When you take the free will out of education, that turns it into schooling.
Pick up a fifth-grade math or rhetoric textbook from 1850 and you’ll see that the texts were pitched then on what would today be considered college level. The continuing cry for “basic skills” practice is a smoke screen.
At the heart of the durability of mass schooling is a brilliantly designed power fragmentation system which distributes decision-making so widely among so many different warring interests that large-scale change is impossible to those without a codebook.
It is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schoolteaching is destructive to children.
It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.
Grades don’t measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager.
You either learn your way towards writing your own script in life, or you unwittingly become an actor in someone else’s script.
There isn’t a right way to become educated; there are as many ways as there are fingerprints.
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
It was never factually true that young people learn to read or do arithmetic primarily by being taught these things. These things are learned, but not really taught at all. Over-teaching interferes with learning, although the few who survive it may well come to imagine it was by an act of teaching.
You need experience, adventure, and explorations more than you need algebra!
One of the first things a family tries to teach its children is the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of the first things our schools do is destroy that distinction.
The primary goal of real education is not to deliver facts but to guide students to the truths that will allow them to take responsibility for their lives.
I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist.