What if School is Bad, Actually?

I was an anti-school child, and now my kid hates school. How can I ask him to do something I hated?

Photo by kyo azuma on Unsplash

Despite the fact that I grew up with two intellectual, Ivy Leage educated parents who were both straight-A students, I didn’t see the point in school. It went beyond a typical “I don’t like learning about geometry” thing and into a true hatred for the very concept of school, which to me felt like a massive waste of resources and time.

In general, I saw school as a place where I was doing thankless work (which didn’t benefit anyone) for free, the only payment for my work a temporary reprieve from teachers yelling at me. I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew nothing in school would ever address it (everything I learned about comedy writing, I learned outside of school.) Even “nice” teachers seemed inherently fed up with students. There was an inherent, pervasive anti-child antagonism that festered within the administration—everyone from the principal to the teachers, to especially the volunteer retiree playground aides—seemed to genuinely dislike children. We were miserable, they were miserable…what was the point?

When I became a mom, I realized there was a decent chance my anti-school bias would reflect in my parenting. I knew, for example, that I would probably not be too hard on my kids about their grades. School wasn’t optional, per se, but my kids’ passion for education was. I wanted them to be safe and loved—no pressure to attend Harvard (and given that I want them to have friends and be likable, I might even root against Harvard.)

But since becoming a mom, I feel like I find myself on the opposing side of parents eschewing the idea of school at all—I’m not talking about homeschooling with a curriculum, but completely abandoning traditional education in the form of “unschooling,” or in other words, prancing around in the woods and singing about pinecones. Recently, famed Substack writer (and homeschool graduate)

Aella

wrote a piece (with which I don’t necessarily agree, but found interesting) where she compares typical schooling to other childhood experiences that most of us would consider extremely traumatic. While most people who read the piece reacted most strongly to the vivid depictions of child abuse that is normalized within certain cultures, the thing that stuck out to me the most was the idea that ordinary schooling “wastes” some of our best years. Is it really necessary, helpful, or even normal, to put five-year-olds at desks for eight hours a day? Maybe it just feels normal to us because it’s part of our culture.

This isn’t about homeschool versus regular school. What I’m most curious about is all the discourse I’ve seen about the idea that the very concept of school—or at least a school that requires sitting down and doing “lessons”—shouldn’t exist at all. As silly as it appears to me initially, especially as a normie who sends her older child to a regular Pre-K, there’s another part of me—the little girl who was absolutely miserable in school for years—who feels like it’s at least worth examining.