10 mortal sins of schooling
This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)
In this book, I list a few dozen cardinal sins of "modern" school systems. Here is just a quick summary.
The deadly sins of passive and compulsory schooling:
- schooling stifles the learn drive, which results in inefficient learning
- schooling stifles creativity, and leads to learned helplessness
- schooling stifles problem solving, and results in weak generalization capacity
- schooling stifles exploratory learning (see: Education counteracts evolution)
- schooling stifles intelligence due suppressing choice, and requiring asemantic learning
- schooling stunts intelligence by interfering with the conceptualization process in development
- schooling fails to optimize for long-term active recall (e.g. as facilitated with spaced repetition)
- schooling undermines the structure of knowledge, and comprehension
- schooling powers interference that favors forgetting of the hurriedly crammed knowledge (see: On the superiority of a rat over a schooled human)
- schooling results in the hate of learning (see: Why kids hate school?)
- schooling conditions the belief that the displeasure in learning is natural (see: Pleasure of learning)
- schooling interferes with sleep, the circadian cycle, and the natural creativity cycle (see: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome (DSPS))
- schooling results in chronic stress
- schooling undermines self-esteem and self-discipline (e.g. by labelling kids lazy)
- schooling suppresses the need and love of exercise
- schooling affects mental health: bullying, school refusal, ADHD, depression, suicide, as well as toxic memory with ramifications for dyslexia, dyscalculia, dysgraphia, etc.
- schooling affects health in general (e.g. obesity, diabetes, eyesight, etc.)
- schooling establishes a pathological social environment based on a closed systems of socialization in age segregated groups (this results, for example, in bullying)
- schooling undermines knowledge diversity in society
- schooling is used for the indoctrination of children
- schools promote dozens of harmful myths about learning (see: Mythology of schooling)
- school instills dozens of bad habits that often last for life (see: 100 bad habits learned at school)
- schools steal the best years of youth
In conclusion, compulsory schooling must end. It should be replaced with free learning. Survival of the present system of education is rooted in rich school mythology that needs to be abolished before change is possible. For an alternative vision of the future see: Grand Education Reform. See also: Declaration of Educational Emancipation
Figure: This is how school destroys the love of learning. Learn drive is the set of passions and interests that a child would like to pursue. School drive is the set of rewards and penalties set up by the school system. Learn drive leads to simple, mnemonic, coherent, stable and applicable memories due to the fact that the quality of knowledge determines the degree of reward in the learn drive system. School drive leads to complex, short-term memories vulnerable to interference due to the fact that schools serialize knowledge by curriculum (not by the neural mechanism of the learn drive). Competitive inhibition between the Learn drive and the School drive circuits will lead to the weakening of neural connections. Strong School drive will weaken the learn drive, destroy the passion for learning, and lead to learned helplessness. Powerful Learn drive will lead to rebellion that will protect intrinsic passions, but possibly will also lead to problems at school. Storing new knowledge under the influence of Learn drive is highly rewarding and carries no penalty (by definition of the learn drive). This will make the learn drive thrive leading to success in learning (and at school). In contrast, poor quality of knowledge induced by the pressures of the School drive will produce a weaker reward signal, and possibly a strong incoherence penalty. The penalty will feed back to produce reactance against the school drive, which will in turn require further coercive correction from the school system, which will in turn reduce the quality of knowledge further. Those feedback loops may lead to the dominance of one of the forces: the learn drive or the school drive. Thriving learn drive increases rebellion that increases defenses against the school drive. Similarly, increased penalization at school increases learned helplessness that weakens the learn drive and results in submission to the system. Sadly, in most cases, the control system settles in the middle of those two extremes (see: the old soup problem). Most children hate school, lose their love of learning, and still submit to the enslavement. Their best chance for recovery is the freedom of college, or better yet, the freedom of adulthood. See: Competitive feedback loops in binary decision making at neuronal level
Copyright note: you can republish this picture under a Creative Commons license with attribution to SuperMemo World, and a link to the updated version here
