One of the weirdest characteristics of education in our (western) society… is that our approach to education is extraordinarily authoritarian. It is obsessed with compulsion and control. So the child in the modern classroom may not move, speak, sing, laugh, eat, drink, read, write, think their own thoughts, look out the window, or even use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure. In WEIRD (western educated industrialised rich democratic) societies we are so habituated to this appalling lack of personal freedom that it has become functionally invisible to us and in a truly Orwellian twist, many people now consider it a ‘fundamental human right’ to be legally compelled to learn what somebody in authority says they have to learn.
Carol Black