Episode Details

6-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss Of Formal Schooling http://www.theonion.com/content/news/6_year_old_stares_down_bottomless What if children really knew what they were being dragooned into? "Public education" is group think writ large; "This is what we're supposed to do"; adults erroneously believe it's "good for socialization" Schools as prisons, basically forced "socialization" It's HOW you're taught that does the harm The Student as Nigger: Essays and Stories by Jerry Farber http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html "...imagine what the effect must be upon our apt and impressionable minds of a twelve-year course in servility. Think about it...What is it that they're teaching you? Twelve years pitted against your classmates in a daily Roman circus. The game is Doing What You're Told." The insanity of forcing people (either big people or little people) to learn things The Comprachicos by Ayn Rand (in "The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution", pp. 41-95. Signet, 1975); government school "socialization" leads to gang warfare and loss of conceptual thinking and objectivity http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/learning.html Choice quotations: http://www.stormy.org/edcompr.htm Ayn Rand and her thoughts on Rational Education by Michael S. Berliner http://tinyurl.com/8ylvr8 "Learning" by memorization rather than conceptual integration doesn't foster enlightened and healthy minds; it's dire and hopeless and soul-crushing "Public education" can't be rationally defended, but educators do have their rationalizations... Since "public education" is coercively funded, we can expect the aftermath--such as mass servility and obedient payment of property taxes Jerry Farber's "IF IT WEREN'T COMPULSORY..." http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html "It would be well if we stopped lying to ourselves about what compulsory schooling does for our children. It temporarily imprisons them; it standardizes them; it intimidates them. If that's what we want, we should admit it. There's not much point in going on about this. If you've somehow missed reading A.S. Neill's Summerhill, you ought to go out and get it." http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School http://www.amazon.com/Summerhill-School-New-View-Childhood/dp/0312141378 Parents and other adults are much better able to create educational environments that cater to the varying interests and abilities of children, and kids should be free to pick and choose as they see fit Delayed adolescence courtesy of governmental schools Trashing Teens: Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them. by Hara Estroff Marano http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/index.php?term=pto-20070302-000002&print=1 The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by Robert Epstein; Ph. D. http://www.amazon.com/Case-Against-Adolescence-Rediscovering-Adult/dp/188495670X Being able to conceptually integrate in an objective fashion is the hallmark of maturity (an