We are on Thunder Bay Beach on Georgian Bay, the southern part of Lake Huron. I have been here a week now with my wife’s family. I realized yesterday and last night that this is my family too. I love them all, even with all their faults and foibles (which are not as pronounced as mine). They are lively and energetic, even if they don’t delve into the mysteries of life as I do. I am the weird one, but they accept me without question. As long as I can play cards and whip up some breakfast, I fit in.
I remembered back when my son’s teacher wanted him tested for ADD, a disease invented to help teachers deal with the problem of bright kids. I fought them. He was in a Catholic school but they were going to send him to the big school district in Billings for testing. I did an end run and paid $300 for a doctor at the Children’s Clinic to test him. I did not have $300. The doctor was kind enough to let me pay him $50 a month for six months.
The verdict? “The kid is bored!” The school’s answer was to set him aside to do some more challenging reading when other kids were … I don’t know … doing easy reading? The real answer, which I did not see at the time, was to get him out of his desk, out into the world, to let him explore. Sitting in a desk is the problem. Sitting, under control, bored, thinking it important to internalize boredom and be a good factory worker … that is the point of industrialized schooling.
Standardized testing (and our overlords surely must know this) is about answering questions. Learning, on the other hand, is about asking questions. It does not matter if the answers are found. Searching is far more important. To ask a question is the key.
The most important answers are never found. Is there an Atlantis? A God? A God particle? What happened to the Pueblo tribe? Why do dogs know when we are angry, even when we try to hide it? Who killed JFK? How exactly does money control politicians? Why are journalists not curious about important matters? Why is there not one identifiable part from four supposed plane crashes? Why do people hide and pretend that there are no conspiracies? How can they be that blind? How does television control our perceptions?
Over the years I have taken countless tests, studied, done my homework, but haven’t learned much. That part of “education” is rote and pointless. Asking questions just about the JFK murder, for example, has led me to question everything I see and hear. My sense of wonder and curiosity never leaves me. Life is a beautiful mystery.
My advice to youth: Quit school. It’ll ruin you. You’ll end up like your teacher, thinking you are educated, not realizing you’re just another brick in the wall.
Piece of Mindful 
Amen!!
Asking questions = searching for truth.
Answering questions = believing or having to assume truth is already established.
LikeLike
Not sure if there’s a plan anymore. What are schools preparing students for? Industrial production has been moved offshore, domestic labor is imported, agriculture is being replaced with pavement and GMOs. More jobless consumers, I suppose.
LikeLike
The plan is to turn us all into debt slaves. Then we can sell each other cheap hamburgers and pizza until all wealth is congregated in the fewest hands possible. Then there is always soylent green to take care of what’s left…
Schools used to teach people how to think. The details of what was used to accomplish that purpose — readin’, writin’, ‘rithmethic — weren’t as important as a student’s ability to learn how to think for themselves. Then they could pursue whatever knowledge and experiences that they wanted to. But now with common core and standardized testing, students are not taught how to think and challenge, but how to conform and normalize –and become fodder for soylent green.
And them ADD drugs? They just assist the process. Those of us who grew up not knowing we had ADD, and not being mis-treated for it, are much the better for not having had to submit.
LikeLiked by 1 person
You complaining about the modern school strikes me as Frankenstein confronting his monster.
The Left/Lib/Progressive has had free run of the school and it is now a way for the State to supplant the family. Thus the kids show up with the proper shots, including the various stimulants and depressants, to be indoctrinated in the latest gender equality; applied homosexuality; vocational transgenderism; various racial equality classes; but also told that race does not exist; various love-ins for third world immigrants; etc.
LikeLike
You’ve mixed a lot of good and bad together, otherwise we could have common ground. For instance, I agree that PhRMA and drugs have made huge inroads into the schools with their needless vaccines, antidepressants and anti-psychotics and remedies for “ADHD,” an invented disease. Views differ on some matters, but as per usual you diver right into the race dumpster.
Modern schooling is a product of the Industrial Revolution (the need for factory workers) and the need for soldiers (the Prussian system). Before that time, schooling was for basic skills, and lasted only a short part of the year. College was reserved for a few very bright ones.
Since the mild uprising of the sixties, there has been a clamping down so that schools produce people incapable of independent thought. I cannot help but think that standardized testing is a large part of the dumbing down process. Kids are taught to answer questions, not ask them.
LikeLike
All kinds of bad debts and foreclosures such as defaults, IVA,
CCJs, personal bankruptcy, foreclosure, debt an so on would experience
an approval This kind of stimulus package consists
of over $40 million in capital directed toward electricity
related issues of renewable energy manufacturing and energy preservation. Instant
cash financial products would be the strategies to all your questions.
LikeLike
Dead written articles , thanks for selective information .
LikeLike