Schooling

Having observed (and shielded as much as possible) my children in the public school system, and having done lots of volunteer work there, let me share some of my observations as a non-teacher about what I see happening in the public schools that prevents people from being able to pursue Numenism as a way of life.

First, the bells. The purpose of the bells seems to be a sort of Pavlovian training. When students hear bells, they are taught to stop what they are doing and do something else, often somewhere else. They aren’t given a chance to complete what they are doing, and any thought in their head is interrupted. This sets them up worse than Sesame Street for short attention spans. They learn that nothing is important enough to finish. The bells teach the students indifference. It teaches them to turn on and off at set signals – just like Pavlov’s dog.

Second, constant surveillance. This is becoming even worse and far more pervasive than it was when my children were school students. There are no private spaces for children, no private times. Hall change times are scheduled to prevent any kind of decent fraternization between students. As many thinkers[1] have indepedently discovered, it is essential to keep children under constant surveillance if one wishes to keep society under a centrist control. Our society is certainly striving for centrist control. Students are encouraged to tattle on one another, and on their parents through intrusive essays. Parents are encouraged to tattle on their children through homework and parent-teacher conferences. All the Gods forbid that children have time to learn anything real, whether from their parents, from a wise neighbor, from outside activities, or even from their own personal explorations. They learn that privacy isn’t important, that no one can be trusted. Small wonder that religions which require trust have such a difficult time, and why so many people choose to be solitaries.

That ties in closely with a third lesson: that their self-respect depends on the evaluation of others. Students are constantly evaluated and measured. They are under constant performance pressure. The schools send home reports that tell, down to decimal places, just how dissatisfied with the children the schools are. I’ve seen how little time goes into these evaluations, given how much weight they carry and the burdens they place on the children. It is a cumulative weight of judgement that rarely takes into account the differences in the children, and effectively suppresses the initiative of many children, a suppression that extends well into adulthood. Self-evaluation, a primary precept in Numenism (and other philosophical systems), is rarely factored into these evaluations. Children are taught they cannot trust themselves, or even others, only certified officials. What qualifies them as certified? Only the fact that someone hired them. So it is that people learn they have to be told what they are worth, they can’t discover it for themselves. This lesson presents a huge barrier in being Numenist, because self-evaluation is the primary way to learn Numenism, to use it and live it.

This lesson, of course, emphasises lesson four: conformity. Or perhaps dependency. All those tests and evaluations are geared to making each child as like every other child as possible. Have you read the comments coming out of the Georgia school system about their position in last place in the SAT/ACT scores? Have you heard how important “standardized” testing is, how crucial it is to society that all students meet certain set requirements? It’s all part of the lowest common denominator trend that has been happening in schools for several decades, a trend that has frustrated parents and their children, but pleased the school administrators. Students are taught that they are incapable of deciding for themselves (this dovetails with research of mine that arose from the earlier post sparked by the newspaper article on too many choices crippling America). They are taught they can’t decide what they can learn, when they will learn it, or how. Good students wait to be told what to do and when. Other people, better trained than they are, will tell them how to live. If we look around us, we can clearly see how this degree of conformity and dependence cripples us, not the lack of choices. The entertainment industry would weaken if people knew how to make their own fun. Fast food businesses would suffer if more people trusted themselves to cook their own meals. Look at how TV commercials cater to that very thing. I’m thinking particularly of some Carl’s Jr. commercials that declare “Without us, Joe[2] would starve.” The schools create a constant supply of helpless people, people who haven’t learned how to make decisions, because those have always been made for them. They need TV commercials to tell them how to dress, what to eat, what drugs they need to carry around with them, and to never question that there might be alternatives.

Those students who do show initiative are rare, and become rarer as they progress through the school system. Remember the bright eyes and enthusiasm about going to school young children have? It gets squished out of them, and all they have left is a sullen rebellion that isn’t even very original because every other teen is doing the same thing. Creative, genuine rebellion is rare, and becoming more so.

Another lesson (five) deeply taught in school is that they have no rights, only privileges, which can be withheld at any authority figure’s whim. They have no control over which privileges they get, because each authority figure has different standards. Privileges vary from adult to adult, there is no consistency. Students rebell in little ways, but eventually, even that ceases. They try to sneak a private moment with a request to go to the bathroom, or to savor a moment of solitude at the water fountain. Many of these children don’t even know that’s what they want, or why they struggle so much to leave the confining classroom. This behavior, this sneaky, “I can’t trust you” behavior persists into adulthood. This is difficult for a religion which depends on trust to overcome. These ingrained habits of passive resistence and sullenly subdued anger make learning a religion which lauds independence, trust, community, freedom, and strength difficult to encompass.
The last lesson I will adress here (there are a couple of others, but they aren’t as well though out yet) is one of – place, I guess is the best word to use. Students are taught to keep to their narrow little niche. They must stay in their classroom, stay with their grade level. They are locked into this tight little world, and taught to fear going outside it by a series of privileges (hall passes) and punishments (suspension, visits to the principal’s office, calls to parents to force them into greater conformity). They are taught to fear and envy those students who are “better” than they are, and to be contemptuous of those who are “worse”. The decision on who’s better and who’s worse is, of course, determined by those tests and grades and “permanent records” that follow students from year to year, and school to school. Students are given the false hope of changing classes through better grades, better performance, tempted with the notion that employers will choose only students who perform well. In real life, outside the schools, I’m here to say: bullshit. Not one employer of mine ever cared what grades I made in public school. College they scrutinized a bit closer, but not by much. And the same is true of my children; their employers only looked for competency in their fields, not grades. But children learn their class lessons well. They compete in arenas that are meaningless outside the classroom, and that lock them into a mindset they may not even notice is placing contrived and artificial limits on them. And many learn no real education.

Just a generation back from me[3], originality and creativity, variety, was commonplace in education. Our freedom from regimentation made the US the wonder of the world. Social class boundaries were virtually non-existent. US citizens were individuals, able to think for themselves, inventive, independent, confident. A scan of the patents pouring into the US Patent Office will show the decline of that trend. Many of the patents offered today are variations, improvements. very few are original or startlingly new, and the ones that are, are rarely products of people who graduated through the US public school system. Homeschooled students, children of recent immigrants, even immigrants themselves, offer more variety and creativity than most children who are products (and yes, products is the right word) of the modern American school system.
Aristotle taught that we could not be complete humans without a fully active role in our community. This is one of the foundations of Numenism – active community involvement. Schools discourage true involvement, in spite of the recent trend for community service hours. It is to parents we look to for the children who overcome the lessons and handicaps public education places on the children, and thereby on society.

When Plato wrote _The Republic_ (read it) he laid down the plans for total state control via compulsory schooling and training in subordination.

I have a problem with subordination. Many Numenists do. Unquestioned obedience is what our schools expect, but not what I (or fellow Numensits) offer.

Modern public schools dehumanize our children, harden them to into rigid castes. The value of family and community is lessened in a centrist government such as ours now is. That article in the newspaper that complained of how freedom of choice was crippling America [4], that it was time-consuming tyranny that took us away from more important things in life (like work) is looking at the issues from the wrong perspective, at least as far as Numenist philosophy goes. Mr. Schwartz mentioned how friends were crippled by the choice of eating out, or the struggle to buy a pair of jeans. And how it’s important that regulating agencies step in to limit those choices so people aren’t confronted with 80 different types of toothpaste, amd waste time figuring out which one they want.

I’m sorry, but I like having that many choices. In fact, I don’t think there are enough choices, considering I often have to resort to making my own because I can’t buy what I’m looking for.
My whole point with this article is that public schools have taken the initiative and individuality away from people, putting them in a position of being a permanent underclass, of being deprived of finding out their strengths when they are young enough to utilize them longer and better, to live happier, more contented lives.

I know many people feel children are not protected by the Constitution, but they are. They must be, for us to raise them understanding what the Constitution means, and how it affects us, as a society, and as individuals comprising that society.

It takes less than a hundred contact hours to impart all the basic literacy and math skills a child needs – anything over that is specialization. And yes, I’m all for learning more. But with that hundred hours of basic education, a child has all they need to self start their own education. They have the tools needed to explore their world, and to make interesting discoveries. It doesn’t matter that they re-invent the wheel while they are children, because that re-invention gives them the incentive and the curiosty, not to mention the skills, to invent far beyond any mere wheels.
In spite of the media barrage of “international competition” there really isn’t any. We’re not competing on an international basis, not really. All this hype does is attempt to force greater conformity on the schools and the students trapped in them. Having a conformist country will work to our ultimate detriment. Public schooling exists primarily to regulate the poor, to indoctrinate them into being good little consumers and work drones, not to educate them in ways that will sustain the country through viable, creative ideas. The recent Department of Labor effort on minimum wage and overtime pay is a good example of what is expected out of our poor – more work, less free time, fewer choices, less autonomy.

This is no longer limited to just the poor, though. Even rich kids, who attend public schools, or schools modeled on public schools, cannot concentrate on anything for long, are addicted to distractions, have a poor sense of history and lack the ability to project into the future (important traits in Numenism for those who wish to learn and work our patterning, also important in conducting practically any scientific studies, or to generate deep philosophical thoughts). They are mistrustful of intimacy (another crucial component of Numenism). Children growing up today hate solitude, yet are uncomfortable with practically everybody. They feel they don’t “fit in”, yet crave a community of some sort. They are passive aggressive, prone to violence and frustrated anger with no known target. Even as adults, they are dependent. They are timid in the face of the unexpected, and really, we Numenists just can’t have that. Boldness is sometimes required, independent action and thought, social consideration and kindness.

Good teachers, good equipment, and a sound curricula will not overcome the hidden lessons the children learn at school, lessons and methodolgy is so entrenched the only way to end it is to do just that: end it.

It won’t happen, not in my lifetime. But someday, either the lessons learned in school will be so deeply integral to society that it will be unthinkable to do anything else, or there will be such a rebellion that the entire school system is overthrown and outlawed.

You can guess which way I am advocating.

School is like starting life with a 13 year jail sentence in which only bad habits such as anti-social behaviors and self-destructive actions are learned. When such students come to us, we have to de-condition them and re-teach them how to think, how to be independent, how to be bold and strong. We have tools at our disposal, dialectic thinking, logic skills, heurism, ostranenie, and more, that we can employ against these mind-destroying school-ingrained habits. We have to rethink our first year lessons, impose patterns on our students, then break those patterns in the hopes of breaking the hold the indoctrination of the pulic schools has had on the younger generations.
Then, and only then, can we teach them about Numenism.

[1] Plato, Francis Bacon, Clavin in the Institutes, and others.
[2] OK, I don’t think the name they use is “Joe”, but you get the idea.
[3] That would probably make it 3 or 4 generations back for most of you
[4] Excerpted from a book by Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice, Why More is Less. 2004, Ecco Press (HarperCollins imprint)