[EDUCATION] The 10 worst reasons to go to school (part 2)

For the first six reasons see the previous blog:
steemit.com/education/@steemswede/education-the-10-worst-reasons-to-go-to-school

7. "School creates social cohesion and community"

The nicest kind of community is created through voluntary association. Children and young people can get to know each other - across class, gender, and boundaries - in the Scouts, the book club, the soccer team, or in most other parts of civil society.

Viewing social cohesion as desirable doesn't imply that you ought to go to school. In fact, the school system, with its compulsory schooling and obligatory curriculum, is a pretty bad place to create community and cohesion. For many students, school is characterized by frustration, depression, bullying, humiliation, or just boredom. These are not evidence of a flourishing community, but rather of social deprivation. If any other social institution would have the same social problems politicians would have campaigned for the elimination of it.

8. "You need basic skills to be able to search for information online"

Basic skills that everyone needs can't possibly take more than a few years of training to learn. Primary school is nine years. Remember that there are quite a lot of knowledge floating around in popular culture that normally gifted children should be able to pick up through cultural osmosis. No single child growing up in Sweden can reach adulthood without having heard of the Roman Empire, DNA, or the solar system, regardless of whether they went to school or not.

If you necessarily want to have compulsory schooling (which you don't) the kids can learn the basic knowledge through compulsory courses in elementary school, and then get to choose topics themselves. Basic skills that are primarily needed in a particular subject can be taught to the students that choose to study that particular subject. It doesn't take four years to learn about the basic concepts of biology if you don't intend to work with biology, and it doesn't take nine years to learn basic skills in math if you don't intend to become a mathematician. This so well reflects on the inefficiency of statism and central planning.

If school had only focused on the basic knowledge and let the rest of the education focus on things that the students were interested in, instead of compulsory modules that can be replaced with a Google search, it would have been a clear improvement, and truancy would probably decrease. But as it is now school is designed in that way and as a result many parts of the education is a waste of the students' time.

9. "Primary school is about preparation for upper secondary school, and upper secondary school is about becoming employable or get into college"

First of all, this is a logical error. Electrician companies could train their own electricians, law firms their own lawyers, and hospitals their own doctors, but this is prohibited. Instead, you have to go through centrally planned courses to obtain a state-approved exam.

Secondly, this position becomes very interesting if we consider it in isolation. According to this reasoning students only ought to take as many academic points they need to enter the desired education or graduate, and then ignore all the other studies. Seen in a vacuum this position actually advocates for more truancy, not less.

10. "School teaches you to work with people you don't like"

Obviously not, considering how many children it is that skip school, refuse to work together, and even kill themselves. School rather teaches you to try and avoid people you don't like. If you just want to teach children to socialize in general, they can do that just as well in sports clubs or similar.

Bet let's say that you're trying to convince a student to not cut class by talking about how he or she  must learn to work with people that he or she doesn't like. What if the class ends up with a good group dynamic where everyone agrees? Reasonably in this case we ought to break this and other such classes up and mix them until they become conflicted and dysfunctional.

Furthermore, I question what kind of insane workplaces people go to where they hate their fellow workers as much as many students despise their classmates. It sounds like a completely untenable work situation, and if I had ended up in such a workplace my first thought would have been "how do I find a new job", and not "how lucky I am that school taught me to hate myself enough to work with these people."