Do We Really Need Schools?

Educators have always set goals for students leaving no space for them to think critically regarding what aims they want to achieve. Personal ideas, imagination, self-developed thoughts are not instilled or ingrained in children. It may be speculated that schools are used in order to shape the human’s mind into a gullible, uncritical, and robotic one. In one angle, David H. Albert believes that “critical thinking is a threat” (1991) and some schools are trying to cancel it from their curriculum. Contrastingly, we see many aware educators and teachers endeavour to bring about change in their classrooms by incorporating critical thinking and other primordial skills. There is a hidden friction between our expectations and the aims of schooling; it seems like children become stupid as soon as they get into schools. From another angle, Gatto (1992) suggests that the purpose of schooling has become to inculcate a secular world-vision as this process replaces the church in many ways. He argues that “in our secular society, school has become the replacement for church, and like church it requires that its teachings must be taken on faith” (p. 17). In this perspective, many educators believe in unschooling as they assert that learning is not about imparting knowledge or the result of teaching but rather it is a free process that is biological and inherent in human beings.

The proponents of unschooling notarize that since children can learn easily from their environment, (they learn how to speak, walk, sing, etc. through watching, asking, repeating,etc.) why do we need to take them to schools where everything is controlled and closed not allowing them to breathe out their imagination and dreams. They can overcome all the deficiencies they encounter in their road towards achieving their goals without getting bored since their motivation is intrinsic; however, once they are under the schooling system teachers combat to revive motivation in them again. Children are naturally hard-wired to learn, passionate to discover, and curious to experience new things. Unschoolers also believe that learning or studying is not a goal but it rather takes place when the individual has got a high interest in something. Another important point is that learning is the result of teaching, children learn things they were not taught; hence, learning is driven by one's wants, needs, instinct, and interests. 

In one of his speeches, Peter Gray (2015), an evolutionary psychologist, reveals that children are inherently playful and curious in addition to the fact that they are genetically born responsible with the ability to educate themselves alone. He provides the example of the hunter-gatherer cultures where he tries to convince us that if we give a chance for children to self-educate themselves, we will no longer need schools. He states that hunter-gatherer children are allowed to play all day long in mixed-age groups with no adult supervision. Their curious minds lead them to play at how to hunt, build things, gather, etc. They observe those who are older than them, play and interact with them. Similar to hunter-gatherers culture, the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham Massachusetts is a school where no tests, exams, syllabus or curriculum exist, it is all about intrinsically motivated self-learning. The building principles of this school are based on participatory democracy, personal responsibility and freedom (Gray, 2015), similar to anarchist ideas but not the same. All the learners that are part of this school could pursue their goals and many of them have achieved their childhood dreams and become successful individuals.

“School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned” (Gatto, 1992, p.19). Being compared to jail means that children’s minds are being tortured and their intelligence is being suffocated. Series of lessons that are presented by different teachers in a similar or slightly distinct way make learners feel bored as the passivity of this long-established process is like agony for them. Humans by nature are active, they adore action and staying under strict control can lead to serious problems such as the decline of one's abilities including critical thinking, intelligence, motivation, curiosity, etc. In our society, schools do not respect learners’ dreams and curious beliefs but they impart in them new ones, the ones that they want to ingrain in every individual not allowing for the freedom of choice to take place. Almost, the kid is being agonised in this schooling process as opposed to hunter-gatherers who feel free to play and discover at all ages.

Do we really need schools? or Do we need to change the structure of our schools and eliminate those ingrained thoughts that have been stable in our society for centuries? Places like Sudbury Valley School should be seen as a model that has to be followed and utilised in our world. Children in this school feel sad if they miss a class; nonetheless, it is totally the opposite when it comes to usual schools where learners feel more than happy for not attending and missing classes. The reason behind this massive difference is that Sudbury Valley School supports learners’ freedom and do not force them to do things they do not desire. There are no exams, no tests, no structure timetable, it is all about being free and responsible. When it comes to our totalitarian secular schools, children are seen as machines that should produce homework, sit for exams, take tests, etc. It is a torturing prison rather than a place for seeking knowledge and creativity. As final words, Gatto (1992) declares that “it is time that we squarely face the fact that institutional schooling is destructive to children” (p. 17).