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[–]WickedWitchOfTheWest 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Why it’s time to abolish schools

Then there are the more mundane forms of cruelty, like boredom. If you have ever worked in a school — if you haven’t but you manage to combine the attributes of a High Court Judge, a Welfare Officer, and a Prison Guard, then you ought to apply now — you will know that many, if not all, pupils are bored to the marrow. At the school I worked in, it was not uncommon for some of them to simply fall asleep at their desks. The teaching profession is obsessed with the idea of “engagement”. If only teachers can produce the right tasks, develop the most involving activities, then pupils will pay attention. But for a good number of pupils, it is not the activity, the lesson, or the teacher that fails to engage them — it is the fact they are being forced to go to school against their will.

They are forced to do tedious tasks, watch tedious videos, and listen to tedious teachers. Huge cliff-sized chunks of irrelevant material are dropped on them from a great height, for obscure purposes. Once they have learned to read, and learned basic mathematics, and learned how to stand in a line without starting a brawl, what exactly are most of them there for? To learn about the water cycle? To learn how to read a map? They can google the water cycle, and they have GPS on their phones. Children are technology-literate in ways that their parents and teachers don’t really grasp at all. The educational system — like so many others in the last decade — has been outflanked by technology to the point where it looks obsolete.

As a result, pupils report becoming more and more bored with secondary school as it grinds on. Up to a third of Year Nine pupils in 2016, for instance, said they felt bored at school. Experts have long recognised this, but they blame it on hormones, rather than the fact that for many children, school work is irrelevant to their interests and unsuited to their abilities. No wonder. If I were locked in a room and forced to watch someone I wasn’t wild about — say Paul Mason — blather on about something I found boring — like the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg — I would begin to seethe a bit.

If you then told me that I had to ask Paul for permission to go to the toilet, or that the person behind me would begin to start prodding me with a broken ruler sharpened to a fine, stabby point, I would start to feel seriously frustrated. That’s precisely what school is for millions of children. Institutionalised, legally-mandated, financially wasteful frustration, overseen by teachers who are, politically at least, just like Paul Mason.

And then we tell these Year Nines they have to endure it for four more years after the point they have given up on school entirely. The English used to flog children’s bodies, now we flog their minds instead and call it progress.