Maybe We Should All Just Drop Out of School

I used to believe that if you work hard enough you can accomplish anything you want in life. This mentality is impressed upon us in our education system. It tells us that education is the key to prosperty.

But, I want to challenge that idea for a moment. Maybe working really hard will allow you to improve your circumstances to an extent, but I don’t think it’s anything near the cure all solution we claim it to be.

This mentality ignores structural inequalities that exist and have existed for hundreds of years. It discounts the struggle of people who are born in the most dangerous, crime ridden, drug infested areas. It discounts those who grew up in poverty, living on a dollar a day. It discounts those who need to work hundreds of times harder from the start to even reach the point that others were born at.

Our education system tells us this and we believe it because education is supposed to be the solution. Knowledge is power, right?

But when that knowledge is biased heavily towards upholding a system that perpetuates inequality, can we really take it at face value? When the education system enforces a particular perspective, it ignores the points of view that challenge it.

And when a particular mindset is impressed upon generations of people systematically, and when everyone in every particular society is forced to receive this kind of perspective, you know what that’s called?

Brainwashing.

I’m sure some of you may be rolling your eyes right now, and I don’t blame you. If you disagree, feel free to reach out and I’d love to have a conversation about your thoughts. Maybe what I am saying contradicts everything you think to be true.

But I would argue that everything you think to be true was taught to you by this very institution I am questioning. So what do we do from here? Should we throw away the system we’ve created and start over? How would we even begin?

If I were to design a new education system, I’d put a stronger emphasis on debate. Learning is supposed to be about challenging your beliefs. I’d make classrooms discussion based instead of lecture based. I’d shift from sitting in a classroom for hours a day to playing outside and exploring our world for hours a day.

But, of course, it is much more complicated than making a few changes and calling it a day.

Because once you start questioning the education system, you realize that many systems in our societies are flawed in major ways. But, they were created to reinforce themselves. They were created in such a way to keep power at the top. They all reinforce hierarchies and perpetuate inequality.

We go to school to learn and build our knowledge off of prior knowledge, but sometimes you have to step back and ask yourself if all of the knowledge you have been fed is really the full picture. Sometimes you need to look at your deeply held beliefs and ask how they could be wrong.

It’s an uncomfortable process because our beliefs make up who we are, and by challenging them, we may also be challenging key aspects of our identities.

Sometimes learning how to unlearn what you thought you knew is more important than learning how to learn.

But, this is difficult because I think we may not even be concious of some of the beliefs we hold. Sometimes they are so deep that you make decisions and don’t understand the basis of these decisions.

I’ll give an example to make this all a little bit clearer. If a woman marries a man who abuses her emotionally and physically, but refuses to leave because she claims that she loves him, people around her may wonder why she stays in the relationship. But, deep down, she believes love is about being hurt. Love is about sacrifice and selflessness. Maybe she doesn’t know she believes this, but it was likely an attitude that was impressed upon her from her life experiences.

She hasn’t learned how to unlearn these attitudes. But, the only way she can free her mind is by unlearning these harmful deeply held beliefs.

It’s the same with our education system. Some of the beliefs that we hold are harmful, but have been pushed down our throats for so long that we view them as absolute facts instead of small pieces of a much larger puzzle.

So from this, I want to know: what are your deeply held beliefs, and how could they potentially be wrong? What do you need to go back to for further analysis? And if you go through this process, do you feel your identity changing before your very eyes?