Educational Freedom

When I was in school, I wanted to tell my teachers one thing. Get out of my way. I believe in educational freedom. What is educational freedom? Those who want to learn should be allowed to do so with as little restriction as possible. This contrasts heavily with schooling, which attempts to control the learning process.

We possess a natural desire to learn. We frequently lose that desire as we turn to the schools who insist that learning must be a chore. In our earlier years, we want to communicate and be able to move place to place. We don’t ignore these wants. While we may have parents helping us out, it is our own desires and our own efforts that teach us how to walk and talk.

When I was in school, I would get into trouble for learning in class. I came home daily complaining about how schooling was getting in the way of my education. I wanted to learn, but my teachers wouldn’t let me.

After I received my mindless drone certification (high school diploma), I initially felt that I could finally learn. Instead, I faced repeated discouragement. In modern day society, learning outside of the schools is unacceptable. You can’t convince anyone that you know anything unless you have your knowledge documented from an accredited institution. The primary argument against independent learning is that you can develop bad habits. Even if you learn for your own personal reasons, others will insist that the results are worse than had you learned nothing at all.

The concept of schooling conflicts with educational freedom. I would love to see the schools cease to exist. Even with the schools still destroying minds, we need to make some changes. Our primary goals should be to eliminate discouragement and improve access to resources.

I have already discussed the concept of learning resource centers. As a quick recap, I believe that facilities should be developed to make educational resources accessible. For the most part, documentation is already widely available to those who want to learn. We could probably still increase the variability of documentation. We could also simplify for those who want to learn the basics of a complex subject before developing expertise in earlier fundamentals.

We openly discriminate against anyone who learns outside of a controlled environment. Keep in mind there is nothing that can be learned in school that can’t be learned elsewhere. Employers are particularly problematic in the sense that they use schooling history to reduce the number of applications that they have to go through. This has helped create a world where it is much easier to make a living if you are a college graduate than if you are a high school dropout, even if you would have developed into a more capable individual without the schools’ influence.

We need to restore the educational rights that our schooling system has robbed from society. If we need a starting point, I have three simple words that we need to keep in mind when dealing with children: LET THEM LEARN!