it's called "the teenage liberation handbook: how to quit school and get a real life and education." pure, simple beauty. i'm only partway through chapter one, but i'm already enjoying it far more than any i've read in the past few months.
it starts by stating the following: how strange and self-defeating that a supposedly free country should train its young for life in totalitarianism. and just think about it...we are a free country. supposedly, everything in it is supposed to be free for us to aspire to. but...if we're attending school...WE'RE NOT FREE. everything about the school system is based on control. and what do they tell us to ensure this control? "oh, of COURSE you don't have any freedom YET. that's because you're too young to know how to act. we need to keep you locked up six hours a day in a dank smelly classroom before you can excercise this freedom." everything about this horrid system we've created over the past two hundred years or so comes down to a bunch of insecure adults who, because they crave authority and something to latch onto, feel the need to hold power over a thousand children simply because they're a younger age and, therefore, supposed idiots.
and if you ask people who are older now what they remember from school, what do they tell you that they remember? NOTHING. can your father recall precise math formulas that the teachers told him were the most important thing in the world for those few days before a test? of course not. does you mom even remember how to graph a sentence like they taught her in 6th grade english? i think not. did those help either of them in any way? i kinda doubt it.
of course, when we bring this up to our teachers, they do their best to convince us that it's not the little things that count; it's that school helps us realize what we love to do and helps us learn about it. uh-huh. so if we want to be poets, we must suffer through an english class? people with a joy for mathematics are not TRULY skillful unless they've passed an algebra class? it's idiotic to the last degree. it makes absolutely no sense.
and kids everywhere - every one of the kids in my class, i know for a fact - are convinced of this too, because they've been told that they'll end up in the inner city doing crack and flipping burgers if they don't stay in school. who can blame them for having no motivation? they've been told that if they do what they feel like doing is simply not right. heck, even going to the bathroom - the most basic and necessary of needs - is WRONG.
so here we have a wonderful society of clones, formed by the school system to be completely submissive and think that school is needed for success. more than likely they'll send their kids off to the prisons as well, and the cycle goes on.
i don't know about ya'll, homies, but i ain't giving in. i'm keeping my baby natural and with the same instincts she was born with, not shipped off to a stinking overcrowded cell to await conmformity.
Brittastiq · Wed May 03, 2006 @ 04:10am · 2 Comments |