Why I hate school!

Tell that this is not true and I may change my mind. Tell why you think that this is good for your children. Tell me wht you expect from your children as they endure this. (From Teaching as a Subversive Activity by the late Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner via Dick Jones)

"The institution we call ‘school’ is what it is because we made it that way.  If it is irrelevant, as Marshall McLuhan says; if it shields children from reality, as Norbert Wiener says; if it educates for obsolescence, as John Gardner says; if it does not develop intelligence, as Jerome Bruner says; if it is based on fear, as John Holt says; if it avoids the promotion of significant learnings, as Carl Rogers says; if it induces alienation, as Paul Goodman says; if it punishes creativity & independence, as Edgar Friedenberg says; if, in short, it is not doing what needs to be done, it can be changed; it must be changed.

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In our society, as in others, we find that there are influential men at the head of important institutions who cannot afford to be found wrong, who find change inconvenient, perhaps intolerable, & who have financial or political interests they must conserve at any cost.  Such men are, therefore, threatened in many respects by the theory of the democratic process and the concept of an ever-renewing society.

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The principles of educational process now:

•    Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism.

•    Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business.

•    Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, & the collection of unrelated ‘facts’ is the goal of education.

•    The voice of authority is to be trusted & valued more than independent judgement.

•    One’s own ideas & those of one’s classmates are inconsequential.

•    Feelings are irrelevant in education.

•    There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question.

•    English is not history & history is not science & science is not art & art is not music, & art & music are minor subjects & English, history & science are major subjects, & a subject is something you ‘take’ &, when you have taken it, you have ‘had’ it, & if you have ‘had’ it, you are immune & need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)