School slavery will end soon

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This FAQ expands on the content of "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Why are schools so backward?

Ryan Jacobs asked (see original wording)

FAQ question. What are FAQs?
Do you believe that your ideas will ever be applied to school systems? You have some excellent ideas, no doubt about that. But how applicable are they? And if they're so good, why haven't they been implemented into school systems around the world yet? In fact, it doesn't look like this will change any time soon. In particular I ask about spaced repetition and free learning

Compulsory schooling will end soon

Free learning will keep growing in popularity with an increase in the freedom of education (see: Declaration of Educational Emancipation). The biggest obstacle today is compulsory schooling, and powerful forces that want to keep it in place or even strengthen it.

Compulsory schooling will inevitably end as it is a violation of basic human rights. No good parent should accept her child being woken up forcefully in the morning, and being lectured against her own will on subjects of somebody else's choosing. However, in good faith, most of parents accept coercion in learning out of force of inertia, force of habit, and sheer ignorance. The awareness of their own rights and options in life is increasing among children and teenagers. If the respect for human rights is too slow to come due to insufficient initiative of a minority of parents, the children may take their fate in their own hands by announcing a global school strike. Such a strike may erupt in a couple of years, or it may erupt next month. All it needs is a leader not unlike Greta Thunberg.

Dr Peter Gray predicts that the end of compulsory school will happen soon (see why). The ultimate spark is the ever accelerating understanding of the power of knowledge and its instant availability for an increasingly large number of children in the western world. All major disruptive forces, like the coronavirus pandemic, only contribute to further dissemination of this awareness.

Future is hard to predict

In 1988, could anyone predict the collapse of the Soviet Union in 2-3 years (1991)? A wise man said: "the future will outwit all our certitudes" (Arthur Schlesinger Jr).

All seemingly obvious change cannot be easily put on the future timeline. If you compare the obviousness of world trends in the 1850s or the 1900s, you will see that the end of slavery and the ever-lasting peace were both obvious and inevitable. The remnants of slavery live to this day in various forms of discrimination. Global peace is far from being reassured. Imagine the 1890s. Was is Belle Époque or was it Fin de siècle?

To say that compulsory schooling will collapse in 5-10 years, you need to be an optimist (like Peter Gray). I am equally optimistic because of my decades of work over efficient learning that make me clearly see the evils of schooling. Equally well, someone might fear re-emergence of totalitarian control over children. When seemingly progressive Emmanuel Macron calls for the end of homeschooling in France because of his fears of Islamic radicalization, we are just one major terrorist act away from similar clampdowns around the western world. On the other hand, it takes just one Greta Thunberg to spark climate school strikes around the world. There is as much outrage with the inefficiency of schooling as there is with climate change. The only problem is that the outrage affects mostly the youth who viscerally understand the problem while adults quickly whitewash their schooling past (see: Glorification of schooling).

World War I was just a war to end all wars. It was to be over by Christmas. Pacifists were wrong. Optimists were wrong. The obvious and the rational was overshadowed by hubris, greed, ambition and ignorance.

History of educational freedom

All the great minds of history understood the importance of freedom for creative achievement. Those who proposed compulsory schooling were more concerned about the need to enlighten "backward masses" than with achieving the best of human potential.

The end of compulsory schooling will be far easier than the state of global peace. Alexander Neill had good ideas about good schooling as early as in the 1920s, and yet his Summerhill School had to wage major battles against the ignorance of the government (see the movie). His model of democratic school is still illegal in most countries of Europe.

However, John Holt's work seemed equally controversial and yet it lead to the explosion of homeschooling in the US, and also in other parts of the world. By 1993, in all US states, in a few short years, homeschooling stopped being a crime. Today, unschooling is easier than ever in the US, and some forms of unschooling start showing up in Europe.

Peter Gray is today quoted in blogs and discussions in all countries of the world where compulsory schooling is a source of pain for children. The critical mass of understanding the problem is already here in young minds. The collapse of the old system may happen at any minute. The coronavirus pandemic is a powerful accelerant. Today, even parents can see the absurdity of the old system.

Totalitarian systems can re-emerge

For Emmanuel Macron, freedom of education is secondary. It takes a back seat behind the suppression of the freedom of religion. Instead of free minds, we have a bondage of secularism. Macron is not the only example of threats to educational freedom. Sweden, the utopian socialist land of plenty, gave up on homeschooling in June 2010 by making it illegal (see: European Outcasts).

Finland is a shining good boy of education, but kids in Finland are smoothly oiled into accepting conscription as a necessary duty that will ensure peace (see: Finnish paradox). This reminds me of July 1914. There were so many good ways to protect peace that they all got tangled into a complex fabric of dependencies that collapsed into war. War is an expression of our inability to embrace the best of game theory in conditions of complex social and national relationships. To get the best of humanity, we need high intelligence and diversity of models. Those all get quashed and homogenized in the assembly line of a school factory.

It takes just one Trump to undermine world organizations and treaties that provide for peace and the protection of human rights. There are still powerful players like Russia or China that might want to plot their own course of history. A historic clash is still a possibility. All it takes is just one angry Trump or one dumb Brexit.

The Revolution

Until now, the most likely pathway towards freedom in learning was incremental, i.e. by gradual enactment of laws that increase the rights of children and parents (as it is the case in the US). However, this process is increasingly perceived as too slow, and insufficiently supported by the adult world. This is why that the initiative of students may soon become a primary force of change. In ways similar to climate strike by Greta, students may refuse to participate in most hated classes, or may seek legal initiatives such as the possibility of a referendum on the change in educational rights or changes in their constitutions. Once a major disruption happens in a single country (e.g. in Europe), the rest of the countries may follow in a domino-like fashion like the collapse of communism or Arab Spring. On one hand, the indoctrination and intimidation at school is a powerful force that may make it difficult to build the critical mass needed for the change. On the other hand, the power of social media is increasing. For example, see today's school strike in Poland: National School Strike, Dec 7-11, 2020, and strike timeline.

See: Declaration of Educational Emancipation

Spaced repetition does not belong to school

As for spaced repetition, it cannot ever come from above. If it does, it will inevitably lead to failure (see: Hating SuperMemo). Students who take on SuperMemo for the sake of an exam, often give up after passing and never return. They have been conditioned to dislike the program in the same way as they are conditioned to hate math, history, or literature.

Schools were good for SuperMemo World and we should be grateful for the extra income. However, we are not.

When a school mandates spaced repetition, it will most likely fail. It must be an initiative of an individual, and that initiative will come with a growing awareness of the value of long-term knowledge (see: Exponential adoption of spaced repetition). In a similar fashion, the best changes in education will come from individuals. School systems are too fossilized and soaked in the old-fashioned methodology and mythology (see: Mythology that keeps the archaic school system alive).



For more texts on memory, learning, sleep, creativity, and problem solving, see Super Memory Guru