I wake up at 7 and eat a hastily prepared breakfast. I dress up in my white button shirt and red tie, and leave. I enter the building, wait until the bell rings, and enter the classroom. For the next 45 minutes I will sit silently down at my designated spot (possibly near someone I hate) to write down things I don't care about. Finally, I am graciously allowed to leave for the 5-15 minute break. I enter a small corridor, with hundreds of other screaming people, running around. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a CCTV camera, watching my every move.
The bell rings again, and I find myself back in the classroom. The story repeats 6 to 8 times that day. Finally, I can go back home. I turn on my computer to play some games. But then, it dawns on me that I still have homework to do. Another two hours gone. Need to pack up my belongings for tomorrow. Maybe I still have some time for a round of Fortnite. Or I will just go to sleep, as I'm fucking tired. After all, I must be rested for the test tomorrow. A test where I will have to answer questions about things I don't care about. Okay, I've earned a decent grade. At last, I can forget it all. After all, I need space in my brain for the next wave of trash.
Sounds like hell? Well, this is the reality for over a billion children on this Earth:
About one billion between ages 5-14 (school age). Add the 15 and 16 year olds and you get a few hundred million more. Most of them will go to school:
Worldwide, about 4% of school age kids will fail to finish (primary and secondary) school. For Europe and Central Asia
, the amount is very close to zero. You could say we have a pandemic of the school virus. So let's explore the harms of this virus:
We will let the government itself (archive) (MozArchive) explain it:
We all have a responsibility to educate the next generation of informed citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said, and instilling in them a love of knowledge and culture for their own sake. But education is also about the practical business of ensuring that young people receive the preparation they need to secure a good job and a fulfilling career, and have the resilience and moral character to overcome challenges and succeed.
I'm guessing this will be the most important paragraph, so I'll focus on it. Does school introduce students to the best that has been thought and said
? I don't recall learning about Ray Peat ^_^. But anyway, this isn't justified - the students will forget most of it since the schooling system is not designed with long term memorization in mind. Does it instill in them a love of knowledge and culture for their own sake
? No way - how can you "love knowledge" when you are forced to sit in a chair for 7 hours a day, writing down things you don't care about? School, in fact, does exactly the opposite of what it allegedly aims at. How about the good job and fulfilling career
? Most jobs don't need any education at all, and the majority of people will end up working in those (as butchers, cleaners, etc) since they are the most available ones. For the rest, you will have to learn the skills on your own - and school inhibits that - or go to a special school later, anyway. And hell - even if this was true - have the school shills considered that maybe people don't want to fulfill
themselves with jobs, but just earn enough money to live so they can then do what they want? The last stated justification is and have the resilience and moral character to overcome challenges and succeed
. Don't mock me - the only resilience you learn is in enduring school abuse - but you might just as easily be psychologically destroyed by it. There is certainly nothing positive going on there. As we can see, the four pillars of justification for the educational system have fallen. What does school really accomplish, then?
This should be obvious. Let's look at the specifics:
To be honest, I had a serious problem filling this section. I knew the conclusion is right, but justifying it has proven to be more difficult than I thought. During every school subject you learn lots and lots of things, and it's hard to pick just one or two examples to represent the uselessness of that subject. Besides, I forgot it all so I had to dig deep into my mind to even remember what was being learned (which in itself is evidence in my favor). If I wanted to cover every single thing that was taught during a certain subject, I'd have to write pages upon pages - and again, I don't remember. So I just picked a few examples to illustrate the principle. Ask yourself: if the school subjects are not taught for usefulness purposes, then for what?
Sometimes people try to answer this argument with something like "but look, we did [x] during school, and I also do it now when I do [y]. Checkmate! School is great!". There are a few problems here. You're trying to justify schooling as a child by appealing to your current experience as an adult. And almost certainly, what you were learning as a child was useless during the time you were a child. And so, you then forgot it, and relearned what you needed as an adult. Therefore, this argument cannot justify schooling children. But to be charitable, maybe it is able to justify schooling adults? Not really, since the information you consider useful is only a very small part of the subject that you were taught in school - and an even lesser one of the whole curriculum. You cannot pick a single thing you learned in school that you just happen to be using right now as an adult, and say "Look! We've had writing poems in school, and I'm now writing poems as a profession, so school was useful for me!" - while ignoring the 99,9% of school things that turned out completely useless.
But it gets worse. Remember, you're only describing your own personal experience, which likely only applies to a small percentage of people. For the vast majority, your specific piece of information would still be useless (all those not writing poems wouldn't be able to say the above). But it gets even worse! Because, in school, kids almost never really do anything - just write stuff down. And so, there would still be no connection between a piece of information learned and a task performed. So that's still the part you'd have to learn on your own, and probably trash most of what you've written down anyway - since it wouldn't be that useful in practice. Either way, this is only relevant to schooling adults; schooling kids is refuted with exclusively the fact that they will forget it all before ever making use of it. Even if the child - by some miracle - did not forget the thing it's now using, the other arguments still apply. That it's only one of the few useful things it's learned, and that it's one of the few people for which it's going to be useful.
In Poland, primary and secondary lasts 9 years (until recently this used to be 10); 6-8 of school hours per day plus the commute, five times per week. Adding homework and other preparation (like for tests) on top of that means the formative years of a person are almost entirely focused on school. This all directly follows from the above; the only way to justify such long duration of schooling is by shoving a lot of useless things into the curriculum. Now let's generously assume 10% of the knowledge learned in school is useful; limiting education to that means you end up with 3-4 school hours per week, plus let's say 2-3 more hours for homework and tests. Suddenly, school becomes just one of the chores you have to get done - barely a blip in your timeline, instead of your entire life. You get 5-6 days a week fully free, and can actually plan out your life instead of having it designed from above.
This cannot be allowed to happen because the elites want you to be a domesticated doggie instead of a free human. And you cannot accomplish that with just a few hours of obedience training that would then be undone by the kid during the rest of the week. Even if you give the school shills the benefit of doubt and assume 100% of the stuff learned there is useful, it could all be learned in one year, instead of repeating and forgetting the same things over and over for the whole duration of schooling. The fact that this happens unfortunately leaves obedience training as the only explanation for the gigantic amount of lost time, that makes any sense.
This happens for 3 reasons:
As far as I'm concerned, the brain keeps information around for only two reasons. The first is that it's being consistently used for a real life task. So, a programmer might know all the function names of his language if his job or project depends on it. But the knowledge needs to be reinforced every so often; after a few months or years of not using the language, the programmer will likely need a refresher (though the general proficiency in programming will - of course - remain). Since none of the knowledge you learn in school is being regularly used outside of it, the brain will see no point in keeping that stuff around and will trash it after the tests are over.
The other reason information would be kept is that there's an emotional reaction associated with it. Maybe you remember the lyrics of a song that helped lift you up during tough times, or which you kept hearing during fun events you experienced as a youth (advertisers sometimes repurpose popular melodies with their own lyrics overlaid onto them, why do you think that is?). Nostalgia definitely fits in here too; there was a even a meme about someone remembering all the Pokemon even when they last played the games 15 years ago or so. The brain might keep something around if it perceives it as morally important; or maybe traumatic. Perhaps you've absorbed a topic as part of your identity; I feel this explains how someone like Ray Peat seemingly knew everything that's happened in biology during the last 6 decades or so. Or maybe you were simply fascinated by something.
None of that - of course - applies to anything learned in school, where the knowledge is presented in the most boring way possible. When there's no "doing" or "feeling" associated with it, the brain won't bother carrying the additional baggage. But the situation is even worse than it seems. Because even if you found something useful and / or interesting in the school curriculum, the brain might decide to trash it anyway as it's already been overburdened by endless hours of having stuff shoved in. School is like a trance, an existence entirely concerned with sitting and writing things down. No wonder the brain decides to tune out and forget even the fun things.
School convinces you that education means sitting, writing down, answering questions on a test and forgetting. This is what's being engraved into your brain's circuits through 10 or more years of schooling. And with that conviction, why would anyone want to learn anything? It seems that school is designed to cause exactly this attitude towards learning. Even if a child survives the grind with its youthful curiosity still intact, it can begin actually learning skills only at age 16 (if high school is skipped) or later. Regardless of this, education is impossible during the school ages, as there is just no time. At best you come back home at 14 or 15, and have to make your food, then solve homework. And your brain is fried anyway, so you just want to rest or play. Imagine if kids could instead learn what they are interested in without being distracted by things they don't care about. Without associating education with boredom or hurt. Every so often you hear about kids that taught themselves programming or drawing at young ages. But this is despite - not because of - schooling. These are the few that have had enough resilience to still retain their natural excitement about learning. And they did it in an entirely self-directed way - at the time and pace of their choosing, finding their own materials, asking questions, creating their own paths through failure and eventual success. If school didn't exist, there would be a lot more of such people.
If someone is great at programming, writing, drawing, or sports - he will still have to bother with all the stuff they don't care about. He still has to deal with screaming teachers and other fluff. In most cases he will lose motivation and his exceptional talents will go to waste. At best he will waste time on useless things until he is able to cultivate his talents. On his own, because school does not provide opportunity to do so (it's not in the program). This will necessarily sacrifice his grades (see above section) but will produce better results overall in terms of satisfaction and later opportunity. How cool would it be, if school picked out the talented kids and directed their development towards their talents? No, got to bring everyone down to the same level of "general knowledge" and demotivation. As stated before, only the truly determined kids can survive the grind and still retain their excitement for learning.
In school, you are required to perform a bunch of arbitrary tasks, on the performance of which you are then graded. These tasks can include remembering things well, solving chemical or math equations, writing essays, drawing, cutting, recitation, playing sports, etc well. If you don't perform a task well enough, you get a "bad grade", and might be made fun of in front of the whole class or even asked to repeat it later. Officially, the entirety of schooling is based on those "ratings", the dividing of students into higher or lower rated - where the former receive rewards like special diplomas or better treatment by teachers - while the latter are punished with reprimands, additional work, or having to repeat a year (ugh!). This has deeper implications than it seems...
Right from the youngest ages you learn that someone is better, and someone is worse, AKA the "fight for position" ideology - or social darwinism - that our entire society is seemingly based on. If you don't fight hard or well enough for your position, then you drop lower, and deserve the suffering that comes with it. And the fight is constant; there are no breaks for disease or mourning family deaths, etc. There is no mercy or consideration for anything other than "you must perform at the task!". The human - then - becomes a tool, to be used and thrown away if it is defective. Since all the required school tasks end up being useless in the end, there is no point to them aside from teaching kids the "proper" mindset. The one in which their lives are meaningless aside from their performance as work horses. The one where abuse is acceptable or even noble - because surely, the abused somehow failed, and so need to receive their punishments. The one that allows the elites to do whatever they want to, since they're high up and surely deserve to be where they are and the perks that come with their positions.
We don't need any of this, and can drop it in favor of a world based on respect, empathy and morals. Someone might tell me that this surely can't work, because "meritocracy is great" and "competition results in better products" or similar nonsense. In "competition", the winner is actually the liar, the abuser, the trickster - and not even the "good performer". Besides, humans just shouldn't be rated in this way, as "better and worse" products. This is evil in principle; and if you wanted to know why so many assholes (such as those who think "pointing and laughing" is a way to accomplish anything useful) exist, look at what they've been taught in school, perhaps. We need to structure society in a way that lifts everyone up, instead of focusing on this needless fighting and discrimination that only wastes mental resources and brings stress, isolation, and disease.
So don't blame them. Please realize that - for all the time the student is in school - the teacher has to be, as well. And he has to control 30 screaming kids at a time, for 8 or so hours a day, every day. This is very stressful and I've seen teachers have literal breakdowns. The teacher will have to compete for the attention of a student that is already bogged down with 10 other subjects they don't care about. And what he is supposed to "teach" is carefully controlled. He has to review the stupid tests, etc. So a teacher might be excited about a subject, but will still be consumed by the grind - same as the student. With this in mind, we see that the teacher's situation is even worse than the student's. At least the student has to focus only on writing things down - the teacher must take care of a bunch of children who want to be anywhere but in school. Now imagine that the student was able to choose his subjects. And that the teacher can do whatever he wants during the lessons, instead of following some "program". Since the things taught in school are not required for life, it only makes sense to base teaching on interest (both for the student and the teacher). This would also increase information retention, if the students learned only what they cared about. And would decrease the stress levels of the teachers since the kids would not feel like caged animals forced to perform tricks. The current system is so insane, I can barely believe I'm not in some nightmare.
This should have been obvious but yet somehow eluded me until today, when I heard a person talking about her kid's school issues. So - the parent has to help the kid with homework, learning for tests, preparation of meals etc, as well as keep convincing it to go to school when it really doesn't want to. But that's not all - they have to deal with the complaints from the school employees about their kid's behavior; the parent bears much of the burden of ensuring that the kid adapts to the school requirements. That has to suck hard for any caring parent, knowing he's going to have to rip apart his kid's childhood innocence piece by piece, just so it fits in there. To be honest I cannot imagine anything worse, than having to contribute to my kid's psychological destruction day after day, year after year, and to see it happen right in front of my eyes. It's probably not how most parents feel about it, though. Anyway, all of this is in addition to the jobs the parent(s) are most likely going to, and won't be allowed to rest after coming home because of school stuff.
I will surely hear (and have a lot in real life) some people say that kids must go to school because otherwise, they won't be able to get a job later in life. First of all, that's not exactly true - teenagers have been doing jobs forever without finishing education, even during their vacations or weekends etc. But even with that assumption, it's only because it's been arbitrarily decided that you need to finish school to be graciously allowed to work. The "knowledge" you've gained (and forgot) during your school years is not actually used at the workplace. They will either teach you at your job if it's simple, or you'll need to go to a special school anyway if it's complex. Primary and secondary school, or even general high school, is only relevant as much as it allows you to enter the higher schools (this is also arbitrary). And the majority of people are doing those "simple" jobs, so education literally never comes into play. Someone like a barber needs only a short barber course to be able to do his job properly. Again, the education requirement is just arbitrarily set up by governments. The right response is to take it down instead of sending kids to a 10 (or more) year long prison because of it. You could also bypass the school requirement by being a self-taught artist / programmer / writer etc. and accepting donations or doing commissions. Of course, in the end, I think the job system is outdated (or maybe it's never been good) and will die soon regardless, but for now, it needs to be reformed as to not require finishing school.
I've had people tell me that "work is school for adults" or such things. There are actually very few similarities, though. The biggest one is that you "have to" go to both, but even that evaporates when you have money saved up and can stop working at any moment for at least a while (a kid cannot leave school for the whole duration of his education aside from 2 months per year vacations). You can choose your job - a kid cannot choose his school and they're pretty much all the same anyway (talking about primary and secondary here). The vast majority of jobs are way less restrictive than school. You can usually walk and speak. For many jobs you can at least partially control your work environment, and have an opportunity to rest - in school, you just write and write and write. In most jobs you also don't have the boss watching you over at all times, so there is not the aspect of behavioral control that the teacher provides. Nursing - for example - allows significant freedom of movement, resting opportunity, task variety, has good pay and you actually feel like you are accomplishing something. But even for the extremely restrictive jobs - you at least get fucking paid; a kid never earns anything for his torture. Don't get me wrong - jobs suck - but compared to school, they are not even in the same league of suckness. Oh, and it just occured to me that the worker is free to do whatever after coming back home (even if the time remaining is little, at least it is truly free). The student - on the other hand - is burdened with homework and preparation for the tests. Despite the physical place of the student's body changing, the mental chains of school remain.
This wasn't always the case (only because of the lack of availability of the tech), but now should be obvious. CCTV are all over the place, as well as RFID tracking of students' locations (archive) (MozArchive), facial recognition (archive) (MozArchive), and transparent backpacks (archive) (MozArchive). With these kinds of things normalized, how likely are those kids to resist the technological slavery system when they become adults? I say, very little chance. And it seems that schools are the introductory places for new spy tech. The same one that will later be implemented everywhere else. At least, that's where they've put CCTV here first. A United States resident has also told me this:
The students all use an extra-locked-down version of Chrome OS on their school computers. It monitors everything they type, what they click, all network traffic, etc. It's all sent to Google, who do things like check to see if they're threatening suicide, saying naughty words, etc, and automatically reports it to their teachers.
UPDATE November 2024: new spy shit just dropped in a French school
Yes, I am talking about vaccines. It's been long shown they are potentially toxic (watch the movie Vaxxed II) and don't even work (archive) (MozArchive) for preventing the diseases they're given against. And yet, they are required for attending school. Vaccination campaigns teach your kid that its body is property of the government and the pharmaceutical industry, which will now decide the kinds of substances that go in it. I don't know about others, but it was traumatizing for me to have unknown stuff injected into my muscles, for no stated reason and without consideration for my feelings or concerns. At least they are not (yet) enforcing COVID vaccines, which are 12 times more likely to get a side effect than all other vaccines combined - and the severity is also worse. But stupid parents can still decide to give them on their own, and will surely be pressured to do so. Edit: they already are (archive) (MozArchive) - School health providers might also be able to leverage community partners and relationships with families to increase vaccination coverage
. And as with the spying, how likely is it that those force-vaxxed kids will resist mandates when they are adults?
Let's check out some justifications for the school uniforms. Flying over to the United Arab Emirates (archive) (MozArchive), we find:
The unified appearance aims to provide a sense of equality and justice amongst all pupils, regardless of backgrounds or social status and to manifest the UAE's national and cultural identity.
Is your whole cultural and national identity reduced to white shirt and black trousers? Weak. As for the other justifications - you can't disappear poverty by equalizing clothes; only give the illusion of doing so. But even that doesn't work as the richer kids will bring their expensive smartphones, jewelry, travel by car, etc. So the poor kids will still feel worse than the rich ones but will also lose the benefit of wearing the clothes they like, even if they are cheap ones. Therefore we see that the policy of school uniforms not only does not accomplish what it sets out to (presumably, making the poor kids feel better about their poverty) but actually makes the situation worse. School uniforms are just a bandage above the actual problems - the poverty and the capitalist notions of worth; and the bandage doesn't even stick. Of course, not every school has such things and they might not be enforced in the same way. But they can get pretty heavy, as well; this US school (archive) (MozArchive) pretty much defines the entire look of your kid:
Belts:First, second, and third grade students must wear belts with shirts tucked inside pants, shorts, and skirts.Pre-K and Kindergarten students may wear elastic waist paints.
So, you must wear a freaking belt. I've never done so in my life, they are pointless and uncomfortable. I don't see any justification (even a stupid one) for their enforcement, either.
Boy’s Hair:Hair must be clean and well groomed.Prohibited items include bandannas, hair wraps/scarfs, large headbands, extremes in hairstyles (discretion of administration), unnatural human hair colors, lines, letters, or designs shaved in the head.Hair arranged in a manner detrimental to the performance of normal educational activities will be prohibited.Hair must be kept out of the eyes.
Girl’s Hair:Prohibited items include bandannas, hair rollers, hair wraps/scarfs, large headbands, extreme hairstyles (discretion of administration), unnatural human hair colors, lines, letters, or designs, shaved in the head.Hair arranged in a manner detrimental to the performance of normal educational activities will be prohibited.
Not Allowed:Purses, tattoos, false or long nails, sunglasses, oversized clothing, hats, large or hazardous jewelry.
You can't even tie your hair or grow your natural nails. There is zero point to this except destroying a kid's individuality and making it feel like a cog in the machine. The psychological damage will surely spill over into adulthood, as well.
The kids are shoved into a classroom with 30 other kids they might not like. They have to sit in the same chairs for years, five times a week, 7 hours per day. They cannot speak or stand up without permission - pretty much making it into a master-slave relationship, where the teacher is the master and the student - the slave. They are required to write things down (that they don't care about) for almost the entire duration of this process. Then, they have to deal with being randomly pulled by their teachers to the front of the class and being rated on the knowledge of the stuff they were writing down for the last weeks (be prepared, you little slave - you might be next for the chopping block of being screamed at and embarrassed in front of the whole class). The student's wants, likes / dislikes, or individual dispositions do not come into play at all. They cannot ever participate in controlling any part of this process. Natural behaviors like exploration or avoidance of tasks and people they don't want to deal with are erased from their brains. What are the effects of all this on the student's psychology?
The feeling of being a separate person is buried altogether. They get taught that what they think, feel, or want does not matter at all. And if so, where does individuality come into play? Ha-ha. Nowhere, of course - except when it's thrown into the grave to rot. Repetition of the same pointless behaviors day after day, year after year creates learned helplessness and solidifies the student into a beautiful cog in the machine for the elites to exploit later with consumerism, propaganda, bullshit laws and political fights, etc. We treat our children worse than pets - how insane is that?! At least the pet can, like, walk freely around the house and isn't (usually) forced to perform stupid tricks for hours per day, every day. When the pet is let out, it can usually run around and stuff. Not so with the student, who will be promptly punished with a written note to the parents and / or a bad behavior grade if he steps out of line. Don't you see what school is trying to do here? Why does any parent put up with this?
What happens if you take a small (yes, a 5 year old is still small) child and break its beautiful innocent life in order to throw it into a cage for the rest of its youth? What happens when you force it to sit down in that cage and write down stuff it doesn't care about? What happens when you finally let it out onto a corridor to run around with 300 other angry kids? Of course, it has to let out its anger somehow - and the easiest way is on the other kids. This can include following someone around, insults, spitting or beating up, or really anything else. Everyone knows how prevalent and harmful bullying is, so I won't cover that. But let's take a look at how the US government pretends to fight bullying (archive) (MozArchive):
Solutions to bullying are not simple. Bullying prevention approaches that show the most promise confront the problem from many angles. They involve the entire school community—students, families, administrators, teachers, and staff such as bus drivers, nurses, cafeteria and front office staff—in creating a culture of respect. Zero tolerance and expulsion are not effective approaches.
A culture of respect
? Is this some kind of satire that I've missed? How does school respect the child at all when its autonomy is completely taken away?
Maybe the reason bullying actually happens is because the students are treated like absolute trash by the so-called "adults" who lock them up in a torture chamber for most of their childhoods (so the exact opposite of a culture of respect
). There, they are reprimanded and screamed at by teachers. Maybe the kids eventually figure out that abusing others is a fine and expected adult behavior, and replicate it? And yet, the world has chosen to play the whack-a-mole game with the bullies by trying to punish them without considering what makes them do what they do. That will surely not make them double down on their bad behavior... Maybe if the catalyst of school was taken away, the school bully would not have necessarily been one at all? But even if you assumed that bullies are "born that way" - eliminating schools would still decrease their opportunity to do harm.
Don't forget that - in school - the student is forced to meet up with his bullies every day during class or the breaks. So, the kid has no way to use the simplest anti-bully strategy possible, which is to just avoid them. Contrary to the government's claims, the bullying solutions are indeed very simple. Just stop shoving kids into the torture chamber known as school! Without the perfect bullying environment that the school provides, the issue's prevalence will be heavily reduced.
But of course, this idea has not been taken into consideration by literally any government in the world. Why do you think that is? Maybe because no one really wants to stop bullying? There's no way I'm the only person who realizes the obvious solution to bullying (ending schools), so I will assume it is being kept alive on purpose. And the purpose is to teach the kids that in the so-called real world, any kind of weakness (or just difference) will be ruthlessly exploited. Install into them the idea of the jungle - where the hyena eats the antelope - before they get to learn much of anything else. That will ensure they - then - accept the business frauds, media lies, politicians' corruption, etc as just the natural order of things. Yes, school bullying is a conspiracy to ensure the assholes currently in power stay there. And "education" is a cover for this.
While talking with someone about how shitty school is a few days ago, I remembered a student that transfered to my class during year 4 or 5. This student had a condition where he had to poop quite a bit more often than the regular person. So, during most lessons he had to ask (beg) the teacher to be allowed to leave the classroom and do his deed. How dehumanizing was that? He had to announce his weakness to everyone, and wonder if he'd even be allowed to leave. If he wasn't, then he'd likely have to poop himself, which I do think happened at some point. Of course, all the other students took notice and some made fun of it behind his back. He never ended up being popular, which must have been kind of sad for him.
Wouldn't it be better if everyone was simply given the basic human respect of being allowed to fulfill his body's requirements without begging someone else? But of course, school students are not treated like humans, but more like pets or even worse - invasive species that have to be "controlled". Still, even giving students that power wouldn't be enough; I mean, the others would still notice someone's unique toilet habits. Now imagine a more serious disease, one that would prevent fulfilling school duties properly - such as hearing, sight, movement or memory problems. All students are presented with the same requirements, and no one cares that their condition makes them unable to fulfill them; they will still be discriminated against. So, the sick child gets lower ratings and learns early on it's worse than the others, just because it's unable to fulfill some arbitrary requirements. The only solution is to let such students not go to school and not be forced into situations that would make their conditions be a burden. In this sorry piece (archive) (MozArchive), it is shown how our governments (Australian in this case but it's the same everywhere) really view sick kids. Spoilers: it's just your usual Orwellian pretending to care but instead abusing them more. Let's check it out:
Beginning primary school, or moving to secondary school, can be a challenging time for any student and family. This can be even harder when the student has a chronic (ongoing) health condition. To get the most out of their schooling, students with a chronic illness need ongoing and coordinated support from their families, schools and medical carers.
The first paragraph already blows the government's cover. The only reason they want to give support
to the sick kids is so that they get the most out of their schooling
. AKA getting them to absorb the entirety of the bad psychological effects.
Students with a chronic illness may miss a lot of school. This might be because they need to go to hospital, recover at home or attend regular medical appointments.
How dare you miss a day in the torture chamber, you sick trash!
This can lead to:
- Difficulty completing work on time or taking part in exams
- Decreased academic performance
- Difficulty keeping up relationships with school friends
- Difficulty getting around the school environment
- Difficulty participating in some school activities (for example, physical education or excursions)
- Feeling less confident and less motivated, also possibly affecting self-esteem and body image.
The government is not bothered by the sick kid being sick and suffering - only by the fact that the sickness decreases its ability to fulfill school obligations. And let me remind you, that if your kid skips school for a long time, it will get welcomed back with a bunch of lowest grades for all the unattended exams. Regardless of any pretense at support
, it's still being directly punished for its sickness, and possibly made to repeat a year. Wow! How cruel would that be! Just because someone dared to become sick as a child. Knowing this, the parents might decide to force their child to keep going to school even while it's having an extreme wave of symptoms, just so it can skip less exams; which will - of course - destroy its health further.
You and your child should decide what information about your child’s condition should be shared with appropriate school staff. Remember to: [...] Decide how much information should be shared with school staff, classmates and the wider school community.
Useless. They will all know if the disease is serious enough. And yes, the kid will certainly get abused for it by the healthy students and possibly by teachers if the issue affects its performance in their subject. This is impossible to avoid by any support
means other than just letting the kid leave!
In consultation with your child’s doctor, family and school principal, a school-based care or management plan should be developed. This plan should be accessible to relevant staff and reviewed every year, or whenever there is any significant change to your child’s condition or treatment.
Great. More burdens. Do these people not know the saying less is more
?
Regular communication between the school and the family is the best way to monitor how your child is coping at school and at home (academically, socially, physically and emotionally).
Again - for the government, the sickness is just a barrier blocking the kid from fulfilling its school obligations fully. Its wellbeing isn't at all a consideration. Instead, the kid is being additionally burdened with "monitoring" its school performance.
The physical environment may need to be modified to allow full access to school facilities and activities for children with chronic illness [...] The academic environment may also need some changes [...]
Hey - I have just the perfect set of modifications prepared. Let the kid leave! Let the kid leave! Let the kid leave! It's so simple! Why bother setting up all these new protocols and burden the school employees, as well? Why is it necessary for everyone to go through the torture chamber? Of course, I know why, but let's give the government the benefit of doubt for a while here.
I've skipped a lot of the article but let me assure you it's just more of the same. It is clear that - at best - these people know nothing about living with sickness. If it's serious enough, it consumes your entire life - yet these abusers are trying to bury the sick kids with more demands - schoolwork, communication, monitoring, whatever. What these people think is support
is actually additional burden. And this burden ensures that the physical health of the child will keep degrading and also take its mental health with it. All so that the kid fits into its prescription of a "perfect student". It is trying to fit a square block into the circular hole - it will never work and will destroy the block in the process. And yet, that is all that the psycho governments care about. For all the kids to go through their torture program without interruptions such as sickness getting in the way. As I've said before, the only way to truly support
the sick child is to let it rest at home - with medical treatment if necessary, but certainly without the burdens of the school. If the kid has working parents that can't manage to give it proper care, then additional measures might be needed.
Of course, all of this sadly reveals how society treats the sick in the first place. The entire world is set up for the "normal" - and if you're not "normal", it tries to make you act in accordance with the "normal" anyway. If you can't manage that (whether by sickness or any other reason), it shoves you aside like a defective product. The worse your health condition is, the less you're treated like a human and the more like a cockroach to be stepped on; with mild conditions, you can still fit in pretty well. But not something like type 1 diabetes or blindness, certainly. The sick are reminded at all times about how useless and unwanted they are. And - while the media often talks about the supposed discrimination towards blacks or women - there's not one word ever said about the sick. Do you know why that is? Because since childhood, we're all groomed to go to work in adulthood. And the very sick kind of can't do that (while the woman, black, transgender, etc still can). The media (and the world in general) is controlled by the rich, and the rich only consider the plebs to be useful as workers and followers, so they spread the narrative about the sick being useless (recall how they're described by the top libertarians as weak economic actors
, etc). And so, it's obvious that school is supposed to teach the jungle mindset already to kids; that someone is "better" and someone is "worse". That's why everything the kids do is "rated", which also works very well as a way to reject the sick in a more stealthy way. Those kids then grow up to be adults, with that attitude still remaining. This is how the elites' system - based on hierarchy - survives in the first place. Your sick kid is sacrificed for the benefit of a small group of psychopaths ruling this world.
And that is why the sick are trashed (or at least ignored) by even the progressives who pretend to be empathetic towards "marginalized groups". The progressives listen to the mainstream media, which has no respect for the sick. Of course, the sick kids feel that pain way more during school than the already adult; because their brains haven't developed yet and don't fully grasp what's going on. They only feel extreme stress from the alienation; from being the "weird", the "other", the "worse". This will surely result in a trauma later. The adults - also - aren't forced to go every day to a place where their weaknesses will be shown clearly in a way that will be used against them later; and where they can't avoid the constant embarrassment (working from home or going on disability is a possibility, whereas the child cannot leave its abusive school environment). Eliminate the horrible schooling system already, where all the cruel crap seemingly begins.
UPDATE April 2024: I tried really hard to find anyone else pointing out the problem of sick kids being treated worse than cockroaches in school, but (unsurprisingly?) failed to find a single complaint. On the other hand, I found plenty of bullshit like this:
Children with chronic health conditions may experience problems with school performance, including reduced attention and concentration, poor motivation, resistance to school assignments and absence issues.
Same as before. The wellbeing of the child is not considered at all, only its ability to fullfill school obligations.
Arrangements should be made to help keep up with schoolwork when a child can’t be at school.
Yes, pile on the burdens.
If absences are required for treatment or recuperation, or to avoid contagious illness, a parent can work with the school to continue instruction online or to get assignments the child can do outside of school to keep up with the class.
Cannot ever rest even when you really need it, the school monster will also grab you over the wire - just so you can keep up
. Always under pressure, always having to "accomplish" something. Is this the world we want to leave our kids with?
In some cases, medication may be prescribed to the patient to address emotional problems.
Oh yes, give the kids depression drugs for the depression caused by the torture chamber known as school, instead of...having them leave the torture chamber? Anyway, this utterly disgusting article has many more of these "gems". But let's move on to the other articles I've found:
The good news is that our work throughout the country shows us that chronic absence is a solvable problem. What works is taking a data-driven, comprehensive approach that begins with engaging students and families as well as preventing absences from adding up before they fall behind academically.
Don't you dare fall behind
in learnings things you won't ever need.
By working together, all of us — schools, public officials, public agencies, civic organizations, businesses, philanthropic groups, families and students — can ensure all children can get to school every day so they have an opportunity to learn, flourish and realize their dreams.
Learn, flourish and realize their dreams
:D. Of what? Being a caged animal, performing tricks for its master? And being left with learned helplessness for life?
- Installing wheelchair ramps
- Ensuring sidewalk, pavement and classroom floors are easy to navigate
- Being aware of, and avoiding, the use of substances that create fumes or strong smells
- Preparing food that is food-allergy safe
- Teaching staff members and students about bullying and inclusion
- Educating staff members to be sensitive to chronic illnesses
- Having a school nurse on campus throughout the day
Sounds costly in terms of time, effort, money, required expertise, organization...and almost certainly won't be done adequately in most schools. Besides, how could you possibly prevent all the hundreds of kids there from bullying the sick? But even if you did manage to bring about the entirety of this list, what would it accomplish? Because none of it removes the burden of the sick kids having to enter school, sit there for seven days a week, five hours per day, writing down stuff they don't care about. They still cannot focus on their disease, they cannot rest at home. Which is the real problem.
This will be fun :D. I just know it from the title :D.
These homebound students, who may have cancer, heart disease, immune system disorders or other illnesses, appear to be the last excluded population in the U.S. education system
Excluded? Or maybe "saved" :D.
Telepresence robots allow their users to see, hear, move around and interact in real time with people in faraway places. They offer a way to finally include chronically ill children in traditional school learning environments. The homebound child operates the robot from home, setting a rolling camera-speaker-screen in motion to engage in small group discussions, travel from classroom to classroom, join friends at recess or lunch break and even attend after-school and extracurricular activities, such as choir or Boy Scouts.
Cool. But why? Why do all these articles take school as a given?
Our initial research shows that the robots help students overcome isolation and are accepted by most classmates.
I very very much doubt any digital toy cures isolation, since they've been tried for a long time now and all have failed. Metaverse, AI girlfriends, etc. are all not a replacement for real human interaction. Besides, why assume someone even wants (as much) interaction with their peers? Introverts exist.
The time and the technology are ripe to include these students in their local schools at long last. Federal, state and local education officials will all need to act together to end this segregation. If educators and policymakers believe chronically ill students have a right to attend their local schools via robot, they will create legislation and policies that meet the learning needs of these students.
Include these students
, have a right to attend
, learning needs
...it's all portrayed so positively, huh? Again, the assumption in this and all other similar articles is that a student absolutely needs to finish the entire duration of school, or else disaster will strike. But there is no disaster to be found in missing school; in fact, school is the disaster. Anyway, this article also cites a scientific paper (Research suggests that social connectedness contributes to chronically ill children’s well-being.
); surely that's the big hitter that will prove school's necessity for the sick, right? Let's see:
Although most children with chronic illness do not need specific special education placement, they require coordinated school interventions to maximize school attendance and facilitate educational and social growth.
Maximize attendance
(as usual, fulfilling requirements above the kids' wellbeing) and social growth
(why can't this be done outside of school? Again, remember the introverts!). Reading and responding to the same nonsense is getting tiring.
Because the child’s ability to attend school, relate to peers, and achieve academically are integral parts of optimal overall adaptation to an illness, effective management of school reentry is imperative.
Why? Why are those the absolutely needed adaptations? To me, the adaptation to disease is clearly rest, treatment, and not burdening yourself with additional (and pointless) obligations.
Successful reintegration requires consistent, prospective identification and management of with school attendance and problems obstacles to school reentry.
Identify and manage the "problem" of the sick kid daring to focus on its disease instead of forcing itself into a place it suffers in and degrades further in health. This all sounds so dystopic. The kid is afflicted with some extreme disease and all the adults above him can think of is "shove! shove! shove it into the school pronto! Lest it won't attend enough or perform well enough!".
Fowler et al. reported that achievement test scores were significantly lower for their group with chronic illness than those of their healthy peers.
Expected when the kid has to focus on disease instead of learning for a test. Again, the spoiled healthy authors - who have clearly never dealt with disease or knew anyone who has - can't figure out the simplest of things. Also, what do the better test scores bring into the kid's life? It's blindly shooting for higher ratings, again.
The importance of reintegrating the chronically ill child or adolescent into the school system cannot be overemphasized. Cahners (1979) stated that school reentry for the child who has developed a chronic health problem may be as critical for his or her social survival as effective medical or surgical treatment is for the child’s physical survival.
Social survival
? If the kid wasn't thrown into a corridor with hundreds of other screaming kids, there would be no need for social survival
.
The school milieu for growing and developing children or adolescents provides students with opportunities to learn, socialize with peers, experience success, and develop increased independence and control over their environment
The sick kid won't be experiencing any success
, for sure. And develop increased independence and control over their environment
? This has to be a some kind of a cruel joke. The kid sits and writes down stuff (that it doesn't care about and cannot change) and cannot speak or move without permission. Cannot choose its clothes, and is made to perform arbitrary tricks, and is measured and rated on everything it does. Where is the control and independence? Hey, I remember that same phrase from somewhere else...
In fact, the immediate outcome of delayed school reentry may seem positive to the resistant child but may also be viewed as a message confirming the perceived hopelessness of the situation, further complicating the emotional issues involved in school reintegration
Does anyone else see the problem with the wording used here? Resistant
...almost as if there was something bad about trying to avoid the dangerous place for the sick that is school. It reminds me of calling the people who didn't take the snake venom "refuseniks" or other inflammatory terms.
One example of a very complicated emotional obstacle to school reentry is school phobia, or separation anxiety disorder. It is described primarily in the pediatric cancer literature but may be relevant in the management of many chronic illnesses that lead to feelings of vulnerability on the part of the child and/or the parent.
They feel vulnerable because they are! Again, trying to avoid danger becomes a disorder
, so entrenched the school cult is.
Prolonged absence or multiple, brief absences from school may contribute significantly to school performance.
O rly? So what?
The process of returning a child to school often adds additional stress to the already overwhelming situation in which the child and family find themselves (Kagen-Goodheart, 1977). Parents may feel that the emotional, and sometimes physical, effort needed to return the child to school is excessive, particularly if the child’s illness is seen as potentially terminal.
Finally something sane said in this paper?
However, absenteeism may be fostered more overtly by parental overprotectiveness, which expresses itself in constant surveillance. The parents may feel that their child is too vulnerable to go out into the world.
Haha. Of course they had to take it back. In this statement, valid concerns are blamed on the mental defects of parents. Stop being "overprotective" and get out of the way, and let us shove! Shove your kid into the torture chamber!
Additionally, some parents do not recognize that school attendance is vital [...]
Vital for whom? Maybe the psychopaths running this world, but certainly not the kids.
It is imperative that school reentry be discussed almost immediately from the time of diagnosis
Oh, you just learned you have cancer? That's bad...now sit in this room and solve this test, you spoiled brat!
Returning to school is particularly significant because it gives the child the symbolic message that he or she is better.
Actually, it gives the child the message that its health status doesn't matter and it's supposed to suffer just to fulfill the requirements designed for the healthy.
While teachers should be aware of the possible need for flexibility regarding quantity of assignments, deadlines, and tests, they should remain firm regarding concepts to be mastered or quality of the finished product
Are you sick? We will graciously give you some flexibility
, but will still bury you with an avalanche of assignments, deadlines, and tests
. Enjoy!
Meeting the educational needs of a child or adolescent during the terminal phases of an illness [...]
The school shills won't even leave the terminally ill kids alone. For fuck's sake.
Flexibility in the educational approach may allow for meaningful school-related activities even when academic pursuits no longer seem viable. Continued interactive school-related experiences are important and valued parts of the dying child's life.
Does this send shivers down anyone else's spines, or am I just that much of a fuckup? Even when the Reaper is staring the kid down, the school shills still wonder whether academic pursuits
are worth it. Ugh.
Anyway I'm already tired of this crap. This paper is based entirely on the assumption that a child absolutely must go to school and fulfill the entire set of requirements, even if extremely sick; and all the harm coming from that is dismissed or made to seem irrelevant compared to the oh so important school obligations. Basically the theme of this entire section is taken up to eleven in this paper.
So I just learned that - in the next school year (beginning September 2023) - every Polish kid starting the 4th grade will receive a 600 euro laptop (archive) (MozArchive) from the government for free. The specification includes a minimum 8GB of RAM
with the ability to upgrade to at least 16GB
and an SSD with at least 256 GB storage space
. Hey, I don't even have an SSD or that much RAM, what does a schoolchild do to justify hardware this heavy? Are they going to be playing Fortnite during lessons? Which would probably be a better way to spend their time than whatever they'd usually do. But anyway, another requirement is a legal operating system (meaning Windows, thus paying a ransom to Microsoft for the license), access to the Office suite (another license cost, probably) and a three-year long warranty.
Why not - for a start - use this as an opportunity to teach kids FOSS operating systems, which do have access to an Office suite
as well? They want to buy 370 000 laptops this year (which together would cost 222 million euros), but they are thinking about the 3.5 million that will reach schools in the coming decade
. This is yet another way a clueless government wastes our money. Of course, it's not the only cost school necessitates - there are still the backpacks, schoolbooks (why have the laptops then?), notebooks, pens, crayons, scissors and whatever else the students are going to use; maybe uniforms, as well as wages for all the employees. If the cult of schooling was given up, all this money could be returned to the people for actually improving their lives, and the employees at those facilities could be freed and actually become able to fulfill themselves doing what they care about.
People sometimes come up with reasons why school is necessary after all, or with ways to save it by implementing some small reforms. Let's see if there is anything of value to those:
This is the dumbest reason for sending a kid to school, even dumber than "education" - yet it is commonly used. The kid is shoved in with 30 other kids - that it might not like at all - in the same room; and it has to endure them every day for years. More than that - since it can't stand up or speak without permission during lessons - there is no opportunity for socialization at all, either way. The situation is even worse during breaks, where the kid is thrown into a corridor with 300 other screaming kids, and has 10-15 minutes to...listen to screams or perhaps get beaten up by the angry kids that have finally been graciously let out of their cages. There is certainly no space, time, or opportunity to do anything there. Clearly letting the kids go outside and play around without restrictions would be a lot better for "socialization". And what about the introverts? All this "socialization" is literal torture to them, but in the quest to find a justification for schooling, everyone has suddenly forgotten them.
So what? If you care about your child, you absolutely must save it from the torture chamber known as school. Just as you would save it from the Germans that were coming to take it to a concentration camp. Find a way. Maybe don't register your kid after birth, or hide it at a distant family member's place when it reaches the school age. Or flee to somewhere where homeschooling (which still tries to replicate the school environment - just at home - so does not exactly fix the problem) is legal. But don't just bend over and sacrifice your child. And don't use stupid excuses to pretend that torturing your kid is somehow noble. This whole situation also proves that the legal system works against us. After all, for how many decades has forced schooling been in place? And yet, no politician has ever bothered to do anything about it. Neither does a citizen even get a chance to overturn this slavery.
Critics of the schooling system have usually focused on the general dumbing down of education (archive) (MozArchive) or the particulars of the curriculum, such as the teaching / non-teaching of modern evolutionary theory (archive) (MozArchive) or foreign languages (archive) (MozArchive) (this is very common in Europe, which often teaches two additional ones). These are - at best - side issues; all those critics are still fine with the general curriculum system, which is the actual problem. They are fine with all the disgusting things I've mentioned in the intro and other sections, as long as one of their favorite subjects is being taught the way they want to. It is like wanting your head cut off, as long as the scythe is of your favorite color. Hey, here's an interesting comment on a youtube video that I just have to cover:
The real problem with modern entertainment is our education system teaching racism, preferred pronouns, and LGBT propaganda instead of teaching the kids to read, write and do math.
I guess this is what passes for insight in right-wing circles these days, since this person got 343 likes (in 22 hours) and many positive replies. First of all - teaching racism
? I doubt anyone is doing that and if they were, that would undermine this person's point. Next - even if you removed all LGBT propaganda
from the curriculum - school would still remain terrible because of the many reasons I've given here. I am pretty sure all schools in the world teach the kids to read, write and do math
, so I have no idea what's this person's problem. I am also quite sure it is not needed because those things would be learned just by regular living. Also, teaching LGBT propaganda
in no way precludes teaching the kids to read, write and do math
. But, since this person's thinking is clearly only surface level, she won't even realize this. Nor will she consider "how" the kids are "taught", focusing only on the "what". She will also ignore all the other stuff that school brings aside from "teaching". "Teaching good thing" = good. "Teaching bad thing" = bad. That's as far as this person can look, and this mindset is very common, and harmful.
This is a common claim in the so-called "manosphere", where I just came across this terrible article (archive) (MozArchive). The gist of it is that boys are so mentally defective that they need to be sent to school a year later than girls so that they are able to perform at the same level:
But I believe the biggest reason for boys’ classroom struggles is simply that male brains develop more slowly than female brains—or at least those parts of the brain that enable success in the classroom.
It cites many stats:
Once boys begin school, they almost immediately start falling behind girls. A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade.
According to a 2012 Brookings Institution study by Julia Isaacs, for instance, American girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be “school ready” at age 5 [...]
Across economically advanced nations, boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science.
With so many stats, the article can't be wrong, right? Well, it never questions its assumption that the performance level in the toxic schooling environment is some kind of a virtue to strive for at all costs. And if you give up this assumption, then the "girls maturing faster" claim evaporates, as well - since it was based on school success in the first place.
However, I don't mind if you believe that "girls mature faster", whatever measure you use. I just want to end the abusive schooling system. And this "boys vs girls" crap is another attempt by the elites to put us into camps that fight each other, while being distracted from the fact we are all being abused. The feminist camp is happy the girls are finally succeeding, while the manosphere camp wants to "repair the schooling system" (archive) (MozArchive) to "fix the gap". It is funny how this is just the "wage gap" all over again except with the sexes reversed; the elites really just reuse the same tricks because the people can't catch up. So those camps fight each other while the elites laugh behind their backs because - as long as school exists - all the kids are still being conditioned towards the elites' prefered state.
It really fucking disgusts me that an entire article was written to attack boys only because they don't navigate the minefield known as school well enough. I'm also disappointed in the so-called "manosphere" which can't seem to figure out it's being dragged into yet another controlled opposition trap. The men's rights activists struggle to explain away the reasons why girls perform better in school; they are really triggered by the possibility of "boys being defective". They are desperate to try to "fix the schooling system" so that boys don't appear worse. But, they don't realize that this is only an issue if you take the performance in school as the criterion; with the schooling system removed, there is no basis for these claims. And the elites' gender wars also evaporate, then. The reason this article was written in such an inflammatory way - alleging literal neurological or hormonal defects in boys - is so that the manosphere gets mad and fuels the elites' division tactics, which is exactly what happened. Sigh.
I've spent years in left-wing spaces, and one of the (many) things that annoyed me there was how they always worshipped the schooling system, as long as it was free and teachers were well paid. Yet the many harms of it - or even whether there is a need for it - were never ever considered. I've only seen someone truly criticize the schooling system once, and started wondering if I'm in a dream. But no, it was real (MozArchive). I'll just repost the entire OP as it's so good:
My son (my first and only) is six years old, and started 1st grade about three weeks ago. Every day he has about 2 hours worth of homework, this includes 15 minutes of reading to/with him. Granted, to an adult, this would take maybe half an hour tops, but he's 6, he's still learning, and like most kids his age, has the focus/attention span of a gnat on meth. So, 30 minutes of homework turns into two hours.
He's in first fucking grade, and already his life is wake up, go to school, come home, do homework, go to bed, wake up, go to school. . .basically grooming him to life as a typical US work only to live wage slave.
I barely slept last night as this fact was swirling around in my brain. I feel this is child abuse. He's six years old, his life should not be all about work! We, of course, try to make the homework as fun as possible, but after two hours he's tired, grumpy and just doesn't want to try anymore. This makes me frustrated, to my great shame, which of course, only makes it worse.
I hate the fact that I'm raising my son to accept a life that isn't about love and joy and fun, but of servitude and sacrifice. How is this not child abuse? How is it acceptable for a 6 year old to live like this?
This post is just me venting, of course, but conversation, especially counter opinions are greatly welcome.
You won't understand how happy I got when I saw this post. Finally, someone in these spaces dared to question "education" - the left-wing sacred cow - and happened to discover a minefield there. Yes, school is absolutely child abuse. And yet look at some of the responses (MozArchive):
Former teacher here and 2 hours for a first grader is insane. The recommendations I always saw were 10 minutes per grade. So, for your kid, like 10 minutes of reading or writing or some easy math facts. [...]
And 10 minutes would somehow make it acceptable? The kid already spent 7 hours in a torture chamber. Why burden it more? Currently, this response has 5165 upvotes, yet I have no idea what's so good about it. Let's tackle a few more responses (MozArchive), to show this mindset is not just a one off thing:
Yes, this, yes!
I am a school counselor and I will 100% tell my own kids to walk away from a homework assignment that stresses them out. The academic support is at their school and will resume when they return in the morning, they get to be a kid at night.
Amazing. You're such a great parent, freeing your kids from homework. Yet you keep sending them to the torture chamber. They are slaves during the day, yet should be grateful they get to be a kid at night
. Hooray! Moving on (MozArchive)...
I can almost guarantee the teacher is not expecting a first grader to spend 2 hours on homework. If you haven't already, talk to the teacher and/or your sons pediatrician. While it is possible the teacher is out of touch, it is also possible that most students are spending significantly less time on homework and there is a reason why your son is taking longer. If this is the case, it would be helpful to determine that reason now and start taking steps to address it. [...]
Your son is just defective, bro. Start taking steps
to un-defect it. Remember it absolutely needs good grades, that is its entire reason for existence. BTW, the reason why your son is taking longer
is probably because he realizes homework is useless and fucking boring. Continuing... (MozArchive)
The schedule sounds awful but you should be held back if you don’t understand the material assuming you don’t have a disability. You need to build on the foundation you got from the previous year to learn properly. Though in actuality summer school is definitely enough if you only failed one or two classes, you don’t have to retake a whole year.
This sounds like it came out of a "how to shill for the schooling system 101" propaganda book. Kids should be held back
? That's a nice way to call spending one more year in a torture chamber. But only if they don't understand the material
; however, the possibility that someone just doesn't care about the material - and / or doesn't need it - is not considered. According to this person, school abuse is fine assuming you don’t have a disability
- so if you're sick, you can skip it? Thanks, that makes the healthy kids feel a lot better, I'm sure. Yet in reality, sick kids still don't avoid the abuse. Kids need to build on the foundation
they've got from the previous year to learn properly
? Meaning just repeat writing the same useless stuff and solving the same useless tests with a little additional burdens added every year. But graciously, this poster will allow the kids to not have to retake a whole year
if they only failed one or two classes
. Yet, the concept of failing is not at all questioned. Hey, I left the best response for last (MozArchive):
My daughter did my grandson’s homework all during Covid. The result is that he feels no need to complete assignments. When they went back to in person learning, he felt no need to complete assignments. The result is he barely passed 5th grade and is struggling in 6th grade already. I think you have to allow some acceptance that life is sometimes hard and the earlier you learn it and learn to over come, time for joy and play will come.
Well, good for him that he doesn't feel the need to complete useless assignments. And if he barely passed 5th grade and is struggling in 6th grade already
, then blame the school prison, in that it will increase your sentence if you don't perform well in its arbitrary tasks. But no, you'd rather accept abuse as a given, so severe your case of Stockholm Syndrome is. And ha! You're supposed to just accept that life is sometimes hard
and learn to over come
the pain, so that the joy and play
will feel better later. Might as well send all the little girls to rape centers by this logic. They would learn the brutality of this world early and cherish every moment after that, right? An absolutely insane way of thinking, if it could be called thinking at all. This post should have gotten five hundred downvotes for justifying child abuse, but got 14 upvotes instead. It really seems that the left-wingers love slavery and abuse just as much as the right-wingers, except the type of it changes. Horseshoe theory fits here, I guess.
Don't get me wrong, not everyone in that thread was so disgusting. Many people questioned parts of the schooling system, but no one agreed the entire thing is a torture center - though some went dangerously close (MozArchive):
This is absolutely vomit inducing.
Let me be clear, I am in no way calling out OP. I am calling out the bullshit system that we are all a slave to. Look at how young they are breaking down the spirit these days in an effort to train humans to be slaves of the corporate overlords.
Makes me sick.
OP I feel for you, and I am sorry for your situation.
The leftists still believe in simple solutions for the problems of schooling - such as meeting teachers, forging signatures, moving countries (because they consider it an exclusively American problem, which it obviously isn't) etc. Even the person above, I really doubt wants to get rid of schooling entirely. And remember, this thread is the only one I've seen to criticize school fundamentally in my years on antiwork and LateStageCapitalism, among others (the OP also got deleted for being off-topic
- meaning only the abuse of adults matters, children need to shut up and suffer). The rest - as I've said - just shill and shill the essentiality of the schooling system, but complain about teacher pay. I think it's because they (consciously or not) consider kids as below adults, or not even really people. Yet they will move mountains for any supposed injustice a woman or transgender has to deal with, while ignoring (or more like supporting) the hundreds of millions of kids being tortured 7 hours per day, 5 days per week, 9.5 months per year, for 9 years at least - without the tiniest possibility of escape. Absolutely insane.
And I know this is going on because I read leftist sites and again, have spent years in their communities. I might be visiting the wrong ones but still, you'd think if they really cared about marginalized groups
, they'd spare some empathy for the most marginalized group
of all, AKA the kids. But no, they don't do that - at least not visibly so. For them, the kid is clearly just a pet that's supposed to sit, perform tricks, and shut up about it. I even suspect that if pets were treated the way kids do, some animal abuse unit would get involved. Yet you can't hear a single peep from the leftists on this, except chants of worship for the abusive schooling system. I might be too doomery here though...maybe it's just a blind spot they have. Yet, there appear to be quite a few such blind spots there, such as Pfizer worship, conspiracy denial, etc. Either way, they've missed the mark on school issue completely.
To kill our instincts and mold us into domesticated chihuahuas. Consider what we've done to the dogs with dog training. A dog will naturally run after birds trying to kill them, hide food around the house, or even bury itself in shit so that its prey doesn't notice its scent. These and other instincts have helped them survive in the wild when they were still wolves, but are only a burden in civilized life. Yet, a dog does not understand this; in its mind, it's still living in a reality where it has to fight for its survival. Dog training is just a way to inhibit (or completely remove) those instincts in a world where they are not acceptable anymore, e.g biting the nurse who's vaccinating you (which - for a dog in the wild - would simply be considered a defense from a snake trying to poison it).
Now what if I told you, that school is doing the exact same thing to people as dog training to the dogs? We also originally come from the wild, and bring with us many instincts - some of which are new compared to animals, or improved versions of those. The ability to perceive, think, and act independently. We retain the instincts to fight, run and gather food. All of those are obviously very dangerous to the elites' prefered world; I mean, imagine one in which people weren't afraid to destroy property that was being used against them (CCTV, spybots, 5G towers, GM food fields, etc). Imagine if we were able to resist the defaults that have been thrown in front of our faces; the prison-like schools, the useless jobs, the hospital births, the shitty foods and endless consumption. Imagine if we could deny the hierarchy that's been imposed on us, where the really high up people just do whatever they want to without fear of consequence. Our base instincts would actually bring about that reality if they were allowed to develop. And so the elites need to inhibit, redirect or delete them as young as possible, making you into a kind of domesticated human-doggie that can only follow conventions blindly, and will never resist. But since we have a more advanced brain, it is harder to rip those out than with dogs. And so, our masters had to create a true brainwashing institution in order to succeed with this. They have accomplished that almost perfectly with school. At least as well as they could have without triggering some concerns from parents (they test the resistance levels all the time though, with new spy tech, etc).
In school, everything is about the grades or ratings you get. You are considered a good person if you earn high ratings, and a bad one if you earn low ratings - and who wants to be a bad person? First of all, every time a lesson starts, there is a check for the presence of every student (prison-style). And if you are absent, it's marked and your parents get notified (though you can get a justified absence if you tell your masters why you've been gone a certain day; this is similar to the system from work which allows pregnancy leaves, etc). This teaches you that you're supposed to be where your masters want you to be, unless you can explain why that is not so.
Then - when you're already locked up - you get rewarded for arbitrary behaviors like writing down stuff you don't care about and repeating it on the test later. This teaches you that an act isn't supposed to have a point aside from being what your masters have ordered. If you speak or walk away without permission you get struck with a bad behavior grade. I don't have to tell you what's the point of those, right? Your masters want you where they tell you to be, with your mouth closed lest you dare to spread some "misinformation" around. I remember when I was in primary, every day they told us to walk in pairs; I think this was to teach us we're going to have to deal with people we don't necessarily like. Another arbitrary behavior was to stand in a line, then put one of your feet in front when ordered. A literal military drill, creating the perfect soldier to be sacrificed for the elites' dumb wishes. Hey, let's look (archive) (MozArchive) at what kind of behaviors get you punished in Polish schools (translated by me):
Leaving the lesson- 1 point
Being late for the lesson- 1 point
Disrupting the lesson- 5 points
Disobeying the teacher- 5 points
Arrogantly addressing the teacher or other school employee- 20 points;
peers- 10 points
Harming the dignity of teachers and other school employees- 50 points
Theft- 50 points
Faking a signature or a leave- 30 points
Leaving school territory during lessons or breaks- 10 points
Behavior that negatively affects how the school is viewed, especially outside of school- 10 to 30 points
Inappropriate clothing or makeup- 10 points
Destroying school property- 20 or 50 points
Drinking alcohol or being under influence during school- 100 points
Using, having or dealing drugs- 100 points
Smoking or having cigarretes- 10 points;
assisting a smoker- 5 points
Certain interesting things can be gleaned from this. Notice how peers are less important than the employees, already teaching hierarchy. Harming the dignity [...]
is one of the most punishable offenses, and it is simply a proxy for criticizing your masters. Property appears sacred (as I've said in my report on libertarianism - don't you dare deface those ads, or destroy the CCTV and spy/murderbots) and more important than the people themselves. The drugs and alcohol are kind of funny; how dare you enjoy some escapism from our prison (it's punished more than beating someone up and equally to police involvement). Smoking is ten times less harmful than those apparently (but in reality is at least equal). I don't mean that those items should all be allowed, but you have to have some perspective as to why the kids are getting into them. Anyway, maybe the most important lesson is how you're punished even for your acts outside of school, teaching you that Big Brother is always watching.
But the particular point amounts by which certain behaviors get punished are not as important as the system of rewards and punishments itself. For 10 years, you are conditioned to only do what is allowed and avoid what is disallowed - instead of what you think makes sense or doesn't; what you like or don't like. This - in adulthood - is supposed to make you into a person that takes her vaccines, works her shitty jobs, and votes for her abusive rulers - all without a squeak. "Education" is an almost perfect cover for this, since who doesn't want their kid to be "educated"? But when you dig deep into it, no real learning happens in school - so we have to seek explanation elsewhere. And obedience training provides the perfect one.
But as I've said, humans have advanced brains, and the simple ways to train dogs won't necessarily work here. They need to be in school every day, for 7 hours, executing arbitrary behaviors - then come back home with a stack of homework; with the threat of a test constantly on their minds. And of course, to have every single movement of their eyebrows analyzed and rated. Despite an entire childhood of all this, some people slip through the obedience training episode barely affected. Those become the dangerous antivaxers, anti-capitalists, squatters, freedom activists, etc.
Yet sadly, I must admit that the elites' trick worked very well. The vast majority of adults only care about going to their job to perform arbitrary tasks (same as they did in school), without care as to what kind of effects they're having. Any order they receive, they will execute, even if it causes great harm to others. They will put the minimum amount of effort required to survive and then have their shallow fun at home, only to go back for another day at the job. If they bother to make kids, they will throw them right into the same traps that they themselves are in. They will have hospital birth, probably not breastfeed, feed junk food just because it's called food on the shelf, and send them to the same brainwashing facility that has made them what they are. When their child gets sick, they will predictably go to their doctors and again, accept their pronouncements blindly, without considering that maybe - just maybe - it's their feeding habits that have caused the issues in the first place. If the medicine given by doctors causes harm, they will sit back and watch as their kid degrades further.
The average person only bothers to wake up when their masters shove them a factory produced issue to care about such as COVID, Ukraine or elections. They do not look around to see what's happening, they do not analyze anything they're doing; I'm not even convinced the average person is capable of feeling emotions anymore. They do not seem bothered by anything at all except again, the "current thing" they've been told about. However, I somehow can't believe that this is the natural state of humans. I mean, I do remember how my peers in childhood were still capable of creativity, asking questions, going off road, getting angry about things, caring about others (well, at least some...), etc. And it all gradually disappeared on their way to "adulthood" (newspeak for "shutting up and following conventions"). And we do still come from the wild which required complex adaptive behaviors to survive in. So there has to be a way to thaw "the frozen", it just requires a change in conditions. Might I suggest starting with the elimination of the schooling system? It's not the only problem, but I suspect the biggest one, in creating the kinds of people I just described.
This is the heavily shortened version, that you can send to your "regular" friends so they can understand just what's so bad about school:
The point of all of this is one. To keep power in the hands of the people that currently have it. Everything in school has an equivalent in the adult life. The sitting and arbitrary behaviors executed at work. The always having "obligations" and never being able to truly rest or analyze your conditions. The acceptance of abuse by police, bosses, doctors, etc. The tolerance of CCTV and other spying, airport searches, etc. The fight for position in earning money and relationships (your neighbor as an enemy). The having to "push through" at work, home, or social situation despite being tired, depressed or sick. The idea that if you have it bad, you somehow "deserve" it. None of this would be accepted if it wasn't engraved through a decade or more of schooling at a young age. But it is required for the elites to stay in power, and that is why we have the toxic schooling system in place.
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