> Schools are basically designed to crush that impulse, to humiliate, and
> to control. I never knew what boredom was until I went to school. I
> spent a good part of 1st and 2nd grade in the corner...sometimes on my
> knees...even though I was a straight A student. A significant proportion
> of teachers and parents have absolutely no respect for children. They
> actually think that children are empty, void....until they get filled up
> with whatever the current ideology tells you you have to fill them up
> with. And then they're supposed to feel grateful for that.
Schools as they are currently organized have to be abolished.
I was one of those smart kids who figured out early on that school was designed to stifle learning. I was one of those tykes who was reading adult books by 5th grade. I can still remember reading some 500+ page history of Canada when I was 10 or 11.
I got straight As in grade school and my first two years of middle school. I had transferred from a private Lutheran elementary school to the public school between 6th and 7th grades. I really loved the public middle school. It was a fairly new exurban school with excellent teachers who were an improvement over the authoritarian dinosaurs that taught at the Lutheran school. Fortunately, I quickly became targeted by other kids as a smart kid and a nerd. I figured out that I would need to lower my grades in order to draw less attention from my peers. So I embarked on my own education while being forced to go through school.
I also lucked out and had access to a computer in 1977. The school provided access to a time-sharing computer to several of us "gifted" students. I remember learning Basic and trying to figure out some crude computer games.
I took college prep classes through high school, but due to my own interests, adolescent alienation and boredom with the classes, I finished near the bottom of my class. I had been hoping to pursue a career in astrophysics, but my adolescent body chemistry couldn't cope with an 8 a.m. Pre-Calc class, so I dropped out of math and science. Fortunately, I discovered that I had some artitistic abilites, which got me a small scholarship to KU.
Oh, before I left high school, I managed to place second in the Kansas City Science Fair, matching my school's best showing to that date. I will never forget my science teacher's shock over the fact that I had done better than my classmates, which included the class salutarian (who is now an economist at the University of Chicago), and others who were top of the class.
Thanks to some interesting admission policies at the time, I was able to get into the University of Kansas with a horrible GPA.
I got myself an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin.
I sometimes wonder what our society would be like if it was composed of people who loved learning and who weren't brainwashed by the schooling system.
Needless to say, I'm always shocked when I run across a college-educated person who hasn't read a book since college.
Chuck