When I was young, some well-meaning adults told me that it was normal to hate school, but I should participate anyway. Sure, I wouldn't necessarily learn anything, and the bullying would continue, and I didn't like my teachers and they didn't like me, but it was just what I had to do. Maybe dozens of people told me this, and they all sent their kids to public school. Some of them were wealthy or at least comfortably well-off—they could easily afford alternatives.
In retrospect, I find this completely insane. We live in an age of wildly indulgent and protective parenting. In the olden days, people would just sort of spawn and deal with it, and that worked well enough. Humans are adaptable: we don't really need a book on child psychology to figure out that you should remove the baby's poop from the baby's proximity. But now parents google relentlessly, scour Facebook for tips, shelter and curate and fret.
And yet, the same adults will hand their children over to educational institutions where they waste some of the sweetest years of their youth trying desperately to earn social approval while memorizing formulae that they don't care about, taught by teachers who don't care about those formulae either. At best, these parents will send their kids to an extremely expensive version of the same thing.
Here, it’s important to clarify that I'm not talking about parents who need low-quality daycare. Unfortunately, some people need low-quality daycare, and that's what school is. That’s a whole other bit of societal brokenness. I'm talking about people who say they know the system is awful and then throw their kids at it, despite the fact that they could socialize their children with Judo classes and book clubs and teach them to ace the GED in roughly two weeks.
This is an amazing example of the power of civilization: we can be totally blinded to the reality of our cultural norms, even when we say we aren't. We'll say things like, it's not all about money and prestige, and then we'll get super intoxicated by money and prestige. There is a symbol in our heads representing our supposed defiance but it doesn't at all equate to the willingness to actually go out and defy things. This raises the frightening question of how many of our beliefs we actually believe.
I am definitely guilty of this as well. I'm definitely programmed in ways I don't at all realize. Routine is dominant both on a daily scale in the sense of our habits and on a life scale in terms of the shapes of our lives.
Have any ideas of ways out or know who is thinking about this? In my dreams, I live on an ecovillage where kids get exposed to the realities of moving bits and atoms and where there is an opportunity to dive into each of those processes. After work around dinner tables, the ecovillage comes together to yard around the humanities and knowing what it is to be human.
You inspire me to take a 30 day writing challenge too