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Free to learn: the immorality of compulsory schools

The school system isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s further from the truth than Karl Popper. It’s wrong like the Catholic Church was wrong in refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentrism and...

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Free to learn: the immorality of compulsory schools
Christian Dean
“The school system isn’t wrong in the sense that it’s further from the truth than Karl Popper. It’s wrong like the Catholic Church was wrong in refusing to accept Galileo’s heliocentrism and in locking him up so as to protect their worldview. It doesn’t capture any part of reality, and because of this it doesn’t solve any problems. In fact, it causes more problems than it could ever hope to solve.”
– Christian Dean


     

A peculiar meme seems to have dominated throughout human history, namely, that there always exists some demographic that is less than human. First it was race; then, women. Now, the final demographic desperately waiting for equal moral standing is children.

Today, the institutional instantiation of this meme, of course, is the education system. From the age of five, children are placed on a conveyor belt—tedious for some, torturous for many—until they alight in possession of what authorities have deemed “an education”.

Most would agree that a state of ignorance never justifies coercion, yet for reasons I shall explain below, this courtesy extends only to the point of puberty.

A false theory of mind

Rather than analyse the history of the school system, I think it more fruitful to analyse the current philosophical ideas that are justifying this treatment of children in the minds of adults. After all, we are all prone to err, but something is preventing this error from being corrected.

That something, I believe, is what Sir Karl Popper called, ‘The Bucket Theory of Mind’. The theory is as follows:

Knowledge can be transferred with high fidelity from one mind to another. In other words, the mind is like a bucket into which knowledge can be poured.

As a child, I remember teachers and parents telling me that my brain is like a “sponge”, so it’s important to be exposed to as much as possible during these critical years of my life, because after this, learning becomes slow and arduous.

This theory of mind, then, is the life-raft of the otherwise foundation-less education system. It justifies shuttling batches of thirty kids from classroom to classroom for the entirety of their youth. Exams, curricula, and age-based learning are all natural extensions of the belief that there is a critical age at which kids absorb knowledge. So too, is coercion. As it turns out, this theory of mind is entirely false.