Schools must reform or die
This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)
A kid asked me: Why are you so much against school? Why did you not protest while being schooled?.
The whole system, including well-wishing parents, conspires to convince kids that school is a good thing, school is inevitable, and all problems come from child's own inadequacies, of which laziness is the key frailty. This is similar to organized religions that preach the need to mortify the flesh. Awash in propaganda, kids submit to authority and are lead through the system step by step accepting their fate. I was no different. However, I refused to learn things I did not care about. This made the system palatable.
Today, my background in spaced repetition makes it easy for me to quantify knowledge. I realize that the fruits of decades of schooling might be re-produced easily with months of incremental reading. Young adults carry a great deal of knowledge, but most of top quality knowledge they gain on their own by exploring their passions. This is why increasing freedoms at school is a painfully simple and obvious formula for increasing quality knowledge among best students. In addition to that coherent knowledge, at school, young adults obtain a degree of factual knowledge that can be considered beneficial. That factual knowledge can easily be gained with SuperMemo. The quality of that knowledge, incl. coherence can be maximized with incremental reading. The numbers are staggering: 13 years of English vocabulary learned with schooling can be mastered in just one month with SuperMemo. The whole actually remembered knowledge of high school history can be mastered in 1-2 weeks. Why do we waste decades instead of weeks? Because nobody bothers to make a rational calculation on the capacity of long-term memory. Sadly, very few education professionals even understand spaced repetition and how it can lead to building up coherent long-term memories that can last a lifetime.
My understanding of memory and learning went along in proportion to my protest against mindless schooling. By the end of my 22 years of school, I managed to transform slavery into free learning (see: How I invented perfect schooling?). Over the years, my despair with the school system kept increasing. In the 1990s, I was inspired by the battles of Marek Budajczak who attempted homeschooling his kids in Poland. In free Poland, he was being whipped by authorities in a manner that seemed worse than the worst things I witnessed or experienced as a kid in the communist system. Single-handedly, Budajczak contributed to a change in law, for which 14,000 homeschoolers in Poland will forever be grateful (homeschooling statistics data for 2017).
Before writing "I would never send my kids to school", I was a fervent opponent of the school bondage, and the violation of the rights of children. The more I studied, the more I read of Peter Gray or John Holt or John Taylor Gatto, the more upset I was with the fact that even without my spaced repetition calculations, best teachers have known for ages that schools don't work. Today, the best teachers express the same sentiments. The same people who seem to oppress kids in the classroom, confess their skepticism to me after hours. This system went mad and needs to be changed. The right to choose education is not just a parental right as expressed in the UN Declaration on human rights.
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