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.
Even then, kids are curious but they aren't diligent. They'll get excited about New Thing, then give up as soon as it gets somewhat challenging. They'll get distracted by the next New Thing. They're easily confused and frustrated without guidance or the competition among peers. They routinely get things wrong, then stubbornly insist they are not wrong.
That's before the turn into anxious, cliquish, horny teenagers.
Schools - even American schools - generally exist to provide structured learning, smooth the difficulty curve, and provide a focused environment for learning free of distractions. How well they fulfill the role often depends on the skilled labor and resources available to administrators. But "school is an evil plot to turn children into robots" shit seems to come as much from reactionary libertarian attitudes as genuinely socialist ones. At some point, the process of learning becomes uncomfortable. Working through that discomfort is as much about developing yourself as the lessons themselves.
Do you think humans are inherently competitive? Or that competition is good for education? To quote gigachad Miyazaki, I strongly believe such an idea is an insult to life itself.
Schools as we know them under neoliberal capitalism generally exist to make students learn to be good workers, enforce adherance to a heirarchy of authority, and brainwash people with an inbuilt desire for competition. Students compete with each other because the system is designed to encourage it by assigning self-esteem based on test scores, arbitrary numbers which have been proven time and time again to be inferior ways of measuring learning and cognitive ability, especially for humanities subjects. The problem here is that competition between individuals is an inferior way for a species to exist within an evolutionary framework, and alienates the said individuals from each other, destroying any sort of common humanity in the fires of animosity.
Furthermore, the school system "structure" is fundamentally flawed. I do not disagree with the fact that learning needs to have structure. But how do you know each and every individual child will adhere to the common "structure" such that it suits their individual needs? Why do we need a singular "authority" to provide this "structure"? Even the dude who made Khan Academy disagrees with a singular "structure" that all must adhere to. Also, why should schools maintain a singular standard for "focus" for all children? How do people with different capacities for focus factor into this? How much of this "focus" is just practicing adherance to a manager's or boss's discipline? Is the Prussian education system the best way to go about things?
And yet adults who have finished school still do this, albeit in a more sophisticated way, curious.
How much of this discomfort (understatement of the year) is due to the actual process of scholarship, or due to the influence of an education system designed to churn out employees for the market instead of educated, critically thinking human beings?
I don't think that there's any real doubt humans express competitive behaviors. Particularly young people rivaling one another for attention and acclaim. "Oh well, I find that idea offensive" is a lazy cop-out.
Neoliberalism exploits competitive impulses and perpetuates the theory of meritocracy, wherein exploitation is justified through meritocracy. Past that, the term "brainwashing" gets tossed around far too casually. It feeds the theory of a competent conspiracy and plays into the "evil public school teacher" reactionary stereotype.
The US doesn't have a single common structure. It has thousands of independent school districts funded and administered primarily through local governments, with a little extra from the Feds to cover shit like means-tested lunches and disability care. It is also riddled with segregation and segmentation, precisely because the "my kids are special! they need a different kind of experience!" illusion-of-choice shit has been pumped into the minds of adults who are easily gulled into buying whatever snake-oil cure the private sector is pushing.
Students consistently need three things to get a good education:
Any public-facing system trying to sell you something other than these three things is scamming you.
The line between childhood and adulthood is far fuzzier than folks like to believe.
Critical thinking is difficult. It requires undergoing some amount of stress and discomfort. It requires a tolerance for failure and a certain amount of humility. If you aren't experiencing any kind of stress in your academic pursuit, you're either a prodigy (you're not) or you're not bothering to test your limits.
The brain is a muscle, and just like every other muscle it needs exercise. Anyone who has tried to learn a language or solve a math puzzle or organize a large social event can tell you this. Difficult problems exist. Avoiding problems because you cannot solve them right away will not lead you to become more critical or more curious. They result in the exact opposite.
What a weird strawman, when did I ever state that the correct response to a difficult assignment as a student is to avoid it? This is even wrong because taking a rest to allow the subconscious to work on a problem will actually help in finding novel solutions.
Its ironic too how I will prove your assertion wrong tomorrow by going to sleep first before responding to the rest of your americanisms.
Fuck off.
I have no idea why you responded like this. Truly, Im not gaslighting you, I am utterly baffled as to why you put these words in my mouth. I reiterate, when did I ever state that the correct response to a difficult assignment as a student is to avoid it?
:LIB: :cope:
Of course everyone expresses competitive behaviours. This is largely because the entire neoliberal superstructure is largely based on some fundamentalist christian competitive meritocracy. But does this mean competitive behaviour should be encouraged and strengthened on a fundamental level via an authoritarian schooling system?
No. Brainwashing is an accurate way of describing the Prussian education system with american neoliberal characteristics. "Neoliberalism exploits competitive impulses and perpetuates the theory of meritocracy, wherein exploitation is justified through meritocracy." You said it yourself, this is brainwashing of the citizenry to an ideological standard. This doesn't mean public school teachers are evil, its just that the system is fundamentally corrupt as a whole.
Ok I wasn't clear enough. I meant the very fundamental structure of schooling as it exists today, where all students must adhere to a common timetable, listen to a singular authority figure, get their learning performance assessed based on test scores, and be taught every subject from a monolithic syllabus, among other characteristics.
Yes of course what you said is true. But to what extent is the current schooling system, with its meritocratic foundation, its test-score based assessment, its use of homework and regimented timetables, conducive to creating an environment where humility and the acceptance of failure during learning is cultivated within the individual? Why are single, arbitrary numbers based on an individual's ability to perform a rote task on 1 day a good indicator of whether they "pass" or "fail"? Does this create a mindset of embracing failure? Is failure even being defined properly here?
I agree that learning should be stressful to an extent, the application of mental effort in acquiring knowledge is in fact exhilarating. However, why should this be done under the shadow of external stress from a competitive, rigid, meritocratic marking standard where a singular individual determines the worth of every student's final work?
Of course, but saying the current general structure of the Prussian education system is good for this is like saying joining meal team 6 and doing their 13 weeks of misery is the best way to get fit.
What is your definition of a "good education"?
All in all I think the problem here is that I am operating on pseudophilosophical concepts of critiquing the structure of schooling based on how education should be, while you are operating on practical considerations based on how the current system works today.
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Bro I'm still like that and I'm 21