What’s The Point of School?
It might be important to ask, not just for this blog, but for you personally: What’s the point of school? The answer seems simple, but maybe it isn’t. My belief is that school is a place for children to learn the necessary skills required to assimilate into society and experience freedom. Sure, that includes learning things like how to read and write or add and subtract, but it also includes things like learning how to walk down the hallway and stand in a lunch line. Put to use practically, these skills conform our society so we aren’t all road-raging the fuck out of each other in a traffic jam or drop-kicking every dick in the grocery store check-out line so we can be next. We learn to wait our fucking turn. Kids learn what’s socially acceptable and how to interact with each other. They learn that just because you get called a fat gay pussy by the football team (which isn’t socially acceptable), it isn’t okay to bring a gun to school the next day and shoot every motherfucker you see. When kids perform the ritual of raising their hands to speak, what they’re really learning to do is shut the fuck up as adults. Society simply doesn’t accept traffic jam road-raging, check-out line dick-kicking, fat-gay-pussy defaming, school-shooting fuck-ups with poor communication skills. If you believe, like I do, that schools essentially function to equip students with the basic skills necessary to navigate society and pursue their dreams, then why aren’t they?
Tragically, our nation’s public education system has collapsed under a harmful, misguided philosophical and ideological transformation that no longer warrants credibility. What our schools are producing and what public educators are creating is shameful, unethical, negligent, and detrimental. Knowledge is not being transferred, skills are not being mastered, and appropriate standards of conduct and accountability are not being modeled or enforced. Instead of acting as institutions of learning that provide academic instruction and build character, public schools have become bastions of mental health and emotional safety tasked with providing social services. The collapse of America’s public education system is the failure of a nation and a dereliction of the promise of the American Dream.
In the United States, we have specific national values and beliefs like freedom, equality, and justice. We even have a national ethos called the American Dream, but our failed public education system is gatekeeping students from access to it as early as the first grade. How can we expect our students to lift themselves from their circumstances or out of genuine inequities if we don’t give them the most basic skills necessary to do so? How can we expect our students to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if we aren’t even giving them boots? How can we expect our students to preserve their rights and autonomy, to protect themselves from tyrants or the police or unsustainable lending terms, if we can’t even teach them how to manipulate twenty-six letters? The truth is, our students cannot experience genuine freedom if they are locked out of the uplifting benefits of education that allow them to pursue their own interests and fulfill their dreams.
This blog is not a gentle critique. Rather, it is an overt castigation and condemnation of America’s public education system. It is a call to arms for disturbed and angry educators ready to quit, worried parents struggling to find solutions to their child’s challenges, and policymakers enraged by the heartbreaking realities of a broken system. This blog is a battle cry to wage war against a system so monumentally fucked that only a revolution will suffice.
