A comment I made on my Metafilter post:
I just can’t see how the ends could possibly justify the means. We need to send kids away to school so they can learn to tolerate boring shit? For 6-8 hours a day, 5 days a week? Plus homework? Why not just put them in solitary confinement for weeks on end, that’s surely a more efficient method for teaching that lesson.
The main problem with this take on education is that if you are “learning tolerance for boring shit” for that much of your life, at that tender of an age, it does fucked up things to you. You start to expect that most of life is tolerating boring shit, and then you can’t imagine the world being any different, and you start to cop out with statements like “it’s just how it is”, and then you get depressed and you remain so for the rest of your life. It’s a pattern I’ve seen acted out again and again and again and it scares the shit out of me. The function of school in this regard is as a factory for hopelessness, and it’s worth noting that it’s only one of many institutions in our society which fills that role. I’ve commented with this Huxley quote before, but it bears repeating:
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.”
