Don't Be A Sheep

In all seriousness...

For all of you who do not comprehend why I am not only against all things "compulsory public school" but why I am also against reproducing it at home. Set aside everything you think you know about "school" in it's current state and it's function in The Big Picture and open your mind a little bit while reading this.

Then think about your own experiences at school, both good and bad. Ask yourself what sort of life you would bend over backward to give your children if you could give them the "perfect" environment for nurturing their true personalities, helping them to be who and what they are destined to be in their lives without conditioning and training them into an acceptable mold so that no one will judge you or question you.

Aren't there any times in your life that you look back and feel like no one really knew you at all? Times when you felt like everyone was against you. Times when you felt stuck living up to someone else's expectations and not following your own interests.

So many people spend their entire lives stuck in jobs they don't love, living a certain lifestyle that proves they have accomplished certain goals that were expected of them by their family and friends. People get trapped into feeling like they have to maintain a certain material worth. Not really thinking about what it is that they need or want to make them deeply happy.

Once someone said to me that in this world there are leaders and there are followers. They were using this to explain the benefit of letting their child go into Kindergarten the following year because they would then be the oldest in the class and therefore would have more confidence and do better than their peers. At the time I went ahead and allowed my son, who was only one day younger, to enter public Kindergarten feeling that he was intellectually "ready" because he could already do most of the Kindergarten curriculum. I have learned a lot of life lessons since then. Obviously. Emotionally, he was not ready. I should not have pushed him out of the nest. He spent two years trying to live up to expectations his heart wasn't really into. He needed more emotionally than the "teachers" had time for. They acted as if he didn't deserve it. I have spent the last five years trying to correct the damage that "school" did to his spirit, his love of actual learning, and his creativity. It did not take but two years of "school" to turn my son into a sheep. I don't think that school produces leaders no matter how much older you are than the kids in your class.

I do not want my children to grow up as sheep just following all the other sheep. I do not want them to believe things are the way they are because someone else says it is so. I want my children to be able to find themselves now, not run off when they are fifty to try to finally do that. I don't want them to hide who they really are. I want them to know that we love them for who they are, who they really are. Only when you open your eyes and see your children as real human beings with real talents, real acceptable faults, real goals, real dreams, and real feelings that no one is entitled to change or judge will you understand why we do what we do, the way we do it.

It does not take six or eight hours of forced instruction to provide knowledge and inspiration. All the classrooms and textbooks in the world won't force you to learn. They might force you to memorize and regurgitate information for a period of time so that you might please someone else, but the things that you really learn are the things you strive to know for your own personal reasons. Why is that concept lost on so many people?

I hate that school pushes children into a cookie cutter mold as if they aren't supposed to be individual. All while sugar coating it under the guise of helping them to grow into the best individuals they can be. Parents buy into this in droves. Why? In my opinion it is because we are still trying to hard to find our own personal identities that were lost somewhere in grade school and trying so hard to figure out our own lives that we are too busy and overwhelmed to question the the same destructive path we are letting these institutions force our children down. The very paths that lead us where we all are. The parents are sheep just like the children. What a plague this system is.

People think we are sheltering our children from "the real world". Yet these same people see their own children in such dysfunctional situations in their lives that it is a literal tug-o-war between the insane pressures and judgment of society on their children and the weakened strength of the family unit.

Would you pass your child a crack pipe? Why not? The kid that lives down the street that you aren't worried about them hanging out with wouldn't have a problem doing it. Is your child really prepared to look like a baby in front of his more worldly friends? You think telling them drugs are bad is enough. Is it really? When they are still just trying to fit in is it enough? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe your child is ready to deal with peer pressure. Maybe they have the ability to make those decisions for themself. Maybe they don't. There isn't a certain age that you just have to let go of trying to help them decide what is a good choice. Hopefully, if you have a good relationship with them and they respect your opinion they will ask for it. Dominating them is no better than pushing them out of the nest. I was severely dominated as a child. I had no problem rebelling. There is no perfect mold. At home or at school. Raising children is an ebb and flow. It is not a perfect science and there are no perfect parents. Parenting in extremes is a dangerous business that is born out of total disregard and disrespect for your children.

Would you not let your child read a particular fictional book or watch a particular movie just because everyone else around you thinks they are to young to understand that it is not real? Would you attempt to crush their interest in the filmmaking of a scary movie because the character was "too scary" according to someone else's standards? Of course not. You would use your knowledge of your child and their personality and their maturity to decide what they are ready for. It is hard to put an age on anything. It most certainly isn't for anyone else to decide though.

Would you let some stranger on the street tell you how to raise your children? Would you let them tell your children that they can't speak unless they are spoken to, can't go to the bathroom unless they have permission (and often times they don't), can't read the book they like because they have to read the book they are given, can't take up for themselves when they feel threatened, can't be funny, can't want to make people smile at certain times, can't think for themselves because someone else knows better than them what they should know? No? So why do you let some person in a school do it? They have a piece of paper that says they know more than you do about what is best for your own children? That is funny. Schools don't care if your child is happy. They are more interested in a carefully packaged mass control daycare than they are "teaching" your child anything.

Would you knowingly send your young children into dangerous situations or would you do everything in your power to help them and protect them until they show their own mental and emotional maturity to be able to handle these situations with their own judgment and reasoning skills. It is like sending a toddler out to cross the street alone. Wouldn't you wait until you were sure that your child understood what it involved and how to keep themselves safe? What makes people push their children into the world so quickly, before they show the signs of being really mature enough to handle it, and then spend the rest of their lives wishing their children hadn't "grown up so fast"? What makes people dominate their children to the point of breaking their spirits and turning them into something they are not?

Just stop and think for a minute. Be brave enough to let go of all of your conditioning and question what you think you know.

Posted by gwendolyn on January 19, 2004 at 12:18 PM