School strike for climate
March 3, 2019 4 Comments
There has been a lot of fuss recently about the school strike for climate. People on the left say these children are The Future and we must Listen to the Children. People on the right are mostly saying that children should shut their fucking faces and stay in school.
Children should be free to leave school to go to climate protests if they want. They should also be free to leave school to do anything else: watch a film, play computer games, play frisbee, masturbate, learn differential geometry, read the complete set of Sherlock Holmes stories, go surfing etc. School is an institution where people who have committed no crime are imprisoned without trial. School children are forced on pain of punishment to change what they want to think about at the ring of a bell, otherwise they are guilty of a thought crime. And children are sometimes even forced to defecate in their own underwear rather than letting them go to the toilet. School is an evil institution. And just in case anyone is under any illusions, so-called private schools are also evil. They all benefit from the enforcement of truancy laws. Fuck all schools and all teachers.
A teacher is in a position to make the life of any child under his care miserable. That means a teacher can force a child to say anything. He can force a child to say that fossil fuels must be abandoned in favour of solar panels and wind farms. This whole climate strike idea should be treated as exactly what it is – a disgusting, pathetic and transparent attempt at propaganda. To the extent that this strike works, it will be because nobody wants to look closely or think carefully about what schools are, because admitting that they are prisons where children are treated like shit would be painful.
Most teachers are lefties cuz lefties are sentimental and statist, so they idolise schools as being wonderful places of instruction and fun, rather than seeing them accurately as Room 101 with bright decoration. So most teachers are happy to go along with the idea that an increase in average global temperature over several decades is an emergency that requires destroying the market economy and introducing central planning for energy – they are wrong.
The right likes school cuz it is tradition. The problem with their attitude is that some traditions just suck and should be dismantled, and school is one of those traditions. How should this be done? I’m fucked if I know, but it would be nice if we could start by not lying constantly about school and admit that it is one of the worst institutions that exists in the West today.
UPDATE – Elliot Temple made some good suggestions for reform in a comment.
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> School children are forced on pain of punishment to change what they want to think about at the ring of a bell, otherwise they are guilty of a thought crime.
My fav comment in the post.
> Room 101
Most readers won’t follow this reference nor look it up.
> The right likes school cuz it is tradition. The problem with their attitude is that some traditions just suck and should be dismantled, and school is one of those traditions. How should this be done? I’m fucked if I know, but it would be nice if we could start by not lying constantly about school and admit that it is one of the worst institutions that exists in the West today.
more private schools with more freedom for how they’re organized, less public schools, less government funding and involvement. vouchers. etc. these are fairly practical directions to move things.
more social acceptance of homeschooling, more persuasion about its upsides (and about how fucking bad schools are). also there’s lots of scope for better educational materials. maybe if homeschoolers were a bigger market some better textbooks (or other things) would be made. the way government schools choose textbooks is awful (see Feynman’s story about helping choose math books and the bribery and the judges who don’t read the books and so on).
> Room 101
elliot commented already but yeah lots of people won’t get this. could be easily solved with a link though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Room_101
I have put in the link.
I didn’t know what room 101 was, and only looked at the link after reading Elliot’s comment and then thinking it was probably good to understand the reference.