I will never give in to what is wrong and i have been attending the wrong thing untill i have gathered enough reasons that why i should get out of school and singapore and im halfway there i will not let myself be programmed by stupidity and i will try my best to have them wake up and face the retarded system in singapore and school and i swear that i will destroy all this in my lifetime .
Sometimes when people ask me what is the exact reason why i want to leave school i could not reply why because there are a thousands reasons and im thinking to pick an important reason out of those thousands .
This website has almost explain everything im trying to say .
And the following stuff is extracted from this website
http://www.freedom-in-education.co.uk/school/school.htm
What's Wrong With School Anyway?
This website aims to maintain as positive an outlook on education as possible i.e. we promote the good rather than criticise the bad. This particular article has been included to reassure anyone who thinks that the problems that they are having with school are due to some deficiency in themselves - don't worry, it isn't. The fault is always with the school.
Schools have managed to achieve something that was previously thought to be impossible - a decline in educational standards during a time in which Europe has been enjoying peace and prosperity.
School makes children endure years of boredom and frustration, countless petty indignities and a restriction on personal freedoms and at the end of it has not even provided them with a reasonable education.
The Root Cause of The Problem
Schools are asked to fulfil a dual role - childcare and education - and this is the root cause of the problem.
Children are not simply sent to school so that they can learn something, they are also sent there so that their parents are free to go out to work. In bald terms, parents are not prepared (or not allowed) to look after their own children for large parts of each working day.
This means that the school has to keep the child on the premises whether they are learning anything or not and whether the school has anything to teach or not.
This puts the school in the position of being a carer as opposed to an educator - but schools are not designed to provide good care. It takes the love and time of a committed individual to look after a child properly: it is not something that can be done by an institution.
Everyone know this - parents and teachers alike - but no one wants to admit it because the system offers cheap childcare (with the face-saving label of 'education') for parents and a regular pay-packet for teachers.
The fact that children are not being cared for properly explains all the social problems and illnesses which are now endemic in our school system : minor ailments, chronic stress-related disorders, colds, bed-wetting, depression, low self-esteem, lack of socialisation, cigarette smoking, bad language, crime, alcohol abuse, drug use, drug dealing, bullying and suicide. It also explains the failure of schools to be able to maintain educational standards - children cannot be expected to learn in an environment in which they do not feel at home.
Modern life poses a lot of problems for children and, consequently, they need extra care, not less. This means that while schools may have been suitable institutions for the education of children a hundred years ago, they may not be today.
What Schools do to Make Things Even Worse
As someone who has worked in schools, I naturally have sympathy for teachers. They have been handed the impossible task of teaching large groups of children, some of whom may be trying to deal with serious problems and hardly any of whom really want to be there.
Unfortunately, however, it must be admitted that teachers have allowed themselves to be bullied over the past few years into making a difficult situation impossible. The introduction of a national curriculum and regular testing means that children are no longer treated as individuals.
Instead of tailoring work done to the needs of the children that they are teaching, schools now try to make all children learn the same things at the same time and instead of encouraging diversity and originality, schools either diagnose anyone who doesn't conform as having a problem or label them as being stupid, or both.
Education should broaden the mind but schools now aim to make it narrower. Success is judged on how well children do in tests, and schools are becoming more and more adept at teaching the things that appear in the tests - and nothing but things that will appear in the tests. Any deviation from this could distract pupils from the job in hand - good test results, high ranking for the school, prestige for the teachers and job security.
This ill-considered approach alienates the children - especially those who do not do well in the tests - and also extinguishes their interest in learning. Schools have produced a short-term improvement in the scores achieved in meaningless tests at the expense of frustrating another generation of children and causing a further erosion of overall educational standards.
The authoritarian way in which schools are run are directly responsible for the problem of bullying and for the widespread use of cigarettes, alcohol and drugs by children. Their inflexible approach to education is responsible for many of the learning difficulties experienced by children.
Technology - Failing the Future
The only coherent argument that is put forward to justify the way in which schools treat children is that it prepares them for the world of work. In a nutshell, this argument states that working for a living is dull, repetitive and frequently humiliating so it is good for children to be broken into these conditions as soon as possible i.e. at school.
The terrifying reality is, however, that the world of work has changed. Mundane factory jobs and clerical jobs have disappeared, as have paternalistic employers that provide people with a job for life.
In the modern work-place you have to be resourceful, independent and, above-all, you need to be versatile.
This change in working practices has been driven by the emergence of new technologies. Computerisation has done away with clerical jobs and automation has done away with factory work. The biggest growth areas in new jobs - by definition the area in which young people look for work - have all been technology based: computer programming, website design, etc. and most conventional jobs now require some level of computer skills.
This means that young people need an education that trains them to be skilled in the use of new technologies.
Schools cannot provide this.
In the first place there is always a skills shortage in a rapidly developing field. Few experts opt to teach children in a classroom when they can be pursuing their interest in the real world. This means that computer teaching in schools is always slightly behind the times.
Secondly, even if children were being given the most up-to-the-minute information at school, it would be out of date by the time that they left and started work - because technology is changing from year to year.
Tests, exams and qualifications have no relevance in this field - if someone can make a computer work then that is what counts. Employers are not interested in paper qualifications.
Working with technology demands the very opposite skills from those that are required for success at school. It requires an interest in the subject, the ability to look at the problem from different angles, originality in thought, initiative and self-motivation.
School, on the other hand, requires the mindless repetition of irrelevant material and doing what you are told. Rather than preparing people for work it is now making them unsuitable for work - by fostering those qualities that are least desirable in the modern workplace.
The Bigger Picture
We have been brought up to be very proud of our civilisation and our technological achievements but the sad reality is that it is the the way in which we treat our children that really differentiates us from everything that has gone before. History does not provide a single example of a society in which all the children are locked up and kept out of sight for so much of the time.
The architectural legacy that will excite most interest in future generations will probably be the obscure buildings on the outskirts of towns - with chain link fencing, iron gates and bleak rooms - in which our children are enclosed each day; which we never visit ourselves and which we like to pretend are not really there.
People will say 'Surely people can't have known that it was going on, or they would have stopped it?' - but then they will realise that we did all know, because we went to school ourselves.
That is the way that it always is, we fail to see the thing that is most obvious.
In our hearts we all know that it is not right to take children away from their mothers and to only let them see their fathers for a few minutes per day and at weekends. These are monstrous acts that would appal us by if we heard of them happening anywhere else in the world. But, because we have convinced ourselves that going out to work is so terribly important, we just don't see it in ourselves.
Modern schools are an abuse of basic human rights - while we cannot even treat our own children with respect and dignity we cannot call ourselves a civilised society.
This is the issue that needs to be addressed ahead of all others. People in the West must realise that they have no right to preach to the rest of the world when they have created a society in which all the children are kept locked up and unhappy for the greater part of each day.
The Solution
Given goodwill on all sides, it would not be difficult to find the solution to these problem. Billions of pounds are spent on education each year and hundreds of thousands of people earn their living as teachers.
It simply requires a re-allocation of all these resources.
Children could be offered courses in the same way as adults - they could just sign up for courses that they wanted to attend; parents could be given more financial assistance in raising their children; schools could be smaller, part time and flexible; libraries could be extended; tutors could be subsidised; exams and testing could be scrapped etc. etc. - I am sure that I do not have a monopoly on creative solutions that would allow parents to spend more time with their children and at the same time offer better targeted help to provide them with a good education.
These sorts of ideas are not outlandish or radical - they would simply bring education more into line with the way in which the world of work is changing. They would transform education from being a centralised, bureaucratic system that stifles individual enterprise into a de-centralised, flexible system that encourages entrepreneurial activity and the development of individual genius - as such they are not only possible but probably inevitable.
Don't ask me anything related to school because it is not related to me.
Copyright © Gareth Lewis, Freedom-in-Education January 2002
Gareth Lewis is the author of One-to-One A Practical Guide to Learning at Home
