooling ‘support’ and the right dominates that ecosystem. Anyone wishing to do it another way is very much truly on their own.

At the risk of too much information, and still trying to be fairly vague, my mother pulled me out of public school before I was even done with elementary (mainly because she wanted to get me away from that evil evolution talk, and probably also the specter of sex education in my near future. My sex ‘education’ consisted of being handed a right wing ‘your body and you’ type book and then nothing ever being talked about. Fortunately because they so undersocialized me there was never any risk of anyone ending up teen pregnant, so that’s a plus, maybe? My father was the ultimate doormate and non-entity (in this and everything else. If he disagreed, and I have no idea if he did, his opinion was unvoiced and irrelevant). She hooked up with a Creationist network for the textbooks (I’ve kept some of them; they’re fucking masterpieces. The astronomy book that says we shouldn’t believe in black holes because ‘Bible verse about the dangers of believing in things unseen’ has aged like milk, given we now have a direct picture of one. Also they ignored completely the little fact of gravity, and pretended that the only sign of black holes is lots of x-rays. But many things can produce x-rays, thus black holes can’t be real. Brilliant logic. Lots of Confederate apologetics in the history books too).

But she was as inept at this as she was at everything else, and didn’t stick with it. So I came out of it all with no highschool diploma equivalent and severely undersocialized (for a while I had a minimum amount of that because I sometimes went to a strange, partially publicly funded homeschooling support thing at an old school, until the general public found out about it, demanded the funding be cut, and most of those students (but not me, of course) ended up at…a charter school paid for with vouchers funded by the public school budget anyway. Amazing.).

I ended up as a NEET who almost never left the house and basically existed in stasis for fifteen or more years. Eventually I started simply forcing myself to go outside and landed on my feet largely on my own. It turned out I’m semi-competent at a job and at socializing (my mother at one point becane obsessed with Temple Grandin and convinced herself I was some sort of autistic idiot savant. No, she can’t be a shit parent, the kid must just be a naturally insular genius!). I simply had to make myself leave my shell to discover it.

Plenty of people say their school years, especially highschool, sucked. Maybe. But also plenty come out of them with no particular trauma. I’ll never know because all of those experiences were denied to me. I lost decades of my life, arguably my best youthful years, because of homeschooling.

Now I understand this is all highly personal anecdote, and doubtless a particularly bad case of inept misparenting. But everything else I’ve ever seen or interacted woth of better homeschooling kids is that they almost always have something weird or deficient about them. Whatever good homeschooling is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of its products.

How to do public education, rote training for industrial workers vs some other approach, has been a debate for basically as long as public education has existed. I don’t consider ‘just don’t have schools at all’ to be a viable option.

Given how Trump in his national treason seems to be planning to substantially destroy what was left of public schooling, I suppose we’ll find out how good or bad or useless it was in the coming years.

Credentialism is a huge thing in university. But K-12 schooling doesn’t do credentials. And while it is true that schools do basically teach people to sit still and obey, it is also true (well maybe not in the US these days, but normally) that they teach them to read and do arithmetic and have some understanding of science and a smattering of history and in some cases a bit about how to cook and basically a lot of stuff that in retrospect I’m kind of glad I know.

I’d like it to be done better. Around where I live, it actually IS done better than it was in my youth, in many ways. There’s a LOT of local variation in curriculum and approach between different parts of North America. The school my son went to I was amazed to find unlike at every school I ever went to, that kids who were different . . . WEREN’T bullied. It wasn’t a “zero tolerance” thing, they had proactive approaches that started from young about teaching the kids empathy and stuff, and that actually worked. I was blown away, I didn’t believe it until I’d seen it in action for a few grades, but it was real. That’s how the public schools in at least some of the municipalities in my area work. They still teach obedience and sitting still, like, a lot. But it goes to show that important things can be shifted even in the society we have. In the big picture we probably don’t get really great schools until we have a very different society, but educators do try and that can make a difference.

Another thought that comes to me is that while I’m not happy about the “obedience” thing and I think there are better directions to socialize people, the “sitting still” part may actually be kind of valuable. I mean, can anyone imagine a plausible future society where people are going to not be sitting still a whole lot?

Oh, and Bob? I have a degree. You can rotate slowly on my diploma.

Universities are this very ambiguous thing. Sure, credentialism. Sure, there’s constant efforts at all times to turn higher education to where it is useful solely to the capitalist class and stops doing anything except pseudo-vocational training and pro-ruler propaganda. Sure, there’s an epidemic of cheating, these days using AI or whatever. All that stuff.

And yet, half the resistance to the status quo, maybe more, still always comes from universities. Ultimately it is very difficult to have a place designated for people to learn and think, and yet completely stop them from actually doing so. They keep on trying. Where are the demonstrations against genocide in Gaza? Universities. Who is the Trump administration grabbing and suppressing? University students. Whose budget do they have the biggest hardon to fuck with? Education and research. What’s all this woke and critical race theory stuff the MAGAts hate with a blazing passion and try their hardest to ban and suppress? University research. History, sociology, literature.

I work at a university. Just as the iconic entry for the contest for “As Canadian as . . . ” was once “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances”, people at the academy still try to be “As academic as possible under the circumstances”. You think they don’t know about all these criticisms of the modern university? They freaking wrote them! They’re doing their best, mostly. Just knee-jerk condemning them all is as stupid as condemning the whole working class because most of them haven’t formed unions.