#anti-school

[thornshadowwolf]

As someone with a distaste for the school system and the treatment of children as "stupid humans," I found this an interesting read:

https://stinneydistro.wordpress.com/2015/06/20/no-zine-against-adult-supremacy/

NO! Issue 1

Imposed PDF Children’s Oppression, Rights, and Liberation  Samantha Godwin Parenting Is a Conflict of Interest  Kathleen Nicole O’Neal Cheat

[international-wet-floor-sign]

ok imma finna level with y’all real quick

i am mildly a mess.  here’s why.

(to people: this is not related to the Thing that caused me to take a break from here like 9 months ago or something when I was still @quitzlecoatl)

below the cut:

Let me get this out of the way: being smart is a double-edged sword.  I know everyone says, “Oh my gosh, Lee, you’re so smart!  Everything’s so easy!  You shouldn’t be struggling at all!  You should be thriving!”

You have no idea.

Look: being smart is pretty cool and all; don’t get me wrong.  But, sometimes, being smart can also be pretty annoying.  

At the point of this story, I was in middle school.  Barely five feet tall and very innocent.  I was in an accelerated math class in sixth grade that was three years ahead of the basic curriculum.  I was taking algebra 1 at the time.

All that had to be done to accommodate our schedules was that we ran across the school between two periods and left homeroom and math around three minutes early to fill the time.  It wasn’t that big of a deal, and we weren’t set apart from everyone else.

That all changed a year later.

The first day of school, the eight of us child prodigies all were called down to the principal’s office to have our schedules explained to us.

Apparently, we were going to have gym class with eighth graders and miss half of social studies every day.  We ended up being isolated from everyone else because we all have the same schedule.  We were in every class together, and not many other people were in these classes with us.  So, we ended up being cut off from many of the other people in our grade.  My friend group at the time all had completely different schedules than me, so I only got to see them at lunch, which was around thirty minutes.

The people in this accelerated group are the epitome of “nerds.” They think that getting an A is right, and getting a B is equivalent to getting an F.  It didn’t help that I got a C on my first test and everyone else made fun of me for it.  This mentality transferred to me quickly. All of the pressure that was being placed on me shattered my mental stability.  I was binge-eating every day, crying myself to sleep almost every night, and was always scared to go back to school the next day.  My life was a mess, and I needed to get out of it.

So, I did.  But, not in the way you’d expect.  I asked my middle school at the time to pull me out of the program, and they refused.  

“It was too late in the year,” they said.

“Why would you want to drop down?” they asked.

It was clear they were trying to keep me in the program.  But, I wanted out.

To them, I was just a statistic; I was a strong test score that couldn’t be lost or weakened because I have to make the school look good.

Why would I want to make a school that pushed me past my breaking point look good?

I left that school after spring break of seventh grade.

I went to a different school, a catholic school, for the end of seventh grade and all of eigth grade.  I met great people there, and I learned a lot about myself and other people.  I learned that you aren’t defined just by your grades.  You’re identified by the people around you and how you treat them.  In eighth grade,  I made friends and memories I’ll never forget.  From the Tongue of the Butterfly Incident, to the Wizard of Oz, to being Varsity Basketball Captain, to winning the conference volleyball title, to some of the greatest friendships imaginable, I found myself in my eighth grade year, and I wouldn’t trade that year for anything.  That year was the only year I wasn’t seen as a statistic.  I was more that my grades; I was a person with a niche sense of humor, a loud demeanor, and a whole lot of heart.

Now that I’m in high school with people I left two years ago, I’m not who I was before.  I’m quiet and reserved.  I still have my niche sense of humor and heart, but I’m not as outgoing as I was in eighth grade.  I think my social anxieties have something to do with that.  I wasn’t exactly “cool” and “normal” to the people at my old school.  In fact, I was quite the opposite.  I was picked on a lot, actually.  I still am.  It doesn’t bother me as much, though.

My grades aren’t a big part of my personality, though.  They’re just a thing on the side, like whipped cream with a bowl of strawberries.  When I meet new people, they can’t tell that I’m in honors classes or that I have a high GPA.  I don’t tell people about it because I don’t think that someone should be judged based on how smart they are, and they shouldn’t need to be pushed too much.  You’re smart no matter what classes you’re in.  

To anybody out there being pushed to their breaking point in school: you are smart no matter what.  Nobody should tell you any different.  Your welfare is very important; if you’re being pushed too far, speak up!

You are more than a statistic.  You are more than your brain.  You are yourself, and nobody can take that away.

[fuckyeahradicaled]

Children, Learning, and the Evaluative Gaze of School

How a watched pot loses the desire to boil.

Another absolutely fantastic piece from Carol Black. A must read! And as usual with anything by her, there are so many terrific quotes from this piece I had a lot of trouble picking.

"There is something profoundly deadening to a curious, engaged child about the feeling of being watched and measured, or even, some studies suggest, the anticipation of being measured. Sure, some kids seem to dig it. They preen and pose for it, they compete with their friends for it, they want to be better than everybody else. But everybody can’t be better than everybody else, and this business of being constantly scrutinized and compared to others does something insidious to the life of a child. I've seen kids drop what they're doing in an instant when they realize they're being observed in an appraising way. A wall goes up. The lights go out."

"But the power of the gaze goes beyond the numbers and letters used to quantify it. It exists in looks and tones and body language, in words and in the spaces between words. It is a way of looking at another human being, of confronting another human life; it is a philosophical stance, an emotional stance, a political stance, an exercise of power. As philosopher Martin Buber might have put it, the stance of true relationship says to the other, "I–Thou;" the evaluative gaze says "I–It." It says, "I am the subject; you are the object. I know what you are, I know what you should be, I know what 'standards' you must meet." It is a god-like stance, which is actually a big deal even if you think you are a fair and friendly god."

"The evaluative gaze of school is so constant a presence, so all-pervasive an eye, that many people have come to believe that children would actually not grow and develop without it. They believe that without their "feedback," without their constant "assessment," a child's development would literally slow or even stop. They believe that children would not learn from the things they experience and do and see and hear and make and read and imagine unless they have an adult to "assess" them (or unless the adult teaches them to "self-assess," which generally means teaching them to internalize the adult gaze.) For people whose experience is with children inside the school system, it may seem self-evident that this is true. For people whose experience is with children outside the school system, it may seem like believing that an acorn would not grow into an oak tree unless you measure it and give it your opinion. Because an oak tree does not actually require your opinion, and believe it or not, 90% of the time, neither does a child.

A pot boils whether you watch it or not. It just needs water and fire."

[fuckyeahradicaled]

One of the tragedies of our system of schooling is that it teaches students that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others' judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.

Peter Gray

[fuckyeahradicaled]

Much more than literacy and numeracy is delivered to the peoples of the world by modern institutional schooling. Egalitarian cultures become more hierarchical, as children are ranked and sorted into “successes” and “failures.” Cooperative societies become more competitive, with parents reporting that their children become more selfish as they imbibe the individualistic ethos of school. But one of the most profound changes that schooling brings is the radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.

Carol Black

[fuckyeahradicaled]

Today most people think of childhood and schooling as indelibly entwined. We identify children by their grade in school. We automatically think of learning as work, which children must be forced to do in special workplaces, schools, modeled after factories. All this seems completely normal to us, because we see it everywhere. We rarely stop to think about how new and unnatural all this is in the larger context of human evolution and how it emerged from a bleak period in our history that was marked by child labor and beliefs in children’s innate sinfulness. We have forgotten that children are designed by nature to learn through self-directed play and exploration, and so, more and more, we deprive them of freedom to learn, subjecting them instead to the tedious and painfully slow learning methods devised by those who run the schools.

Peter Gray

[fuckyeahradicaled]

I am very much against assigning books. Making reading mandatory (especially dictating WHAT must be read) is a good way to make someone hate it!

[fuckyeahradicaled]

…the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.

John Holt