| If you cancelled all schools right now, no one would stop learning useful and applicable skills. But many many people would stop being obedient. The bait of school is the opportunity to learn, something every human inherantly loves. The opportunity to learn and access to knowledge is just the sugar that is used to get you to swallow the medicine: the medicine is your obedience training. When people graduate from high school, often the only thing they have to show for it is their obedience and conformity. If they are good readers, they probably read a lot outside the curriculum. If they are good at math, they probably did a lot of math outside the curriculum. etc. One thing from the curriculum which they did thoroughly learn, however, is how to obey, how to conform, how to navigate bureaucracy, how to play social pecking order games, when to bully, when to submit. Conspicuously absent from the gifts of the curriculum is anything related to what used to be called a liberal education or an enlightened scientific education. These things are always learned despite curriculums, and those who achieve a true scientific or artistic education usually have the air of a rebel or hacker, someone who eschews their lessons, who breaks out of the mold, who skips their homework in favour of reading poetry or hacking their graphics calculator. At school, true learning is always a form of rebellion. |