From Kids to Wage Slaves: How School Trains Us for a Sh*tty Life

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Most kids hate school.

That is quite obvious whenever school has to temporarily close because of some unexpected reason. Let’s say because of heavy snowfall.

When that happens, kids are very joyful. They are utterly excited. They are happy. Why would they be happy if they loved school? They wouldn’t. They would be sad and disappointed. And why would kids look forward to the weekend nearly every weekday? Or why do they hate Mondays? If they loved school, they would be looking forward to Monday every weekend.

To understand why kids hate school, we have to look into the process of schooling. We have to look into what schooling involves.

From a very early age, kids are forced to go to school. Most kids don’t choose to go to school because they like it — they are forced to by their parents and society in general. In most countries, not going to school is illegal even.

So kids are forced to go to school where they have to spend hours upon hours every day — usually six, seven or even eight hours every weekday — confined in a classroom, where they have to stay seated and just pay attention to their teacher, who is teaching them things that they don’t give a damn about learning but which they have to memorize, and then they have to spit out all the information that they have learned during the exams.

And at school, kids are not allowed to do pretty much anything on their own unless they ask for permission first. Not even to go to the toilet. So how can they like this kind of life, that they have to spend for about 12 years of their lives? How can they enjoy this life of slavery, really? I know that the word slavery might sound very harsh or heavy, but is this kind of life not a form of soft slavery? A life where kids don’t have the freedom to do what they want for about half of their waking time, at least. Where they don’t have control over their lives. To me, that is a form of slavery.

And school actually was designed to program people to become slaves, to become, more specifically, wage slaves — people who are willing to do work that they don’t enjoy or even despise doing later on in life.

The modern educational system does not go very far back in history. It goes maybe a couple or so centuries back. School was designed and developed during the Industrial Revolution. At that time, businessmen and politicians were looking for people who would be willing to do dull, tedious, boring, monotonous, hard work at factories. And most people did not want to do this kind of work. Who would want to do this kind of work? And they would not comply, and they would say, “No, leave me alone!” But the political masterminds of the time had a brilliant idea. They thought, “What if we could condition people from a very young age to be used to this kind of shitty life, where they work hard all day long?” And that is when they invented school as we know it today.

School is nothing but a preparation for adult life. Just think of how most adults live: They have to wake up early, usually in the morning, and they have to go to some office or other place where they work for seven or eight hours every weekday, just like kids do, who go to school and work for seven or eight hours every weekday.

Then adults have to obey to some sort of authority figure, to a boss. Just think of this word, boss, how ugly it is. But they are used to obeying because as kids they had an authority figure or a bunch of authority figures called teachers that they had to obey.

And modern workers work only for an external reward. I mean, not all of them. I know I’m generalizing here. But the vast majority of them, for sure. And that external goal or reward is, of course, a wage or a salary. Just like kids worked for an external reward. They study hard only to get some good grade or a certificate.

School is nothing but a foretaste of what’s about to come. It is training for adult life. So is it any wonder then that kids hate school? No. At least not in my eyes. And certainly not in the eyes of kids.

Further reading

To read more of my thoughts on the negative effects of our modern school system, as well as on the ideals and principles that a healthy education system would embody, click here.

Image credit: Pawel Kuczynski