Schooling stunts communication
Among other things
I have a rather large pile of notes on this and that, and for the sake of my sanity and my filing system, I’m embarking upon getting out two posts a week to clear things out. I’m aiming to keep the Wednesday posts shorter. [No promises.]
Although my friends wouldn’t agree, I’ve always described myself as profoundly introverted. I don't give any appearance of shyness, I walk with my head up and my shoulders back. I speak clearly and make eye contact. If I'm in a place where I feel in control and confident, such as when I'm teaching karate, I can be downright loud.
But put me in with a group of people I don't now [except for Pagans], and silence settles over me like a blanket. I don't know what to say, and I shrink into myself like an anemone pulling in its tentacles.
For most of my life, I’ve thought that this was my natural state, a normal blip on the spectrum of human behavior. But now in my 50s, I'm starting to realize that it had much more to do with how I was raised.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that my mother migrated from where she had been raised in Maine to Pennsylvania to take a good job, and I had no brothers or sisters. I spent way too much time by myself when I might have been learning how to get along with other human beings from siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Schooling compounded that isolation.
John Taylor Gotto, an award-winning teacher in the New York city school system, makes distinctions between communities and networks.
Networks are groups of people who gather for a specific purpose. But networks aren’t a satisfying emotional bonding environment. No matter how many groups we participate in, for whatever reason, the feeling of being lonely in a crowd is one that’s familiar. With networks you don't get any more than what you start with. Your circle of contacts may grow and your phone may ring on a regular basis, but the network isn’t a community.
Caring is more than companionship and shared interest.
When one is offered institutional simulations of community, A steady diet of networks, involuntary like schools, or voluntary like human places of work that are divorced from human variety, basic human needs are placed in the gravest jeopardy. A danger magnified many times in the case of children. Institutional goals, however sane and well intentioned aren’t able to harmonize deeply with the uniqueness of individual human goals. No matter how good the individuals who manage an institution are, institutions lack a conscience. Because they measure by accounting methods.
John Taylor Gotto
Schools appropriate time. Time that’s needed for self-development and reflection. Time to learn how to interact with other human beings. Time to have strong bonds with family. They stifle any genuine curiosity about other people’s lives.
An education should make one spiritually rich. It should provide a roadmap for life and fulfillment. This is decidedly not what I got from my 13 years of schooling. Schooling puts forth the idea that there is one correct way to be a human being. School is about dominance over human minds. Children must arrive at a certain time move from class to class at a certain time, interact with teachers on a specific schedule, interact with classmates on a specific schedule.
Where in this contained world is there room for spontaneity, natural communication, and play? All the things that allow us to develop into good human beings. Rationality and structure are all very well and the best humans can integrate that rationality into their emotional responses. But school allows no room for understanding one's emotional life. [It’s not very good for the rationality part either.]
Schooling cannot teach non-material values. That is because such values are only learned by the individual given enough time to contemplate, and enough indirect interaction with other humans to understand the consequences of their behavior.
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I’ve finally realized that I need to get better at being with people. Better at having conversations. Better at listening and asking questions. Last month I spent a weekend among Pagans. Pagans love to have deep conversations. We talk about big issues that matter to us and share knowledge that we hold like treasure. We talk about personal issues and listen with compassion. These are the kinds of conversations I want to have regularly. I wish I could have been having these conversations when I was a teenager.
With my day so structured and isolated by schooling, there was never time. What might I have learned if my time hadn’t been tied up with what amounted to indoctrination? I guess I’ll just have to make up for it now.
I’ve looked for and found guidance in making my life better. Here are some newsletters that might make yours better.
Andrew Lokenauth puts advice in easy-to-understand terms in his Money Mastery and Wealth Building newsletter.
Matt Leo talks about communication and people skills that apply to the home the board room.
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Unskool offers insights and alternatives to the sucking pit of our education system
Bobby Dimitrov and Healthy Farming, Healthy Food share their journey on how to build a food production system that is better for humans and better for the planet.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.