School system

[Learning to undeny]

How do you feel about your school system?

This has been discussed in passing. I've seen a few critical opinions here.

I personally think that more emphasis should be given to education about the immediate surroundings, more than sitting in a chair for five hours. We don't learn much even about the beings that accompany us every day. And being forced to see your classmates and your teachers in such an awkward situation where you are expected to act as if it were normal has an odd effect on the psyche. There are surely better ways for children to make friends. Furthermore, we don't learn about our thoughts and emotions or about what we can do for the world; we are not given responsibilities over anything tangible.

Lots of skills are important for most childrens' futures (reading, arithmetic, basic history...). There may be more effective methods to teach them, but I have little idea. Grades or marks should maybe not be used in primary school.

School makes it possible for parents to work for the capitalist system while their children learn that they must adapt to it or be punished. There have been improvements over time, but we still have a lot to figure out. Alternatives may have sound bases, but they fail to escalate to a public system, and often are badly implemented even in smaller settings, from what I've seen.

[Bookshelf]

I definitely think schools need less authority than they presently have. A lot of people that might agree with this (eg US conservatives) would see that most of authority shifted to parents though, which I don't think is any better.

One of the problems with the modern schooling system is that it easily attracts people that don't necessarily care for youth, but are seeking some feeling of control. There are plenty of great teachers out there, but there are also plenty of teachers that evidently hate the children they're teaching and just enjoy being able to make up arbitrary rules that the whole class needs to follow lest they face punishment.

Non-issues become serious issues; arbitrary rules and decisions that the teachers aren't expected to justify; and pupils are expected to give full obedience no matter what.

[Not Forever]

For me, there are far too few teachers and too many students. I’m convinced that a large part of the waste (because I consider most school hours to be wasted) comes from the poor teacher having to deal with twenty or more students all at once. To me, that’s an absurd number that should be reduced, aiming for the utopian idea of one teacher per student.

To me, this is the main problem in practically all school systems.
It doesn’t matter what you teach or how you teach it—anything you put in gets diluted in a crowd of people and consequently stretched out over too many hours. This is especially true in today’s context, where parents are too busy to help with their children’s education (and it would be too burdensome for the student anyway), and where a student has no other reference figures.

[wildly]

I consider the modern school system to be one of the worst and most harmful institutions to children in the modern world.

It's hard to sum up in brief why I feel this way, but I'll give a few bullet points.

1. Takes away kids autonomy, lack of autonomy is tied to various negative mental health outcomes. Kids are constantly monitored at most schools.

2. Don't follow learning science. Some practices - such as academic pre-school and kindergarten - are common despite strong evidence that they lead to worse outcomes simply letting young kids play.

3. Create ideal conditions for bullying and other anti-social behaviors.

4. Condition kids to behave in certain ways to either obtain rewards (good grade, gold stars, candy) or avoid punishment. Learning to do things because of extrinsic motivations, rather than because of ones own intrinsic motivation is also harmful in a variety of ways.

For more in depth reading I'd suggest starting with Peter Gray's psychology today blog (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/cont ... r-gray-phd?).