How Children Fail: angry lessons from failures to teach – Boing Boing

…The valiant and resolute band of travelers I thought I was leading toward a much-hoped-for destination turned out instead to be more like convicts on a chain-gang, forced under threat of punishment to move along a rough path leading nobody knew where and down which they could see hardly more than a few steps ahead. School feels like this to children: it is a place where they make you go and where they tell you to do things and where they try to make your life unpleasant if you don’t do them or don’t do them right…

So many people have said to me, “If we didn’t make children do things, they wouldn’t do anything.” Even worse, they say, If I weren’t made to do things, I wouldn’t do anything.

It is the creed of the slave …

I felt like this all through school, even grad school. I read an article a couple of years ago where the author stated that the American school system was built to process corporate drones. No creativity needed. Now that corporations are becoming more automated, that system is breaking down. My aunt home-schools her children because the system isn’t challenging enough for them.