Schooling Vs. Human Rights

A lot of people view forced schooling (frequently referred to as compulsory education) as a human right. I view schooling as contradictory to human rights.


What about the right to individuality? To me, the right to be yourself is a fundamental right. The schools try to cram everybody into the same mold. They promote discrimination against those who are different. They push conformity and ridicule those who resist. I have repeatedly stated that the schools destroy thought and individuality.

That brings me to my next fundamental right, the right to live a mentally active lifestyle. The schools train their students to turn to their teachers to tell them what to think. Your own ideas aren't going to help in tests that consist of questions that are either right or wrong. If you think for yourself, it won't help your grades at all. In fact, mental activity can make it more difficult to dedicate time to schoolwork. The schools essentially prohibit mental activity.

In many ways, the right to individuality and the right to live a mentally active lifestyle work together. Individuals think for themselves. Looking the other way, those who think for themselves are unlikely to fit the single rigid mold that we want everyone to be a part of. The right to think for yourself should be viewed as another closely related fundamental human right.

We should also have a right to a healthy mental condition. The schools rely heavily on emotional abuse as their primary motivational tool. A lot of the harm that they cause linger on to adulthood. This results of this harm can be unpredictable, and some products of the schools have hurt innocent people when they finally snapped. This is part of the reason that I have frequently insisted that schooling can be incredibly dangerous. You can even argue that schools are indirectly harming the right to life.

The right to a healthy education strongly contrasts with the right to "compulsory education." Once again, the schools have benefited from confusion regarding an apparent homonym. I still contend that education should never be used to refer to schooling. Education should definitely be viewed as a fundamental human right. Schooling contradicts that right as well as several others.