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Q&A: How Do You Show Fellow Students How Stupid School Really Is?
Doc Johnson
Now that is a good question. I find that a certain constant sense of humor helps a lot. Use humor to draw people's attention to what's fucked up. That way, you don't seem like a whiny little shit, but rather a shrewd observer or human nature.
SoulRiser
I think this is a fundamental thing because the whole “point” of school is supposed to be learning, and if you can prove how little of that actually happens, then you can get them to question everything else as well.
xcriteria
Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. How can this be proven? In junior high, I reached a point of being fed up with how little I was actually learning, and I insisted to my parents that I was learning _maybe_ 5% of the time in school, and of that, I wasn't convinced it mattered so much. But I couldn't back up my allegation.
So I've more recently looked into what academic research has been done on how much people actually learn and actually enjoy school. There are a few researchers looking into it. But it would help if students did similar research themselves. And then it could be used to craft arguments that could maybe change things. Or, at least change how teachers, parents, and other students thought about school.
One academic researcher who has looked into this is Marcia Gentry. For example, she and colleagues developed a survey called “My Class Activities” that assesses what students think of their learning experiences in school.
One paper based on that survey is called, Gifted and Nongifted Middle School Students: Are Their Attitudes toward School Different as Measured by the New Affective Instrument, My Class Activities…?
A summary is: “A study that compared the attitudes of 114 gifted middle school students and 673 typical middle school students found that gifted students viewed their class activities essentially the same as the other students. Each group reported their class activities were only slightly more than “sometimes” interesting, challenging, and enjoyable and that they were slightly more often than “seldom” offered choices in their educational activities.”
Will
We don't need to recondition people; we need to uncondition people, which involves making them think about why they are doing stuff so they can learn to do only what they should be doing.
freak-of-nature13 wrote: “And we allow ourselves to be treated like livestock because we don't realize that we don't have to be treated like livestock.”
Here, people realize it.
But shouldn't the idea of not being trated like livestock be natural, like instinct?
It should be, but we're taught (conditioned) at least two main things that discourage us from considering anything anti-school:
It needs to be this way and that we shouldn't complain because it's like this for everyone. In the case of school, everyone has to go to school at some point in his life.
You need to go to school to go to college so you can get a high-paying job (so you can send your kids to school and send them to college so they can get a job).
It's easiest to convince the people who haven't lost their entire brain yet.
This is how it happened for me: I have always been considered “smart” by my fellow students and have always liked logical arguments. I never liked school, and I wondered sometimes why we repeated the same curriculum every year and terrible teachers, but I never questioned it because adults never questioned it. While I complained about individual teachers, I ignored the complaints of the system had until I read this because somewhere in the comments was a link to this. I wondered when I read it whether it was too fanatical, but that fortunately didn't stop me.
I began to feel confident in what I had tried to avoid believing all along, which was that school is not the most efficient way to learn.
Then, I read more and thought more about what I was doing and lost the fear that had been modivating me all along. I would be more likely to accept unpopular ideas now than before all this, but I have always considered unpopular ideas. I have also been confused about school specifically for a long time, so explainations of why it's so bad were always interesting.
Any smart (not “smart”) people should consider your argument that school is not necessary. He will think the same thing to some extent. I think the easiest people to tell are people who meet the following conditions:
- Smart (not “smart”)
- They were/are model students
- They at one point (maybe now) tried to be model students but never could get the desired grades.
- They aren't/weren't very social.
- Cynical (Not too important)
- They listen to people.
Once you get someone to hear that a fellow classmate and a bunch of other people agree with him, he will think about it at least, and he'll eventually come back to the idea and read something about it on his own. You can also give him stuff to read and teach him stuff. This helps a lot when schoolwork, which he doesn't have time to finish, is his primary responsibility and, thus, non-school activity is considered a waste of time. Once he reads more, he'll realize that he is doing things that he doesn't need to do or shouldn't do.
EVOL
Make a underground paper that proves the faults of school, tell your friends why, etc. Just going “GODDAMMIT SCHOOL SUX CUZ OF HOMEWORX!!!!!” does nothing
BobManPerson
This is an easy question: Try to point out your school's faults during class, and loud enough so everyone can hear it. If your school is like any other school, you would be given a punishment immediately.
Geeksta
First off, this is so obvious to anyone in the school system today.
If you really have to, I'd suggest getting a teacher to say something absurd
An example I've done is using chemistry notes and a little research of my own, I convinced a science teacher at my school to sign a petition to ban water.
If that (counting what others have said above) won't do it, nothing will.
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Posted in: Knowledgebase on August 12, 2021 @ 6:31 PM
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