School as alienating education

Jarl OdinsenYesterday 12:18 PM+3

It can't possibly be more damaging than when the government actually tries to actively indoctrinate kids.

John SummersYesterday 2:53 PM

Jarl, Let's fix what's broken and improve our schools. More parent involvement, more parents telling their children to question authority, encourage our children to strive for and engage in critical thinking. My daughter having had this parental guidance was able to survive public school , be on thee honor roll and think for herself. Unfortunately too many of our children are raised mainly by school, TV, Movies, Pop Music and... superstition😉

Jarl OdinsenYesterday 3:01 PM+2

The first step is to not send your kids to school at all. Schools, especially State schools, do not exist for the purpose of education, but rather indoctrination and the destruction of critical thinking skills. Homeschooling is definitely a good idea.

John SummersYesterday 4:24 PM

Home schooling is a extremist reaction to public school so naturally the few who are home schooled get better attention. However, if the majority of children were home schooled we'd have streets full of children getting no education. likely told to get a job to allow the family to buy their fifth tenth TV. 

Study the past. Photos of children working in the mines and factories. You think public school is bad, let the RWNJ get control of our families and we'll return to their "work children for less wages". Or as they call it, "The Good Ole Days"

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Jarl OdinsenYesterday 4:36 PM+2

Wow... so to jump straight to the elephant in the room - what's your position on the initiation of violence against people?

Scott Swain1:46 AM

+John Summers I hear you that from what you have heard and seen and imagined, you worry that home schooling would take us back in time to harsh conditions you heard existed? I'm also guessing that you worry that parents would take advantage of their children instead of giving them a useful education?

John Summers1:55 AM

+Scott Swain I didn't just hear it. I have read the history of child workers. There's plenty of photos of children miners and children factory workers. When families fall on hard times, sometimes, the whole family must pitch in. They certainly did in the past when no unemployment insurance was available, no Government safety net was available and families were left to survive or die on their own.

It hasn't been that long that most families were doing well. The vast majority of the history of working people has been working and barely affording to live. My grandparents generation never felt secure even with a job. FDR was allowed to change all that because of the Great Depression. 

http://lmgtfy.com

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Scott Swain2:30 AM+2

Saving this for when not on phone.

Jacob S.2:40 AMEdit+3

I think of a past when many people lived a primarily agricultural lifestyle  out of necessity, or tradition, or preference; I wonder if out of a need to contribute or out of a wish to be respected as a contributing member of the family, (or out of necessity, or out of familial/social pressure), if such a lifestyle has a tendency to lend itself to children, contributing to the family's work.  I notice my daughter trying to copy everything I do; I observe that she seems to want to help me wash dishes, or do laundry or tend the garden, or rake leaves, or dig swales.  I imagine that in a more agricultural lifestyle, there would be even more of this.  I wonder if perhaps it isn't natural for children to want to help and if those cultural attitudes of the acceptance of children contributing to the same work as the family, might have kept going as people were dispossessed of the land that they had anciently tended by government/lords/kings, enclosure, religious persecution, etc....   I wonder if as these persons were disposed of their lands and were by other pressures moved into more urban areas for work, if that same attitude of the acceptance of child participation in familial labor in the agricultural setting, didn't get transferred to the industrial era... I wonder if when there was connection with production from subsistance on the land, that child-labor was good, healthy and natural, but if that good-thing was made an ugly-thing when in the setting of the alienation of industrial labor? [Not that industrial labor is necessarily alienating, but when labor-supply is plentiful, and the owners of factories believe themselves to be of a superior-breed of person {because of royal, government or mercantile connections} if that plentiful labor-supply under these conditions, lends its self to a devaluation/lack-of-respect-for of human-life]

Personally, I feel that I wouldn't want ANYONE, neither child nor adult, working under the conditions I have read about or  seen from pictures of the past.  I am sad that so many persons must have been so desperate, to have accepted these dangerous working-conditions, the LONG work-days, the barely subsistance pay, that they would accept such a condition to labor under.  I sometimes feel angry when I look to the causes of why those persons came to be dispossessed, of a modest-living to be sure, but one in which they worked for themselves (and the tax-collector), to a condition in which they are in every-way exploited by those in power.  Those institutions of domination, which led them to be dispossessed of land, to be herded into the cities to provide cheap-labor for the cronies of those in power... this thought angers me.

I have taught in public schools, and I wonder if schools represent a dispossession of education; I wonder if it is a kind of industrial education; if an institutional education, is an alienating education.

I wonder if children would not be better off, exploring their world with the guidance of those who love them and cares for them (and who's not in it for the pay-check).

I wonder, what if children learned by doing, by experimenting, with what most interests them; I wonder if children couldn't be spared the boredom of the classroom by learning from the world.  I wonder if children might not be spared the intimidating/bullying environment of a school, by learning in the hopefully, safe learning environment at home.

And if their home is not a safe-environment... I wonder how institutions of domination have dispossessed that family over generations of their self-respect, of their human-dignity and caused them such hurt and alienation, that that hurt/alienation gets transferred to their children.