Authoritarian Schooling Lesson 2: The State Knows Better than You

In the previous lesson, I simply showed how the state monopolization of Education makes my anarchic position sound alien. When I suggest that we should get the government out of education, most people think I hate education. They can't seem to envision any alternatives to state schooling. This reaction is not a coincidence, for they grew up in a state school and were not exposed to any alternatives. But it's because I care so much about education that I actually did some research on alternative systems.

I will eventually point to a few alternative systems, because they do actually exist and work quite well. But, before covering the vast universe of solutions, I want to explore more problems. More lessons learned in government indoctrination centers.

The Second Lesson of State Indoctrination is that the state knows better than you do what skills you will need in life. It has a lesson plan that stretches from birth to young adult. It and it alone is qualified to write on the tabula rasa.

Think back on your experiences with school teachers, and especially administrators. Did you ever meet one of these certified (insane?) education "professionals" who thought they knew better than you? Was it perhaps motivated by their own internment with the system? Next time you run into one of the self-congratulatory authortarians, catch them off-guard by directly questioning their position. Ask why those many years spent away from you (and your child) have any bearing on present circumstances. Ask why those elective education classes about topics different than the one under discussion are relevant.

But really, children are born learners! I mean, it doesn't take an extra-ordinary child to begin speaking by age 2, and pretty well by age 5. If one of these children missed kindergarten, would they not know their basic colors? Would they not know the names of some common animals and fruits? Seriously, the toddlers are soaking this stuff up from their household environment.

Linda Darling-Hammond

If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet.

Government lesson plans take knowledge and arrange it so that it reaches the minds of youth one tiny morsel at a time. The content is scripted into discrete lessons and delivered through a very unnatural format, where all the kids sit in neat rows and aren't allowed to move.

This setting discourages questioning of any kind. I don't have to conjecture that this design is a deliberate attempt to mentally malnourish us at the precise time we need knowledge and experience the most. I've read quotes from the designers of this mental slammer in John Taylor Gatto's book, The Underground History of American Education (you can read it free online, educate yourself!).

Grace Llewellyn

All the time you are in school, you learn through experience how to live in a dictatorship.

William Glasser

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Carl Rogers

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

But what about the structure of the lessons themselves? Is it really true that all children need to learn the same things, in the same order, and at the same age? Will any system, that has such bureaucratic planning actually produce good results when fed strikingly unique minds, each looking at the world with fresh eyes?

George Evans

Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way.

Again, I did not attend any classes offered by the School of Education at my university, but I can only surmise that teachers exiting any government school actually think that a life in the day of a 7 year old can be scripted and planned. Preposterous! Anyone who pays attention to children, knows that their eyes light up when you present them with new and wondrous material. They instinctually want to learn!

John Holt

All I am saying ... can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.

And where, of all places, do you think we were taught that lesson? But it doesn't have to be that way! Today, we have the technology that enables rapid communication of education methods. Technology that can put parents together as they each teach their own children. Technology that reaches into the dilapidated buildings of the third world.

Sugata Mitra, in his TED talk, Build a School in the Cloud, tells about how he has grandmothers in the UK can encourage children in Africa to learn and study complex topics like DNA. And the method of teaching is profoundly simple. You don't even have to know the material yourself. Just show a bit of interest, ask a few questions, give them time to explore on their own, and then follow-up by asking for them to teach you!

For the good of our own future, if not for theirs, let's release the children from these government camps of concentration!

Victor Hugo

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.