"school" rant

Cheater.

 

yeah that's true

 

it's not that i'm ineducated, i just don't understand y they make u "learn" things that will have no importance to u within your life, & i sure as hell don't understand y schools waste so much money on sports instead of accademic related activities, they cut off our liberal arts club paper supply but the sports clubs always have new equipment {not that i have anything against sports but that's ridiculus}

 

Life is about learning, though. If they can cram a lifetime of knowledge into your skull at a young age think of all the other stuff you can busy yourself with. Maybe figuring out new stuff, or getting a paying job. haha

 

i know what you mean.. but that's assuming that a certain curriculum had been set.... you can teach your children all they need to know without making a schedule
\


edit: provided the children were eager to learn

 

You mean "UNeducated"?

One of the reasons you "learn" things [why did you have quotation marks] is because if you only wanted to learn about lets say English studies, how would you knwo that is what you want to do with your life. What if something a teacher said in Math class completly changed your outlook on it and it was a new passion for you? Do you want to grow up ignorant? I am reminded of the home schooled kids on Amazing Race family who were taught that the big lake by N'Orleans was "one of the 5 great lakes"...

Also, did you ever stop and think that maybe the sports teams did fundraising to get new stuff? Sports isn't as pointless as you make it seem. It provides good exercise and also motivates teamwork. Most school I know also don't allow poor students on the teams (at least in high school) and by poor student, I don't mean someone who tries their best but does below average, I mean somsone who just plain doens't do their work...nor do they allow kids who get in trouble all the time. It encourages people to be good memerbs of society...

 

u need not b educated 2 get a well paying job, ex.-writers, u don't have 2 go 2 college 2 become a writer/have your stories published, same with anyform of artist the extra education isn't going 2 effect how your payed, who cares about money anyway, as long as u have enough 2 get by, money is sickening, "the root of all evil", & just another way the government controls us. i evry1 didn't feel the need 2 own evrything & "learned how 2 share there would b no need for any of it

 

Besides, there's nothing wrong with summer sales labelled back to school sales. When I was in elementary, that was the only time all year long that I got new clothes, my parents never felt the need to spend mony on my clothes during the rest of hte year.

 

Writing isnt a wellpayign job for most people. And spellcheck only catches so much (like b, u, 2, etc. I know my writing/spellign isnt perfect on here but spellcheck would catch 99% of my errors on here)

Artists in general dont have wellpaying jobs, barely scrape by for the most part. (And yes you ranted about money later on, but you brought up the 'wellpaying' bit first)

 

No, but going to school will help you type. ex. Affect, not Effect. And besides, school isn't just about memorising facts...it is about learning how to think.

This is a laughable statement.

And this is so incoherant I can't even pretend to know what you are talking about.

 

Nice eye. I never caught that.

 

Your ideas are juvenile and undeveloped. Your spelling and grammar is terrible. There isn't a single thing here to demonstrate you wouldn't benefit by another metric shitload of schooling.

And trust me - there is a hell of a lot more to good writing than spellcheck.

 

Fµçk ëðµçå†ïøñ¡

 

Writers and any person who doesnt go to college but is successful in life financially (and i mean successful as in isn't living paycheck to paycheck), were educated some other way. writing (spelling and grammar, techniques in storytelling, etc) is something you have to learn. Maybe not by your English teacher (as you obviously haven't), but if not there, than through a lot of effort on your own part.
And you'll want to make enough to live more than paycheck to paycheck. Surprising new expenses pop up all the time. For example, hospital bills, babies, deaths and cars breaking.

 

Something a comrade wrote, that i think is pretty interesting


Overcoming the Psychology of School
by Wild Youth

Every high-school student and anyone who has ever
attended high school is intimately familiar with the
psychology of high school. In point of fact, the
psychology of high school is the pathology of
commodity-society and thus it is not enough to say
that everyone is well acquainted with the
psycho-malaise of high school, but rather this
institutional psycho-malaise is the psychology of
individuals themselves. Of course this should come as
no surprise considering that the principal function
of school is widely accepted – amongst
revolutionaries at least – as being the reproduction
of the social relations of capital. What is surprising
is the dearth of rigorous, specific and revolutionary
critiques of high school [2]. Apart from Ivan
Illich's seminal polemic Deschooling Society, little
attention has been paid to the elaborate workings of
school. It is totally inadequate for our critique of
high school to be a mere appendage on a position
paper consisting of a few anti-authoritarian
platitudes (we oppose authority so we naturally
reject conventional schooling). The many deleterious
facets of high school must be analysed in full and
their instrumental role in capital's domestication of
humanity elucidated.

Because high school acts as capital's incubator,
some of the dominations and contradictions inherent
in capital naturally appear in an analogous form
within high school, while some couldn't be said to
appear at all [3]. But those that do manifest do so
in a way endemic to high school and thus should be
treated specifically. I hope to briefly illuminate
those that I have come to recognise and which
collectively constitute the psychology of high school
as personally experienced. I also hope to open up
discourse on the subject and stimulate further
critical analyses of high school by high school
students themselves. We can only overcome the
psychology of high school if we understand its
processes and how we have been conditioned thus far.


The Perversion of Desire

It is self-evident that high school – as one of the
institutions of capital – seeks to transform
individuals into productive automatons. How it does
this isn't quite as clear. Sure, the same
manipulative techniques are used as elsewhere in the
spectacle, but what does this look like exactly and
how does it feel? The high school student's desire to
explore and experiment with the world of knowledge –
if it has survived years of previous schooling – is
brutally perverted to serve the interests of
industrial society [4]. High school falsely satisfies
this desire by offering a clockworklike sequence of
curricular consumption and measured performance with
the ostensible purpose of education and development.
In the face of this overwhelming normality, the high
school student abandons all dreams of passionate
inquiry, creative trial and error and ever-expanding
learning experiences. Some will never even notice
this happening. For others this resignation is a
tragically conscious decision that must be made if
they are to ever feel happy and successful [5]. Once
the high school student embraces externally dictated
education, she becomes in fact nothing more than a
high school student whose primary concern is
fulfilling her role par excellence. Once this process
is complete the high school student is ready for the
externally dictated activity of the world of work.


Quantification

The educational guise of high school can scarcely
conceal the true nature of this formidable
institution. At every stage, the high school student
questions the necessity of some protocol, some
formality to the overall success of their education.
As soon as the illusion is torn down and high school
is seen in its true functional light – a method of
determining another wage slave's position in the work
pyramid – the need for its vast bureaucratic modus
operandi will become apparent. High school students
are spot on when they declare that examinations and
year-round assessments have nothing to do with
education. For the pathological evaluation and
measurement of the high school student's performance
does not facilitate their education but rather
acclimates them to the logic of civilization: that
creative activity, the pursuit of knowledge, personal
growth and even life its self must be quantified,
analysed and reduced to some abstract form. We cannot
even begin to discuss the impact this has on both the
spirit and the psyche of the high school student. The
anxiety, guilt and helplessness evoked by being
constantly assessed and compared to the alienated
activity of others brings the high school student to
the brink of suicidal desperation [6].
Well-accustomed to the unending pursuit of higher and
higher grades, those who emerge from high school
seemingly unscathed are well and truly desensitised
to civilization's fixation with greater and greater
value [7].

Alienated Activity

Before the high school student is alienated in the
sphere of production – for he has long been alienated
in the sphere of social consumption – she is
alienated in the sphere of instruction. The alienated
activity of the high school student does not produce
a tangible commodity, thus no surplus value is
created and consequently exploitation in the
traditional sense does not occur. Nevertheless, the
form and content of his/her schooling is determined
by an institution and their experiences therein are
reified. The daily activity of the individual high
school student bears no distinction [8] from their
peers who all regard their movements as mere “school
work”. They exercise no control over the form and
content of their instruction and so what little they
do achieve becomes the achievement of an institution,
as it was an institution that presided over the
entire experience from beginning to end. Education
really does become something other and this explains
the visceral contempt and disinterest many students
feel towards high school. Like all alienation, the
high school student feels self-worth insofar as she
participates and excels in the institution that
surrounds him.

When the high school student begins to fall behind
his classmates in the competitive consumption of
curricula, she succumbs to the castigation of
teachers and parents and internalises the constraint.
He/she has now learnt to feel satisfaction only when
an inhuman institution applauds his/her output.

Fragmentation

The fragmentation of daily experience and social
activity outside of high school is a firmly ensconced
public secret. How this manifests for the high school
student is particularly noxious. Accelerating what
started as soon as she entered the schoolyard as a
child, the high school student's world is violently
divided in two: the educational and the
non-educational [9]. What little learning is done
within high school assumes far greater importance – a
predictable result when the high school student's
spectacular role is contingent on their high school
success – than that which is not. This incredibly
limiting dualism tears apart what is naturally a
holistic experience and depreciates learning done
outside of school. So much so that the high school
student forgets how to learn without being taught
and/or fails to recognise and appreciate edifying
experiences outside the walls of high school. The
inverse of this fragmentation is that there is now a
specific time and place for those experiences that
are not considered to be educational. Hence the high
school student relegates partying, art, music,
property damage and other joyous activities to
weekends and holidays alone. Here the high school
student is seduced by the temporality of the
spectacle and the compartmentalization of her time
really gets going.

I have only looked at a few aspects of what really
is a multifaceted microcosm of alienation. We must
theorize further if we are to thoroughly understand
the psychology of high school and how to liberate
ourselves from it's crippling grips. It is equally as
important for us to test our theory through practice.
By playing around with different methods of
subversion we can discover the weak spots in our
theory and the institution it seeks to destroy. We
also have to heal the spiritual and psychological
lesions that high school has inflicted upon us and
there is no better self-therapy than joyous revolt.


Footnotes:

[1] I have focused on high school specifically instead
of school generally not because there is any
fundamental difference between elementary and
secondary school, but because the methods of
conditioning are intensified in the latter. It also
helps that I currently find myself there.

[2] To be honest, the lack of a critique of school
amongst so-called radicals does not surprise me in
the slightest. In fact, the number of social democrats
masquerading as revolutionaries who either apologize
for high school or blatantly support it are no small
few. An even larger number of solid comrades
unfortunately just fall short of really understanding
the domination of high school. To be fair though, one
must take into account that many revolutionaries were
not revolutionary during their high school years and
as a result any retroactive critique of school will
struggle to really appreciate the magnitude of its
oppression.

[3] No matter how hard I look I can't find, for
example, wage slavery and the extraction of surplus
value occurring within high school, although the
preparation is clearly taking place. Could one posit
that we produce value to- be-realized every time we
consume and regurgitate curricular thereby
determining our future position in the capitalist mode
of production?

[4] Needless to say, the infinite desires of the
high school student – just like the rest of humanity
– outside of the realm of inquiry are also mutilated
and re-directed to serve the interests of capital. Our
desire to play is replaced by the consumption of
economic pseudo-pleasures and so forth.

[5] This scenario is all too real for me. I just
recently lost a friend to the logic of high school
who openly admitted that the pursuance of an
alternative was simply too hard.

[6] In many cases young people cross this divide and
can simply not endure the pain of high school any
longer. We need to show that while suicide may
expedite survival the only way to life is through the
joyous revolt of desire.

[7] I draw a parallel between the pursuit of grades
and the pursuit of value, as the former really is
just one of civilization's many value systems. Any
qualitative richness that may miraculously arise
during high school is always subordinated to
quantitative success.

[8] While it may be true that the activity of high
school students during school actually is identical
in that they have a limited number of curricula to
consume, the subjective responses are plethoric
despite this standardization.

[9] I'm rather uncomfortable using the term
education due to its prevailing connotations. Though
there exist several dictionary definitions for
education that do not imply an externally directed
formal process.

 

Spellcheck is the scourge of the English language.

"Aye right two learn."

*shudders*

 

geeze peeople we r sooo mean ...

It's liek OMG we are controlledd by da amarican gauverrnemant

 

How do you know that they won't have any importance to you at a later point? Can you predict the future?

 

lol the irony in this zodiac, is that to write all that you just wrote in this thread... well your ideas and ways to do it were created by going to school.. you learned how to write (poorly , i might add). so there, you did learn something at school. good job buddy

I've never liked going to school myself, and always asked myself questions about it, I mean... it IS where we spend most of our childhood, and adolescence at... but to be honest, you do learn things, maybe they're not 100% correct, but hey, nothing is 100% correct. It only teaches you the essentials that you will use later in life.

If you would of never gone to school, you wouldn't know how to write, wouldn't know how life works, wouldn't know about the air you breathe, if it's clean, if it's not, you wouldn't know how thunderstorms create, or how to measure temperature, or which dangerous reactions can create if you expose a certain gas to a certain level of heat, or pressure... I can go on and on.

So please, at least be smart enough to realize that what you are today, the thoughts constructed in your mind... were strongly affected by what you learned at school throughout the years, and that if it wasn't for those things you've apprehended, you'd be far more ignorant then you are today.

 

unless youre speaking from the biological standpoint, nobody knows how life works.