My experience of public schools has been poor. I don’t remember 90 percent of the things I’ve been taught over the years. I don’t think it was that important for me to learn biology in ninth grade, the rock cycle in seventh, or electricity in third. I know I would have remembered a lot more if I’d been taught what I cared about, instead of being force-fed a curriculum. When I went through a decade of school papers earlier this summer, I was amazed and frustrated by all the busywork I’d done that had no effect on my life.
When I was a junior, I decided to work the system, get the credits, and graduate a year early. Now that I’m out in the business world, I feel like I have to catch up. School never taught me how to program, run a blog, or design websites. It never taught me how to create flash games, compose music, or record a podcast. All of those things were more important than learning about the solar system, but I had to learn them myself.
I’ll admit, I learned some things at school, like English, video editing, and how to write news articles. That doesn’t feel like a decade of studying, though. That seems more like something I could have learn in a few weeks. I learned some other things too, but I’ve either forgotten them or never needed to learn them anyway; most are bits of trivia that I could look up on Google when necessary. That said, I feel like the first 17 years of my life were severely underutilized; I would much rather have gotten business experiences than learn things I’d never end up needing to know.
Out of the nearly 1,000 students that graduated from my high school last year, I was the only one to graduate a year early. According to the KSDE, the statewide dropout rate is about 1.5 percent (that’s 15 students out of 1,000.) The question I’d like to pose is: why? Do students really love school enough to stay in it during your entire youth? If not, why aren’t they protesting it?
Compulsory schooling finds it’s justification in a number of laws. According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a declaration passed by the United Nations, children have the “right” to compulsory education. The Kansas legislature has a law (K.S.A. ยง 72-1111) that requires you to attend school from the age of 7 to 18 (16, if your parents will allow it.) I think most students take that law for granted. Though education is great, I don’t think it should be mandatory, and I think voluntary, privatized education would mean higher quality education for those who want it.
Additionally, I think public schools are immoral because they are funded coercively. The truth is that the government robs people of their property and freedoms even if those people have lived peacefully on their own. Pro-government individuals won’t like to admit that enforcement of their laws often takes the form of aggression against peaceful people, but that’s exactly what they do when you don’t pay your property taxes (a portion of which goes to education) or go to school.
Dennis Fermoyle has taught for 31 years. He wrote a book called “In the Trenches: A Teacher’s Defense of Public Education.” Fermoyle is pro-public schools, but we agree on compulsory education. “If some kids are unfortunate enough to have nitwit parents who don’t want them to go to school, we should let the parents have their way,” Fermoyle wrote on his blog. “And I say that because the chances of those children getting any meaningful benefits from public education are either slim or none, and they will only make it more difficult for us to work with kids who we really have a chance to help.”
You can make someone go to school, but you can’t make them learn. Furthermore, apathetic students won’t learn anyway, and they’ll only make it harder for everyone else. I take online classes through Johnson County Community College, and one major difference from high school is that everybody wants to be there. It makes a difference.
In the long run, I believe that public schools should be transformed into schools funded voluntarily and attended by the children of those voluntary taxpayers. Essentially, they should be privatized. The most immediate step, though, is to protest compulsory education. Write to your local newspapers. Proclaim that you are a sovereign individual\and that you don’t accept the government’s authority to tell you how to live. Campaign for representatives who will end coercion against peaceful people. Broadcast your belief that the government should be a voluntary organization by consent of the governed, not tyranny of the majority. It is through activism that we can change the system.
Students’ freedoms need to be fought for. Ask the questions that no one else will. Assume that you, not society or the government, are the owner of your life. If you want help, send me a friend request on facebook or email me at pshields@gmail.com.
