Schools

[unity100]

Same North America disclaimer as the Capitalism thread.

Schools primarily teach obedience based on relative authority: the government says this person can tell you what to do and you must obey them, otherwise your parents will punish you and/or you won't have a good job. Officially they're supposed to fill your mind with ideas, but how can anyone remember something they don't want to learn? And if they do want to learn it then the only thing you'd need teachers for is to help them find the resources they need to learn what they want and answer any questions they have - rather than force a one-size-fits-all set of factoids on everyone in a classroom.

Throughout all 12 years of school the only useful things I learned were reading, writing, and basic math. Everything else was a useless barrage of information I didn't care about, which had no impact on my life or abilities, and which took a toll on my psychological well being. Most children probably weren't as sensitive as me but that doesn't make it alright. School destroyed my creativity and passion for learning, I think I'd be alot happier, more creative, and more intelligent if I went to an alternative school, Waldorf school, or was home schooled in the style of unschooling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling The only good thing I can say about school is it forced me to be around other people my age, even though I didn't want to, without school I'd have no friends.

Canada doesn't have standardized testing, I assume in the U.S. you could skip school every day and still get into university if you did well on the SAT or ACT.

education system in this society exists and works to create the underlings to be employed in the existing hierarchy and mechanism. its no surprise that it did kill some of your creativity.

exceptions may be seen at varying levels of education system in different european countries - netherlands has a pretty advanced system that channels kids to their interest areas from preschool, you can just walk into german universities and start receiving lessons (whether you may be able to go past the first exams is a different matter and depends on you) and so on.

on top of all of these, the education system in america is geared for making money off students. it adds its own ills to the system.