Why School Damages Children by Imran

Another post by Imran which he has kindly given me permission to blog.
A permission I requested so that his  thoughtful and informed ideas can be available in the public domain.

From a post to a home ed support list. 

Hi New Person, and also to ___

Thank you for saying what you said about school, and challenging us for

our anti-school bias. Given the anti-school bias that you pointed to in

this forum, I acknowledge your stand for something different, for

presenting an opposing point of view.

Having said that, I disagree with your point of view; I believe that

school damages children. The only instance when it can be a salvation

is when home life is so distressing that going to school is a relief. I

maintain that most children are damaged by schooling. The problem is

that this "damage" has become normative, and that there are no controls.

Last point first. I had a good time at school. Wasn't bullied much, did

okay academically, and pretty much enjoyed myself. I don't have another

me who was HE'd at the same time that I can draw comparisons with. This is a

challenge that we all face. How can we be sure that what we are doing as

parents really is the best for our children?

By normative abuse, I mean that school is so part of our culture, that

we don't see, or even stop to consider what are the disadvantages, and

the damage it does. If everyone suffers the same way, then it’s harder to

see the damage because it doesn't stick out. If I use bottle-feeding as

an analogy, I can make my point clearer. A woman bottle feeding in

England, doesn't stick out the way she would in Sweden or among the

Yanonami in the Amazon. A child fed on bottle milk appears to be

thriving. What's not apparent is how the health of the colon is

compromised, or the immune system is compromised. So it is with a child

that appears to be happy and doing well at school. What's not apparent

is the internal, intrinsic compromises; internal processes that don't

develop to their full potential. This doesn't get noticed because

everyone else's processes have been similarly compromised.

Schooling impairs neurological function. The numbers of

connections that each neuron can make to others is reduced, thus the

ability to think divergently (i.e. the ability to have your thoughts go

off in many, many directions) is impaired. Children's social skills are

distorted by being forced to mix with 30 others of the same age, and be

ordered about all day by an adult. This is not the same as learning to get on

with people of all ages, in real life. That after all is our

evolutionary legacy. We are designed to live in multi-generational

communities, learning by imitating and trying and asking. We don't need

to be taught in order to learn. We are born with the ability to think

conceptually, and only need the space to give our thoughts and ideas

expression.

If you are not convinced, you could look at the results. Many US states

require all children to sit SATS. HE kids do considerably better than

schooled kids, with those being autonomously educated often doing best

of all. Why is that? Why should those with the least formal HE do better

than those with the most formal of education i.e. schooling? I think it

is because the ability to learn is natural to us as human beings. School

gets in the way. That was after all the way the Prussian aristocracy

designed it. They didn't design "skoles" for the sake of the infant

peasantry. They designed it to instill compliance and obedience, and to

destroy the capacity for independent thought. That played right into

the hands of the industrialists who lobbied their governments to make

school compulsory so that they would have a workforce that would put up

Victorian factory conditions, day after day, without a murmur of

dissent. Schools weren't designed out of concern for the literacy of

children, which goes some way to explain why literacy in the US has

actually declined since the advent of factory schooling. An educated

proletariat is a dangerous proletariat. An educated worker is a

dangerous worker. He is more likely to stand up for his rights, know

what they are, and/or leave to get a better job, with a better wage. It

serves the needs of capital to keep workers dumb.

It was not out of benign concern that the Europeans exported factory

schooling to their little brown subjects in the Americas, and Africa and

Australia and Asia. The British Raj didn't bring schools to India as an

act of charity. Educated Indians would be dangerous...unless of course

you can occupy their time elsewhere, in a school, engaging in

meaningless tasks, learning to be subservient to a foreign Queen,

versus to their own parents and traditions, and their own Gods. This way

you can stop them from really educating themselves; which is why I

believe that Hitler outlawed home education. Too bad if your parents are

Communists, or opposed to the Nazi vision, he wanted to ensure that no

one got to escape the poisonous influence of the Hitler Youth.

So there you have it, school as a tool for advancing the agenda of the

state. That is not the same as being designed to educate our young.

Think about it if you were to design a system for educating children,

would you really design it this way? Would anyone? In this system,

bullying is endemic, and all suffer: those that bully, those that are

bullied, and those that are bullied. In this system a child is lucky if

she gets 10 minutes one to one time with her teacher in a week. In this

system the poet has to endure physics, and the artist has to endure

maths. The kinaesthetic child has to sit still, while his more sedentary

friend is forced to jump. No child gets what they need it when they need

it, as their needs are always subservient to the needs and demands of

the school factory. In this system, the average child will spend over

14,000 hours of her life, when all she needs is 80-100 hours of one to

one time to learn to read as well as you and I, and to cover the entire

school maths curriculum. This system produces people who cannot think

for themselves. I see it in the work I do in the Middle East, training

Indian workers in communication skills. Years of being taught to the

test, of being ordered about and told what to do has altered their

neurons. They have been conditioned not to think, only to please the

teacher, as that is how you ensure you get good grades, or at the very

least escape punishment. They don't think. They shut up and put up,

waiting to be told. Just as Johann Fichte, the Prussian philosopher who

lobbied the Prussian ruling class to institute "skoles” said they

would.

That is an affront to human potential. That is why I disagree with your

point of view. Schools do damage.

Regards

imran


Another post by Imran is blogged here.