Kids are hardwired to love learning, they will never stop asking questions and exploring the world.
Schools quash that curious spirit. They put kids in a boring, prison-like, highly regimented environment that seeks to teach discipline and obedience to the status quo. Don't think, accept your role in the capitalist machine. If you are bullied, no one will help you, but if you fail to complete work you will be punished. Most of all, get used to not owning most of your time.
Take note of this and try to rekindle your child-like curiousity and love of learning. Ask yourself, do you still have questions about the universe you forgot to ask as a child? Read about the planets, the stars, microbes, machines. But most importantly, do it at your own pace and do it because you still have questions. Not to pass some test, but for you.
https://envs.ucsc.edu/internships/internship-readings/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
Chapter 2 starting on page 71, contrasting the "banking model" of education and a liberating one which engages students in dialogue.
Fuck the banking model. So many older teachers still strictly adhere to it and it’s just not accurate
I had all the same sensibilities that make me an ML today as a child and was cycled between Catholic/boarding/public schools. All of them used the banking model, and while I'm good at remembering for tests I learn nothing from that. Any sense of creative or critical or systemic thinking was discouraged if not punished, outside of the prescribed places to be creative or acknowledge that a system exists. At best it felt like gaslighting and now basic algebra gives me anxiety. Every meaningful thing I've learned and every ability I have to learn more is despite school, not because of it.
Montessori schools seem like book chiropractors, but I'd have done so much better in an environment like that where you can explore and engage with shit. Waldorf schools would have been all the better in encouraging formal experimentation. The way Freire structures his model as an improvement over that, committees investigating problems together and engaging students in a rehumanising process, would have really made me love school instead of dreading it. Teachers engaging with students instead of strictly teaching out of a book would have made them much less of an opposition figure to me, as they wouldn't just be the barrier to the grade I need who yells if I ask a probing question about something. The fascist teachers I had wouldn't have lasted a year poisoning history/social studies/English as subjects because they wouldn't have some unimpeachable authority to their boomer rants.
Definitely essential theory.
That’s a class thing as well. Ruling class schools focus much more on open ended project work and team-based cooperation. They teach people to question things because, basically, the engineers running a system need to know about its flaws to keep the junk pile running. There have been studies about how school culture is used to reinforce norms around how much freedom students ought to have. Teachers from working class backgrounds tend to see school as a means to get a job and tend to teach in districts full of other working class teachers where this is the prevailing sentiment