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Compulsory Education

Monday, March 21, 2016 20:26
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Everyone loves learning, but not everyone likes studying. What’s even more frustrating is to be told how we should study, why we should study, etc. Making education available to everyone is benevolent but making education compulsory for everyone is something that we are so used to that we do not see the blatant problem with it — the deprivation of freedom that prevents the flourishing of those who have the most potential in society: children. Children, when you think carefully about it, are the most oppressed class across all societies.

We sometimes only see the value of things once we have gone through them. And some of our experiences as children may never have occurred without the guidance of parents, loved ones, or other influential community members. There is, however, a distinction between gentle guidance and legal coercion. Imagine if we made undergraduate degrees, master’s degrees and doctorates compulsory. This would likely and justifiably result in public outrage due to the deprivation of liberty involved.

When children are forced to go to school, we do not listen to their outcries since they are unable to argue comprehensively against the injustice of the situation. Certainly, there are children who enjoy going to school and who do not protest. But what about those who neither enjoy it nor want it? What about those who have genuine passions and interests outside of the syllabus and classroom? The crude manner in which we are organised according to our “ability” or “academic potential” from an early age is hardly representative. Within each “ability” set, there is still a wide spectrum of potential with respect to the taught material and there is, therefore, an oft-documented tendency for some to feel bored and some to be left behind.

One way to handle this problem is to reduce class sizes and one way to reduce class sizes is to make education voluntary whilst still allowing people to attend the classes they choose to, in order to attain the skills that they themselves think would be useful. For example, if a child realises that they’d like to learn how a computer works, they will quickly realise that in order to effectively learn the skill, they will need to become numerate and literate. Therefore they will, more naturally, come to appreciate the value of numeracy and literacy and, most likely, expend more effort in attaining the necessary level of proficiency as a means to their final end.

Furthermore, the way in which various subjects are taught in school is essentially a form of paradigmatic, scientific indoctrination. Yes, teachers are taught to be unbiased and objective when teaching subjects such as History, Economics, etc. But this does not prevent the syllabus itself from being biased toward a particular methodology, ideology, interpretation or analysis. Thomas Kuhn (1962) argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that sciences such as Physics, Chemistry and Biology are taught as if they had progressed in a linear fashion and the History of Science is completely misrepresented to students from a very early age. The education system is the method by which we are trained to think dogmatically under the rules of a specific paradigm rather than rationally and independently whilst being aware of the prevailing rules of the paradigm. Ultimately, this stifles the speed of articulation and shifting of these paradigms. The representation of scientific knowledge that many are so quick to praise because of the rapid development it has enabled will also, in future, be deemed the dogma of our era, whose limitations were self-imposed, unnecessarily prolonged, and continuously reinforced by means of compulsory education.

However, what would children do if they were not forced into education? Play? Work? Whatever they want? All of these might seem like horrifying propositions to some but this is because we have been conditioned to believe that education means being up to the standard of certain bureaucratically-determined metrics, sitting in a classroom, being passively taught and raking in the qualifications that correlate with higher earnings. Making education voluntary does not mean that people would not learn, it would mean that people would, from a young age, be empowered to determine how they learn best rather than be shoehorned into a one-size-fits-all educational model. They would have a more holistic understanding of what constitutes an education and this would enable them to think more creatively with less regard to the standards currently imposed by civilisation.

What about children who do not feel motivated to advance scientific knowledge and are, rather, interested in pursuing labour opportunities? After all, not everyone is interested in working within the so-called frontiers of knowledge. The phrase “child labour” appalls people because it conjures imagery of children working in horrific, mind-numbing and often life-threatening conditions. I’m certainly not advocating children be sent up chimneys or work with dangerous, heavy machinery once more, but I am saying that children should be allowed to work in jobs that they feel they might gain some valuable experience from. For example, if a child who has taken a particular interest in computer programming was allowed to do some coding jobs for a software developer, would it not be wrong to disallow them from doing so? Coding is not life-threatening, it pays well, the child might love it and indeed, the child may be able to think in ways that adults cannot and he or she may well be far more suited to the job than any adult.

Similarly, if a child has a passion for art and he wants to work as an assistant or apprentice in an artist’s studio, why on earth would we deny him the opportunity and instead force him to go to a classroom to learn the things the government thinks he ought to learn? One of the arguments put forward is that children need to go to school in order to be economically productive in society and work well within it. However, if they find that they don’t need to go to school to do this or that only certain classes taught within school are worth attending to attain this end, then education should not be made compulsory. In fact, studies, life experience, and even common sense repeatedly reveal to us that much of what we are taught in formal education turns out to be of very limited use in the interests we choose to develop in future.

The gender differences in educational attainment (girls outperforming boys) and in pathways (boys being over-represented in mathematics, engineering and the sciences versus girls who are over-represented in the arts and humanities) may also possibly be addressed when individuals are able to express their passion for a subject in their own way.

Indeed, we might find far more passionate teachers outside of the classroom than in the classroom. By making education voluntary, children would be able to pick and choose their teachers and they would naturally gravitate towards those who complement their personalities and this would, in turn, naturally foster passion for their interests.

The gist of many of the arguments for compulsory education is as follows: Since we went through it and it has resulted in some good for us, they should go through it as well. This argument is overly broad in that it considers the entire compulsory educational experience as a whole without examining its individual components. Not even the most stalwart defender of his or her compulsory educational experience was tainted with negative aspects.

What about those negative life experiences that we should like to never have to repeat? Should children be rammed through those as well? Compulsory education advocates should consider some of the horrendous eras in modern history (Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Gulags in the Soviet Union, Hitler’s Third Reich, etc.). Though we may accept that some good things came out of those eras, those good things are quite independent of their larger, statist infrastructures. We would certainly not wish for those eras to be repeated again for the sake of experience.

You might think that the three aforementioned examples are extreme comparisons. But when you think about it and scrutinise education policy closely, they prove to be apt comparisons. Mao thought that his reforms would do good for China, Hitler suppressed and slaughtered entire peoples because he thought the world would be better off without them, and Stalin thought that imprisonment and forced labour was the optimal way to deal with political dissidents. There are many children who love going to school and get a lot out of it but again, what about those who don’t? When those children who love reading fantasy stories, learning about dinosaurs, ancient civilisations, etc. get told to put down their books, lay aside their passions and listen to what must be taught, their thoughts are suppressed. Their “education” becomes the slow-slaughter of the people they could be. It becomes forced labour as punishment for intellectual dissidence.

Of course, we don’t see this when the child cries not to go to school because they would rather do something we perceive to be unproductive. “But how will they learn the skills necessary for economic independence from their parents? How will they learn to be good, functioning members of society if they do not go to school with their peers?” Isn’t there more than one way to learn from and interact within society? Do we really want to teach a child that what really matters is how much income they earn from their education? Should education be viewed purely as a financial investment?

Surely by telling children what they must learn and what is best for them without allowing them to think for themselves from a young age we are preventing them from thinking independently about how best to tackle the world. It is, after all, independent thought that is the necessary precursor for all other forms of independence (such as, but not limited to, the financial variety) and a vital ingredient for advancing civilisation.

In a free society, when children leave the classroom to embark on their own personal journey of learning, a high proportion of those who remain in the classroom will see value in the taught syllabus, for one reason or another. This leaves together those who see value in what they are doing and the mutually shared interests of the class will enable all of them to collectively cover more ground and explore deeper questions. Incidentally, the ideal world of voluntary education would also be voluntarily funded. But while we’re stuck with the taxpayer-funded model, voluntary education will at least reduce the taxpayer’s overall expense, all else being equal.

Even though life expectancy has increased over the centuries, this does not give the State (or any other person, for that matter) the right to encroach upon and dictate what we do with our time. Parents might say “but they are my children, I need to guide them.” The free society would not deny them the opportunity to guide their children. Parents should never forget that although they might think of them as their children, the children’s lives are their own, and their choices should be their own as well.

The government continuously inhibits children’s development, albeit with good intentions. By all means, make education more available, but make it optional. Compulsory education tramples upon that most powerful, cherished and important civil liberty — freedom of thought and prevents children from achieving to their fullest potential.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative



Source: https://c4ss.org/content/44136

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