Don’t Shove Education Down Locked-Down Children’s Throats
It’s their god-given opportunity
This article is not about the coronavirus. It’s about education. It doesn’t have a sell-by date. It’s for the ages. But what got me triggered was all the lamentations about how coronavirus is keeping children from school and how hard it is going to be for them to catch up.
Yeah right. We don’t want our kids do be educated. We want them to be compassionate, to be human, to be able to empathize and to be able to solve the world’s problems because they know how to, and not because they have been told how.
Then why the lamentations about kids missing school and how they should all be taught online? Are the kids headed toward a life of retardation if they miss two weeks of school, or two months maybe?
I don’t think so, but the educators do. The kids are doing fine, it’s a systemic thing, this antsy concern. So don’t go into a tizzy if the kids are enjoying themselves during the lockdown. They will probably learn more than they would following three months of a school curriculum.
Let them enjoy the out of jail card. If possible let them smell the flowers. Education as they know it has them bored to the eyeballs. They got their chance, which we didn’t have. We had continuous school before the ritualistic passage into adulthood. Look what it has done to our generation. Look how many people have to unlearn what they have learned at school if they are to get about making a decent living for themselves in these times when their labor is up for sale to the highest bidder in a market that’s determined almost entirely by the law of supply and demand.
Let kids learn how to think for themselves. A greater gift we couldn’t give them than their three months out of school, learning zilch.
Let them learn the most precious thing they can learn which is to sit still doing nothing with the time on their hands.
Schools don’t teach them that and the school curriculum can never teach them that if they take their lessons from home. It’s enough they have their minds crammed with a great deal of useless nonsense that hardly comes in handy in their real lives, without having that stuff beamed home when they are in the comfort of their bedrooms.
Please, let’s get out of our children’s homes. Nature has offered them the opportunity of a lifetime to think for themselves, or not think or do anything at all if they wish to. Leave them to their do-nothing world. Don’t have your adult compulsion of having to do something all the time — your gadabout workaholism — bear down on them. It’s regressive.
It smacks of spite. Here we are a generation that cannot manage our own educated affairs, and we can’t bear to see the kids relying on their own devices.
There is no room for that kind of rage. Let go. The children are doing fine. We are the ones that are screwed up.
