Why Stay in an Institution That Hates You and Your Family?

We’ve grown so accustomed to going to school and sending our own kids there when the time comes that most of us never stop and think about what of value, if anything, these places give us in return for 13 years of boredom, compulsion and toil. Supposedly, the purpose of school is to equip us with the skills we need in adult life – but if that were true, why do schools never teach us any of the following:

-How to plan a trip to a faraway location

-How to pay your taxes

-How to finance a house

-How to negotiate better insurance rates

-How to find an apartment or house to rent, and what your rights are

-How to give and seek forgiveness

-How to get in touch with anyone in the world, even the president

-How to start a business, what licenses you’ll need, and how to find customers

-How to make the best decision possible in a short amount of time

-How to feed a family of four on less than $50 a week

-How to make the best use of your time when you know you will soon be dead

-How to make money as a part-time ghostwriter

-How to navigate without Mapquest, GPS or a smart phone

-How to change the oil in your car, fix a worn-out shoe, or add a deadbolt to your door

And so on.

Yup. Stick in school and you will be lucky if even one of these crucial things in life is ever brought up. Everybody knows how important these things are, so why is it we are given zero training in them by the very institutions supposedly charged with the task of preparing us for life? If you don’t think this is a serious problem, then I invite you to consider the sheer number of helpless, scared young adults who mire themselves in credit card debt early in life, or take out disastrous student loans, or suffer a divorce before the age of 30, and on and on. If schools really do a good job of preparing us for adult responsibilities, how come so many adults don’t function as…adults?

Alright, you say. Maybe our schools do a crappy job of giving us practical knowledge – but what about all the wonderful intellectual topics they introduce young people to? After all, what normal kid would want to read Shakespeare on his own, or study geometry, or memorize the preamble to the Constitution?

Putting aside for the moment of the question of whether or not these are things that absolutely need to be studied by every single person, consider the well-known fact that compelling someone, particularly young students, to study something they didn’t pick for themselves breeds contempt for it. Think about that. You know as well as I do that there is no better way to get a young person to hate a certain book or author than by forcing him to read it. And yet, year after year, generation after generation, countless kids are taught to hate things like poetry and literature – things they might actually enjoy if allowed to discover them for themselves.

What does this leave us? Surely, you say, even if schools don’t do a good job of giving us useful life skills, and even if they don’t do a good job of cultivating the intellect, they at least make us better citizens, more complete people right?

Wrong. School not only undermines things like community spirit and the family – it was explicitly designed to dissolve them.

That a little too tinfoil hat for you? Perhaps you need a history lesson.

Families that choose to keep their kids out of school, by contrast, have been consistently shown to reflect sound civic values and an unshakeable sense of family. Homeschooled kids actually like their parents, and vice versa. Imagine that! And has been said before, contrary to popular belief, these kids do not have poor social skills – they in fact, on average, have superior social skills in comparison to their public school peers, not to mention better self-esteem and self-reliance to boot.

If you have an unusual religion or a distinct ethnic background, if you value independent thinking and creativity, or if you want you or your children to have real life experiences instead of simulations or phony training, you really ought to consider keeping your family away from the schools. Even the “good” schools in wealthy full of nice teachers and well meaning principals will ultimately have a baleful influence upon your household. No teacher is so good nor a neighborhood so wealthy that it can overwhelm the systemic poison built deep into the structure of the American school system, beyond the reach of any instructor too noble and inventive for his own good.

In case it hasn’t hit you by now: GET THE HELL OUT OF SCHOOL BEFORE LASTING DAMAGE IS DONE. The system hates your beliefs, your quirks, and indeed everything about you that is interesting or special. What it wants is to turn you into a pushover without a personality or any capacity to resist someone else’s orders. It is in fact the most wildly successful form of mass brainwashing ever devised, and it is, as an institution, responsible for much if not most of the sorry state of the nation, most especially the widely noted phenomenon of the average person’s complete inability to think critically.

It’s time to get off the plantation. The North Star is bright, and opportunity is waiting on the horizon for those willing to take it.