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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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Why do loving parents let schools teach kids to be conformists?

By David McElroy · February 25, 2019

It’s a scene that’s played out in front of me over and over. Tonight, it was at a McDonald’s where I was writing. A group of seven teens — around 17 or 18 — gathered at the other side of the room. They were loud and obnoxious. They had no regard for the people around them. They played loud music and yelled profanity at each other.

The most interesting thing, though, is that they were pretty much identical. They were genetically very different, but they had the same references, the same biases, the same clothes. They had taught one another to conform to a rigid culture — one which punishes those who think too much for themselves.

The more time I spend around people who are socialized by modern popular culture, the more shocked I am that any sane parent turns his children over to schools to train them to be like everybody else.

Whether you realize it or not — or like the realization or not — the biggest role of schools is to make your kids just like the other kids.

Both of my parents started their careers as teachers in government-operated schools. My mother spent her whole career that way. She eventually took early retirement when her inner-city school’s social structure had decayed so badly that teachers were just expected to be glorified baby sitters. She had no support from her administration or from the parents of her kids.

I grew up believing fervently in the power of education, and I thought schools were obviously the only way to become educated. I’ve come to see things very differently. Despite the fact that I know and love many people who have given their careers to working as teachers, I believe the school model as we know it today is hopelessly broken — and it needs to be replaced.

If you discuss the idea of letting children learn using any other model — whether it’s homeschooling or unschooling or some other innovative structure — most people express horror and say something such as, “How would the children learn socialization without going to schools?!”

But one of the key points against schools is the kind of socialization that takes place, because it produces social conformity and government-driven brainwashing. (Have you ever noticed that every country’s school systems teach its children that its government is the best in the world?)

I was lucky enough to spend most of my school days — all in government schools — in quality schools with kids from affluent families. (My only dreadful year was in an inner-city school in Pensacola, Fla., because kids who lived on the beach were bused into town.) Most of my experiences weren’t awful, either socially or academically, but none of my learning was fostered by being warehoused with other children for most of the day.

I learned because I was curious and read outside of school, just as most children are naturally curious. It’s only when they’re forced to do “school work” that they found out that learning is boring.

I read history on my own — not textbooks, which were horrible — but regular non-fiction books written for adults. One book led to another. I was fascinated by most things, so I read a lot. (We had a lot of books at home and we were regular visitors to whatever library was nearby.)

By the time we got to any subject in school, I was ready to talk about it — because I’d already encountered it as a fascinating part of life in my books — but the other kids were too bored with our lessons to even pay attention. I learned about the history of Latin America when I was 11 because it was an amazing human story with intrigue and adventure and ugly horrors; the other kids in my class learned a little bit about Latin America the next year because they had to memorize a few facts to pass some tests.

Did I need schools to learn how to be social? Of course not. I was taught at home how to interact with adults and I played with neighborhood kids quite naturally everywhere I moved. My social connections in my neighborhoods tended to be like adventurous people learning about the world. My social connections in schools tended to be more about how to navigate the school social order and how to escape teacher control.

The only thing I learned for which I needed a teacher’s instruction was my high school math from algebra II on. I wasn’t going to learn trigonometry and calculus on my own without someone there to point the way. (But maybe I would have. I’ll never know.) Even outside the full-time school model, there’s nothing wrong with kids coming together for lessons and practice in particular specialities — as they already do for music and gymnastics and other things they want to learn — instead of sitting in a big warehouse every day and learning how to absorb the popular culture instead.

Are there people from some homes who would still benefit from some form of school? Possibly. Kids from uneducated parents and lower-class families might need something different than I did. But the current model isn’t working for them, either, so I don’t see that as a great recommendation.

What does that leave?

Well, here’s the secret that most people don’t want to talk about. Most people who encounter the notion of looking at different models of education will tell you that they just want what’s best for their children, but if they were honest with themselves, they would admit that having government-provided daycare for most of the day is the real reason they love schools. They might convince themselves there are other reasons, but most people today need to ship their kids off — because that allows both parents to work while government employees (or private ones) babysit their kids.

If children learn some stuff while they’re at this daycare warehouse, that’s a great way justification for it in the minds of parents — and taxpayers — but it’s not the real reason for their support.

If you care about your children developing into the best versions of themselves — instead of spending years becoming alienated from their families and learning to conform to school culture — you owe it to yourself to look into alternatives. No matter how good your intentions are — and no matter how good the intentions of some teachers are — the system is hopelessly broken at its core.

Most people will never think seriously about anything for their kids except the current model — which was handed down to us from the Prussian system not that many years ago — but that’s because most of us have been taught to conform as well.

I went to these sorts of schools. You probably did, too. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t alternative models that are better for your children and for their families — and for society as a whole.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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