School, while criticized for many things, is the cause of one major problem in today’s society: it socially misleads its attendees.
Watching education the past few years, I’ve noticed that the system is very broken in a lot of fundamental ways. Sure, the curriculum could use reformatting, the “informing” structure should be changed, and the expectations should be modified to stop forcing students to conform to perfection. But that’s not the real problem that one can find in today’s education. The real issue is a social one.
School creates a structure for life: attend classes, learn, make friends, and get a foothold on the ways of this world before going to a “grown-up job”. Then, without a thought, it rips these things out of our lives. School creates a structured community and then tears students away from everything they’ve grown accustomed to. It begins something that it cannot, with confidence, complete in the student's favor.
This “community” which school creates is known to many as what life should be like. Sadly, once they graduate, there’s nothing to keep their social ventures going. That’s why people end up in bars, coffee shops, and libraries (I had to). There’s nowhere else they can meet people or find new friends, and since they moved away from their hometown, they need these friends.
(Why do people become depressed? They often cannot sustain a relationship with someone after high school, so they end up living along, eventually finding a wife, and living outside community, without the friends they need in this world. Friends hold you up when you don’t know what to do. They provide the perspective you’d never think of. This is why so many people relate to psychologists: they cannot be vulnerable with more than one other person [their spouse would be this one] and eventually find this last resort.)
Of the many problems school poses nowadays, this is the most harmful to its graduates. It answers other questions, too: Why are we so alone? Why do some people have a drinking problem? Why is coffee the number one commodity? And so on. Interestingly, this problem has gotten better lately because of the Internet. I often write about how this global network can hurt so many parts of our lives, but in this one it can actually connect us. I’ve met many people on the Internet in the past five years. It’s amazing how thriving the online communities are. The thing is, communication is fractured at the heart, and even though the Internet is one fix for the problem with community, it only introduces another issue.
What’s the permanent fix then? How can we repair this formula for a generation? Is every man meant to attend college after high school? How can we stop our high school friends from leaving us and forcing us to move on? How, oh how, can we stop this circle we put our children in? There are so many questions it’s overwhelming.
I believe the fix is, of all things, church. It’s always been the one thing that brings people together, whether they like it or not. Religion is not to be confused with church, though. The former is a political struggle and bi-polar mess, the latter an everlasting community faced with the same troubles as any. People shouldn’t be scared of church, but many of today’s churches create fear by being a house of fakery. It’s only pride. Pride is what drives this yearning to show people how good they aren’t. It’ll take a lot of effort to fix this community, but it’s worth it for what such a beaitiful structure can offer.
I could elaborate on many of these issues, but what I really want to do here is get a point across. I want to know what you, the reader, think of this idea. This is all my perspective from growing up in a small town of limited opportunities. Maybe it’s incorrect. That’s for you to say, so please email me!