Satire: 6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss of Formal Schooling
August 24th, 2008It might be The Onion, but it’s not funny.
Via: The Onion:
Local first-grader Connor Bolduc, 6, experienced the first inkling of a coming lifetime of existential dread Monday upon recognizing his cruel destiny to participate in compulsory education for the better part of the next two decades, sources reported.
“I don’t want to go to school,” Bolduc told his parents, the crushing reality of his situation having yet to fully dawn on his naïve consciousness. “I want to play outside with my friends.”
While Bolduc stood waiting for the bus to pick him up on his first day of elementary school, his parents reportedly were able to “see the wheels turning in his little brain” as the child, for the first time in his life, began to understand how dire and hopeless his situation had actually become.
Basic math—which the child has blissfully yet to learn—clearly demonstrates that the number of years before he will be released from the horrifying prison of formal schooling, is more than twice the length of time he has yet existed. According to a conservative estimate of six hours of school five days a week for nine months of the year, Bolduc faces an estimated 14,400 hours trapped in an endless succession of nearly identical, suffocating classrooms.
This nightmarish but undeniably real scenario does not take into account additional time spent on homework, extracurricular responsibilities, or college, sources said.
“I can’t wait until school is over,” said the 3-foot-tall tragic figure, who would not have been able, if asked, to contemplate the amount of time between now and summer, let alone the years and years of tedium to follow.
The concept of wasting a majority of daylight hours sitting still in a classroom when he could be riding his bicycle, playing in his tree fort, or lying in the grass looking at bugs—especially considering that he had already wasted two years of his life attending preschool and kindergarten—seemed impossibly unfair to Bolduc. Moreover, sources said, he had no idea how much worse the inescapable truth will turn out to be.
Related: The Underground History of American Education
And if our fictional six-year-old here was born after 1960, he will get very little in return for enduring all that unless he conforms himself to a very rigorous and limiting way of life.
“It might be The Onion, but it’s not funny.” You said it.
When I discuss the fact that we homeschool our kids with other parents, I ask them to imagine this: you, a full-grown adult, have to sit in a room for 45 minutes or so, and ask the one and only person with authority in that room if you can get out of your seat, go to the bathroom, or even speak. You must do what that person tells you, or risk being disciplined. At the end of the 45 minutes, a loud bell or buzzer goes off, and you have a few minutes to get to the other end of the building, open a locker, exchange your books, and get to another room where you are subject to the same rules, with a different group of adults. If you are late getting to that room, you may have to endure some form disciplinary action. This is repeated a number of times throughout the day, everyday, for years. You have no say in how this process operates.
Then I ask them, if you think your life is stressful now, with your white-collar job, being able to speak more-or-less when you want, going to the bathroom when you want, working with pretty much the same group of people in a much more stable environment — if you think THAT’S stressful, how do you think you’d feel in the environment I just described? But that’s what we do to our kids, and they don’t even have the maturity with which to view it with any kind of perspective.
Not to mention the fact that most of what is taught is busy work, anyway. Quiz: what’s the chief export of Romania? Answer: Who gives a shit! But chances are, if you went to public school, you had to memorize that and thousands of other useless facts at some point. Only to forget them shortly after.
The real lesson of public school is simply this: you will never be free, and you will never change how the system works; the best you can hope for is to become one of the powerful that can order others around.
That Onion article really hits home even if it is meant to be satire. It’s practically a blueprint of how I felt at that age when I was in school. I remember sitting in my 1st grade math class trying to grasp addition etc. and being overwhelmed at how much more I’d have to “learn” before I was a grown-up.
People are born naturally curious, but our education system seems to stifle that curiousity and instead, in a military-lite fashion, drills memorization of facts/figures with a overt emphasis on logic/reason.
Of course, many kids are brought up to think that getting a degree through a formal education is the main objective. I realized that learning, in all its forms, is a lifelong process.
If you ain’t learnin’ you aint’ livin’
i have come to the conclusion that the great majority of parents in affluent countries view kindergarten, primary and secondary schooling as:
1. a cheap child-minding service
2. a means to turn their children into “employment market offerings”
children natuarally want to learn, and are curious about the world and how it works. most of us emerged from the mainstream school system, but so many seem utterly brainwashed and unable to think outside a narrow band of “business-as-usual reality” that it really makes me very reluctant to let my children be fed into such a meatgrinder.
I remember having feelings like that in school. But, I was lucky: I was incredibly smart, skipped four grades over a number of years and got out of there early. Then I discovered the ‘real world’ wasn’t much better.
I long ago vowed not to have kids unless I can homeschool them.
My boy started his second week of 2nd grade this week. Didn’t want to get out of bed and go to school. I said, okay, if you miss the bus you can stay home with me and pick up rocks in the pasture and garden all day. All day. No tv, no playing around, just work with rest and food breaks.
He opted for the rocks. Wife overruled my idea.
Come on and CRASH already. Public school ought to be an early casualty – or at least they won’t track kids down that don’t show up.
Call it “self-schooling” and it won’t be confused with religious fundamentalist brainwashing known as “home-schooling.” The self-schooling I investigated reported that a person can learn everything that is taught from K-12 in 18 months if motivated. As Tochigi says, American public schooling is primarily child care. In the main it is beyond pathetic, but on a teacher by teacher basis, especially in primary school, a kid can get lucky. By middle school, though, forget it. My children’s middle school principal admitted to me that American public school is geared for the unexceptional student. If you have special needs or if you are creative, an active learner, or highly intelligent, American public school has nothing for you. In fact, if you are particularly sensitive, it can be detrimental to your emotional health. From Winston Churchill to Woody Allen exceptional people have nightmare stories to tell of their grammar schooling. I tried to talk my two daughters into self-schooling, but they’d have nothing to do with it. Why? The social life! It may be a jungle out there, but I guess my two daughters identified with Sheena. Besides, how else can you identify with Grease, American Pie, and High School Musical unless you’ve been through it yourself?
Peregrino:
The high-school grades primarily serve to keep teenagers who are old enough to work adult jobs off the full-fledged employment market so that they won’t take jobs that would otherwise go to older adults. Same for college, only college, due to its expense, also acts as a means for keeping certain jobs confined to a hereditary middle-class, with scholarships making it possible for some smart, motivated, and properly conformed members of the laboring classes to work their way up.
I would also add that their are some forms of higher education that are very necessary for professions where one really needs to know one’s stuff, such as law, medicine, engineering, and accounting.
Whoo boy, I do relate to this story. My Mom very much wanted to get out the house and sent me to first grade at 5 and 1/2. I cried for days on end because Catholic School sucked so much and I felt that Mom had abandoned me.
Well, she did abandon me to the system. And yes, well I should have gotten over this by now almost 50 years later, but no, I have not.
My friends in Va homeschooled their children. N got a GED and is an artist. Her child is a frickin genius. N did not want her children socialized in school with the likes of those in the community.
Anyways, I hope the schooling system is the first to go down under. What a freakin joke. Our kids are not learning.
My nephew, 25, is absolutely psychotic over the idea that he must attend college in order to be supported by my sister. Meanwhile he wastes thousands of my sister’s dollars to pay for an education that he does not want.
I for one think my nephew is quite normal. I think he should follow his hearts desire and be a person who rurbo charges cars.
Get the life he wants instead of being a cookie already signed sealed and approved by those who count the ducets rather than talents.
Public schools (as you call them in the US) have become subservient to half-backed 60’s and 70’s sociological theories which undermine the mental health of our children. Added to that exams and IQ tests have been reformulated to favour memory and linguistic type skills rather than a broader definition of intelligence.