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Aella
@Aella_Girl
some ppl responding are like 'but aella ur childhood was abnormal, this isn't actually a societal default' no, *most parents* just go and send their kids to school, which i find to be the biggest quietly accepted thing we'll one day as a civilization look back on with horror
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
I think most of my issues from my childhood stem from parents treating me like a thing they're supposed to make obey them as opposed to a real person with preferences that matter but like, this seems to be the societal default for all parenting, not just mine
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
we have *so many memes* about school being good. ppl love it for nostalgia reasons, ppl elevate it for moral reasons, ppl view it as a necessary part of a functioning society imo this is all a cope
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
(fwiw i dont think *all school* is roughly tantamount to child abuse, like it's possible to intentionally design a thing we would recognize as a 'school' that is not abusive, but most of current schooling is)
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
"aella its ridiculous to view it as child abuse, i went through school and it was fine" yea if u go to a country where its normal to beat your kids and u tell any of the adults 'beating your kids is child abuse,' they'll be like 'naw i was beat and it was good for me'
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
if u present to me an adult from this civilization who insists their schooling was fine, i will believe you that u are not using a framework that views schooling as bad (and there's some ways this is beneficial!) but this doesn't mean we shouldn't change it!
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
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@Aella_Girl
honestly the best argument for most school im aware of rn is that it functions as a babysitting place for parents who need to work but we should at least admit that and optimize *for* that, instead of systematically destroying our youth's relationship to learning
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
right now our civilization is like "yeah we send kids of STRATIFIED AGES so they can most optimally form damaging social norms, into a place where they're forced to waste time and learn things they don't want to learn at a pace that's not their own, all in order to get... GRADES"
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
i've talked about this before but it's been a while: i was homeschooled my entire life, except for a brief period of a few months when my parents sent me to public school, and it was a massive culture shock around learning for me
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
The biggest thing I remember was how much time was wasted. I remember standing around, waiting for teachers to talk, my life existence was just soaked up and poured down the drain, time i could have been spending doing other vivid, skill-building stuff
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
The amount of learning I did at school took SO much more time. At home, I sat down with my books and did my work usually in between 2-4 hours. At school that same amount of work could often take two DAYS.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
i spent my extra time at home developing my own skills. I read books nonstop, wrote fantasy fiction, learned to juggle, i taught myself how to carve wood and build crafts and photoshop and learned in a huge amount about personality systems
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
and maybe you'd be like, but aella you're kinda weird, most kids would just play videogames and maybe you're right, but also maybe you would play videogames too if for your entire life, all the learning you'd done was forced onto you by other people
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
in the years after i left home, i made friends with people who'd gone to school, and our difference in attitudes towards learning was super obvious. I was really *active* about exploring and learning from my environment, and they tended more towards learned helplessness
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
i had never learned shame around nerdiness or loving learning. For me, learning and education had been much less associated with trying to please a system or teachers, it wasn't about being uncool. It was just a natural state of being, like walking or breathing.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
and tbf I wasn't unschooled; there was still a lot of "parents forcing me to learn this thing" - it just took up a much smaller fraction of my life. I can't *believe* that most kids do this for the majority of their waking hours, that's insane to me.
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Aella
@Aella_Girl
how much of your childhood education do you remember? How many of the facts forced into you both stuck and were useful for your life? Probably not many. For me, 90% of the useful education I remember from childhood comes from the hours I taught myself.
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