The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom

by Zachary Slayback

When school and education conflict, education ought to be valued above school.

They are not victims

Disagree. Being a victim doesnt require you be forced into anything

Learning and schooling are not the same thing.

High school became little more than jumping through hoops for state administrators.

I loved learning; I just hated school.

Competition isn’t an inherently good thing, especially on the individual level.[i]

cult of competition

if your competing is entirely status-driven then competition actually quashes your ability to make personal progress.

In the personal mindset the locus of change is with the individual.

If John wants to achieve X, then he must compare himself against what it takes to achieve X and make the proper plans to get there.

I knew what I wanted to do since I was a young child, and school just obfuscated that for me.

So I dropped out.

Why do most people go to college?

Middle-Class Mimetics[iv]

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simply saying that the universities were never intended or designed for the use to which Americans of the mid-20th century put them.

The myth that more formal schooling means more success is exactly that

The cultural mythos we build around college propels smarter people and those more likely to achieve high pay in life (these are not always the same thing) along this path. They likely would have been successful without college.

The best way to prove a stereotype wrong is to live differently.

You don’t need to be a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg or a Harrison Ford to drop out of school.

Going to college without knowing what you want to get out of it or what kind of job you want to land just sets you up for not being in the driver’s seat of your own life.

going “just because” sets a dangerous precedent for your own life.

the idea that you go to college to get a job is absurd on the ground-level,

To get an accurate picture of what you want from life (i.e., the time you spend in the “real world”), you are best served by spending time in the real world. If you are like I was and are coming out of 12 years of compulsory schooling, you probably don’t have a good idea of what the real world is like.

Not all education is schooling, and not all classes are schooling.

many, education and schooling are at odds with each other,

to putting assignment minutiae before learning as a whole,

schools create and reinforce incentive systems that make it difficult to focus on education first and foremost.

Education and work shouldn’t be easily divisible.

It’s time that we rethought the idea that education and work are to be divided. We get the most out of both when we experience them concurrently.

The most valuable skill is basic competence.

organizations often have a difficult time finding people who will do what they say they will do,

If you can approach your work singlemindedly for a short period of time and make yourself indispensable, you’ll never have a hard time getting a paid fulltime job.

They conceptualize that their agency is not something they actually possess until the end of the legally mandated schooling regime.

So, childhood arguably ends somewhere between ages 18 and 23

Compulsory and standardized schooling is completely antithetical to the idea that children can learn when left to their own devices and are, in fact, just adults who spend the majority of their time learning and exploring the world.

we cannot mandate they spend the majority of their time in some way learning subjects mandated by those removed from them.

is leaving an entire generation to the current system not radically cruel when we know we can do better?

There are practically as many philosophies of education as there are schools in the United States.

teaching young people that there are only one or two “right” and “wrong” answers to most questions and that those specific answers must be arrived at in a certain way (as many standardized

tests do) only reinforces this mindset on them that problems are solved by following a formula.

Add into that equation being at some form of school programs from 6 AM until 6 PM and then going home to do homework until 7 or 8 PM, and young people are forced to view the world in a very different, very structured way.

The world is not designed in the way of a classroom and classrooms cannot be designed this way.

Crafting meaning from the world should be the primary priority of any person,

we must even “imagine Sisyphus happy,” as he rolls a boulder up a hill for eternity.

Boston College Psychologist Peter Gray’s excellent 2013 work Free to Learn.

Gray says compulsory schools are by definition prisons).

Unschoolers go about their days and primarily learn from their interaction with the world around them.

military schools, compulsory public schools, traditional parochial schools — may not be dictatorships, but they are strikingly similar to prison

standardization across the education spectrum teaches children to relegate their independent thought and faculties to things outside of “thinking,” and to conceive of thinking as work to be done under threat of force.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is