We Need Less School, Not More.

Colonial America lacked compulsory government schooling laws, yet it possessed 2 factors that are seldom discovered in modern society: personal independence and personal isolation.

Back then, men were self-employed craftsmen, farmers, or small businessmen who lived in rural communities where every family had their own acreage of land. These people did not depend on the central government for resources, and they had plenty of time for quiet thought, reflection, and true community. The children who were raised in these times had the best education possible, that of experience. Their greatest teacher was life itself. Products of this lifestyle, like Benjamin Franklin, Horace Mann, and Thomas Jefferson, led very successful livelihoods, though they received little to no schooling.

Nowadays,schooling is at an all-time high, and the quality of life is diminishing. A working couple today holds less buying power combined than a singular man did 150 years ago. Both parents work nine-to-five jobs for faceless corporations, forcing the children to go to school during the day to be raised by strangers. Communities have been replaced by networks, and the people are more disconnected from reality than ever. Sure, they may be highly schooled with their bachelors, masters, and PHDS, but that doesn’t mean they’re well educated. They’ve learned to use their mouths to recite information, yet they were never taught to use their brains to think for themselves.

It’s important to distinguish the phrases “schooling” and “education.” The concepts are oxymorons; while they may be grouped together and used interchangeably, they are far from synonymous. Education is an intimate experience one undergoes as he seeks to know himself, while schooling is the forceful imposing of one’s beliefs upon another so that his patterns of behavior are predictable and his future easily controlled. A more appropriate word for schooling is not education, rather indoctrination.

Did you know that the word “educate” is derived from the Latin term “educare” which means “to bring forth from within”? Therefore, education is a process of self-realization, and any form of learning that does not begin with the self as the centerpiece is flawed.

Allow me to introduce to you the modern school system, which is strategically structured to ensure that education doesn’t occur, and this was confirmed by the former U.S. Commissioner of Education in 1889 who wrote that “Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening.” One can’t help but wonder what our schools are doing for eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year if they’re not educating our children. ..




     In 1916, the dean of the Stanford School of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley, wrote that “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned to meet the various demands of life.”

Johann Fitche, a prominent German philosopher behind the Prussian education system (which became the American school system) believed that “Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled, they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.”

     Unfortunately, it is so that our schools-and all the entities that work within it, whether they’re conscious of it or not- toil vigorously to teach our children that their lives are insignificant. The constant ringing of the bells teaches them that nothing is too important to focus on, and being raised in a sea of strangers teaches students that family life and communities are things of the past. School teaches our children to disregard themselves entirely and see their peers as unfit to rule. School teaches a child everything he needs to know except himself, the most important concept to master. And so the student wears a mask in public affairs and in private, and he becomes a stranger, even to himself.