Common Sense About Schooling

I feel that 90% of my educational beliefs can be classified as common sense. Unfortunately, the most mindless era in history that the schools just happened to create lacks that common sense. Let me point out some of the more obvious.

• Schooling and education are two different things.
• No two children are the same.
• Learning is possible outside of school.
• Teachers can be wrong.
• There is an infinite number of learning styles.
• A single rigid schooling system is not ideal for 100% of the population.
• What is ideal for a child is not necessarily reflected by whether or not they can get good grades within the traditional schooling model.
• Pace is a potentially variable component of learning ability.
• Failure to address pace indicates a failure to address individual learning needs.
• At least some people learn best when they are allowed to take charge of their own educations.
• Intelligence is impossible to measure.
• Grades do not prove or disprove intelligence. 
• Education isn’t 100% the responsibility of the student when learning doesn’t happen and 100% the responsibility of the teacher when learning does happen.
• It is not wrong for different individuals to receive different educations.
• Our futures should be in our own hands rather than our teachers’.
• Business models based off of schooling do not prove that alternative models could not be found without the process.
• Throwing money at the problems will not guarantee improvement.
• Abuse, including emotional abuse, can have lasting consequences.
• Pressuring children with the weight of their whole future is unhealthy.
• People who value schooling because they mindlessly assume that schooling is educational are taking education for granted.
• People can be right about something and still make spelling and grammatical errors.
• Students whose needs are not identical to everyone else’s are not necessarily inferior.
• There are different reasons for people to become bored in school, and not all of them indicate a need to change the student.
• Just because you think that you benefitted from the schools does not mean that everybody will benefit.
• Not everybody learns best when they rely on others to tell them what to know.
• There are multiple reasons that children fail in school, and not all of them are due to struggles to understand the material.
• If a child struggles with repetition, pushing them to repeat a class can cause problems.
• Everything that can be learned in school can be learned elsewhere.
• We progressed before the schools, and getting rid of the schools certainly wouldn’t result in the elimination of progress.
• Not everything that every teacher has ever done has been for the children.
• Seniority does not prove skill.
• Some people outside of the teaching profession are better people than at least some teachers.
• Updated textbooks do not mean updated teaching methods.
• Not all graduates are better than all dropouts.
• If you are forced to do something, it is not a right.
• Attempts to control education are detrimental to educational rights.
• Turning to the schools to tell you what you think about schooling is not enough to make you an expert on education.
• A 100% graduation rate would not be ideal since at least some students would become better people if they did not become products of the schools.