The Chris Moeller Archives

School sucks

I have no desire to go back to school. I hated it then. I’m not interested in it now. (For added measure, its cost does not make the prospect more inviting.) How often do you hear somebody say something like “I love reading now that I’m no longer in school” or “I enjoy learning so much more as an adult than I did when I was a kid.” We all feel this way to some degree, and researcher Peter Gray explains the reason. Humans do not learn best when the education is coerced.

Our schools were set up in a way that is structurally damaging to the learning process, and we’re paying the price as a society by clinging to blind tradition rather than exploring innovation. Children love self-discover. They have a deep, natural curiosity and strong critical thinking skills. These pieces are in place long before they even enroll in school. The maturation in the early years is rapid. As they age, typically, school work becomes something to be endured. I had no interest in the natural sciences when I was a student. The work was compulsory and the subject matter did not resonate. But now that I live in the world, I find myself attracted to the subject tremendously. It seems silly to me to credit school for laying “the groundwork.” I’m not retroactively more thankful for having been introduced to the concepts at a young age. To the contrary, I’m resentful that my interest laid dormant for so long because I had been made to associate the subject matter itself with the process by which it was fed to me.

Much of education today also doubles as institutional reinforcement of the social order, particularly higher education. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote a letter of support to a writing colleague at IUPUI, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, a school with a decidedly-unglamorous reputation. He expressed support for urban schools "whose diplomas are not famous for being tickets to establishments of the ruling class." "Your students," he wrote, "are miles ahead of the Ivy League, since they feel no obligation to pretend that America is something it obviously isn't."

As an adult, free of obligatory study, dictatorial judgment, time restraints, and age segregation, I can see the forest for the orthodoxy.

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A new Reuters poll finds that only nine percent of Americans support U.S. military intervention in Syria. But I’ll be damned if you can tell it by watching the news. The network news shows yesterday and this morning (which, granted, are not really news shows) are beating the war drums. They are treating the intervention as an inevitability and even an imperative for the Obama administration. Secretary of State Kerry called President Bashar al-Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapon a “moral obscenity.” Here come the cops.

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Charles Pierce gets it. The three franchises battling it out for supremacy in the National League Central are an anomaly, all original National League franchises still playing their home games in the city of their birth. Pay close attention in September. It's a special situation.

posted by CM @ 2:44 PM