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You make a good point, but theres one crucial difference. Most surgeries are done to heal. What governments are doing is sort of like using alchohol to forget all your problems. It might make you feel better for a while, but there are lasting harmful side effects. Rather than simply being blind to the pain, we should face it, and confront those responsible for it. This is a front we really need to fight on, people's ignorance of what is really going on.

Thats true to a certain extent, but over-reliance on government is also partly to blame. They control the education system that accustoms us to this kind of life from an early age. Contrary to popular belief, the government is not the public. People have always had to work for a living, whether it was hunting bison as primitive cavemen, or a 9-5 job at the office. We work through the pain because it benifits us to do so, not becuase we're forced to.

My previous post, the one you quoted, was made with the tax system in mind. Federal and sate taxes are taken out of your paycheck before you get it, so as to not make you consious of just how much you're paying. If we recieved all of our paychecks, then had to pay the same amoutn in taxes, the backlash would be almost unimaginable. We would be far more concerned with how our tax dollars are spent than we are now.

Some of these skills are necessary, but many of them are not. Some of these skills are not required for survival. What people need for survival are the skills that are applicable in the careers they wish to pursue. At an early age, children should be given the liberty to find their own path, and to define themselves their own way. Children are capable of that. Unfortunately, the educational system feel the need to keep the boot down on them. Even more unfortunate is the fact that most children's parents were raised in this way, so they feel that it is the right way.

Actually, children are born with an innate curiosity as well as their own interests - children first start learning by following their interests and curiosities.

My baby cousin - he has his hands out all the time like a radar trying to detect something. He simply seems to love touching things. As he grows with this curiosity, he might even learn how to use the TV control, for pete's sake! What public compulsory schooling does is it necessarily goes against the child's interests or curiosities by imposing a curriculum on the child and forcing him to go to such an institution.

The fact that school is compulsory and forced is what repulses people from school and makes them dislike school - at least that is one of the most primary reasons why. The people who don't want to be there will not act as though he is - he will be a class disturbance and won't help the children that do want to learn. If people could choose not to go to school, all of these trouble-makers will opt out. However, some are "troublemakers" precisely because school is compulsory.

Imagine a girl who just loves to dance and move and can't keep still in school at her chair and listen to the teacher - she might be a dancer and alternatively seek to go to dancing school. But no, she would be branded a troublemaker and given the pill. Very distracted students who doodle on their homework may lose points on their homework because for it - all of these discourage creativity and doesn't harness it. The child may be an artist, and art may be his interest - but school does not provide this, at least not fully.

Even if art were an extracurricular activity, it wouldn't help - since the child doesn't show any interests beyond art, he will still not manage to pay attention in class and will continue doodling, damaging his grade. But instead of spending time in classes the child is not interested, he could just instead choose classes he is interested in. In this way, he will pay attention in class and he will develop his own inner talents as well as harness them for his future - he will be specialized in the arts, and make a living off of it.

But, forced to take part in a curriculum that doesn't fit him, he is a loser (all those that don't fit the curriculum are losers) - he sees himself of less worth because he cannot accomplish what others tell him, and his own diverse intelligence and creativity is discarded of, ignored, and not given credit. He is scarred for life without career.

Notice that children excel less in classes they are not interested in - public compulsory schooling is also all rote learning. It ignores the student intellect and praises his memorization. He does not achieve understanding, just bits of empty formulas, regardless of how useful they are. He memorizes things in the short-term for the purpose of passing a test, but forgets the information quickly thereafter unless it is constantly nailed down until his memory conveniently tricks itself to memorization by correlating questions and answers, remembering pronunciation and spelling of key words in answers, as well. The child then writes that down on the paper. But what he writes to him are empty vowels, sounds, and responses. He starts to confuse genuine comprehension with memorization.

The curriculum has assumptions about what is important intellectually - the child feels that he is a slave to them and that anything else is insignificant of his worth. His standard as to what to do, what to say, and such, is only those set down by others. The child is taught, not to think independently and develop critical thinking, but instead memorization tricks, and conformity - he measures his success by the ruler of his authorities (when taking tests, asking questions such as "Is the U.S. a democracy?", what matters is not what you think, but whether what you put down is in line with what the teacher thinks is correct). He is taught his own interests and curiosities are inferior and trivial.

Changing the curriculum would thus not be a solution to this problem, as individuals are very diverse, and their is bound to be people in the student body that will be unsatisfied with certain parts of the curriculum, and wasting hours on something of no particular curiosity to them.

Furthermore, in public compulsory school, the student does not create or judge values as to whether they are valid or true, or at least give effort to it - he silently adopts values and ideas of the elite called "experts" passively without question, as he was taught in school.

He may even lose interest in reading as he has the negative experience of being forced to read, not out of interests, but out of obligation by authorities. He loses sight of reading as a personal activity, and the same is done with writing where he is forced to write things he doesn't wish to.

What he learns in school is irrelevant to his life outside of school while he is still going to school - thus, the practicality of such things remain puzzling all the way up to adulthood, where he has to all of a sudden try to deal with his incoherent world. Themes of discourse are divided into classes, fragmenting pieces of information and disallowing an intellectual holism of the information.

Kids are taught that mistakes are really really bad things, the worst that you could do. They are ridiculed or looked down upon or with concern when they make a mistake, and their mistakes tell them whether they are "losers" or "winners." "Mistakes" is not part of the vocab of creativity - creativity is not a box - it's a free journey where the individual can do whatever he wants. School constantly puts him in a box and doesn't let him freely explore - he is closed within what he is supposed to say and do, by tests at times, in fact, and he is stopped from doodling, from writing what he wants and made to write what "he is supposed to." Teachers sometimes even choose what position the kid will be writing for on an issue - allowing him not to think for himself.

Kids would flourish more on their own, and very happily so, than in the condition so described, which is characteristic of public schools, and most schools, public or private, that are compulsory and authoritarian in structure.

If public schools are to continue existing, compulsory schooling laws are to be abolished (kids would go anyway, as kids are pressured by their social world to learn certain basic things anyway, and their goals may need relevant information - some kids, like a cousin of mine, may want to learn to draw, for example; she asks me to teach her. I say, she could do so if she would be able to choose a Drawing Class in school).

Homework is an unnecessary extension of school into the home, and grading is too much of a priority in schools, as well as bubbling in correct answers - creativity and critical thinking should be of more priority, and rich resources and artifacts should be supplied for the child that will increase his exposure and his space for exploration. He must be allowed, at all times, to choose what classes to take (and when - the child may be busy with other equally important things like relationships; teens are told they can't make long-term relationships, that's why "friends with benefits" phenomena flourish, as well as casual sex - minors are taught they are incompetent for anything else). The curriculum of public schools can restrict individuals as well in their development - this only frustrates the child because he cannot do as much as he wants to. The curriculum should have the ability to expand by choice of the student body.

The rules and policies of schools are made in an authoritarian way -- how can you teach and encourage democracy within a structure that in itself is un-democratic? An authoritarian structure discourages students from taking responsibility over their own lives because they can't make their own values and follow their own values. They are taught only to comply to rules, not to make them, create them, think about them, critique (to often they are discouraged from critiquing as well). They also are discouraged from personal responsibility because in school, the student has no say in the rules - he is not taking responsibility over his own actions, other people are. It creates a mindset that other people are responsible for my behavior and I play no role in the making of the rules or that people follow it.

Students should be taught to take responsibility, and their self-determination, and sense of justice should be enforced through allowing them to evaluate their world morally and experiment by practicing their values and own morality through the democratic processes. The student body is to be able to make rules through democratic processes within the school.

To paraphrase from John Holt, learning is not the result of teaching but the result of the activity of learners.

All these proposals I've made points toward a free skool establishment. But while I support free skools, and firmly believe in them, especially Summerhill, I do think that the diversification of schools and educational methods is also important, and that schools should thus be privatized. People should be responsible of their own education through a free market where the dollar vote prevails. It's the people that should have responsibility over how they want learn.