Schools As Colonizers

3.31.08

If a student does not do well at Brookline High School, what might be

one or two reasons?

Schools were never designed to be institutions that produced good results for everyone.

“School is like the meat packing

business, designed to teach

children what grade of

meat they are, and to send

them off to the right market--

but make sure they

believe it.”

-John Holt,

What Do I Do Monday, 1970

“Poor people know more clearly what

school does to them… School instructs us on

our own inferiority.”

-Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society,

1971

The experiences of learning are diminished by attending school.

“School initiates young people into a world where everything can be

measured. Once men and women have been schooled down to size they let unmeasured experience

slip out of their hands.”

-Ivan Illich, After Deschooling, What? 1974

The hidden curriculum of schooling instructs us in racist, classist, and competitive values, and then naturalizes and

normalizes this as our self-willed state.

“Most of all, we might grow up without the shell, the casement, the surrounding lacquer, that protects us from acute perceptions of those things we understand, or visible action on those evils we perceive. We might grow up to be brave and subversive human beings. It is against this ever-present danger that twelve years in public school protects us.”

-Jonathan Kozol, The Night Is Dark and I am Far From Home, 1990

Much of our best learning occurs outside of institutional settings.

Traditional schooling dulls us and wastes our time.