True Left

As True Leftists, we must be careful to argue against compulsory schooling NOT (as the Salon article does) on the grounds that other learning methods are more efficient:

Indeed. Reading some of the other stuff by the same author, it is so disappointing when he gets so close to having excellent point after excellent point, but then ends up not being radical enough to just reject Western attitudes completely. In his writings, he also has a number of references to hunter-gatherer societies, because I guess he thinks those are the most dissimilar from the Western education system, by supposedly allowing children to play and not have such rigidly structured exams and adult supervision outside of school... (However, anyone who has ever seen a documentary on hunter-gatherer societies knows that, in reality, they frequently have strict coming-of-age rituals and other restrictions on childhood). Although I think overall many of his articles offer good points that can be modified from False Left to True Left:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn



By the way, has anyone ever had nightmares where you failed a single class and have to repeat highschool all over again? Or are stuck in a loop where you're late to class and don't know where your locker or classroom is? Or anything like that? This is a form of PTSD.

One hundred and twenty-eight readers responded to the survey. In response to the question of the level of school involved in their dreams, 73% mentioned high school, 34% mentioned college, 12% elementary school, and 7% middle school or junior high school. (These totals add to more than 100% because some noted more than one setting for their recurring dreams.) Here are the other main findings:

Nearly everyone rated their school dreams as unpleasant. Nobody rated them as pleasant.

I asked people to rate the pleasantness of their recurring dream on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 = very pleasant, 2 = somewhat pleasant, 3 = neither pleasant nor unpleasant, or equally pleasant and unpleasant, 4 = somewhat unpleasant, 5 = very unpleasant.

None of the respondents rated their recurring dream as 1 or 2. Only two respondents rated their recurring dream as a 3. One of those two rated her dream as a 3 rather than a 4 or 5 only because her “massive sense of relief” on realizing in the later part of the dream that she had already finished school negated the unpleasantness of the earlier part. All of the rest rated their school dreams as a 4 or a 5, with the average being midway between 4 and 5.
[...]
I asked the survey respondents to indicate the number of years that had passed since they had last been a student in the kind of school that was the setting of their recurrent dream. The responses varied from about 5 years on up to about 60 years. On the basis of those responses, I made guesses about the age of each participant and found a range from 20 years up to 77 years old, with most (72%) being in their 30s or 40s. Regardless of age, respondents generally indicated that the dream had remained pretty much the same over the years, though some indicated that, with time, it had become less frequent and in some cases less anxiety-provoking.

This is dripping with Western Civilization:

The third most common dream theme—after the missed-class-all-semester and can’t-find-the-classroom themes—is the theme of being forced, as an adult, to go back to high school, or even elementary school, because of some bureaucratic snafu or the discovery that the dreamer had failed to meet some requirement. Twenty-one (17%) of the survey respondents reported such a recurrent dream.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201606/they-dream-school-and-none-the-dreams-are-good