schoolyard subversion

2000-10-12 [< * >]

I received the following email recently:

Hello. It's 3:40 am. Here and I was just randomly searching through some weblogs looking for something interesting to read when I stumbled onto yours. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one around noticing the discrepancies in the school system. I had these problems for years before I made the wrong choice and dropped out. I made it to my sophomore year of high school and just couldn't take the dumbing down that was occurring there. Unfortunately I also got lazy at the same time. I'm about to turn 18 now and still have no diploma and am nowhere near getting one. I guess I made the wrong choice like usual. I hope you can find a way to at least make a dent in this behemoth before it destroys whatever hope we have in the future. Best of luck to you.

It was a shock to me. A student with no diploma -- a dropout. While I may not like the educational system, dropping out was never an option for me. It was always expected that I'd finish high school, and go on to college too. There were no two ways about it.

But I now realized it wasn't like this for everyone. There were students -- the smart ones -- who realized that high school wasn't right for them. That it was "dumbing down" their lives. So they did the intelligent thing: they left. But our society doesn't reward these freedom fighters, willing to take a stand and follow their own path. Instead, it crushes them. It humiliates them, insults them, locks most of the world's doors to them and often prevents them from making much of their lives.

School isn't the only place where learning can occurr. In fact, most of our learning -- especially the most important things we learn -- happen outside of school. But as a society, we don't often recognize this. So sadly, those that do are crushed by the gears and cogs of modern life that they tried so hard to break free of.

Ouch.

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