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Most critiques of society mention the school system, and describe it as an authoritarian nightmare. I have to assume that people with this viewpoint are from older generations because I (born early 2000s) did not find school oppressive at all. The "education" I received was questionable but that's another matter. As far as I remember, most school rules were common sense and I didn't have to force myself to follow them. Something I see mentioned a lot as proof that school is authoritarian hell is having to ask to go to the bathroom; we did do this, but no one was ever refused or made to wait. The only pedantic rules I remember were to do with clothing; the school I went to until I was 16 had uniforms and there were rules about how to wear them. The school I went to from 16-18 had no uniforms, only a "business" dress code which people broke all the time, and the staff didn't really care. I've seen multiple people saying that school uniforms are fascist and I find this melodramatic. I didn't mind wearing the same thing every day. I wear the same thing every day in the present too. "But you have to consume fashion to express yourse-" don't care. When I was in school I disliked non-uniform days because people just used them to be hypebeast show-offs. I remember one day I wore something that happened to be branded and some of my classmates noticed this and said "wow I didn't expect you to have [BRAND] shoes!" and I was confused as to why this was a big deal. People complained the most about rules relating to smartphone use. I had difficulty sympathising with people who got their phones confiscated ("nooo I lost my Snapchat streaks"), because I didn't have a phone. My parents didn't let me until I'd finished school. Power-tripping teachers were rare and in fact many teachers seemed desperate to be liked and down with the kids, even engaging in what could be described as humiliation rituals. "Delinquent" kids weren't badass anti-authoritarian rebels, they were just babies who were unaccustomed to being told "no". When they were caught they would start crying and then summon their parents to bail them out. Portrayals of school as "prison" or "hell" are alien to me and seem like a relic of a bygone era. Maybe my experience is anomalous; does anyone else relate?

Some people are overdramatic but the idea aint wrong. >As far as I remember, most school rules were common sense and I didn't have to force myself to follow them. Something I see mentioned a lot as proof that school is authoritarian hell is having to ask to go to the bathroom; we did do this, but no one was ever refused or made to wait. Why do you even need to ask? Because they want to establish authority and ingrain obedience. Public school education was historically setup to train soldiers. Following nonsense regulations is prep work to have you follow orders without questioning them.

>>85230 I am older than you, but my experience in school was awful. The hours were simply too long, and very few people enjoyed being there. The main issue was that the standardized curricula weren't conducive to either the very bright, nor the less bright students. Literature classes were dry and often exercises in regurgitation of opinionated interpretations. Math and science classes were devoid of historical and practical context. Social science classes were always taught by misandrist feminists. Arts classes were devoid of skill-based instruction. By my time trades-based classes had long since been cut from the budget. Physical education was a reenactment of Lord of the Flies. Kids who loved learning learned to be bored. Kids who hated learning were bored regardless.

>>85234 >The hours were simply too long, and very few people enjoyed being there. I enjoyed school more than most, mostly because it was my only escape from home. I remember hating it when we had days off or half-days because I had to spend more time at home. At home I was "disgraceful" and "subpar" but at school I was "excellent" and a "model student". While my classmates called on their parents to get them out of trouble, when I got in trouble I tried my best to hide it from my parents because their punishments would be much harsher than the teachers'. Teachers would give me a light scolding, whereas at home I would be shouted at and beaten.

>Kids who loved learning learned to be bored. This was the case for me too, my work ethic throughout school was terrible because I was almost never challenged. When I got to university I realised that my concept of "working hard" was very skewed and I had managed to fool my teachers and family into thinking that I was industrious when I was in fact very lazy.

>>85230 "hell" comes from bullying victims and the way schools handle it "prison" is about mandatory attendance Best case its minimum 50% attendance or you fail regardless of good grades. So you doing mandatory time imprisoned to a classroom and you didn't even commit any wrongdoing... As for why even skip? Cause its the solution to >>85238

>>85230 I guess not everyone had my average country public school experience, but the main issue for me was the sheer amount of my formative years/young adulthood I spent repeatedly memorizing the functional equivalent of popsicle stick, bottle cap, Did You Know factoids. Past maybe Grade 5 - past the point where I'd learnt 90% of the English/Math etc. I would ever end up needing in life - and apart from Home Economics, the entire rest of my education was completely wasted on soykaf that had no utility at best, or at worst was the teacher's personal ideological opinion, if not straight up lies. Realizing that, also past that point, teachers were essentially about as intelligent as the people they were teaching, and were just reading from a curriculum which was sometimes 10 or 20 years old, or the phenomenon of teachers spending good portions of class time not even actively teaching, and instead just yapping with students - or not even bothering and just putting on movies - or 90% of English and History being Holocaust and Minority studies, or the fact that these midwit strangers were raising me more than my own parents, *and* that my parents were paying for this luxury; all of that was just icing on the cake. As was finding out that the vast majority of people around me, still to this day, consider it some of the best times of their life, to the point where they actually wish they could go back. That's one of those things that make me feel so alienated from other people. I can't even fathom that.

>>85230 Perhaps by authoritarian they mean used for brainwashing purposes. Perhaps they belive in the idea that school was useful to teach how to think, not what to think. But that would be naive. Nevertheless it appears increasingly transparent that any questioning can only go one way. I suppose that in the 60s to the 90s there might have been a healthier back and forth between ideas, with obviously one side constantly winning against the other. Is it authoritarian? It would seem that on the contrary it kept getting more and more lax on all fronts. What it is to me is wasteful, too concerned with general knowledge that does not get anywhere for students and which they will have no reason to keep afterwards.

I'm assuming that most of the people in this thread are American. I am British but my family lived in the US for some time, so I have gone to school in both countries. Based on my experience, the US school system is much worse than the UK one. School in the US felt repetitive and directionless. >repeatedly memorizing the functional equivalent of popsicle stick, bottle cap, Did You Know factoids sums it up pretty well. I could have sworn we did fractions and decimals every year. There were a couple of kids in my year group who could barely read or write but kept moving up years with everyone else. I was in some bullshit "gifted program" where all we did was take personality tests and play games; I eventually stopped going because I hated it. I did enough maths in my spare time to complete the entire K-12 maths curriculum in a few months (I was 12 at the time), and when I told the teacher this she shrugged and told me to go over it again. When I went back to the UK the school curriculum felt more purposeful, with a higher proportion of useful content. There weren't any illiterates in my year group, and kids who were ahead were given extension work instead of being left to rot. My school arranged for me to take my maths GCSE (standardised exam for 16-year-olds) at 13. If I'm not mistaken, in the US you're forced to do all the subjects until you finish school at 18. In the UK you can leave school at 16, or choose 3 or 4 subjects to specialise in between 16 and 18. Something else I noticed is that US 18-year-olds have the same level of maths knowledge as UK 16-year-olds, if not slightly less. When I was studying for the maths GCSE there were some topics I hadn't covered as part of the US curriculum. In the UK, there are grammar schools, which are free but you have to pass an entrance exam to get in and the academic standard is much higher than other state schools. I went to one of these. As far as I know, there is no such thing in the US and if you can't afford private education you're screwed.

You went to an upper or upper-middle class school. I'm guessing private too. Low-class public schools are genuinely unsafe for a lot of kids, there's usually cops on the campus, and our bags were regularly searched for drugs and knives. Teachers didn't care at all. Classes that teach you anything practical at all (wood shop, electronics, home ec, programming) were in the process of being removed when I was in school, the classes were all the bare minimum required by state law. Even then most of my peers were failing because they didn't care and were high all the time.

>>85259 >You went to an upper or upper-middle class school. I'm guessing private too. I went to both private and public schools and they were equally lenient. The private school had more crybabies and complainers though. I'm not rich, when I was at the private school I was on a scholarship and even then my parents had to borrow money from relatives to afford it. They eventually had to take me out because they couldn't afford it any more. They sent me there in the first place because they have delusions of grandeur and wanted me to participate in high society or something.

Being a slave is easy when you enjoy everything your master demands, but you are still a slave.

>>85237 you just sound like you're conditioned to oppresive environments. Most people aren't and can percieve our freedoms being limited wholesale instead of sucking at the droplets of freedom we are allowed while stuck in the system.

>>85471 The people are nice to me and all they make me do is a few hours of easy work? How oppressive!

Middle/upper class people complaining about school sound like feminists complaining about "patriarchy". "Waahhh waahhh waahhh I'm oppressed by the system" no, you lead a cushy life. So what if you can't do anything you want all the time.

>>85476 Das Rite! Anybody who wasn't tortured in Guantanamo for at least 20 years have no right to wish for a better life! They should think about the children in Africa!

>>85230 I don't perceive the type of anti-school sentiment you describe to be something common in the culture. (outside of kids maybe?) Most school critique I have seen amounts to "they could teach more important things better" I was exposed late to school and phones, so I mostly hated how school wasted more of our time than they needed to. Even if I personally got free from school, it would still be holding everyone else hostage. I don't know if most kids left to their own devices would thrive. Some would certainly read books, jam out and learn to repair things. I hope some would hack stuff and get up to mischief. Surely most kids would at least spend more time having fun as they grow up. I guess that people with the most isolating home situations would have less interaction with kids their own age if school didn't run for as many hours.

>>85477 "No Fortnite until you finish your homework" isn't oppression, Timmy.

How are they pulling it off in Japan?

>>85231 And how is this neccesarily a bad thing? Any society is gonna need rules to keep functioning, and thus authority to enforce these rules, and the need for people to be obedient to these rules. These are things that have been in almost every society in history. >>85234 Although I don't know your personal experience, I still highly doubt that any of your social science teachers were actual misandrists. Calling every single feminist a misandrist is just as reductionist as calling every right-winger a fascist.

>>85529 Are we allowed to use the same criteria and triggering threshold leftists use? Because the slightest objection to their views, whatever they are, is valid grounds in naming an offender an "ist" or a "phobe". Therefore when taking into consideration how feminists are just that aggressive towards men and have nothing good to say about them, then yes, we are totally validated in calling all feminists misandrists.

>>85530 I think you've been spending too much time in algorithmically engineered echo-chambers, my friend. In real life, the average leftist or feminist isn't gonna accuse you of being some kind of "ist" or "phobe" simply for disagreeing with them. And of course feminists aren't gonna be talking about how good men are, their ideology is focused on women's equality and liberation, so they are gonna be talking about problems women have and how to fix them. That doesn't neccesarily mean they hate men. And even if they actually did do what you say they do, doing the same generalizing you criticize them for just makes you a hypocrite.

>>85529 > I still highly doubt that any of your social science teachers were actual misandrists they might have been misandrists without being feminists, lol. >>85530 >Because the slightest objection to their views, whatever they are, is valid grounds in naming an offender an "ist" or a "phobe". Not in my experience. I publicly hold many views that are counter to (most) leftist ideology, but I am accepted into their circles because my views are not incompatible with theirs. Same goes for (some) Trumpists and the like. Is your only experience with leftists and feminists arguing with them in comment threads?

>>85532 >And of course feminists aren't gonna be talking about how good men are, their ideology is focused on women's equality and liberation, so they are gonna be talking about problems women have and how to fix them. The days of first or second wave feminism have long sailed. Feminists who mean business definitely adopt very negative views of men while the weaker ones who trail behind will parrot some feminist mantra in the limpest of ways but will nevertheless take a chance at automatically spewing some pee brained soykaf. >>85547 >Not in my experience. I publicly hold many views that are counter to (most) leftist ideology, but I am accepted into their circles because my views are not incompatible with theirs. Same goes for (some) Trumpists and the like. This is illogical. I must conclude that you're interacting with people who barely are leftists. If they truly espoused the ideology you attacked and contradicted, you could not be accepted in their circles because your views would precisely be incompatible with theirs. That or you are conveniently avoiding the key points which you know will have you antagonize them to the point of exclusion. Your diluted leftists are inconsequential and the laws were not made for them to exploit but for the more radical of them, who can for example go after you within your own work place and hit low through the HR department. Middle ground lukewarm pseudo leftists are not relevant in the slightest and hold no power.

>>85564 Out of curiosity, have you actually ever personally encountered leftists doing the things you say they did to you in real life? Particularly the teachers you accuse of misandry, since this thread about the school system is starting to get derailed.

>>85564 >I must conclude that you're interacting with people who barely are leftists. We're labor organizers, so we're not exactly coming together on the basis of politics, but we're pretty far left even as labor unions go. >you could not be accepted in their circles because your views would precisely be incompatible with theirs. Like I said, my views are not incompatible with theirs. I disagree in many ways but we ultimately hold similar values and share common goals. >Middle ground lukewarm pseudo leftists are not relevant in the slightest and hold no power. Lmao, tell me, is Kamala Harris a "lukewarm pseudo leftist"? Because she is *far* to the right of everyone I'm talking about.