Don't Blame Schools for a Lack of Children's Curiosity
A child’s natural sense of curiosity begins to be stamped out long before they set foot in a school. And although today, the vast majority of schools are designed not to teach children how to think, but what to think, the focus that many advocates* for change in schooling place upon these institutions is an unfortunate shift of responsibility from those who are really to blame.
I’m talking about the parents. There’s no need whatsoever to tell good parents about how bad most schools are – any good parent would notice this in a heartbeat, and quickly take their children out of those institutions of indoctrination. Indeed, they would doubtful let their children set foot there in the first place.
The problem is the bad parents. The parents who don’t really care about their children. The ones who truthfully view their children either as a burden or a means to their own ends, more than happy to be absentee parents who hand their children off to the care of total strangers, sometimes from as early as daycare.
When a naturally curious child trying to explore and discover the world asks the fundamental question, “Why?”, and is met with a harsh, “Because I told you so”, or words to that effect, or avoidance, or distraction, or a boldface lie, or a vile myth, most children will grow up with an abrupt buffer stop called, “Authority”, at the end of a rather short train of thought.
Yes, this happens in schools too, but parents who encourage their child’s curiosity would never place them in such schools in the first place. While parents who have had their own curiosity extinguished and replaced with asinine superstitions and an utter disconnect of cause and effect as children are hardly going to notice that anything’s wrong, and these schools exist as a mere extension of the mind-crippling environment already pervasive in the home.
There’s no conspiracy in any of this. Bad parents don’t meet up in smoky rooms behind closed doors, and plot how they can divert attention from their own shortcomings and abuses. But they’re more than happy to jump on a blame-the-schools bandwagon if it relieves their anxieties when they finally notice their child is slipping behind.
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*Note: Those advocates for a change in schooling who care about results are busy creating alternative schooling systems, or working outside the system entirely with homeschooling and un-schooling. They don’t naively work within a government system that by the very words of its creators was designed to throttle the last bits of imagination and creativity of children (reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okPnDZ1Txlo) and create a permanent under-class who will never grow up to be a threat to those in power. A population of people who, as George Carlin said, are just smart enough to operate the machinery, but just dumb enough not to notice what’s happening around them.