Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
(newsletter.goodtechthings.com)368 points by forrestbrazeal 4 days ago
368 points by forrestbrazeal 4 days ago
I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison.
I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.
Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.
The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?
I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.
The principal always told me "just walk away" and I said, "You fool, the bullies have legs".
The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.
I can see why an adult who's never dealt with these difficulties in childhood would give that sort of advice, but it's bewildering how school administrators weren't (and probably still aren't) trained on the reality that "just walk away" is a platitude in the context of an environment where bullies have a captive audience.
It reminds me of how we were told "stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me", which is easy to say as an adult with autonomy and other sources of fulfillment; in reality, words not only hurt, but have lasting social consequences. If some turd of a kid has the charisma to humiliate you in front of everyone, even when only verbally, that can lead to a permanently damaged sense of self and lack of respect from peers.
Having the emotional maturity to deal with things you don’t like happening has a major influence on how tough being bullied feels like. It’s rarely much time or physical pain, but some kids obsess over it even if they aren’t the major target they often feel extremely persecuted.
Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
> The principal always told me "just walk away"
I think the root of this problem is the principal-agent problem.
It literally doesn't matter to teachers (a) if you get bulled at school (they are not being bullied themselves) or (b) if you have problems later in life.
Maybe a bullied kid will completely lose it as an adult and murder a bunch of people. But does the teacher who completely failed to help them get arrested? No, therefore it just doesn't matter to them at all.
The only thing that would prevent this is teachers actually caring or being kind. And of course there are some that do and are. But relying on that isn't enough. There need to be right incentives set in order enable the majority of teachers to put in the effort to act in the right way.
(I don't know what that incentive structure looks like I'll admit.)
We pay for a private school, it's expensive yes and I know not accessible for all, but it's kind of the best of both worlds. You get to choose the school and it's a community vibe. It helps when the other kids, potential bullies, know your kid and know their parents talk to your parents. It also helps as the staff is acutely tuned in to things like this, and they have amazing ways of conflict resolutions. It's not difficult, it just requires some attention and thought. They reinforce golden rule type actions/behaviors/leading by example/etc. As an example, if one kid picks on another one, instead of detention - they will both be given a 'private talk' and then paired up on some activity. The result is, they were constructively scolded then had a chance to bond and become friends - and it works. It's never going to be fully eradicated, but it's amazing just how little there is and how supportive everyone is in trying to develop good humans.
They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.
Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.
I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.
This is why introducing a degree of school choice is becoming a popular policy among parents in both parties, but I think bringing back rapid expulsion to disciplinary boys/girls schools would be even more impactful. Unfortunately, recent social justice activism has stymied that possibility in progressive areas. Either restore unfettered power of self-curation to the environment and ensure it is wielded effectively, or parents will demand more flexibility in choosing from non-monopoly options.
I find it appalling that parent who can afford a private school, even with much sacrifice, would instead send their children to a a public school.
It is the equivalent of eating soup at a homeless shelter when you can go to the store and buy something better, made worse by the fact that you are making the decision for someone else that cannot decide on their own.
I attended a private school for a couple of years, and I have to say it was worse than the public ones.
Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.
And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.
I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.
But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.
PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.
I forgot about the lack of personal property.
You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.
I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.
I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(
This is a major reason (but far from the only reason) that we homeschool. Knowing what I know about the school system, about my own experience thereof, and about my kids' personalities, it would be grossly immoral for me to put them through it. The risk of long-term trauma would be too high.
There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.
> I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system
I went through a normal school system (the first 8 years still during the communist regime in my country, so take that "normal" with a grain of salt), and the gaps in my knowledge are enormous, in some cases subject-wide. I know literally nothing about chemistry, except the bits you learn here and there from TV shows and such. I vaguely remember some kind of equations, but nothing stuck. Biology - everything I know I know from somewhere else, mostly from that TV show with talking blood cells [1]. Surprisingly, I had pretty good grades, but it had nothing to do with knowledge - I was able to quickly scan the textbook before an exam and somehow it was sufficient, but there was no retention, I forgot everything after the exam. I was forced to learn Russian for 4 years and I remember literally nothing, not even the alphabet.
Those are mostly just anecdotes - I am sure that modern schooling can do better than rote memorization in a toxic environment. What I want to say is that motivation, a friendly environment, and fun learning are a lot more important than how well the teacher knows, say, chemistry. It is entirely possible that your kids will retain more knowledge, not less.
I am only talking about elementary school, college was different - I loved it and learned a lot.
[1] Il était une fois... la vie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/
Agree, there are plenty of kids who go to government schools and have enormous gaps in their knowledge, in the west as well.
I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.
I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.
Every public school I've been to has literally been built like a prison. Every student I ever met made the same comparison.
School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high.
Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.
Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.
These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).
Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.
The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.
Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.
Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.
An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.
A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.
This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.
The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).
Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.
You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.
The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.
Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).
The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.
The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.
In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.
It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.
Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.
Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.
You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.
These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.
Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).
What you say about the reality and mechanisms of torture may be true. But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
It won't change the amount of political violence that's ahead of us, but I would recommend that you, at a personal level, question those associations.
No political side, no country, or race has the monopoly of evil, and if you believe otherwise you have some serious work to do.
> But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.
The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.
I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.
Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.
There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.
I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.
All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).
In other words, falsehoods get discarded.
They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.
Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.
Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.
The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.
Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).
These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.
The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.
They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.
Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.
If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.
Now that is frightening.
When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.
Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.
I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.
A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.
The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.
Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.
While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.
Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.
If you read nothing else, read this, it speaks unpleasant truth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3263007/
how is public school teaching kids to take collective ownership of the private means of production? must have slept through those classes. My public schools in Oregon had a lot of anti-communism elements and I got a brief suspension for writing a research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school -- cited reason was "defending/promoting terrorists" or something along those lines
They promote 'critical consciousness', which is a framework of looking at things in isolation without resolving indirections, and examining existing relationships by their power dynamics which are treated as static, not dynamic. These are based in fallacy, but more recently described in the critical turn in education, and was somewhat inspired by Paulo Freire's work.
The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.
This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.
Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.
The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.
This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.
All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).
Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.
Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.
> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.
Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.
The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.
If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.
The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).
Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.
This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).
A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.
There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.
Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.
If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.
Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe, but you should post some high quality sources to back up your extraordinary claims about Maoist torturer-teachers or whatever.
> Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe.
If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.
The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).
The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.
Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.
You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it. Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.
James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.
Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.
When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.
I went to a state school in the North of England with a GCSE pass rate between 30-40% and this is a fair description of what it was like. At the time the performance of all schools was based on the percentage of students achieving at least a C including Maths and English, and as Goodhart’s law suggests this inevitably meant the school’s resources were optimised for getting students around the C grade borderline to pass while all other students didn’t get an education suited to their ability. The Gove reforms included changing how schools are assessed to a value-added measure, that I believe is commonly used in the United States, which has created the incentive for schools to focus on all students rather than just those near an arbitrary passing grade. The deeper underlying issue that’s harder to solve is the anti-aspirational culture that pervades through a lot of schools in deprived areas, in my experience most students didn’t really get the value a good education could bring to their lives and like the original comment treated it like internment rather than a route out of poverty.
This was exactly my experience in the South too.
It's funny that society has the same issue - refusing to expel disruptive students, refusing to imprison or deport criminals, it's all the same.
Frustratingly, under pressure, Bridget Phillipson looks set to roll back most of those reforms.
It's not always anti aspiration. It's knowledge that the school system isn't doing anything for them.
I went to a school that had a lot of good teachers, and I learned a lot from them.
But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.
And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.
My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.
But man, the bullying was bad.
Not being supported by the adults who pretend to be trustworthy is nearly as damaging as the bullying itself. Like you, I would be punished alongside the perpetrator even if I didn't throw a single punch or insult. This is extremely toxic because it completely breaks trust and causes children to lose faith in the system they're in, and they shut down. I know I did. I stopped telling anyone my problems because experience told me saying anything only lead to more shame.
The only true advice I could give to a child with bullying issues is physical violence - as fast as possible. It is sad. It doesn't take many humans to make school/life/work miserable.
I saw one of my bullies after high school, and I asked him why he stopped hitting me. He looked me in the eyes and just said, "You got big."
He was only scared that I'd hit him back, and nothing else.
> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.
I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.
> […] so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.
Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.
Let's call this what this is, it is "below terrible" instead of "anything close to optimal". It's an interesting tidbit from a game theory perspective, but telling your child who is getting beaten up to not worry and play the long game is 1) horrible, 2) only works if everyone else in the game is rational. I don't remember bullies getting into trouble and stopping.
> you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide
This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.
I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.
Generally speaking, yeah. Someone else mentioned the system preparing you for life later, and I can see where the bullies made me stronger as well.
I definitely don't condone all that as a way to get stronger, but at least I got something from it. Silver linings and all.
Wish I could say the same. I often wonder how things would turn out if I didn't have the insecurities/other mental handicaps stemming from that period. And fantasize about rewinding time with the current brain and leaving a trail of broken bones in my wake :-D
I went to grammar school (UK) in the 1990s, and also absolutely loathed it. I think it set me up horribly for life and (especially) for my career. People use the phrase "PTSD" too lightly, but I think it gave me something like it that I often feel in an office full of people, and especially during in-person meetings. Years of CBT and ERP have helped a lot, and now I'm middle-aged I think I've put the worst of it behind me. I remember that horrible feeling that both the bigger kids and the teachers were against you, and the sense of utter helplessness and despair.
A few times my parents hired tutors for subjects I was struggling in, and I remember that suddenly I found myself enjoying them. I think I would have benefited greatly from being homeschooled, but of course at that time it was unheard of in the UK. I know it's not for everyone. There's no perfect answer. What's certain is that there's nothing 'normal' about sitting in a room with 30 people who are exactly the same age as you, plus one official authority figure.
So school certainly 'socialized' me, but not in a good way.
It wasn't entirely bad. I got a reasonably good education, and some of the teachers have left a positive impression. Overall though it was horrible.
PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.
Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.
No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.
Thanks. Yes, CPTSD would be more accurate -- the result of a state of near-constant low-level fear. I had, and continue to have, massive trust issues, particularly at work. I struggle to think everyone doesn't secretly hate me and that I'm not constantly on the verge of getting fired, even though I can see it's not logical. Steadily getting better now thanks to CBT and similar techniques.
But I have lost many friends and career opportunities as a result of my time at school. I had a basically healthy and happy home environment, but as you say, school can still screw you up badly.
Wow, it seems like the UK education system is a very severe environment. Remember Anthony Hopkins saying the same thing about it being brutal, having received abuse from both the teachers and the other students.
Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.
So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.
Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.
I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.
Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.
It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.
It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.
I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.
Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.
It also says something about the quality of the "education" that you were able to (presumably) manage some sort of technical aspirations and career without the "required education".
I know the feeling.
> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...
In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.
> In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
That depends.
Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.
Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.
> forced internment for children
Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.
In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
> And we are told this is freedom.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
There's security checkpoints and police officers in bulletproof vests and carrying guns as well in some cases, because what if a school shooter shows up? Of course, when one does show up a hundred militarized police will show up and... do nothing, because what will the union do if one gets shot?
My favorite was the lady cop in Texas who said she would only "go in" if her kid was in there. Your kids? ... Not her problem.
I live in the UK now, but grew up in the US. My own experience is pretty similar.
I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.
I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).
As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.
The kind of school you went to sounds very different from the grammar school that my working-class father went to in the 1960s and that helped him escape a life of asbestos-breathing drudgery in moribund shipyards.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
Can confirm.
My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.
When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.
I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.
But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?
I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.
I am guessing you live in an area with high average housing prices in the catchment area of your school? Over the past 60 years, several generations of parents moving to catchment areas of good schools creates a self-reinforcing loop where only middle class people can afford to live near good schools.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
> But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.
> In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.
For non-british readers; state-funded Grammar schools famously, were abolished.
(I’m being downvoted, but this just objective fact, and something my grandfather brings up commonly).
EDIT: according to a lot of HN comments; they still seem to exist but they aren't evenly distributed.
There certainly were none in my city.
Despite one being named a grammar school, it does not follow a grammar school curriculum: https://www.coventrypublicschools.org/schools/cgs
How messy.
No they weren’t. There are still many (163 according to a very quick google search) selective schools in the UK with entrance based on taking the 11+ exam.
Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.
Thank you. I get irrationally angry, when I hear the 'socialization' argument, precisely because of the experience you described. To be fair, it does, in a weird way, prepare you for some areas of adulthood, but I think those areas are thankfully somewhat avoidable.
It prepares you as much as it desensitizes you to accept bad environments because that's all the "adults" can do for you.
Interesting, if there is one thing that I have learned in my life, it is that you can pick up your stuff and leave. It is depressing that what we teach our kids is that they just have to stay in that bad situation; that there are no options.
What six real castaway boys did in 1966:
https://www.newsweek.com/real-lord-flies-true-story-boys-isl...
>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination
I've always assumed that the babies grown in test tubes and graded into alphas to epsilons in Huxley's "Brave New World" are simply a metaphor for children going throught the UK school system.
In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.
EDIT: corrected spelling!
I hated school as well but I would still disagree on almost all points with you.
But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.
I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.
I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
I hear your overall point, but treating this issue as a dichotomy undermines your point. Critics of homeschooling aren't claiming that schools are perfect, or that schools educate ideally. The claim is that, as poorly as our teachers are equipped to educate students, parents are, on average, worse equipped.
You're insinuating here that you were not educated in school. You're making that claim in a text-based format. How did you learn to read and write? Are you making the claim that your mother taught you how to read and write, and the school had nothing to do with it?
Here's the problem with what you're saying: a lot of homeschooled children don't know how to read and write. Or add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And contrary to your theory of education, memorisation is useful in learning these skills. A kid who has memorized how to do addition and subtraction can make change at a cash register, and a lot of homeschooled adults can't do that.
There are outliers in both schoolchild and homeschooled child experiences. I am one myself: my mom homeschooled me for kindergarten and first grade, and did a great job, but she had the advantage that she was a schoolteacher. And maybe your experience was an outlier in that you really did learn nothing in school. But the averages, at a systemic level, are that homeschooled children are at a large disadvantage compared to children educated in a school.
I'm early 50s and went to school in the Republic of Ireland - late 70s, 80s. I really feel the same as the OP here. It felt like a daily prison, combined with huge amounts of memorisation for exams. (promptly forgotten)
Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.
Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.
But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!
I agree with you. This is coming from Saudi.
I don't have any friend from my school times. Bullying was the norm back in late 80's and the 90's till I am in college on '99.
The real friends? the real education? started at college. School was a 12 years full of non sense useless stuff to someone's practical life and improvement (to me and many of people around me. The most I remember of these days were math and science lessons that were beneficial and my father alone was more than capable teaching me that... other than language lessons, religious teaching that were just a formality for us (we learn religion the best from home, our extended family) etc etc. At the end? We lost most of 12 years that are the best for internalizing more engineering and professional education. Yes we are capable of that at that age, I and my younger brother at the least built some robots and actual cars with suspension and steering etc although using old Lego collections (since we grew poor we couldn't afford actual tools) and that was ALL on our own at home and we didn't have internet or anything. We modified RC cars to go faster by soldering capacitors to give that boost to the motor (at the expense of battery life and potentially burning the motor) when we were in middle school.
Programming you say? my love for computers and computer games? all at home too, with some help from my older cousin (that I will visit in 30 minutes, he is 67 years old now and without him I wouldn't even dream of getting a PhD in CS, and of course my professors who I revere and respect).
Nearly all my useful skills, other than math and science as I mentioned), I and my brother learned on our own... at home. It all started at home. The school? was torture and a formality we had to go through or no one will hire us.
I am for minimal formal schooling with specialization starting from day 1, each one can choose a MUCH shorter path and more focused on what they want to do... switching between specializations and/or profession shouldn't be like collapsing a sky scraper we have built with hay (like it is now the case). wasting people's lives, causing them trauma for whatever miss function (e.g. students being beaten for silly missed homeworks etc). This system is age old and not effective, and there are more effective ways. Most of those who changed the world were school drop outs for a reason... they focused on what really matters and connected it to reality.
That sucks and I really don't mean to well actually here.. but in that scenario - which doesn't sound like the default outcome of going to a public school anywhere - would this not be "just" a reason to go for homeschooling later, only after the system has provably failed (long-term).
Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.
That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.
My argument is that school experiences vary drastically, that everyone commenting before me was saying that homeschooling their children was egotistical, stupid and harmful.
When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.
Just because your own school was sadly, terrible, doesn't necessarily mean your kids' would be similar, though? A formula that's worked for us, is - find a school with nice staff, be wary of huge academy chains (UK specific) and above all, seek peers that are very diverse - in terms of class, education level, wealth, race, nationality etc. That way your kids avoid being bullied for being "weird" because there's no such concept of "weird"-ness, kids in such a group have many different perspectives. To me, that's a far better environment for kids to develop and flourish, than siloed in a homeschooling situation.
Kids are excellent at pattern matching, and "weird" doesn't go across racial lines, weird is the kid who's a little on the spectrum, or not emotionally mature enough their first year to deal with circumstances- and instead shuts down.
It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.
I think you're right to start by saying this isn't universal worldwide, or even within Britain.
You describe hell. But I don't believe that your experience is dominant or even that common in the UK. Which generation are you from?
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I'm around 11 years older than you.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
As a parent with kids in the UK state school system, I've noticed a considerable attitude change in terms of reducing bullying, acknowledging and supporting learning difficulties (dyslexia, ADHD, autism), and on trying to keep kids happy and engaged, in a way that simply didn't exist during my time in the '80s and '90s.
In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.
I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Yeah, Coventry is rough. This is a good anecdotal overview for anyone interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watch-My-Back-Geoff-Thompson-ebook/...
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school.
I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.
It's like all the people that insist "School never taught me anything useful like how to balance a check book" when you learned how to balance a checkbook in the math class that person never paid attention to.
I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.
Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.
Literally by my own, with books that luckily I had available. I learned no grammar and certainty no spelling in school. As I was 18 nobody could under my writing because of the terrible spelling.
I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.
I hated school too, but I'm not sure I would have learnt much at home. My parents both lack higher education and frankly haven't been able to keep up with me past the age of 12 or so. Home schooling might work for children of smart people to be accelerated into the exact same field as them. But it won't work for kids like me or those who just aren't good at whatever their parents do.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
I became progressively more withdrawn throughout my school years and for most of high school I was a ghost. I talked to no one and hid in the library during lunch hours, and for all the kinds of reasons that have already been mentioned here.
My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.
School was OK, but Boy Scouts was great! We learned to organize into groups, to obey orders and coordinate as groups, play games, watch the Scout Masters (all adult men) discuss and decide matters and then try to do the same ourselves.
I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn.
I was never bullied (in school or out) and I can think of only a few instances where I saw it. So I am always disappointed to see numerous claims of bullying "pile up" online whenever there is a discussion of school. One gets the impression that everyone has been bullied always and that school was/is hell. But my experience was that bullying was truly rare: rarer than snakebite, rarer than black widow spider bite, indeed, rarer than actual death! My conversations with others with whom I associate indicate similar experiences. School was fun and rarely boring.
I like your anecdote about the boy scouts being a healthy environment- that could well be true and I have no reason to think otherwise.
But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.
You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).
This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.
Bullying is definitely more common than death.
Yes, 1000x this!
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
I agree with this (as the bloggers seems to too). Yeah, dealing with all the different personalities you see at school is an important skill, as is dealing with difficult situations. Yeah, would like to think I was in general a nice kid, but had some share of being bullied, and unfortunately have also bullied another kid (neither were common in my life, but you had to learn how to handle these situations, and also make mistakes to learn from them). Yeah, this understanding of people is super useful, and for me at least, the corporate world can be just as ruthless as a school playground. Need to know how to navigate all those egos.
"Chapter 1: Letters from Prison"
https://laniakeabooks.org/books/letters-from-prison/part-1/#...
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).
I never read pretty much any book written before 1970, never learned a foreign language beyond a single semester of Spanish, and certainly had no Theology in a US Public school. Now as an adult, I do want to learn all those things (to some degree) and feel like I missed out on it; “If only I had a better education.” But I probably would have been more like you, uninterested and equally as dismissive of my childhood education if I were forced to learn all of those things at that age. Is it a problem with educators, families, or just the children themselves that they will grow up and realize the opportunities they’ve lost?
Also British, although i was living abroad when I started home educating (the correct term in UK law, and more accurate because the whole point is that its not HE).
> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning
This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).
> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,
This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.
> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children
IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.
> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.
I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did
Interesting story and very good points :) I certainly have concerns, that much of the curriculum in school here in UK is basically pointless box-ticking (metrics as you refer to it), and a certain part of the day is just a waste of time and/or at a pace that doesn't suit brighter kids. OTOH there's some great stuff at school that'd otherwise be hard to replicate. I know people that do homeschool or private school with good reason, due to the limitations of state school. Sounds like you've done a lot to ensure your kids have friends and go to things where they meet other kids. So in your case, probably the lack of social side is less of an issue... however, isn't that quite an investment of your time? (and to some extent cost). you list a lot of things your kids go to, that must mean quite a lot of "ferrying" / "taxi-ing" around? Or are they very independent and using public transport? To me , it sound like you've done homeschooling right, but I kind of wonder whether a lot of people would be unable or not enlightened enough to do all the social side you've done.
In one word, yup. My solution: In class put head down and just ignore the teacher. I DID want to learn the good material (math and science) so DID that in the one hour of daily 'study hall' and when I got home. And, with this approach, in math and science did quite well in aptitude tests and achievement tests. Those test results, and NOT what the teachers said about me, got some higher-ups to send me to summer advanced math/science programs.
That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.
The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.
Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.
The people who say "it's to make you interact with normal people!" miss a key point. In the real world, you meet a person, and if they treat you like shit, you walk away. If they physically assault you in the workplace, you can report them to HR, and there's a good chance you'll never have to see them again. In school, you get told you need to have empathy for their propensity to beat you, get subtly or not-so-subtly victim blamed, and you still have to interact with them for at least a year, and maybe years.
Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.
Agreed but what about the person that doesn't exactly treat you like s** but they are difficult to work with, but in order for you to achieve the thing you need at work you have to work with them daily? Then walking away isn't an option - perhaps just going to work somewhere else is not feasible. So then, a certain amount of experience of dealing with idiots at school can be useful can't it? (within reason... ;) )
>I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding.
Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.
This was my reaction upon seeing the question in the post title, too.
I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.
To be fair - the US changing their mathematics education system has been worse for the mathematics program. The kids learning math now who don't learn from outside networks will be significantly worse off in mathematics by far.
Also there is no other way for people to learn mathematics then without doing the work to learn. This utopian idea that's bled into the education stream that we can teach math without significant amount of problems to practice on is kind of nuts.
Youth polling consistently ranks public schooling middle-high school as the literal worst time in their life. However, I still think they should do it as it gives them exposure to the bottom quartile of the population. It gives them motivation and reason to structure the rest of their life to do anything and everything to never have to interact said population group again.
>I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. >However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life.
Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.
I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.
I was schooled in Bangalore India and I particularly loathe and revile both the school and most of my teachers. My school did nothing except make me believe I was a horrible child with no future.
I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.
34 year old who grew up on Guernsey (small island south and independent of Britain but with very much the same values) and went to a state-funded Grammar school for secondary and can't relate to all of this, but certainly most. The details are different but I agree that the education offered is subpar and the "socialisation" argument is bullshit. School left me feeling more isolated and alone than I've ever been.
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.
But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.
I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.
Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
Yes some kids face abusive situations in public schools. But all kids are by definition facing abuse when home schooled imho.
If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.
I'm glad that you have a way to help your daughter. But there are many kids with similar issues and homeschooling can't be our solution for all of them. Instead we need to figure out how to accomodate them at schools.
Not sure about USA, but here in UK there are special schools for people whose autism really makes it unviable for them to be in mainstream school (whether that's a failure of the mainstream school, or just level of anxiety etc of the student). Such special schools are often wonderful, with the most amazing, dedicated staff. Usually staff have specialist training (albeit not always to as high level as one might like, due to underfunding) and much experience of working with autistic people. So, able to provide things that parents with no prior knowledge of autism, and jobs to go to and bills to pay, are less able to provide.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work
Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.
I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.
The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell
If there's one thing I was surprised when I moved to the UK from Portugal were the number of stories work colleagues told about bullying in school. Although there were fights and stupid games in the schools I went to in Portugal there was never systematic bullying.
I'm sorry you had a bad time at school.
> give an appreciable reason
You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)
Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.
School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.
At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.
I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.
I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.
Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.
So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.
So, there. Options.
Bullying is not just something that one does to another person. It's the social destruction of self that is mediated by a group:
https://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Social-Destruction-Laura-Mar...
Bullies couldn't do what they do if they did not have the support of the other students, teachers, administration, etc. As late as college I was harassed by criminally minded person who led a criminal gang that was not held in check until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock in front of many witnesses. Two people were driven to suicide.
The leader has been to prison and if he got out and went straight I could forgive him, even celebrate him, because it is so hard to get out of being justice involved. I'm still angry at the college administrator who told me "my hands are tied" who many see as a hero because he really did a lot of great things for our school -- but I wonder who else was driven to suicide and I fantasize about going to his funeral and dumping over his casket. An apology from him would go a long way, I've asked for it, I never expect to get it.
If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I guess you are answering to the "you also get friends" part of my comment.
What you suffered was horrifying, I hope you have recovered. There's degrees in bullying. Mine was not that bad in comparison to yours. The kid who was a bane of my existence would not attack me every single day, at every single hour. I was not important enough or "fun enough to mess with", I suppose. It was more like a "once per week" kind of thing.
I was not very successful at making friends. But I did make a couple. The first one was the other guy who was also regularly bullied. He had clear developmental issues, I don't think teachers could turn a blind eye on them like they could on mine. We talked about videogames, almost exclusively. It helped, somewhat. Then he (I think) became romantically interested in me and I had to cut it off.
Then there was another kid who regularly came to my house. We played with legos, which I had many. Then he stopped liking Legos. (Children...)
My school did give me many more opportunities to make friends. Retrospectively, I know I could have made more. I just didn't know how to. In my case it would be "the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you to not get friends". I only managed to make real friends in highschool (and even then it was just 2 or 3). And that was after I decided to make a conscious effort to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to others.
I think my problem was more a "me" issue. The bullying didn't help but I suspect I would have made very few friends independently of it.
> Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I do agree. Unfortunately many children's homes are not safe environments. Homeschooling for them is worse than bullying can ever be at school. Imagine 24-7 with your bully, who is way bigger than you and from whom you also depend for food, water and shelter.
Wow, that is tremendously messed up! I'm sorry you had to experience that. Kind of makes my young adult life sound like a cake walk.
Ironically, it was the jocks and the gang affiliated kids who always left me alone. I don't know exactly why, though I figured the jocks were popular enough to not waste their energy tormenting someone socially beneath them.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you've said. Whenever I experienced bullying, it was in close correlation to how callously indifferent the overall system was. The couple of schools I went to where I didn't experience trouble had empathetic teachers and administrators whom actually built trust with the students. The earlier schools I went to were mostly run by selfish teachers (whom I later learned were even more selfish than I realized at the time!) and administrators who would punish the bully and the victim equally out of laziness/callousness/stupidity; or look the other way entirely! Guess which ones I suffered under and which ones I didn't.
> If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I know you're referring to elementary school here, but I think this dynamic you're describing also explains why so many kids have a rotten time in middle school. Usually, middle school lasts only a few years, and can easily mean being separated from any sort of peer group you have for multiple reasons. If your friends are even slightly older or younger than you are, then one will have to face a year of middle school without them. Depending on where your friends live, they might end up in a different middle school even though you both went to the same elementary school.
Even though I did have one good friend in elementary school (we are still best friends today), he is a year older than I am, and even though we went to the same middle school I had to spend at least 1 year in elementary school without him and then another during my second year in middle school. And I know he had the same problem in reverse. When you're seen as having "no friends", even though you actually do, everyone treats you like you have the stink of death. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
Agreed. If I ever have kids, I'm signing them up for MMA classes from the second they have to step onto school grounds.
As another product of the British 'education' system, this is all very familiar.
If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/
As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.
To heavily paraphrase a short of stature comedian: Childhood and School is basically jail. You're confined with a bunch of violent sociopaths, have minimal agency over what you do everyday, spend most of your free time trying to smoke weed out of improvised pipes, and the greatest reward you can obtain is like a bag of Doritos.
This does prepare you to life though. More likely than not you will go to office. You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim. Rather than feeling sorry about yourself, school prepares you to fight with bullies, to find inmates, to find friends. I think you could have not understand the life lessons.
You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.
God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
Good grief, if the lack of caring for the kids, the indifference of the educators is now reframed as a virtue and core function of the failing school system I guess we are in deep trouble.
Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.
So... you're either predator or prey?
In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.
Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.
If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.
>You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim.
I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.
Reality? And those safe spaces are built upon and upheld by others - who bully the other mean bullies to keep it that way. Every part of civilization is a energetic effort and if the civilization runs low on energy/supplybribery - the space closes with a thunderclap as the structure giveth.
I can agree with that, it's the best counter argument, at least. Though it's a weak one.
Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.
Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.
This is completely wrong as far as I can tell.
I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)
While I hate to admit that you are not inaccurate, we are humans and should be able to find a way to raise the youth without resorting to storing them in prisons while they explore how to physically and emotionally torture one another. The fact that we accept this as a mere expression of nature is beyond horrifying, because schools are anything, but nature. I would sooner accept gangs of free roaming kids across the neighborhood, but you can't have that, because that would impede private property and businesses.
<< God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
It is not a question of safe space. It is a question of what you are teaching. Because of the people like you, who think it is perfectly fine education, I can accurately pinpoint 'troublemakers' and 'danger' as I walk down the street and avoid the place. That is explicitly NOT what early education should be.
OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.