With voting set to close tomorrow at midnight I would like to thank everyone who has connected with me over the past month. It has been really great hearing from members about their ambitions and dreams for a space enabled society. I thought I'd share this image of the UK taken by our very own astronaut, Maj. Timothy Peake during his time aboard the ISS in orbit 254 miles above us.

I am very excited about the prospects in space for the UK and particularly London. I look forward to reaching out next week to industry and finance to begin challenging them on what they are doing to engage with the space sector, to create space jobs and encourage their investment committees to apportion 5% of their eligible funds and portfolios to space related technologies and activities.

I welcome correspondence from all Asgardians and especially the London electorate, please do connect with me through the website or e-mail me directly on edmundgrecharcadian@gmail.com to share your thoughts on Space for London. Finally don't forget to vote, it's the most affirmative way you declare your clear desire to make the world a space enabled planet!

As a concept, Asgardia is an ambitious one, and as with any new movement there is much still to be decided. The ultimate character of the organisation will emerge only with time and patient development, but at its core I believe all members share a fundamental conviction that we have a common destiny beyond the reaches of Earth alone. We will all possess our own unique culturally informed view on what such a future may look like, but I for one am looking forward to discovering it together.

Any persistent off-world human project will take the dedicated effort of generations of people working hard for a future they themselves may never see, but that should not discourage us, because unwittingly it is what we have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. As the aerospace pioneers of the last century leave us and entrust their legacy to new generations, we all must reflect that the ongoing success of the human story can rarely now be measured out in a few years. We have collected the low hanging fruit of what single lifetimes of human endeavour can achieve and must now work together toward often intangible horizons. Combating pollution and climate change are two examples of global problems where a solution will not be found in the term or resolve of any one nation's government. Among our supranational organisations it would be premature to label Asgardia a contender but it at least signals that a great many hearts are in the right place and will serve to drive the process by which we act mutually in the common good of our world.

We are fortunate to stand on the cusp of a new golden age of space exploration with the tools at our disposal to solve the crises we face. We must act decisively to extend our presence into space, to fashion a viable human experience there, and to overcome any and all technical barriers to achieving that goal. We possess the means, and we have the opportunity, we need only exercise the will to make it a reality.

As a Mayoral candidate for London I propose to continue a lifetime passion for conveying the business case for space, to deliver the myriad benefits space has to offer us and promote investment to deliver this vision of a new life and a new economy. I also encourage others to submit their candidacies to expand the platform of issues we can address, and to engage with people's passions for what we might achieve as a city at the forefront of a new race for space.

There’s nothing more relaxing and unwinding than summer vacations after attending the academic lectures the whole semester. Meanwhile, everyone has plans to spend our holidays in the ideal way we can.

In the same manner, people start to reserve tickets to their favorite spots. Some may want to attend Cold play concert, while some may wish to attend a book launch event happening nearby if their favorite author, while some may have planned a long trip to Thailand. However, even after spending most of your time in your leisure activities, you can still make time to learn something new to enhance your interpersonal skills. Besides, there are more options available where you can improve your writing skills by writing essays and taking essay help from your friends.

Following are some essential skills which you can work on during your off time from studies:

You can learn new skills for repairing things on your own:

For what reason do you have to fix something when you can pay another person to do it? That may be right, but why waste money on something that you can do without anyone’s help? Besides, doing things on your own will enhance your skills and learning. For instance, you can learn to repair things. You don’t need to bother of having a prior degree to have the capacity to fix something. What you mainly require, is only the time, purpose and access to the internet. Likewise, holidays are the best time where you can learn about repairing stuff without the need of an expert. You can also watch DIY (Do It Yourself) videos on various sites like YouTube and Vimeo, the opportunities are inevitable.

You can learn about website development or programming:

While surfing the internet and redirecting to different sites, you may have come across a desire of making a website based on your concepts and ideas. So! Why wait for it? There are services available by which you can make a site without the need for programming knowledge if you don’t like coding to create executable programs. However, you can also try to firstly improve your programming skills so you won’t be facing issues in understanding the concepts and logic behind the coding of the website.

You can try your hand at learning some creative skill:

It is indeed a gift from God if you possess creative skills apart from your standard capabilities. It is entirely up to you find your hidden talent and excel in it. For instance, you can try your hand at Photography, or you can also become a fascinating artist by painting artistic artworks. Likewise, you can learn to play instruments such as Guitar, Piano, Cello, Violin, Drums, etc.

You can also learn about self-defense:

This is something everybody should think about learning. You don't need to be some fighting master or a black-belt winner to have the capacity to safeguard yourself, but only a couple of moves will do. You can find many "self-defense" videos on the YouTube from where you can get some viable and straightforward survival moves. You don’t necessarily require them in your life, but rather having them learned can help you in big time if needed. Perhaps, learning the self-defense moves will sure make your vacation period more entertaining and exciting.

Although, there are many or maybe various skills and things are available out there to learn in life, but it is up to you to invest your holidays time in expanding your capabilities in different activities and learning OR enhance your existing skills by practicing daily.

When first introduced to the Asgardian Nation it was purely conceptual, but it was a concept so powerful and engaging, an idea that resonated so clearly with my own hopes and dreams of the future that I was instantly devoted to becoming a citizen and doing my part to drive the Asgardian Nation forward, and I know that many of my fellow Asgardians will share my drive to patriotism.

Like many of you, I dream of a day where science is at the forefront of our minds, where technological advancements for the betterment of humankind are unhindered by "product profitability" and the antiquated choices of the past, but rather controlled only by logic and moral compass. As an avid reader and movie-watcher, it is easy to look at books and films like Tomorrowland and compare the Asgardian dream of a nation free from racism and discrimination, where the advancement of humankind is our shared goal, where the scientific exploration of ourselves and the universe is a task we hold at our core, and see what our future can be if we strive to rise as a nation and show the world what we are capable of achieving as a race.

I'm just wondering if I could be the first deaf man who ever get send to space and to live there along with the others Asgardian, I'm focusing on my fitness currently, such as learning to do Krav Maga and Yoga to keep my mind sane  so I'll be fit enough for the blast off. It's like a real passion of mine to leave the Earth and explore the unknown, ever since I was a little boy and I'm always dreaming of watching down to see the blue jewel of Earth, as I leave further and further away.

I'd like to see an Asgardian news outlet.

It would bring unbiased news from around the world, well outside of the influence of any local government but freely available to all the populace.

It some ways I'm basing this on the BBC, which I feel does already bring unbiased news. Unfortunately China has very recently blocked the BBC. Too many people within many countries do not have access to this vital information store. I'd like to see Asgardia change that.

I'm Emma and I've just become an Asgardian today. I live in Slough, Berkshire and I work in London for a business finance company.

I've always been interested in a more unified and spiritual place, where we are more connected to eachother and our environment.

I care about people, animals, our environment and the arts to name a few.

I believe in one love and hope for a future without racism, prejudice and homophobia with less crime and corruption.

I studied t.v and film studies and find it interesting how the way we live, the future and technology are portrayed in the current media and films. Happy to discuss various topics

I work as senior dementia carer in the day and stream during the night  on twitch, Thinking of making a Asgardian twitch gaming stream to help  spread the message and cause of asgardia and what we stand for as a new  and budding nation, What do yoou guys think is it a good idea.

To understand schools, we must view them in historical perspective.

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn't force children to go to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been tested and have failed.

Studies on Self Directed Education (SDE) schools and its graduates show that normal, average children become educated through their own play and exploration, without adult direction or prodding, and go on to be fulfilled, effective adults in the larger culture. Instead of providing direction and prodding, the SDE schools provide a rich setting within which to play, explore, and experience democracy first hand; and it does that at lower expense and with less trouble for all involved than is required to operate standard schools. So why aren't most schools like that?

If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have to abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or scientific insight. They are, instead, products of history. Schooling, as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective. And so, as a first step toward explaining why schools are what they are, I present here, in a nutshell, an outline of the history of education, from the beginning of humankind until now. Most scholars of educational history would use different terms than I use here, but I doubt that they would deny the overall accuracy of the sketch. In fact, I have used the writings of such scholars to help me develop the sketch.

In the beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years, children educated themselves through self-directed play and exploration.

In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. The evidence from anthropology is that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning.

With the rise of agriculture, and later of industry, children became forced laborers. Play and exploration were suppressed. Wilfulness, which had been a virtue, became a vice that had to be beaten out of children.

The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people's ways of living. The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labour-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play--essentially all of life was understood as play.

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labour. While hunter-gatherers skilfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plough, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labour, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children's lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

Agriculture and the associated ownership of land and accumulation of property also created, for the first time in history, clear status differences. People who did not own land became dependent on those who did. Also, landowners discovered that they could increase their own wealth by getting other people to work for them. Systems of slavery and other forms of servitude developed. Those with wealth could become even wealthier with the help of others who depended on them for survival. All this culminated with feudalism in the Middle Ages, when society became steeply hierarchical, with a few kings and lords at the top and masses of slaves and serfs at the bottom. Now the lot of most people, children included, was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to learn were obedience, suppression of their own will, and the show of reverence toward lords and masters. A rebellious spirit could well result in death.

In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically beating children into submission. For example, in one document from the late 14th or early 15th century, a French count advised that nobles' huntsmen should "choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight" and that "...this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of failing to carry out his masters orders."[1] The document went on to list a prodigious number of chores that the boy would perform daily and noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at night in order to attend to the dogs' needs.

With the rise of industry and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Business owners, like landowners, needed laborers and could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with as little compensation as possible. Everyone knows of the exploitation that followed and still exists in many parts of the world. People, including young children, worked most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in beastly conditions, just to survive. The labour of children was moved from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air, and some opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. In England, overseers of the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to factories, where they were treated as slaves. Many thousands of them died each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. Not until the 19th century did England pass laws limiting child labour. In 1883, for example, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of 9 and limited the maximum weekly work hours to 48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to 17-year-olds [2].

In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their wilfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly, the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

For various reasons, some religious and some secular, the idea of universal, compulsory education arose and gradually spread. Education was understood as inculcation.

As industry progressed and became somewhat more automated, the need for child labour declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to spread that childhood should be a time for learning, and schools for children were developed as places of learning. The idea and practice of universal, compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe, from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had many supporters, who all had their own agendas concerning the lessons that children should learn.

Much of the impetus for universal education came from the emerging Protestant religions. Martin Luther declared that salvation depends on each person's own reading of the Scriptures. A corollary, not lost on Luther, was that each person must learn to read and must also learn that the Scriptures represent absolute truths and that salvation depends on understanding those truths. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation promoted public education as Christian duty, to save souls from eternal damnation. By the end of the 17th century, Germany, which was the leader in the development of schooling, had laws in most of its states requiring that children attend school; but the Lutheran church, not the state, ran the schools [3].

In America, in the mid 17th century, Massachusetts became the first colony to mandate schooling, the clearly stated purpose of which was to turn children into good Puritans. Beginning in 1690, children in Massachusetts and adjacent colonies learned to read from the New England Primer, known colloquially as "The Little Bible of New England" [4]. It included a set of short rhymes to help children learn the alphabet, beginning with, "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all," and ending with, "Zacchaeus he, Did climb the tree, His Lord to see." The Primer also included the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and various lessons designed to instil in children a fear of God and a sense of duty to their elders.

Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better.

As nations gelled and became more centralized, national leaders saw schooling as means of creating good patriots and future soldiers. To them, the crucial lessons were about the glories of the fatherland, the wondrous achievements and moral virtues of the nation's founders and leaders, and the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces elsewhere.

Into this mix we must add reformers who truly cared about children, whose messages may ring sympathetically in our ears today. These are people who saw schools as places for protecting children from the damaging forces of the outside world and for providing children with the moral and intellectual grounding needed to develop into upstanding, competent adults. But they too had their agenda for what children should learn. Children should learn moral lessons and disciplines, such as Latin and mathematics, that would exercise their minds and turn them into scholars.

So, everyone involved in the founding and support of schools had a clear view about what lessons children should learn in school. Quite correctly, nobody believed that children left to their own devices, even in a rich setting for learning, would all learn just exactly the lessons that they (the adults) deemed to be so important. All of them saw schooling as inculcation, the implanting of certain truths and ways of thinking into children's minds. The only known method of inculcation, then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for memory of what was repeated.

With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom.

Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children, whose instincts urge them constantly to play freely and explore the world on their own. Just as children did not adapt readily to labouring in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling. This was no surprise to the adults involved. By this point in history, the idea that children's own wilfulness had any value was pretty well forgotten. Everyone assumed that to make children learn in school the children's wilfulness would have to be beaten out of them. Punishments of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. In some schools, children were permitted certain periods of play (recess), to allow them to let off steam; but play was not considered to be a vehicle of learning. In the classroom, play was the enemy of learning.

A prominent attitude of eighteenth century school authorities toward play is reflected in John Wesley's rules for Wesleyan schools, which included the statement: "As we have no play days, so neither do we allow any time for play on any day; for he that plays as a child will play as a man."[5]

The brute force methods long used to keep children on task on the farm or in the factory were transported into schools to make children learn. Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic. One master in Germany kept records of the punishments he meted out in 51 years of teaching, a partial list of which included: "911,527 blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the head"[6]. Clearly, that master was proud of all the educating he had done.

In his autobiography, John Bernard, a prominent eighteenth-century Massachusetts minister, described approvingly how he himself, as a child, was beaten regularly by his schoolmaster [7]. He was beaten because of his irresistible drive to play; he was beaten when he failed to learn; he was even beaten when his classmates failed to learn. Because he was a bright boy, he was put in charge of helping the others learn, and when they failed to recite a lesson properly he was beaten for that. His only complaint was that one classmate deliberately flubbed his lessons in order to see him beaten. He solved that problem, finally, by giving the classmate "a good drubbing" when the school day was over and threatening more drubbings in the future. Those were the good old days.

In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. The methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal; the lessons became more secular; the curriculum expanded, as knowledge expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects; and the number of hours, days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously. School gradually replaced fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores as the child's primary job. Just as adults put in their 8-hour day at their place of employment, children today put in their 6-hour day at school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of lessons outside of school. Over time, children's lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum. Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

Schools today are much less harsh than they were, but certain premises about the nature of learning remain unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children's self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like "discovery").

Clever educators today might use "play" as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this is decreasing in very recent times), but children's own play is certainly understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers never knew--the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, "you must do your work and then you can play." Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play, which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between work and play and that learning is work, not play.

In this posting I have tried to explain how the history of humanity has led to the development of schools as we know them today. In my next posting I will discuss some reasons why modern attempts to reform schools in basic ways have been so ineffective.

By Peter Gray , Ph.D., research professor at Boston College and author of the book Free to Learn (Basic Books) and Psychology .

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Notes

1. Quoted by Orme, N. (2001), Medieval children, p 315.
2. Mulhern, J. (1959), A history of education: A social interpretation, 2nd edition.
3. Again, Mulhern (1959).
4. Gutek, G. L. (1991), An historical introduction to American education, 2nd edition.
5. Quoted by Mullhern (1959, p 383).
6. Again, in Mullhern (1959, p 383).
7. From “Autobiography of the Rev. John Bernard,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Ser., 5 [1836]: 178-182. Extracted in J. Martin (Ed.) (2007), Children in Colonial America.

As a kindergartener, I went to school because I didn’t know how to do anything but what the adults in my life commanded. As an elementary and middle schooler, I went to school because I’d never been presented with another option. As a high schooler, I go to school because I’m afraid that if I don’t, I’ll be a failure.

Never have I gone to school with the intent of being educated; anything learned at school is merely a byproduct, and any real passion is crushed into something that can fit in the bubbles of a Scantron test. The goal of the school system is not to produce innovative individuals. It is to churn out efficient, but not empowered, employees. John D. Rockefeller, creator of the General Education Board, once said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.” ¹ Although this was stated well over a century ago, it may as well serve as the moral and intellectual compass of modern American schooling.

Students are discouraged from expressing any distaste for their schooling at a young age. Kids who berate the fact that they are forced into spending seven hours locked in a room with twenty other children, being taught how and what to think, are labelled trouble makers and treated as problems to be dealt with similarly to a rodent skirting across a clean kitchen floor.

Kids who go to school lose their passion for learning at a young age, and by the time they reach middle school, their curiosity and creativity has been graded into submission. There is no evidence supporting the claim that students need grades to learn efficiently; most children have learned to speak and walk before entering kindergarten, and they have done so without each minor accomplishment being given a letter grade. Many begin reading and writing by three, and four-year-olds can count, recognize different shapes, and add and subtract some numbers, yet they don’t begin kindergarten, and by extension, formal grading, until age five. However, 68 percent of students surveyed believed that grading was a necessary part of education.

What is the benefit of being graded? It doesn’t improve students’ ability to learn, and it certainly doesn’t impassion them, rather its purpose is to judge them: to weed out those who it deems subpar through failing them or through shoving them into under-funded special education programmes, to elevate those who conform by rewarding them with gold star stickers and A grades, and to streamline the youth into a hive mind so as to simplify it all.

If students went to class only when they wanted to, went to the restroom without asking, openly conversed without permission, and exercised their right to express themselves freely, most schools would ascend into unmanageability. Administrators would no longer be able to control the students; kids who sit quietly and do what they are told are more easily regulated than intelligent individuals who elect to govern themselves. Alexander Khost, a youth rights advocate and founder of Voice of the Children, highlights the primary issue with conventional schooling, saying, “It boils down to one issue that a man named Alexander Sutherland Neill stated about a hundred years ago. That is, that the school should fit the child rather than the child fit the school.” School isn’t built to accommodate the needs of the student; it is built to accommodate the needs of itself at the expense of the student.

When asked about the efficiency of the school system anonymously, one hundred students I surveyed at a public high school said:

• It sucks. (written five times)
• Probably rigged, doesn’t benefit the students, just the people in charge.
• It’s f*cked.
• It doesn’t evolve and it teaches us to be robots.
• It also makes us feel dumb in some ways, like a fish being told to climb a tree.
• It mostly just teaches us to memorize things.
• There’s too much pressure on tests and not enough time to learn things.
• Honestly it’s crap.
• We focus so much on the grades and not on the outcome.
• They want their children to be straight A students.
• They shove everything about our future up our butts and never talk about how to get to that future.
• There’s way too much useless stuff that we just learn for the standardized test, instead of stuff that would be helpful in life.
• It is more about passing than learning.
• It’s very backwards and overwhelming.
• The school system has everyone stressed and getting mental disorders.
• Garbage.
• It blows.
• Sucks balls.
• 
  

Students know they’re being cheated out of an education by the politicians who designed this system and by the administrators who enforce it. Their opinions are just as valid as those of an adult, yet they are brushed aside as the edgy complaints of a typical teen. Students are not taught that they have an unalienable right to speak their truth and to control their own bodies and actions. Why does a bell have more of a right to control your time than you do? Why does a teacher have the right to take your personal possessions if they deem them distracting? Why are kids who commandeer themselves slapped with labels like “problem child” and “trouble maker” and told that they’ll end up flipping burgers?

There is no answer that can justify indoctrinating children into believing that they lack the right to control their own lives, yet this system is ingrained in our society as the only true way to be educated and prepared for adult life.

In the past 125 years since this system was founded, humans have developed computers, smartphones, internet, solar panels, air conditioning, and hundreds of other things that we wouldn’t think of living without in 2018. And with these inventions, we’ve thrown out things like showering only twice a year, measles and mumps, and washing laundry by hand. It’s time to add this school system to that pile.

John Taylor Gatto, former schoolteacher and author of Weapons of Mass Instruction , notes that schooling is becoming useless in today’s world, saying, “I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching — that schools and schooling are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” ²

The world has changed a lot in the past century.

A century ago, John D. Rockefeller, founder of the General Education Board, said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.” His words are echoed by almost every school in the United States. And in 2018, they’re dead wrong. Manufacturing jobs are obsolete, as are coal jobs. Retail jobs are following, and none of them are coming back. The wealth of all human knowledge is at our fingertips.

The youth of today will not succeed through obedience and conformity, or with an education suited to a factory worker in 1890, rather through innovation, ingenuity, and creativity. Khost says, “Standardized tests produce standardized minds. And the world doesn’t need standardized minds; it needs people who come alive.” I asked Khost what advice he would give to students who hate school, and to that, he said:

If every day of your life is being dictated by someone else, there is something wrong there. This is true whether you’re twelve or forty-two. And so, if you do not like school, you should start considering no longer going. Remember that life is a balance and doing so will definitely have consequences that also might suck. But I would much rather be fighting for my rights and struggling than complying with someone else’s oppression of me and struggling.

Rebellion sounds exciting, but in the end, rebellion means taking responsibility for your own life and your own decisions, which is actually quite burdensome. That responsibility starts with a really really hard question: what do you want to actually do with your time? And then it gets even harder because you actually have to go do it. And a lot of the time, what you thought you wanted isn’t really what you even wanted. And then you’re not only back to square one but you have a lot of people (especially adults) sitting around telling you, “I told you so!” This is what is called failure. And failure is absolutely fantastic! No, really. An expert is any one person who has made all of the mistakes in one concentrated field and now knows how to not make them any more. Fall flat on your face. Then pick yourself up and do it over and over and over again. Follow passion. Passion is real. And all of the nine to fiver career oriented folks out there who say otherwise are just jaded and forgot how to joyously fall flat on their faces with failure.

Have a dream so worthy that you would die for it. That is passion, that is worth pursuing. And if you’re not doing that and people are holding you back from doing that, something is wrong, go fix it. Now!

And contrary to the sea of blank faces you’ll see if you walk into an average high school classroom, students are passionate.

I asked students what they were truly passionate about learning.

Their responses ranged from “how the world works” to “music, history and science.” Some said, “not sure,” while others said “anything I can.” Students are passionate about languages, programming, maths, psychology, law, writing, computers, and so much more. They want to learn about money, economics, space, finance. One student says, “I’m not really sure because we’re only taught four main things.”

Another states, “I’m just getting through it so I can get a job and start my life. Anything STEM-related.” They are curious and intelligent, and they are being held back by a system that does not value them. One says, “I’m passionate about learning so many different things, I’m not even sure if I know everything I’m passionate about. With the school system now, they don’t allow those passions to develop because right after an interesting unit, you just move on and never talk about the topic again.”

If you walk into a classroom of kindergarteners, they are eager to learn. They ask hundreds of odd questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark at night? Why do cats have tails? What happens if I eat food I found on the floor? If you walk into a classroom of high schoolers, chances are they won’t even notice you’ve entered.

Over 20 percent of the students I surveyed said they learned nothing at all or very little during the average school day, and 52 percent said they learned only some things. One student said, “I learn how to juul in bathrooms.” When asked about how frequently they are bored during school, over half said they were bored over 70 percent of the time, with only 36 percent being bored under half the time.

What happens between kindergarten and high school that results in all the zeal for learning being sucked from the classroom? They learn that their passions are just hobbies, that the things they love doing are useless compared to their homework, and that the only way they can succeed is to stifle themselves into mediocrity.

Students want to learn. They just don’t want to be schooled.

[by Jane Arisi ]

[1] One Nation Under Siege. Directed by William Lewis, BridgeStone Media Group and William Lewis Films 2006.
[2] John Taylor Gatto. Weapons of Mass Instruction. New Society Publishers, 2010.

Jane Arisi is a writer, artist, and high school student.

Moving away from here and residing somewhere else, out in the space,.... it looks like a joke NOW, but I've no doubt it WILL happen one day.... because mankind and its abilities and dreams are much much much bigger than this little tiny planet called The Earth...
2-July-2018

London, UK