Comment by Nursie
4 days ago
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Yet another person here who agrees with OP. I think you're vastly underestimating how common our experiences were. Vastly.
Feel (some) of your pain - was bullied some in school, and actually had terrible compressed nerve problems that made sitting in high school all day terrible. But think what this person is saying is that this probably isn't the experience of most students. And in all humbleness, would have to agree, don't think me and my friends wouldn't say it's was an extremely abuse experience.
Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(