The word education comes from the Latin word educo which means to educe, to draw from within. Generally in school we are convinced that education comes from the outside in, with lots of information to fill our minds with to make us clever and ‘successful’. The beginning of school is the beginning of children being robbed of themselves, and being taught that they are not adequate, and not enough or complete people as they are, but will only be enough when they get the next exam, result, better class, better job, better house etc.
This brainwashing literally leaves a person scrambling forwards for the rest of their life trying to find themselves, when they were there all along. Our education and schooling system is not an education, it is a system which teaches us to endure boredom, gets us used to being somewhere between 9 to 4, and forces us to listen to and answer to authority.
Real education should wake us up. Conventional education puts us to sleep and robs us of ourselves. I can remember seeing it in the face of other kids in school, it was an empty look, a look of someone being forced to hand their will and life over to a system they deeply deplored and felt uncomfortable in.
It really was a sort of concentration camp. I felt it was almost like frontal lobotomy en masse. There was a look of confusion and hopelessness in the kid’s eyes, like trapped geniuses. I remember well the feeling of whether you achieved another gold star on the wall chart of the class and the rivalry and fear of who would be best or worse. And the school reports with the comments about your brightness or short attention span. It was not an attention span problem I had, it was that I was bored out of my tiny mind having to go to this same building for years on end listening to the same uninteresting, useless rote.
Over the course of our schooling that system which is supposed to educate us actually does almost the opposite, it dulls and chokes off our innate creative genius, gifts and abilities, which every human being is born and gifted with.
It is like chloroform for us, which creates an amnesia which disconnects and dismembers us from ourselves at a very early age, and cuts us off from who we really are. This may sound harsh but school turns us into robots that are programmed and conditioned to fit into the system that we are forced into when we leave school. By the time we leave school we have become thoroughly conditioned to function in the system of virtual slavery, of working for the next 50 odd years. Looking forward to our lunch break, home times, and weekends off if we are lucky, and our pay cheques which barely feed us, clothe us, and house us. I recently spoke with a disillusioned teacher that had left the system through frustration, who said he can teach a child how to learn what they learn to pass an exam in a few weeks, which they would normally take two years to learn, sat bored to death in a classroom. – Jason Liosatos www.jasonliosatos.com
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