Why children study and go to school - Anti-Schooling Series Part 2
Introduction to the Anti-Schooling Series
Why children study and go to school
Children do not go to school to learn. I went to an advanced placement school in NYC and an ivy league school. Since a young age I worked very hard almost every day, not to learn, but for money. Some people make an effort to try to remember some of what they spend so much time memorizing for tests, but most don't. After we are done with a test we move on to studying for the next test and quickly forget what we studied before. This is because we don't care about learning. Children care about getting into a good college for a degree to hopefully make more money. Children think they need to do this or risk facing poverty, or they hope that we will have more money in general. We go to school, do homework, take tests, and sacrifice 16 years of our life for money and only money.
Most children have been tricked. Children are led to believe that without doing well in school they will be poor or have less money in general. This is not necessarily the case, but children believe that common concept and let it dominate their lives. Parents and our culture perpetuate and reinforce the concept that doing good in school will lead to a higher paying job. Even if a child questions it, the fear of poverty is so great, they would rather be on the safe side and work extremely hard during their youth than risk poverty. They think their parents, politicians, and popular culture must know better.
Many children who work very hard in school live in households where the alternative to working hard is violent confrontations with their parents when they get home. Rather than have to yell and fight their parents, they work hard in school and get good grades. The other alternative of having to run away seems even worse than fighting with their parents. Children are aware that if they want to leave their parents and go into the foster system then they will be in situations where they will be drugged with anti-depressants and ADHD medication and be abused. If they run away illegally and are able to avoid getting caught it is obviously a very scary concept to have to be able to somehow make money for food, find shelter, and stay safe as a child. Even if a child's parents are prone to using physical and verbal intimidation in the form of yelling or physical abuse to discipline a child or get what the parent wants, the child most likely still loves their parents and wouldn't want them to worry.
For the children that don't work hard, many go to easy schools that they do not mind going to. Their school isn't competitive and it is easy to get good grades. Another possibility is their parents don't care about their grades so they get don't work very much and they get bad grades, or because their school is easy, they don't have to work very hard and they still get good grades. School is a lot easier and less stressful if you don't care about your grades and getting into a competitive college, or it is easy to get good ones.