Our schooling system is based on mistrust. Our schooling system is based on the belief that children - all people in fact, but especially children - cannot be trusted to know what is best for them. Cannot be trusted to know how to behave “well,” cannot be trusted to know what is important to learn, cannot be trusted to learn and grow without constant “guidance” and correction and judgement and ranking. Even in the most benevolent-seeming school systems, these assumptions are so foundational that they are invisible. And the adults perpetuating the system themselves grew up in it and were shaped by it, as were their parents, down through several hundred years of generations. But this is a created system; this is not “normal” or “natural.” Can you guess who created the system, and whose hands still hold down the lid of revolution against it? The parallels between the schooling system and the prison system in this country are chilling. And those few of us who see it feel that we are spitting into the wind to even mention it, let alone dream of taking it down.
Briefly and naively, I imagined that the pandemic might have opened up an opportunity window for a grassroots rebellion against how our children are warehoused and force-fed and controlled in their “education.” But parents cannot be faulted for having no vision of what trust in natural learning might look like, because they have never experienced it. No, that’s not quite true. We all have had moments in our lives -- most likely outside the school building -- when we were joyfully, unselfconsciously immersed in learning. But we’ve been trained to mistrust our inner, north star compass. We’ve been trained that what our heart calls us to learn, if it’s not within the culturally prescribed curriculum, is a “hobby” at best, and at worst a “waste of time.” When our north star compass pulls us away from the culturally prescribed curriculum, we are labeled as having an “attention deficit,” because the system defines what is worth paying attention to and what is not.
For how many more generations will we accept and allow our children to be raised within a system that leaves so many of them ill-equipped to thrive and be happy, all in the name of chasing the phantom of “success”?
Briefly and naively, I imagined that the pandemic might have opened up an opportunity window for a grassroots rebellion against how our children are warehoused and force-fed and controlled in their “education.” But parents cannot be faulted for having no vision of what trust in natural learning might look like, because they have never experienced it. No, that’s not quite true. We all have had moments in our lives -- most likely outside the school building -- when we were joyfully, unselfconsciously immersed in learning. But we’ve been trained to mistrust our inner, north star compass. We’ve been trained that what our heart calls us to learn, if it’s not within the culturally prescribed curriculum, is a “hobby” at best, and at worst a “waste of time.” When our north star compass pulls us away from the culturally prescribed curriculum, we are labeled as having an “attention deficit,” because the system defines what is worth paying attention to and what is not.
For how many more generations will we accept and allow our children to be raised within a system that leaves so many of them ill-equipped to thrive and be happy, all in the name of chasing the phantom of “success”?