School Isn’t About Learning — It’s About Obedience

BY SOFO ARCHON

School is supposed to be about learning. But for most of us, it’s really about obedience. And that lesson sticks longer than any textbook.

To learn more, watch the video below.

Transcript

School is a prison.

When I say “school,” I mean conventional school—school as it commonly exists in most places around the world. Because there are alternative schools—schools that actually respect children’s freedom. But conventional school is pretty much like a prison. Not a maximum-security prison, but more like a minimum-security one.

In our society, children from a very young age—usually around five or six—are forced to go to school. Whether they want to or not does not matter. They have to go. It is demanded by law. If a child does not go to school, that is considered a crime. In other words, we have criminalized children’s freedom.

Let’s see what children do at school. Every weekday—for five, six, seven, sometimes eight hours—they are confined within four walls, in a small classroom where they are told to stay seated in a particular way and pay attention to their teacher. They are not allowed to do pretty much anything on their own. They are not allowed to stand up. They are not allowed to sit how they want. They are not allowed to speak when they want. They are not allowed to communicate with their peers—their classmates.

Anything they want to do, they must first be given permission. If they want to speak, they have to raise their hand and ask for permission from their teacher—the authority figure of the class. If they want to go to the bathroom to satisfy a basic biological need, they must ask for permission first. So, from a very young age, children begin to learn that they are not free, that they have no autonomy, that their lives—for the most part—do not belong to them.

At school, children are also forced to learn things they don’t care about learning—things they find boring or uninteresting. Children might want to paint, dance, spend time in nature—in the great outdoors—climb trees, play sports with their friends, have fun, or observe and explore the world around them. But school does not like those things. It doesn’t allow time for them, or it allows only a very limited amount.

At school, children learn history, math, and all sorts of subjects that, for the most part, they don’t care about. But they have to learn them in order to do well on exams, pass their classes, or get good grades. If they don’t, they’re going to be punished. They might be mocked sometimes, but usually they just get bad grades—which means they might have to repeat the class or be looked down upon by their teachers and parents. Sometimes, parents even punish their children for not getting good grades.

So, children learn to do as they are taught in order to avoid punishment. They memorize information that they regurgitate during exams so they can get good grades or pass those exams. But most of the things they learn, they don’t even truly learn. They forget them very quickly. They memorize the information necessary for an exam, and then they delete it from their memory so they can memorize the next thing—and so on and so forth. By the time they finish school, they have forgotten almost everything they learned—or thought they had learned. Perhaps 90% of what they memorized is gone. It’s vanished into thin air.

Another thing children learn at school is to see their peers as competitors, because school pits students against one another. You have the “good” students—those who are great at obeying, conforming, and doing well on exams—and the “bad” students, who do the opposite. If one student helps another pass an exam, that’s considered “cheating.” So collaboration at school—seeing others as partners, as people to work with rather than compete against—is discouraged.

Children learn through this conditioning that we live in a very competitive world—that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. And of course, that idea is reinforced later on when they see how competitive business can be.

Children are told that school is the best years of one’s life. I remember being told that by my parents and teachers. They would say, “Enjoy life now, because later on it will be way, way worse.” And they were right, in a sense. Adults have so many more responsibilities and obligations. They have to strive to make ends meet—most of them, at least. But that doesn’t mean school is good, that it is a positive experience. It is just better—or it just doesn’t suck as much as adult life.

Children hate school because their spirit wants freedom. It does not want confinement. But as they grow older, the system breaks their spirit, and they begin to accept slavery as normal. That’s why, once they become adults, they are willing to do work they hate, obey rules and authority figures, not talk back, not rebel against oppression, live only for the weekend or holidays, or look forward to getting old and becoming a pensioner. They accept living a life that is not truly theirs. This is exactly what the system wants, and it is exactly why school is designed the way it is.

But if we don’t want children to suffer; if we don’t want them to turn into mindless, obedient conformists; if we don’t want people to be exploited by one another, constantly competing, and living a life that feels meaningless—a life that brings no fulfillment but only misery—then we need to seriously rethink our education system.