I agree wholeheartedly with Zvi’s aesthetic opinion, which is that schools seem absurdly terrible, like a kind of dumb, terrible joke. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go to school again myself. I might rather select some different kind of minimum-security prison if I could.
However, I am not a child any more. When I was a child, I was different and I had a different personality. I went to a public school and a STEM magnet high school, and it was fine. It was a big waste of time, mind you. (I declined to go to college.) But it wasn’t an incredibly unpleasant big waste of time, and unlike Zvi’s experience it wasn’t obviously worse than if my parents had just left me at home alone.
(I’m actually curious if Zvi would elaborate on his negative experience, which I didn’t really understand yet. What’s so unpleasant about sitting in class expending a tenth of your brainpower, if you are a smart kid? I sat in my class expending a tenth of my brainpower and I passed notes to people and programmed my calculator and read books and did math and thought about chess. That doesn’t sound maximally productive, but it certainly doesn’t sound torturous.)
There are many children like Zvi, who self-report hating school. Probably there are also many children who are ready to do something other than dick around in day care until they are N years old. I hope alternative arrangements flourish for those children and I am hopeful that my future children are among them. But there are definitely many, many children who are more or less OK with schools as they are, and all their stupid mediocrity. I’m wary of our crowd of outliers with our adult eyes looking with vicarious horror at something which is not actually that bad for the principals involved.
I suppose I should also chime in with “school wasn’t that miserable for me,” but I do recall thinking there was an obviously better option at the time—just spending my time alternating between reading in the library by my house and running around in the park by my house.
I also only recall two dominance contests with teachers, and remember myself as winning both of them—my guess is that many smart adults who are bitter about school are bitter about being forced into those sorts of dominance contests (and losing them).
I agree wholeheartedly with Zvi’s aesthetic opinion, which is that schools seem absurdly terrible, like a kind of dumb, terrible joke. I certainly wouldn’t want to have to go to school again myself. I might rather select some different kind of minimum-security prison if I could.
However, I am not a child any more. When I was a child, I was different and I had a different personality. I went to a public school and a STEM magnet high school, and it was fine. It was a big waste of time, mind you. (I declined to go to college.) But it wasn’t an incredibly unpleasant big waste of time, and unlike Zvi’s experience it wasn’t obviously worse than if my parents had just left me at home alone.
(I’m actually curious if Zvi would elaborate on his negative experience, which I didn’t really understand yet. What’s so unpleasant about sitting in class expending a tenth of your brainpower, if you are a smart kid? I sat in my class expending a tenth of my brainpower and I passed notes to people and programmed my calculator and read books and did math and thought about chess. That doesn’t sound maximally productive, but it certainly doesn’t sound torturous.)
There are many children like Zvi, who self-report hating school. Probably there are also many children who are ready to do something other than dick around in day care until they are N years old. I hope alternative arrangements flourish for those children and I am hopeful that my future children are among them. But there are definitely many, many children who are more or less OK with schools as they are, and all their stupid mediocrity. I’m wary of our crowd of outliers with our adult eyes looking with vicarious horror at something which is not actually that bad for the principals involved.
I suppose I should also chime in with “school wasn’t that miserable for me,” but I do recall thinking there was an obviously better option at the time—just spending my time alternating between reading in the library by my house and running around in the park by my house.
I also only recall two dominance contests with teachers, and remember myself as winning both of them—my guess is that many smart adults who are bitter about school are bitter about being forced into those sorts of dominance contests (and losing them).