We all start out in life with the same road map. We turn five years old, and everyone tells us how fun school is going to be. You wake up the morning of your first day of school, and you are kind of excited because all the things that were told to you about school sound so exciting and fun. You will be able to do arts and crafts, play with other kids, learn your ABCs and the list goes on. And, for many of us, it was kind of fun until the part they forgot to tell you about: you have to sit in your seat until the teacher says you can move, you cannot talk unless the teacher says you can, you cannot go to the bathroom unless you are given permission, you can’t even eat a snack until the teacher, who for some strange reason has become your new mom and your new authority, says you can. For the first time in your life, you have become part of a system that puts an authority in front of you, and you are supposed to obey this unknown authority without question. The moment this authority begins their training session of keeping us bound to our seats, our mouths shut, hungry until the bell rings, unable to go to the restroom or call a parent until they give permission, we begin to lose our trust for our very own parents because we feel slightly betrayed by them for taking us out of our innocent life and putting us into this cage.
The new authority, the teacher, will first punish you and then comfort your pain in this new situation that you find yourself a part of, and, at five years old, you give into this comfort and this new authority because the pressure of rebelling is too painful for you. So now you hold some secret contempt towards your parents because they threw you into this cruel system and, in one single day, your life is changed forever.
Think about it. Do you really know the teacher you have handed your beloved children over to? At five years old, kids are not yet equipped with protection against what they might see as a threat against their very souls. If they are the type to speak up, they will be punished for their awareness. They will be called troublemakers and, depending on the level of tolerance of the teacher, they will not be favored by this authority, and you will be called in to make them behave. Now you become part of the system, because you have been through this very system and were expected to behave as well, and you say to your child, “Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do!”
Why, I ask, why can’t school offer us what we want? Did anyone ever ask you, at any time in your life in school, what you might have been interested in? Did they even care? Why can’t school offer each and every child the ability to learn using their own interests? Why are we required to have such a robotic system that enforces obedience and does not consider the child’s interests and, in the end, their soul? Instead, it offers each child a huge piece of bait, promising them greatness if they achieve and jump through all of the required hoops in school; they will be smarter than anyone without good grades and will succeed and make mega bucks. Practical skills are always put down and it is insinuated that skilled laborers and hard-working entrepreneurs are somehow a lower class of people. How many times have you been told in your life that, unless you get a degree, you will never make it in life?
We have all been sold the lie. The entire country has bought into the hypnotic belief that, if you get a degree, you will be set for the rest of your life. So many parents have such great hopes for their kids that they even forget to ask them what they might be interested in becoming in life.
If you really think about this concept in depth, you will see the real strangeness of it all. You hand your child over to someone you do not know and expect them to love and respect and protect this little person you have learned to love and respect and protect, and your innocent, little child is now at the mercy of this teacher who has been trained to treat all kids the exact same way; as if they were a herd of animals. They grow up in this system soon forgetting what they love with only a few falling through the cracks to make it out alive with their passion and vision fully intact. These are the few who become successful in spite of education, not because of it.
Think about this while your child is being educated. If we all really considered how simple it is to educate kids, school would be one day a week and the assignment would be, “Find something you are interested in, and let’s talk about the possibilities.” Everything a child should learn in life is in real opportunities, not in stupid schoolbooks that fill the space in our minds where real creations and ideas should be allowed to flourish. But we have all bought into the idea that without permission from the appointed authority, whoever they are, we are all failures! We should really consider this last question: Where would these teachers and authorities be without the hard-working entrepreneurs, skilled craftsmen and women, and practical, skilled laborers who build the buildings that they sit their big egos in? They would not exist!
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