How School Damaged Your Mental Health [Part 1]
Why State-Enforced Schooling Is Dangerous
On my first day in school, I felt that there was something wrong with the whole institution of schooling. On that first day, I was thrown into a prison-like yard, and forced to interact with problematic older kids who picked on the smaller ones, humiliate them, and elbowed their way in front of them at the canteen queue. It was a lesson in the law of the jungle. It was clear right from the get-go that I, my will, individuality and sense of self-ownership were not worth considering; not by the abusive kids, not by the adults who carelessly discarded me there, not by the negligent educators, and not by me. I was more alone in school than I was in solitude, because at least in my own company, no one could deny me myself.
In school, I found myself alone in an environment where cliques had already formed. I couldn’t make friends easily, since my parents disciplined me to be a passive obedient “little soldier”; to obey, to never take initiative, to not speak unless spoken to. I was conditioned to never interrupt, never take risks, never try to control my environment/ This happened probably because those who presumed authority over me felt threatened by a child’s curiosity and enthusiasm for life. It reminded them of what was ripped out from them, so they needed to do it to their children too out of spite. The smothering enmeshing parenting I received denied me the sense of ownership needed to take initiative, seize opportunity, innovate and win. I was passive, so instead of being assertive and proactive, I just responded to external stimuli like a soulless automaton.
So I was particularly vulnerable in school. In a state-enforced schoolyard, just like any prison yard, your friends determine whether your day is bearable or a hellish nightmare of constant rejection, humiliation and debilitation.
I found myself more lonely when I was surrounded by peers than when I was alone. And all this during a sensitive malleable age that defines one’s sense of self-worth.
Not only was I given poor parenting by parents I never chose, but I was plunged into the prison of school, forced to comply with Pavlovian school bells, to fall in line, to speak when I was ordered to, and to shut up when I was told to. And if not, then I’d be punished: reprimanded, publicly humiliated, physically abused by teachers (yes, physically abused), and then accused to my parents so that they could repeat the same punishments. All this psychological abuse, plus having to endure the hissy fits of psychotic educators who exploited children as emotional tampons, drove me to suspect that schooling was just an excuse for parents to free themselves of the burden of their children for most of the day. The “to learn how to read and write” excuse for schooling felt like unconvincing nonsense. I wondered how people in the past could read and write and build cathedrals without identity-denying school uniforms and 12+ years of loss of productivity. School-less people even created the languages that we are too dumb to learn without school.
Schooling was never about our education nor for “what was best for us.” It was always about controlling us and rendering us subservient, obedient, and too demoralized to step out of line.
“Discipline” is a euphemism for taming.
Schooling is not synonymous with education
Education is the act of learning. It includes any act that results in learning: self-learning, tutoring, mentorship, experience, experiment, trial-and-error. Reading a book or watching a tutorial on YouTube is in fact learning; no school needed, especially when the vast majority of information is freely available and accessible in libraries, bookshops and the internet. Sure, you don’t have some arbitrary institution “certifying” that you know something just because you memorized key points and cheated your way to a pass grade, but in real life, you have your portfolio, experience, skills and references to prove what you can do. No fancy papers with magical stamps and stars needed.
You don’t need a school, a teacher, a school bell, or government-enforced curricula to learn if you truly want to learn. And if you don’t want to learn, then why the hell should anyone force you to “learn” something? If anything, force makes you resent what you supposedly learn, and you will not only forget it, but you will also destroy any chance of you picking it up by yourself in the future. We can’t appreciate what comes without your effort, let alone what is enforced upon us. This is why the vast majority of people cannot remember most of what they force-learned in school.
So, what is schooling?
Schooling is state enforced curricula and timetables in the convenient packaging of day-care. Schooling also functions as an arbitrary “recognition” of supposed expertise given by the perceived “authority” of the state; or fat clueless state bureaucrats who have no practical proven expertise (not even close) to verify anyone else’s. In other words, with state schooling, it doesn’t matter how good you are at something; unless you have a government paper, with cool-looking stamps and designs saying you’re good at it, you are not allowed to claim that you’re good at it, even if your works prove it.
If you suck as something, but cheated or bribed your way to a degree, then you are a supposed “expert” in that field. Don’t worry; no one will call out the emperor who wears no clothes, because that would expose their hypocrisy too.
Without said paper, you’re not allowed to be good at what you’re good at, even if your experience, portfolio and market recognition prove otherwise. Unless you waste 12 years of your life toiling purposelessly with curricula defined by unqualified bureaucrats, and depriving society of 12 years of your productive value, then you are considered illiterate. If you don’t waste even more years in university chilling, partying, and pretending to be useful to the world when you are not, then you are not an arbitrarily defined “expert”. This is the tragicomical reality of state schooling.
School and mental health
Schooling is damaging to mental health because it deprives you of meaningful purposeful self-actualisation for most of your youth; all of your youth when schooling extends to post-graduate higher education. We need early on in life a sense of identity, which we get from purpose and meaning, and vice versa. Children need to know that they offer value to society, and in doing so, derive purpose and define their unique sense of self-image. Wasting their youth with passive tormenting schooling, laborious homework and PTSD-inducing exams deprives students of their chance to seize control over what they learn, what they produce, and who they want to be in this world. Schooling throws children into nothingness, levels them into a passive uniform-identity that is indistinguishable. Then we pretend to wonder why existential issues are on the rise, and why depression, self-harm, extremist ideologies, suicide and school shootings are not a shocker anymore.
The recent school shooting in Prague shows that it’s not about the guns, since private gun ownership is banned in Czechia. The fact that young people would resort to mass murder and suicide in a desperate attempt to, for once, define themselves (in a school setting, no less) should ring alarm bells. Maybe the problem is not the gun; maybe the problem is the school.
Schooling prolongs infantilism. It renders teenagers and young adults passive, inactive, unproductive, and without a sense of value, usefulness, identity, purpose and meaning. Since schooling doesn’t allow children and young adults to choose by themselves what to learn or what part-time job to work, schooling deprives them of much-needed initiative to get a sense of control over their lives. Children need to feel like they get to define their education and how useful they become early on to society. This is how they define themselves. School denies them self-determination.
This lack of control over their lives means low self-confidence, since they don’t have experiences of failures or successes that belong to them. And this during a period in their life when they need to determine their value, usefulness, identity, purpose and meaning. They need to know what they are good at and what they are not good at. They need to know what they value, what they identify with, and what society values in them.
School deprives them of this initiative and self-confidence for 12 years, renders them passive and full of self-doubt, and then demands that they choose, within a few months, a life-defining subject to study in extended schooling (university). And when they make bad decisions in what degree they choose to pursue, we blame them for those bad choices, as if we, the adults, aren’t responsible at all. No wonder mental illness is on the rise in lockstep with increasing years in school and academia.
Mental illness seems to be a symptom of “civilization”.
Humans need to feel useful to society. It’s how we define our worth, our purpose, our identity and meaning. Children need early on in their lives to structure a solid identity and purpose founded on social proof of their usefulness, and validation of their worth. This is how children give meaning to the life they are gradually beginning to conceptualise. Schooling is passive, and it renders students unable to work or provide value to society so as to derive satisfaction in their ability to contribute. No wonder young adults more and more feel a sense of meaninglessness, hopelessness and depression. No wonder self-loathing, depression and drug abuse run rampant especially in countries with too many years wasted in schooling (including university).
It comes at no surprise that university (late-stage schooling) is generally associated with substance abuse, vices, and students so confused with their non-existent identity that they take up radical ideologies, mutilate their bodies with tattoos and piercings (a form of self-punishment), or even undergo gender reassignment (a form of self-rejection). It’s because, if they haven’t achieved a solid purpose and meaning for their existence by then, then they have no identity. They feel like they don’t exist in any meaningful way. They either numb this non-existence with addictive behaviours, or they submit to easy pre-packaged tribal identities that give them instant faux meaning at the expense of your dignity and self-ownership. And people without a solid identity are easily manipulable. I wonder if that was the true purpose of schooling all along.
Having been an army instructor, I can attest to how easy it is to make obedient pawns out of people with no identity.
The only students who seem to be grounded and in control of their lives during university are the ones studying a solid useful degree, like engineering or mathematics, and who also have a plan for what they’ll do with that degree later on. Most students don’t have a plan. Most students are conditioned for 12 years in a state of school-induced passivity, which killed their initiative, critical thinking, and proactivity, after which they were forced, in a period of a few months, to decide what direction their life would take through a generic overhyped degree. This is hardly intelligent.
Schooling conditions students to obey, fall in line, disregard their own opinion over the opinions of teachers and state bureaucrats, and we then assume that they have enough self-confidence to make the life-shaping decision of choosing what to study. They never chose what to study all their lives, they were never allowed to work anything except the really bad part-time jobs that are available to older teenagers, never empowered them to make any meaningful decisions about their lives, then we expect them to choose something to study right then and there? And we think this is a good idea?
Why do we pretend to be surprised when young people feel helpless and hopeless, and resort to drugs, video games and porn to dull their meaningless existence? How do we have the gall to blame movies, music and pop culture for the youth’s lack of principle and morality when schooling deprives them of identity, purpose and meaning that make a principled moral lifestyle worth living?
We need a separation of education and state.
We need to end government interference in education. The state has no business deciding what is worth learning for everyone, and to what degree. Government has no authority or right to decide how people spend their free productive time, especially when they have committed no crime against anyone. Government employees are hardly qualified to make such tyrannical decision of what constitutes sufficient “education” for each different individual, especially when those individuals choose to offer value to society, rather than become the busybody parasitical class of unnecessary governance.
How would children know what to learn? Let the demand of society, their peers and their family show them what they could supply, just like in any free voluntary market. Positive and negative feedback in a free market is enough to give anyone enough insight to know what to go for, as long as no state interferes.
How the state “necessitates” schooling
Think about it. You learn to speak at home with your family. No school needed. Without schooling, you’d also learn to write and perform basic maths in the home too, if the state hadn’t made it so difficult for a single pay check to support a household. And yes, the state is the reason why wealth gaps are increasing steadily along with taxes, money printing and regulations/restrictions. How? Taxation and state-induced inflation means that the vast majority of your income goes to direct as well as hidden taxes, while the ultra rich who lobby for higher taxes get tax breaks and state funding from your money. When you buy something, most of the price is taxes, and you don’t even realise it. So, when both parents need to work overtime just to get by, schools become a “needed” day-care, which is also enforced through the threat of state violence. What kind of education do you expect when it must be enforced? What lessons do we give to our children when we teach them that the group with the most guns gets to enforce anything it wants on a weaker group? We teach our children not to steal, yet the state steals from workers, calls the theft “taxation”, and provides useless services with a fraction of that theft, just like the protection mafia does.
Education without the state - What true education looks like
Whatever you learn is not worth the effort or opportunity cost if it must be forced, or if it does not contribute to your identity, purpose and meaning. If you don’t value what you learn, then there is no point to learning it.
True education should come from freely choosing to be educated in something. Education needs to be voluntary, so that it fosters a sense of self-ownership, initiative, and self-confidence on one’s own judgment.
Education also needs to be personalised to each individual, so that the individual values it more. To do this, education must be modular rather than served as a big generic chunk of a “degree”. Modular education is how professional qualifications work already.
Freely chosen education cultivates a sense of self-identity and self-worth because with it, people know that their free will ended up providing meaningful useful value to society. They know that what they freely chose to learn is voluntarily rewarded by society. There is no greater satisfaction. This is the whole point of being educated. Faux education to get a PhD in front of your name while offering zero usable value to society is nonsense babble. Education is about offering organic value to the world, not state tenure and funding from involuntarily seized taxes, without any obligation to offer voluntarily requested value.
Anything that doesn’t offer real value to society is not education; it’s mental masturbation. What measures real value? Whatever people are willing to pay for with their own money. Paying for something with other people’s money (taxes) is not valuable, especially when the opportunity cost of it being freely paid for (without taxes) would have been much greater.
Common objections
Whenever I criticize the institution of state-enforced curricula and schooling, I get the same predictable objections by people who argue out of ignorance, and out of laziness, because they never had the intellectual honesty to challenge their cherished faith-based beliefs regarding their worship of state and schooling. Here are some:
“But without school, how would people be educated?” asks the over-educated mis-educated PhD who’s learned more science and technology from free Hindu YouTube videos than overpaid clueless university professors (the latter of which generally seem unable to address students’ questions with anything other than “just read the book”).
In the age when usable information is widely available, and largely free, one begins to question why me need expensive abusive corrupt schools at all. Information is widely available and accessible. Affordable courses and tutors on every subject are everywhere. Private certifying organizations are way ahead any state certification in every industry. Children can socialize and interact and gain market insight on what to study from various freely choses tutors, institutes, online courses, and work placements suitable for children. The market insight from these activities is way more in touch with the real world than any clueless government educator with no grasp of reality in the free market. Why on earth would we need the state to interfere in education?
“But what about lab work?” We are kidding ourselves if we believe that a university lab, detached from reality and true market demands, can teach us better than on-the-job mentorships. “But rarely do employers offer mentorships or internships.” Yes, maybe this has a lot to do with state-enforced degree recognition, which makes it pointless for free business to invest in mentorship programs. Without the state forcing you to have an engineering degree, otherwise you can’t work as an engineer, businesses would have every incentive to provide on-the-job mentorship opportunities for the next generation of employees they need. Businesses could provide incentives for mentees to stay in the company to depreciate the cost of mentorship, and private standard organisations can ensure education quality much better than any state monopoly without incentive to maintain quality. University recognition is nonsense because no university has any accountability for the bad workers it throws into society. You cannot trust universities if they aren’t accountable for their works.
“But not all children exhibit such trauma from school. Doesn’t that invalidate your suggestion that schooling is traumatic?” Yes, it’s true that not all children are affected by school in the same way and intensity. But made no mistake. They are traumatized. The ones who seem less traumatized were lucky enough to have nurturing parents, and generally a better environment with emotional support systems, guidance, and engagement with loving people around them. This doesn’t mean that school isn’t traumatizing. It means that they turned out relatively healthy, despite school trauma.
“But without schooling, people wouldn’t feel the need to be educated.” Really? How can you prove this wild unscientific assertion? This is a convenient ad-hoc fallacy, as well as a burden-of-proof fallacy, whereby I am called to prove how the default non-existence of schooling is better than the alternative existence of schooling. If we can’t even logic, then this shows how useless schools are! If schooling were effective, then we’d have a basic grasp of logic enough to understand logical fallacies. Logically, I don’t have to prove to anyone that having enforced schooling is “better” than having no enforced schooling. Enforced schooling needs to prove that it is better than the default of non-schooling.
But I’ll prove it anyway. Human beings are driven by incentives. This includes adults as well as children. Children can freely choose what they will learn, just like they freely choose which skills to hone. Real-time feedback from a free market will guide them. No state-enforced “education” is needed.
The term “education” has been hijacked by atherosclerotic bureaucrats in cosy government jobs with no footing on reality, nor on how society truly works. They presume to “know best” just because their sucking-up skills got them to the belly of corruption of centralized government: no incentive to work, no drive to produce results, no accountability for erroneous decisions.
People who have no incentive to work cannot possible understand how incentive works.
And these self-appointed state “experts”, deluded in the self-importance, have equated education with state accreditation and enforced generic curricula that waste children’s best years with useless nonsense. Not only that, but institutionalised schooling renders children passive and inert in their submission to life paths over which they had no choice.
“How do we learn without school?” The same way people in the past built cathedrals without going to university: they learned on the job through a mentorship. Children need from an early age to get involved in work. The extreme of child labour exploitation has swung the pendulum so far the other way that we deny children the option to work appropriate jobs, and learn through them, and in parallel to them.
Another problem with state schooling is our deluded need for state-approved validation that we are the “experts” in a given field. This is the only function of university, which is reduced to a mere certifying organization. As we all know, a silly degree means nothing in the employment market, unless you are applying for a government jobs that works completely inorganic, and without incentive to produce results. In the free market, there is the incentive to get the best, so a measly degree by itself means nothing. In the free market, you have to prove your skills, showcase your portfolio, and you have to show your professional qualifications, which are the most important. So, in essence, universities are completely useless, and so is their unholy alliance with the state by which universities receive unearned funding from taxpayers, so that academics can become the mouthpiεce of government propaganda. In return, the state gets to enforce the universities’ oligopoly on certifying the alleged “expertise” of their customers “students”. How clueless university educators presume to “know best” is beyond me. It’s a scam.
The whole modern “education” system is all wrong. True education should come from the best in their field, and the best in their field are in their field producing results, not coming up with useless studies, and marking exams. True experts don’t have time to teach; they use what they know to produce better results than mere teaching. If they do teach, they teach on the job through mentoring, not mentally masturbating through lecturing. Knowledge doesn’t require “teaching” in a passive classroom. In other words, if the best in their field truly master what they claim they have mastered, then they can make more money doing it rather than teaching it. This is why if you can’t do, you teach. The most useful hard-to-acquire knowledge is always through on-the-job experience.
Mentorship should be the way to learn, not sitting passively learning something theoretically, then diving in the deep end of the labour market to realise that you learned nothing of practical use, and nothing that you could not have learned on your own, minus the student debt.
“But what about certifying someone’s expertise?” Oh, please. The private sector has always been more suited, more incentivized and more accountable to more accurately certify, verify and accredit qualifications, safety standards, and quality assurance. We know this because a university degree is a meaningless dime-a-dozen that plays little to no role in the labour market. And sometimes candidates even hide their degrees out of fear of being deemed overqualified. Professional qualifications are by far more meaningful in someone’s CV. A university degree is like a necessary evil imposed by government: you need a degree in this and that if you will be legally allowed to do this and that. You might be allowed, but you’re not at all qualified unless you get the qualifications that really matter: experience and professional education.
“But what about state teachers? Do you want them to lose their job?” First off, just because someone has a job in something doesn’t mean that the rest of society must stay behind so that they keep it. Your car and your supermarket from industrial and agricultural revolutions have cost billions of jobs, but have created way more. A gangster has a job, but that doesn’t mean that the mafia must exist just so he can keep his job. Second, who says there will not be any teachers without the state? Private tutors already exist, and they make better money per hour, plus they don’t have to deal with reluctant students who are forced to sit there and pretend to be interested. Teachers can teach modules, and can partner up with private certifying bodies, or they can create their own courses and books. Yes, most state educators today hate their jobs, and shouldn’t be teachers anyway, let alone in the presence of children. Thirdly, I do indeed advocate for useless state education bureaucrats to lose their jobs, especially when they sold their vote to a sleazy political candidate in exchange for a cosy useless government job at the expense of others. I do advocate for them to work in a sewer or a brothel instead; these are actually useful jobs.
“But without state-enforced schooling, why would anyone want to educate themselves?” Are you kidding me? In a free society, people will be incentivized to learn whatever they want and whatever they find useful. If anything, the only thing that disincentivizes learning is the lazy comfort knowing that the state will always take relative care of you with basic income and healthcare at the involuntary expense of others.
“So how does education work without government?” Like it used to work for thousands of years. The fact that only few people could read and write had little to do with the lack of state-enforced schooling, and more to do with the lack of demand for reading and writing. Yes, maybe most people 200 years ago couldn’t read or write (at least this is what state schooling tells us), but they knew how to farm, how to plot irrigation systems, how to build a wooden house out of nothing. They learned this because these skills were relevant and useful. The students had every incentive to learn, and the teachers had every incentive to teach. Twelve to sixteen years of state schooling doesn’t teach you any of that; not even how to change a tire.
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Good article. I also recently realized how damaged i was from school.
Well written and painfully accurate. It took me years to understand and start to overcome the damage school had done to my vigour.