Kids should be taught more than how to make money in school. They should learn how to live without making money in school. They should learn how to thrive without money.
I’m reading an astrology book, learning about the fourth dimension and all I can think about is why do teachers not have the opportunity to teach this stuff in school? If only they had told me that math can literally apply to everything! That it would be useful for imagining the 4th dimension, or for understanding fractals – the building blocks of life! If someone had said to me “Mathematics is also the language of the universe,” I would have been much more interested as an angry pubescent teenager. What does that mean? The language of the universe!? How intriguing.
“You mean there’s more to life than my new acne issues and my inability to control my emotions!?! TEACH ME MORE MATH!” I would have said. Maybe.
When we asked our teachers, “What is the point of this?” they often had no answer. I always felt shoved off. Maybe they don’t have the answers, or maybe they don’t have the time, or the passion to explain. A lot of teachers end up teaching things they’re not even very interested in, which is so sad. It takes the humanity out of schooling.
Even beyond math, school always felt a bit pointless to me. Especially as a kid. Of course it was great to learn simple math, how to read, and I loved recess! It was a lovely place to meet friends, but now when I look back, it still seems as pointless as I thought it was for the most part. I’ve only been alive for 23 years, and of those 23 years I’ve spent 20 subscribing to this way of life that says formal education is important. We can all look at curriculums for the Alberta school system and other curriculums and see how kids could learn the few learning goals for each year via numerous other means. The internet is a wonderful thing if you know how to use it properly. They could easily find books about how to make a map, or about how the Canadian government works etc, etc. Satirical comics are brilliant, and the documentaries you can find on Netflix these days – whew! The knowledge of the world is at our fingertips.
The reason I bring this up is because I’m suspicious of how much of schooling is about learning to put your hand up before you speak, to ask permission to go to the washroom. Learning how to survive in a competitive system where kids with high grades are successful and kids with low grades are less successful. It looks to me like school, in many ways, prepares and encourages kids to grow up into capitalists who listen to those who are above them. That’s who we’ve all become, and we’ve all gone through the system. We are all capitalist cookie cutters, melded through years and years of schooling.
What if it was the norm to teach your kids through really living your life with them, and through letting them interact with people they want to interact with? By helping them learn things they want to learn? There’s the argument that kids would miss out on the social aspect of school, but if every kid was out exploring the world to learn the ways of the world they would run into all sorts of other kids doing the same thing. That sounds so magical. As a bonus; maybe more adults would be better at making friends outside of work or other organized events if we didn’t all grow up in a way of life where your friends are your friends because you’re with them all the time in school.
If that’s not possible or doesn’t seem like something that you could get on board with then why can’t kids have the choice to learn things like we do as adults in university or college, or as self-motivated readers and explorers? I think we’re all idiots for assuming that you couldn’t teach a grade one student about neurobiology, astrology, economics, or political sciences. What if instead of smashing a large group of kids into one room, with one teacher, then telling them what to learn we got kids together and then asked them what they wanted to learn, and helped them figure out ways to do that. There are Waldorf schools that work somewhere along the same lines of what I’m describing but they’re too expensive for every kid to have the opportunity to go to.
The way we teach our kids is as important as what we teach our kids. I think we need to level up this crappy system that everyone hates. I also think the government is pretty big into it, though. That makes things more difficult, but we have the power that we’re taught to give up. Maybe if we stop raising our hands and waiting for the government to answer us when we ask “What is the point of this system of learning,” only for them to shove us off we could make some big changes around this issue.
What do you think?
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