In
order for there to be freedom, human curiosity cannot be limited. To be human
is to seek understanding. In understanding there is love, there is camaraderie,
there is friendship, there is community, there is togetherness and there is
wholeness. Yet throughout human history, humankind has worked diligently to inhibit
our most natural inclination. The inevitable consequence of limiting curiosity
is the emergence of the harbinger of our intellectual, moral and physical
deaths: Apathy. With each passing decade, Apathy grows ever stronger,
enveloping our minds, deadening our hearts and destroying our souls. The
apathetic are empty, they are devoid of the emotions that characterize humanity, they
seek nothing, pursue nothing and do nothing, they are perpetually depressed and
incapable of discovering why. Apathy thrives in America and it is the greatest
cause for the physical, intellectual and moral deterioration of our nation. To
stave off the inevitable cataclysm that such a decline will invite, curiosity
must be unfettered, it must be allowed to search and explore and it must be
given the room to grow and mature. In centuries past, human curiosity was
curtailed by the institution of religion which decided on our behalf what we ought
to believe. It follows that the next great impediment to human liberation is the
institution of school, which decides on our behalf how we ought to think and
what we ought to know. School has indeed replaced religion, inhibiting our curiosity
with an all too similar hierarchical ordering of society. Where America once
paved the way for religious freedom, it must again strive for the growth of
humanity and build toward educational freedom.
A
clear distinction must be made between schooling and education. Schooling is
the process by which human beings are conditioned to compartmentalize
themselves and their dreams. The school is a paragon of rigidity, an inflexible
machine that demands mindless grade based competition. Rather than encourage
understanding, schools demand the memorization and regurgitation of information
to which no real attachment is ever built. Rather than allow children to
naturally gravitate toward one another, school enforces separatism, dividing human
beings according to age and the ability to memorize and regurgitate. Rather
than allow the developing minds of children to explore and discover the world
and its wonders, school imposes disconnected and meaningless curricula upon
them. None of this is to say undeveloped minds are not in need of guidance. It
is to say that children are naturally inquisitive and thus do not need the
forceful hand of school in order to become exploratory in their behavior. An education
is not an indistinguishable commodity manufactured by teachers in a school
building. An education is the development of unique and invaluable physical
skills, intellectual powers and moral understandings acquired first through simply
living, then through having our curiosity nurtured and our thought processes
challenged. Thus, it is meaningless to have curriculums that divide highly
interconnected fields of study into separate subjects. The only end such
curriculums serve is to teach the human mind to compartmentalize the multifaceted nature of life and rationalize it as being a jumbled mess of disparate and unrelated parts, when it is instead a whole composed of inexorably interwoven wholes. It is also meaningless to have
curriculums that are structured to confine boundless fields of study into
thirty minute periods. All such a structure does is teach our minds to open and
stifle curiosity at a moment’s notice, which is one of the two direct
causes for the unreasonably short attention spans of children. The other cause
is television, both of which serve our minds unrelated, time constrained
segments that train us to forget the immediate past and to disregard the future unless it holds immediate
gratification. Disarmed by this manufactured need for immediacy, children
remain children as their bodies mature into physical adulthood, almost
irreversibly and nearly incurably disabled by the Apathy that pervades our
entire society.
Education,
the antithesis of schooling, is open and fluid, governed solely by curiosity.
It is the act of arming an individual with the tools necessary to develop
oneself intellectually, emotionally and morally for mature life. True education
features a malleable structure, allowing for educators, and most importantly learners
themselves, to adapt said structure to individual needs and wants. Children
first develop their natures through internalizing the attitudes, behaviors and
actions of the major influences in their lives. As they mature, they discover
their true selves by sifting through these internalized influences for the most
deeply resonant ones, then augmenting these understandings with their own
personal perceptions. School, limited by meaningless curricula, divisive
policies and empty standards, can do nothing to aid individuals on that journey.
If a school ever offers anything of educational worth, it is wholly because the
school building has become the only place where children are allowed to be. Hiring well-intentioned teachers is not a solution because they
too are limited by the meaningless curricula and empty standards. Students
inevitably admire these well-intentioned teachers solely for their extraordinary
patience and commendable dedication. Students rarely, if ever, come to
appreciate the actual material being forced upon them. Universal education through
schooling is infeasible and unrealizable because schooling implies education is
entirely the result of being taught. Human beings will, and have, internalize a
crippling dependency on institutions following such a blind assumption. The
answer, then, is to reject the ideology that education can only result from
being taught and replace it with the understanding that while education can
benefit from direct instruction, it results more wholly and more usefully from
self-discovery.
Self-discovery
was once a defining principle of American society. It was summed up in the
second sentence of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights… among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Education
is all at once a matter of life, liberty and happiness. In the absence of an
education, human beings are robbed of the opportunity to live, left to merely
exist in a state of unlimited suffering, painful aimlessness, incorrigible shiftlessness,
crushing ineptitude, soul shattering lostness and hateful ignorance, all of which compound an
already fatally confounding incapacity: the inability to understand Self. The impact education has on living should not and must never be
undermined, as it is from its absence that our fellow human beings have been
driven to suicide, an insoluble madness stemming directly from the inability to
comprehend. All current impediments to living life freely can be directly attributed to
a lack of education, to the absence of nurturing guidance and direct challenges
to our innermost thought processes.
First
robbed of life, the uneducated man is simultaneously relieved of liberty.
Liberty is the ability of an individual to exercise control over their Self.
Animals, unencumbered by the blessed curse of Reason, are motivated largely by
Instinct and are thus unable to exercise full control over their actions. But
we humans, gifted with Reason, have the innate potential for mastery of Self
and understanding of divine Nature and the Universe. If these things are accepted
as liberty in its fullest and most complete form, then any laws prohibiting men
from reaching those thresholds should be considered sinister and heinous.
Compulsory schooling is such a law, as it promotes merely adequacy while
demanding, at minimum, ten years of our lives.
Robbed
of life and relieved of liberty, the uneducated man is also deprived of the
ability to pursue happiness. Happiness is not a thing that can be universally
defined, but it can be understood as a state of mental well-being. But for a
moment, let us ignore what happiness is or is not, as it becomes irrelevant
when it is understood that the uneducated man has not the tools to pursue
anything. The uneducated man resolves himself to aimlessness for the sake of
tranquility and he commits himself to drudgery in the name of productivity. He
does not pursue anything, he holds still and waits. Mental well-being itself becomes
a remote fantasy, something to be dreamed about but never sought for. To be
uneducated is to be all at once denied life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.
Though
he is clearly the antithesis of all it means to be a citizen of the United
States, the uneducated man is ubiquitous in American society. I am him. Your
school aged sons, daughters, nephews and nieces, they are him. Our college aged
brothers and sisters, cousins and friends, they are him. Our middle aged
parents, they have become him. Even our grandparents, who carry what are now
vestigial remnants of previous generations, have been subsumed. And you, you
who may long for something greater than what exists now, you too are him. The
Americans who are not him are long dead, and those who seek to free their
Selves from his grasp have been killed, imprisoned or otherwise ostracized. His
existence is a genetically engineered cancer that pervades and poisons every
facet of American society. And this cancer exists as a direct result of the
educationally worthless American school system. Given that that is the case, it
must then be understood that the American school system is inherently
anti-American.
But
before we are Americans, we are first human beings. Laws propagated by
government representatives in order to control how human beings are educated
are as sinister and as ill-intentioned as those laws which once controlled how
human beings practiced religion. It is both abhorrent and unconscionable to
impose laws which serve to first impede human growth then unabashedly mitigate
the full liberty of human beings. It is this understanding that necessitates
the following statement: The American school system is inherently anti-human.
Increased
funding is not a solution because the American school system is not a thing
that can be repaired. It is not damaged, it is not broken. It is in fine
working order, it does exactly as it was intended to do. It produces a pacified
and predictable public that can easily be monitored and controlled. It does
this by taking the curious human mind and stripping it of all its natural
affinities, until all that is left is a receptive, passive and apathetic husk.
Human beings are schooled enough to be deemed adequate by the society in which
they live, never for the purpose of self-mastery or for the purpose of fully understanding
the world around them. The average American adult will have spent at least 10
years of their life being schooled in mathematics and English, but is incapable
of articulating anything more than the most basic processes of arithmetic, is
inhibited by poor vocabularies and is largely unable to maintain oral or
written coherence. Americans are expected to begin the journey of self-mastery
in their late teen years and early twenties, even though life clearly begins at
birth. And as a result, the purpose behind our beings becomes buried beneath societal goals we
have been forced to internalize. Though initially victims of circumstance, we ultimately grow to become our own hostages,
imprisoned behind the bars of false incapacities that we ourselves prescribe and
straightjacketed by crippling notions of our own design.
If
we are to advance as human beings, there is no other recourse than to utterly
abolish this mockery of reality and liberate ourselves and our children from this
systematic genocide against the human mind. It is time we forever end this
destructive and all together useless system of compulsory schooling. In its
place, we must devise a system wherein education is regarded as an invaluable
treasure, not as a costly commodity. Instead of demanding money and encouraging
debt, this system would demand compensation only in the form of spreading
knowledge. In lieu of school buildings and classrooms, this system would allow
for all places, or in particular, specialty learning centers, workplaces,
homes, parks and community gathering places, to serve as educational bases.
Teachers would no longer exist as instructor, pedagogue, psychiatrist, judge,
baby sitter, police officer and priest all rolled in one, nor would they have
to lead classes of unreasonable amounts of children. Educators would instead
serve us on a more individual basis as moderators to our intellectual
inquiries. Curricular schooling, from which very few retain anything of
substance, would cease to be the norm. Instead, informational and educational
resources would be afforded to those of all ages with the utmost accessibility,
allowing curiosity to be the principal guide for a learner’s mind. Government
officials, who are merely the representatives of our will, must not be allowed
to decide when, where or how we learn. That is a decision that must be left to us,
our parents and our communities. Neither the homeschool nor the charter school extend
far enough to free us of our educational shackles, as they too are governed by
state regulations. Furthermore, it must be made illegal for employers to
question an educational background in the same way that it is both taboo and
illegal for employers to question religious affiliation. By giving credence to an Ivy League embossed paper rather than the human being the paper is meant to represent, we strip our society of humanity by denying ourselves the opportunity to truly discover the breadth of our abilities. The idea that college schooled individuals are more suitable for the task of leading our world is an illusion that must immediately be dispersed. Competency and ability
must be the only questionable aspects of human being in regard to employability.
Education must be made as free as religion in this nation. To this end, a new
amendment to our Constitution must read:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an
establishment of education, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
Though
such action will not immediately solve our dilemma, it will be a step in the
right direction. In order for the next generation to be free, it is upon us who
are of age and of sound mind to deschool society. Such a call to action is far deeper
than merely opening education to the free market, which would inevitably invite
failure and doom. This is a call for Americans to rediscover what it means to
be educated, what it means to be an American and most importantly, what it
means to be a human being. We must decide together what the supreme ends of
humanity are; we must search together for our purpose here. Should any
government, established or burgeoning, ever form against us in that regard, it
shall not prosper, as it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such
government and provide new Guards for our future security, for this is our
heritage, the heritage of humankind, child and caretaker of the Earth.
First I want to say very well written..I only had to look up a few words lol. I get what you're saying..somewhat. I get that that the school system curricula in place now stifles us as human beings. It tells us what to think how to think which leads to our apathy. Our emptiness. Our do nothing pursue nothing care about nothing attitudes. Correct? I get what you're sayikng about how education should allow us to explore on our own, develop our own skills for life liberty and pursuit of happiness.
ReplyDeleteI'm gonna be honest and you know this is not easy for me to do, be upfront about my feelings. I feel like you were describing ME toward the end. " incapable of articulating anything more than the most basic processes of arithmetic, is inhibited by poor vocabularies and is largely unable to maintain oral or written coherence. ... And as a result, the purpose behind our beings becomes buried beneath societal goals we have been forced to internalize. Though initially victims of circumstance, we ultimately grow to become our own hostages, imprisoned behind the bars of false incapacities that we ourselves prescribe and straightjacketed by crippling notions of our own design."
This is a topic that simply cannot be covered in a single reply. I'm not going to pretend to have grasped all the suggestions I picked up on.
Basically from what I understand of this reading though? The school system in place now is like a nerve buried deep in years and years of scar tissue. After the nerve has been suffocated and buried in scar tissue it has died. It is impossible to remove it to fix it. The problem is peeling away all the tissue and being able to get through.Each piece of tissue represents a piece of the system connected to another system connected to another system. Where to start?? How to start??
What about instituting education according to your dream? How will that be structured? Who will decide on that? How will it be measured? Not grade wise? But how is it measured that one is learning or being educated? What about the basics? Reading & writing. Surely you can agree that is needed correct? Do you allow for exceptions? If so what are they and what are the guidlelines for those exceptions?
I sincerely hope I did understand your read correctly in my reply. Questions I asked are just examples. This would be one of those conversations to have on a warm day in Central Park where time is non existant. I have a dream also but one of my favorite sayings is Dreams without action are just fantasies. So right now MY dream is just a fantasy and I havent lost sight of it but I'm curious to know what actions you have in place to spread the word. To make your dream a reality. LoL I have so many questions I hope we can talk further..
Respectfully
Laurelai
ninest123 12.15
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