January 14, 2004
Nobel Prize winners who hated school.
Via
Metafilter is a link to this
page of comments by various Nobel Prize winners who hated school. Courtesy of the
Learn in Freedom organization.
There are some great quotes on the page, by the likes of Einstein, Tagore, etc. Including, to be fair, one by someone who actually enjoyed school. But most of the world's most creative thinkers would, I think, agree with George Bernard Shaw:
. . . and there is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But it is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders (who of course would not be warders and governors if they could write readable books), and beaten or otherwise tormented if you cannot remember their utterly unmemorable contents. In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to the turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and are therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains; and they protect you against violence and outrage from your fellow-prisoners. In a school you have none of these advantages. With the world's bookshelves loaded with fascinating and inspired books, the very manna sent down from Heaven to feed your souls, you are forced to read a hideous imposture called a school book, written by a man who cannot write: A book from which no human can learn anything: a book which, though you may decipher it, you cannot in any fruitful sense read, though the enforced attempt will make you loathe the sight of a book all the rest of your life.
"A Treatise on Parents and Children," preface to Misalliance (1909), reprinted in Bernard Shaw: Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, volume IV (1972), page 35.
I couldn't agree more. I myself hated school, and think that it severely retarded my education and my ability to think creatively. My ability to learn in general actually. Goodness, when I think of the hours I had to sit there doing busywork, and listen to teachers explain things for the umpteenth time that I got the first time, I could cry. Yechhh! I have thought for many years that I should have been taught to read, pointed at the library and left alone. Just my opinion of course.
To add to that I have to express my opposition to public education in general. Which I see as mostly an attempt at government brainwashing. I'm a big supporter of efforts not only to privatize schools, but to get government out of the education business entirely. I think it does a great deal of harm to children, and is the major source of the ever-increasing conformity in our society. What public education does is reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator. It frustrates the most intelligent kids, and leaves the less intelligent ones way behind.
The first thing people like Hitler and Stalin do is to take over the schools. Once you have the kids you have the society. It follows as naturally as night does day. And it's no surprise to me that one of Bush's first priorities on becoming president was to push his education bill, and to establish more standards and controls.
Most people seem to automatically assume that it's only so-called conservatives who want to privatize schools. But I'm what you would call a "progressive liberal". (Although I hate that label and now that I think about would have to say that teaching people to label and categorize everything is one of the biggest faults of education.) And I think we ought to privatize them all as soon as possible. Colleges too. It's curious that those on the "left" who are supposedly most opposed to what the government does, are the ones who most vociferously back government control of childrens' minds.
I agree that every child is entitled to an education, but that doesn't necessarily mean doing it through the public sector. For one thing that doesn't appear to work very well. For another, it inevitably leads to government control. There are other methods to accomplish the same goals, ways that would be much more efficient and would better satisfy each individual's special needs.
And, by the way, the desire the help kids who want to teach themselves, is the major reason I set up the Galileo Library. In order to make the texts and such available to home schoolers, private schools and others trying to work without government support and control. When I was in college I wanted to do it as a doctoral project. But it was new, different and hadn't been done before, so they couldn't handle it. I was supposed to just study what other people had done, not actually do anything myself. So stupid, so sad.
I didn't know about the Learn in Freedom organization, but I'm glad to hear there are some folks out there who have the guts to take on this most sacrosanct of all institutions. Freedom of Education is the most important freedom of all. Without that, all of the other freedoms, religion, speech, press, are absolutely meaningless. Freedom of religion, for example, doesn't just mean the right to believe what you want. It means the right to pass those beliefs on to your children, and entirely in the way you want to pass them on. Without the government looking over your shoulder going, "Well, this part is OK, but not that part."
