Homework 39 -First School Assignment

Part A
People are always talking about how much they hate school, and how they can’t wait until we don’t have to go anymore. I have to admit I had this same thought at times, but when you actually think about me, school helps us develop and grow. This sounds really stupid now, but honestly, if we were not in school what else would be doing with our time? When you actually think about it, up until we are about sixteen (if you’re lucky), you can not get a job, meaning you will not have a source of income to support yourself. Sure you can live off your parents, but what about once they kick you out? School helps us develop our minds, and teach us things we will need to know in the future. Sure learning quadratic functions or the formula for a circumference of a circle seems stupid now, but maybe you might need it in the future. It’s not a definite possibility, but it is always better to be safe than sorry. What I’m basically trying to state is the fact that without school, we will have nothing to do with our lives. Sure you can sleep in late and not have to worry about homework, but you also won’t have your friends you met at school or learn how to use your brain to think.

I also believe that school is the government’s way of civilizing us. Every since we were young, we were taught manners, how to interact with others, and how to share by our elders. But what better way to actually work on these techniques then by surrounding us in a room with others our age, for five days a week, approximately six hours a day. By surrounding us with others our age since we were young, we were able to understand the proper way to interact, the proper way to be kind to others, etc. The school system helps young minds learn to become civilized when all they care about is themselves, and think everything belongs to them. We also learn how to speak and write, further continuing our ability to interact with others.

One of the most interesting and powerful questions I believe was raised in class was how is school similar to a hierarchy, where the teachers are the ones in command and we but simple followers? Another question I had was how do private schools compare to public schools; do private school students receive a better education? Another question is how does religion play a role in our education system?

Part B
Sitting down, tapping my pencil, my eyes room to the clock on the wall. Ten more minutes until I am free, I think. The teacher writes some more formulas on the board. More note copying, isn’t it wonderful? This my friends, is what I call a classroom setting where we the students sit down quietly and copy the notes our teachers so kindly write on the boards. Civilization at its best is how I think of it. We all sit down at our tables, copying down notes that we will never again review once the school year is over. We act like we are listening to the teacher giving a lecture in the front of the classroom, but really we are thinking about our plans for afterschool or how adorable our crush looked today in the hallway. It’s a strange experience in my opinion, how we all so cooperatively sit down and write down facts that we could rather not care about.

As Andy so kindly puts it, our classrooms we sit in are like boxes that we are always trapped in. We travel from box to box, learning different things in each class. Rather robotic in a sense, we arrive at school, follow our fellow classmates to our next class, and maybe shoot out a smart comment at times. This all goes back to my theory that school is the government’s way to civilize us. Somehow, without us even realizing it, they managed to trap us in a boxed building, letting us out only for lunch, which is less than an hour. They managed to keep us occupied for six hours of our day, making sure we are all safe in a contained building, learning useless information. When you think about it this way, school doesn’t seem so interesting now does it?

Of course there are consequences to trapping us in boxes, without giving us an opportunity to think on our own. We become so use to having things told to us that we lose the ability to think on our own. We forget how to process something, how to analyze and further develop our thoughts. Without any free space to think and learn on our own, we become trapped in our own minds.