As a radical unschooler, I get asked ALL THE TIME, "What's wrong with school?" Not just from folks happy sending their kids to their local schools, but even from homeschoolers trying to give their children the education they believe they'll need in a friendlier environment.

Our family's biggest answer will always be that we do not agree with the compulsory and standardizing nature of the school system and the general lack of respect for the humanity of the humans that go there. Children/students and adults/teachers. As far as we can see, that is plenty enough reason to opt out. 

I give people this answer, and it is SO BIG that they cannot even see it. If you aren't accustomed to considering overarching story themes, my reasoning can seem a bit... lofty. A little high in the sky and hard to grasp.

But what EXACTLY is so wrong with school?

I've thought deeply about this for many years, and I understand now that many folks are looking for concrete obvious answers and not foundational archetypal ideas. I get it now. I got so far away from family's daily lives that most folks couldn't automatically take that deep dive with me. 

So today, I present to you a much more detailed and close to home answer. The top 3... well, 4 because I couldn't help myself ;-)... things school teach and why I disagree with them, followed by the top 4 things I believe humans should learn and why, as well as why schools definitely do not teach them.

Top lessons of schools:

1. The first and deepest lesson schools teach is unquestioning obedience to an impersonal system of standardization, both created and implemented by strangers. Today, for the sake of brevity, we are only focusing on the unquestioning obedience part. 

Unquestioning obedience is drilled into students from the earliest ages to make it possible for as few adults as possible to manage as many students as possible. 

No one I know, and certainly no one in my family, is at all predisposed to obedience of any kind. Nor do we believe unquestioning obedience is useful, except perhaps by a large military practicing the arts of war, and of course situations of imminent danger.

If you happen to be authentically fulfilled by devoted service to authority in that way and that is your true path, you will not find school's obedience training to be a problem, but for me and mine, we simply cannot abide even the idea of unquestioning obedience. We are actually incapable of doing absolutely anything unquestioningly... we are far too curious about absolutely everything. It looks a lot like ADD/ADHD. Even people we respect and ideas we completely agree with are not immune to our curiosity. Devil's advocate is one of our favorite games. So there's that.

2. The second lesson of schools is all-encompassing competition. Everything is a competition and there is only one winner. This lesson comes straight out of capitalism's desire to keep the scales balances toward low supply and high demand which keeps prices of everything high, including having only a few jobs of each kind available, hence the need to compete. This is the reason all arts have become professions and everyone else believes their art is meaningless. There's no reason excellent storytellers and painters and performers should not get paid and paid well, but now that we believe only excellent artists deserve to be paid, we have stopped seeing art as and creativity as basic human practices- that our art is devoid of meaning if we aren't good enough to get paid for it or even make a whole living out of our art. And because of that, very few of us pursue multiple arts even for pleasure. How sad and inhumane.

When everything is a competition, there is only ever one winner, which makes the vast majority of everyone losers. Ouch. Competition is what fosters isolation, as we use any means necessary to achieve the love reserved for the winner. Competition is what negates collaboration and cooperation. 

Light competition can be very motivating, even fun as in sports and games, but the levels of competition in schools make everyone, and especially children, feel worthless and desperate, leading to outcomes like cheating and bullying as well as far more serious ones I will not mention here. No one should be made to feel this way by a system that promises to educate and empower, certainly not our children., and certainly not by a system they are required by law to attend. Never ever.

3. The third lesson is a dual one- literacy and numeracy. I know what you're thinking... As a mother in the real world with a job and money and books and electricity and the internet, how could I possibly be against reading and math??? Well, actually, I'm not. I love reading all kinds of books and blogs, reading is my preferred avenue of learning. And I adore math. You can find me protecting my commission and tips based income and running our household budget in my heart while performing my day job, hand drafting clothing and costuming patterns from scratch, and playing algebra games to relax. I was lucky enough to have an actual math major teaching my high school Algebra 3 class, and he allowed me to actually understand all the math I'd previously been forced to memorize. 

Which brings us to my true problem with how schools teach literacy and numeracy. I stand against school's requirement that they be taught at all, and especially against teaching these subject before learners are developmentally ready to learn them, far before they become interested, and way before the students actually need these skills.

Anyone can learn to read and use math when they have a need or desire to do so, to the precise level they need or want. Just like walking and talking, these skills do not require a teacher to be learned, much less an expert. 

The only reason literacy and math are on the school system's agenda is because industrial business requires large numbers of literate and numerate workers to make more money faster, its just an industrial training scheme. Reading and math do not make a person more humane, better, or smarter in any way. Theya re just skills like any other. If you force people to learn skills you want them to have, you have an inexhaustible stream of servants to build your empire. Gross.

In real human life, outside capitalism (and especially corporatism) and outside the training schools for them, no child needs to learn to read or compute at any level until they become interested. Even inside these structures literacy and numeracy aren't needed until shortly before a person is going to need a job... say age 14? 15? Or slightly earlier if we allow our most passionate age groups to actually contribute to society. Just saying.

K-6 math can all be learned in about 8 weeks by the vast majority of tweens if they are interested, not even including that early math- addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions- are usually discovered in play before children enter the tween years. If you haven't ever seen a child discover multiplication or fractions like they invented it on the spot, you are truly missing out. https://www.julienaturally.com/how-to-teach-k-6-math-in-one-year/

Reading can be learned in about 30 hours by most children older than 6. And you can spread that 30 hours out over a year! https://www.julienaturally.com/learn-read-thirty-hours/

Combined with the fact that children in environments that value reading and math (actually modeled by real people they care about using the skills for real life and pleasure) will want to learn these skills of their own choice, the fact that they take so little time to learn should be a huge red flag for schools that take up several years force-teaching these skills to children too young to understand.

The system A: wants everyone to believe they are stupid and need schools to learn anything, and B. want to take up as much time as they can keeping us all isolated from our f1.amilies of origin as well as even other kids a year or two older and younger, so not only force upon us the skills their business requires but also make us easier to manipulate as we no longer have strong ties to anyone other than their system. 

4. This fourth lesson came up twice in the other 3, so naturally it needed to be highlighted. Isolation. It's the easiest way to control and manipulate people. Sever their ties to their family, religion, and culture, make them feel alone even in groups you place them in, and then offer them solutions to the holes in their hearts? It's just good business. But it's not human, or humane. We are social community animals, plain and simple.

Skills schools don't teach or promote, and why:

1. Human lesson #1 opposes unquestioning obedience, competition, and isolation: Self worth. I believe absolutely every human is born worthy of love and respect and acceptance as a human person in the world, and children in particular have not amassed the range of issues some adults have. If I had a time machine, I would not go back and harm baby Hitler. 

Schools are systems that are set up to destroy the inherent feelings of self worth we all are born with, through competition, bribery, coercion, punishment, and isolation, for the purpose of breaking students to obedience, like breaking a horse to the saddle.

2. Human lesson #2 is collaboration, how to work together to solve problems, improve efficiency, and simply because we enjoy being others. Imagine what we as a species could do if we just worked together toward common goals! (And invited teens and young adults, our most passionate age group to join us instead of incarcerating them...) Instead of fighting about who is best at what, and by what standards, we could change the world for the better. Which would result in removing corporatist policies and beliefs, which is what schools were created to support, so they cannot teach collaboration in any real, deep, or meaningful way. It would totally upset our Capitalist Corporatist Overlords Master Plans!

3. Another dual lesson: critical thinking and discernment: the ability to be curious, ask questions, think deeply about the answers, and use our conclusions to direct our choices. The industrial business world needs very few people able to actually think, and large masses of people to perform it's labors, and so they allow very few people to learn those skills- mostly their own children at their own elite schools. Very few school children are allowed to keep their innate curiosity, and certainly aren't allowed to ask questions, even if teachers had the time to answer them. They certainly cannot experiment with ideas or follow through to see the results of the decisions they might choose if they were allowed the freedom to think about their own desires. Schools and corporations need obedient, compliant, and manipulable workers, not thinkers. (Reputably spoken by John D. Rockefeller, upon the creation of the General Education Board)

4. One more great lesson for everyone: body language, including the tell-tales of a lie. Words only go so far where truth is concerned, and text is even less contextual. The world would be a far better place if we could all understand the signals we all make subconsciously. Our communications would be full and true, and we would be more easily able to see when we are being lied to or manipulated. Schools actively squelch the learning of body language by forcing students to sit still all day facing forward and allowing very little time for socialization. (For all that we worry about homeschoolers being unsocial...) Corporatism and capitalism are not actually healthy for humans, and schools need to train people to not see, or at least overlook, all the damage they are both taking and giving in the name of making a living. If we could see the lie behind "oh, it's fine..." and "we'll fix it..." we wouldn't allow ourselves to be so easily lead around. 

What would we do with our time if we could read people well enough that advertizing skin creams with love, sexuality, status, immortality, or selling entry level labor jobs with promises of promotions and money and joy and status was no longer possible? If we could all see the lies, and see the liars as reprehensible, we would have stopped playing that game centuries ago. And while that would be magnificent as far as I am concerned, the business interests behind the school systems obviously could not survive that way, so they train us into unseeing and unfeeling money making zombies.

Still believe schools are, at best and worst, insert systems? Me either. 

So we choose differently. We opt out of school, and coerced education, entirely. We don't need it. Interest and need are enough to drive true and relevant education. Promise.

Want a deep dive into how to live an authentic life? Like the one we have built outside the system? Deschooling with Direction starts tomorrow, October 2. Join us before I close registration!

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