School’s Out Forever
School was a waste of time propped up by false promises even before it became open indoctrination. It’s time to dismantle it to protect our kids.
For the last few centuries, public school has been on an seemingly unstoppable march forward, a sign of “progress”. In many countries, private schools and even homeschooling, where allowed, have to follow bureaucratic standards set by public school managerials. But things have changed, and finally, everything is set for us to dismantle that despicable institution.
Public schools, especially compulsory public schools, have a long history. German reformator Martin Luther argued for it in a 1524 letter “An die Ratsherren aller Städte deutschen Landes, dass sie christliche Schulen aufrichten und halten sollen” (“To the councilmen of all towns of the German lands, that they should create and maintain Christian schools”). The duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, under a Calvinist duke at that time, implemented compulsory schooling in 1592, as the first state in the world. Its spread in the following centuries was slow, but seemed inevitable at least once the managerial ideology took hold. For example, the first time compulsory schooling became the law in all of Germany was 1919, in the Weimar Republic, after the noble class had been stripped of all privileges in the wake of World War I. Most Western countries are similar by now, since 2019, France even requires 3-year old kids to go to public pre-school.
It has always been about control. But this terrifying run will end, and we will be the ones to end it.
If you are a millennial, you will most likely remember that “Be good at school and you will have a good life!” was a central tenet of the upbringing the Boomer system gave us. We all know it was a lie. An elite overproduction pipeline. We wasted our time there, lost great years of our youth. The lie was self-serving not just for our teachers (and everyone in the educational system), but also for those of our parents who thought good marks in school are the sole metric of good parenting.
If you are younger than that, woe you! On top of what I described for us millennials, you will most likely have experienced the full-scale woke invasion of the school system, with socialism, enforced white self-hatred, puberty blockers, and maybe even the mutilation of some classmates in the name of progress.
But there is one upside to all of this: We finally hate the school system enough. Even if we don’t have the power yet, the Boomers will age out of active political life eventually. The days of schools are numbered.
After all, next to our political realization of the uselessness and even harmfulness of schools, there also has been technological change that renders it obsolete to corral helpless kids in small rooms and bore them to death until they turn on each other. When schools were originally introduced, knowledge was hard to come by. Most people still worked on farms (and eventually in factories), and knowledge was in books and in those few who had studied. Already ten years ago, the internet had drastically changed that. And now, we have AI, which can not only find knowledge like a search engine, it can also do all the work previously done by students as well as teachers. It can write and grade text, math, code, etc.
Economically and spiritually, this creates deep questions on what skills kids should learn in the future. But whatever the answer to that, it is clear that this learning no longer has to take place in a stuffed, calcified dedicated building. It can take place everywhere where parents and educators are and have access to a computer.
Once we have dismantled the rigid and outdated school system, we can have a vibrant homeschooling community across the whole Western world, exchanging ideas on how to best educate strong and virtuous kids. We also can have noble private schools who outdo with new approaches to excellence, which most certainly don’t involve much sitting around in classrooms.
We couldn’t free ourselves from school, but we can free our kids.
School’s out forever. It just doesn’t know it yet.