Heimarbeit Mact Frei! (or "School is Psychological Warfare")

I wrote the following piece at the end of the spring semester of 2009. I was going through kind of a nervous breakdown as I was coming to terms with what school had made me into, what career path I wanted to take, and the place where these things intersected.

A little background. I'm a 23 year old privileged white male who has always lacked a satisfying intellectual challenge from school. I graduated with a bachelors in psych in the spring of 2008 and decided I wanted to teach math for a living. So I began taking grad-level teacher training courses.

I think the only thing more hopeless than being a student trapped in school, is being trained to be the teacher who keeps them there and forces them to do useless bullshit. Seeing from the inside how teachers are trained, I understand a lot more about my own educational experiences and where the roots of many societal problems lie.

(a joke: why do we have 13 years of public education? Because that's how long it takes to break a child's spirit...)

Anyways, here is my little splat of creative writing borne out of true anger and frustration:

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Heimarbeit Macht Frei!
April 20th, 2009

Children have a natural hatred for school from a very young age. This is good. Children are a lot smarter than people give them credit for, and they know instinctively that school should be treated with contempt. They associate it with oppression, and rightfully so, since proper classroom conduct requires a restriction on every healthy impulse that a child might have. They rightfully associate it with death.

There are all kinds of funny metaphors used when talking about education. Knowledge can be "passed down" and "picked up", built into "structures" guided by "scaffolding". It’d be interesting to hear knowledge metaphors based on life. What about allowing knowledge to "take root", to "grow and mature", finally to "blossom" and "give birth" to new understanding? The metaphors we use reflect the intentions behind the act. The purpose of school is to "build character" and to "shape individuals". It is a purely mechanistic and utilitarian view, and it requires that the spirit of every child be broken on the gears of the educational system.

School is the Lesson! It is socialization, not education. Standardized tests give high scores to standardized test takers. It is the crude production of a culture and value system. School is psychological warfare. The student is repeatedly, ritualistically traumatized through humiliation and personal degradation. The sanctioned reward system instills self-objectifying values as it "grades" the products being prepared for the job market.

Why are we told that we should care to do well in school? Well, so we can go to more school! Bigger and better school. More expensive school. The kind of education you go into debt to receive. But don’t worry it’s cheap debt… at first. Then after four years of that school, sweet deal… you get to go to more school. Except now your state scholarship ran out and there are no jobs because the economy crashed. Then you have the shocking realization that you’ve spent the past eighteen years of your life inside the walls of some cryptic government institution and that you know of no other way to live. You have been institutionalized. Driven absolutely out of your mind, yet sanctioned as economically viable.

Employable skills include: the ability to sit at a desk and do mindless, tedious tasks. Respect for deadlines and authority, but passive contempt for peers and self. High tolerance for bullshit and degradation. A massive debt that looms over my future, ensuring loyalty borne of desperation. I am a firm believer of the philosophy that Work Makes One Free.