100 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t go to School

First off, let’s be clear: School, by the following points, is an institution with a physical location to which people go from home, to acquire knowledge.

Second, there’s a big difference between school and education.

Third, theories can’t be learned only in school.

Finally, if you’re one of those very intelligent people who gets annoyed every time someone criticizes school, please stop reading immediately! This write-up is not meant for you. I’m simply writing for the people who love to think different. For those who want to unlearn. For the foolish ones who want to stay foolish.

100 reasons why you shouldn’t go to school.

1. People of low and average intelligence teach, some of whom went to teachers’ training schools as a last resort.
2. Low and average income earners teach children who are learning to be financially successful
3. You are taught that failure is bad
4. Schools are built for reading and writing, not doing. In a great majority of schools, classrooms are more and larger than laboratories, if at all these exist. Theory is hardly ever accompanied with practice.
5. A paper constitutes a certificate of knowledge instead of practical realizations
6. Creativity is killed as you are rewarded if you repeat what you’re told.
7. You’re only as smart as your teacher, if you are smarter, he/she could misinterpret your difference for folly and fail you
8. You must pass all subjects to be considered successful, even if you’re a specialized genius in 1 or 2
9. You are punished for exploring your creativity (drumming the bench, drawing in your book, etc.)
10. The rule of doing what you love is swept under the rug — for example so many kids who love and excel in sports, instead of being made to specialize in them, are forced to read history and practice it only during break.
11. Smart and dumb kids are taught in the same class and the teacher has to compromise the learning speed of fast ones to let slow ones catch up
12. You are taught that fun is laziness
13. You are taught that success is the offspring of stress and difficulty. Hard work is wrongly equated with these.
14. Money education is limited to one subject which is taught to 3/10ths of all students (in General education)
15. You are taught so many things which you’ll never need or use
16. You are fooled that if you pass in school, you’ll definitely be rich in future
17. You are taught that if you fail in school, you’ll hardly succeed in life
18. A pupil or student who can’t make it to school on certain days never gets compensated for the knowledge lost
19. Teachers punish students/pupils for opposing them. Dogmatism and brainwash thrives
20. If you know what no one else knows, you’re failed
21. If you know but can’t express yourself to the understanding of your teacher, you’re failed
22. Collaboration, which is indispensable in professional life, is punished in school and termed “cheating”.
23. Exams in school are a foolish formality. They’re in no way a test of how you’d perform in real life. I once set an exam where I wanted to mimic a professional setting by letting students access the internet and use PCs in the examination hall to build websites. The university cancelled the exam and ordered me to reset and allow students use only pen and paper. School by its nature will find it difficult mirroring a professional setting while testing you. Even after internships, you’re judged based on your internship report.
24. Almost no one became a billionaire while in school
25. Official exams are the only test of knowledge. You’re forced to repeat even if you took personal improvement classes during the long holidays
26. Only school places an age restriction on learning
27. It takes lesser time to learn any trade out of school than in school
28. School’s definition of experts are professors, many of whom do nothing concretely, not even what they “profess”
29. “Illiterates” and school dropouts still employ graduates, even though for most people, the purpose of school is to be better off in society than illiterates and dropouts
30. So much information is lost in the teaching process of learning and regurgitating: A teacher reads a book then repeats what they’ve read to the student. Why didn’t the student just learn by reading the book themselves?
31. You don’t live the life you want to live. You live the life others want you to live.
32. A majority of those who go to school never chose to. They have no idea why they’re there.
33. Students/pupils are forced to duller or more boring teachers than some of their mates are
34. The rating system is extremely flawed. Teachers rate students differently and subjectively in each class & school, yet they’re all rated together in national & global exams
35. Failure in certain subjects is totally a consequence of a student’s relationship with the teacher
36. Early years of schooling are wasted with the assumption that all pupils will someday make it to classes where they finally specialize.
37. It’s only in school that you can never become a professional after your first 7 years of study, no matter your age
38. All students are forced to learn even at the times when they’re not psychologically apt to. Attention spans are assumed.
39. You can’t teach in school unless you’ve been to school, even if you’re the smartest person on earth
40. The false security a certificate gives you kills your desire to grow limitlessly
41. Teachers are allowed to teach their beliefs and their definition of morality to pupils/students
42. There’s no universal yardstick for measuring intelligence. The best student in one school/district/country can be the worst in another, without even knowing it.
43. There’s no mercy for being less privileged. Everyone is bundled up in the same class and weighed on the same balance
44. Children are made to pay for the errors of their parents — e.g. you’re kicked out if you’re from a poor background and your parents can’t pay your fees on time.
45. The class system breeds disregard for age, wisdom and experience.
46. The poor suffer from inequality as they can’t afford the best schools. A poor kid has greater chances of making it in the world than in school
47. Parental guidance and monitoring is completely absent while the kid’s in school
48. Due to little practice, especially before postgraduate studies, theories are hardly developed by students.
49. You can’t compete against the world, you only compete against a few classmates
50. Not everything you’re good at is being taught or developed in school
51. School has never admitted it’s got a problem
52. Quality of education doesn’t seem to improve over time
53. Certificate holders have no more knowledge than “illiterate” colleagues practicing the same trade.
54. Many self-made people still make it big
55. Students have to take what their teacher says, and there’s no way to know if the teacher is lying. Case study: Anglophone Cameroon History
56. Peer pressure born out of clogging up children with diverse capacities in one place has made some of the highest suicides, murders and mass killings to occur in schools
57. The people school considers the very best (Professors) are among middle-income earners
58. School has severally recognized and capped “illiterates” for doing what they couldn’t do, after rejecting them
59. School up to this day hasn’t been able to understand entirely the theories of people it condemned, like Einstein and Srinivasa Ramanujan
60. School rejects theories from scientists who are smarter than school but haven’t been trained by school, e.g. Srinivasa Ramanujan
61. You can cheat school, you can’t cheat the world
62. School rewards you with a paper, the world rewards you with whatever you bargain for
63. School makes you believe that hard work alone can make you successful
64. Some of the dullest people in school make it bigger in life than the most intelligent ones
65. School terms you retarded if you speak of things too difficult for them to understand (Einstein and Srinivasa Ramanujan )
66. Teachers develop preferences for students thereby increasing the learning imbalance
67. Because you learn everything from someone else and not by yourself, it’s easy for school to lie you, as they do
68. School usually fails you if you discover its lies and answer its questions with the truth
69. School encourages fraud by forcing society to accept a piece of paper as proof of knowledge.
70. School discourages the spread of knowledge by ignoring to teach a huge chunk of the knowledge deveped by “non-scientists”
71. Because school encourages cheating, even teachers can cheat their way into the classroom, further ruining the value of education from school
72. School doesn’t distinguish between good and bad procrastination. It punishes all forms of procrastination
73. If school was really that great, why are the most accomplished school goers those who steal time to work at home and practice what they learn out of school?
74. School has successfully fooled a lot of people that it’s synonymous with education.
75. School’s view of hard work is extremely underestimated. That’s why graduates find it hard to do real hustle or remain in the office after 5pm.
76. By glorifying graduation, school makes you believe that learning has an end.
77. Holidays are a deceptive waste. Students only realize too late that in the real world hustlers don’t take breaks.
78. You learn faster out of school than in school. A lot of people who find a job after graduation don’t practice what they trained for in school, and they practice really well.
79. You are forced to do what you don’t like, and you carry this into your professional life, ending up with a miserable job.
80. Inquisitiveness is squashed, especially at early ages, as 1 teacher can’t respond to 100 questions from 50 students
81. The teacher’s goal is to make you pass, not make you learn.
82. Your parents’ desire is to see you pass, not to see you learn
83. School makes you memorize, not think.
84. The boring nature of school kills the desire to learn. In the morning, students crave for break. After break, they crave for closing time.
85. You can’t tune school to your schedule
86. School imposes unnecessary psychological issues on children’s learning (bullies, peer pressure, self-image issues, etc.)
87. Because students are constantly monitored and controlled in packs, individuality, self-expression and self-assertion are drastically curbed.
88. School unnecessarily repeats teaching of certain topics in different classes (e.g. I was introduced to mathematical sets in every class between class 3 and form 3 finally going deeper only from Form 4.
89. Some skills which everyone needs are taught only to a few, especially in subjects like Biology which many stop doing at a certain age in certain schools.
90. School still trains you in fields for which all jobs would have disappeared by the time you graduate, e.g. typewriting (yes, it is still taught)
91. Teachers who can’t practice what they teach as well as some students are allowed to teach those students (physical education and IT teachers for example)
92. The class system assumes intelligence is proportional to age. This prevents very brilliant students from learning advanced issues which they’re capable of understanding.
93. School assumes everyone in the world learns at the same rate, and it assigns a specific number of weeks (semester, term) for the attainment of some specific knowledge.
94. School is OK with the pressure on kids to fit in, even if fitting in means drinking beer and considering a 3.0 GPA as excellent
95. In the University, Professors are not hired based on their pedagogic abilities.
96. You never get corrections on some exams you write
97. You never even see your script after certain exams
98. Teachers determine your love for all subjects. They have the capability of making you hate a subject you’ve got much skill in.
99. Unnecessary expenses are incurred just because you have to go to the best school (rents, movement, etc.). We’ve reached an age where physical movements to find knowledge should even be outdated.
100. Because the teacher is always right and more knowledgeable than everyone else, it’ll be difficult for school to witness any improvements. Why aren’t people who don’t aspire to teach allowed to learn and criticize pedagogy as a subject? The only solution against this bad system is to learn another way. Homeschooling with a virtual tutor is amazing because the best teacher can be accessed by everyone worldwide, at their schedule and they can learn at their pace. The only exams a student should take should be how much value what they MAKE/DO adds to their lives or the lives of others. Mind you, I said what they make/do, not what they learn; be it in history, in languages, in engineering or in physics. For as long as the schoolteacher is always right, we the students, dropouts and non-scientists can never change them or school.