A thanks for nothing open letter to my public school teachers
Dear old public school teachers: Thank you for doing all you could to drill conformity into my head and try to indoctrinate State dogma into my brain.
You never taught me how to think, but what to think. You drilled it into my mind that I couldn’t take education into my own hands if I wanted to succeed.
To that degree, you taught me dependency, and that I had to recite and repeat everything you preached if I was to grow into a well-rounded, financially secure, and happy citizen. You never tried to help me maximize my individual potential, instead relegating me and my hundreds of classmates to a quota so we could, together, pass a “one-size-fits-all” standardized test.
You never tried to learn my interests if they didn’t align with that standardized testing. Hell, you couldn’t have cared less about how I, or anyone walking through the halls of grade school, middle school, and high school, learned. Instead, you coerced us all to a desk and “learn” in a style that the State saw fit, never considering individual tastes.
You told us to “sit down, shut up, take notes, do our homework, study, repeat what we studied on a test sheet, turn it in, and get on with our day.” Even if we were doing things that could’ve been considered “learning,” or “academic,” you forced us to conform otherwise, telling us to “put the book away,” or to “stop writing up a mock draft” and focus on Spanish, math, reading, etc.
Know how much of what you supposedly “taught” that I use today? If you guessed zero, then congratulations. You’re not completely hopeless.
You never told us that self-directed education can occur outside a classroom setting. Nor did you even imply there are thousands, literally thousands, of different ways to master language arts, math, science, and history, the Core Four, by applying them to what best interested us in our preferred learning styles.
You never prepared us for life
No. You thought that boring story you made us read somehow better prepped us for life. Know what would’ve been the superior option? Reading instruction manuals that come with do-it-yourself home improvement, or reading instructions to build something.
Not reading a story and asking ourselves if blue curtains symbolized a character’s melancholy. Where’s that gonna get us in life?
You also thought a systematic way to teach math outclassed learning how to balance a budget. Wouldn’t a personal finance course, or several of them, have helped prepare us for life better than solving algebraic equations?
Somehow, you felt reading and copying diagrams from a science textbook of a freaking plant cell was more worthwhile than teaching us how to maximize our health and fitness each and every day.
And you might wonder why there’s an obesity problem in America? Maybe if we spent more time studying nutrition as opposed to performing surgery on dead animals, you might’ve spared some of those who are on an endless array of meds.
Don’t even freaking get me started on history. You drilled State-driven propaganda into our heads. You never introduced us to Austrian economics and the works of Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, and Hazlitt. It’s almost like you never wanted us to know they even existed.
Instead, you told us the State was necessary to save capitalism from itself. Look at the national debt and tell me how well that’s working for America.
As opposed to molding us into critical thinkers prepared to run a self-sufficient lifestyle, you only fed us material that would serve us zero purpose in life unless we ended up working a job that involved any of the above. And only a small contingent of any graduating class would work such jobs.
You tried to squash our creativity and curiosity
For those of us who either weren’t academically gifted in your image or, like me, didn’t care to be because we realized from an early age how worthless your curriculum was, you singled us out. How many times did I see kids who never had any interest in playing the “game of school” because it wasn’t for them clash with teachers?
And how many times did I see a teacher even remotely try to connect with those students? No, in your eyes, they were jail-bound troublemakers. They were never worth investing time and effort into. Your only remedy involved forcing them to stay confined within those cinder block walls of that prison with mandatory after school intervention.
Yeah, that’s smart :/. Force kids to stay in an institution that’s clearly failing them for even more hours. Seriously, you people have zero freaking logic.
Know what you succeeded in with a strong contingent of these students? Forcing conformity, while crushing their creative and curious minds. Creative minds that all kids are born with until the State sees otherwise, leaving just a few souls unscathed.
I will never thank you
Because of you, I was never able to pursue my creative passions during the eight-hour block, Monday through Friday, where I was forced to sit at an uncomfortable desk and learn nothing that would benefit me later.
“TC, NFL isn’t academic,” you once yelled in front of an entire class. “TC, start paying attention and stop writing mock drafts and scouting reports,” you also quipped. “TC, stop zoning out.”
You never took the time to know me, so instead of a ‘thank you,’ a loud ‘f*ck you’ and a giant middle finger is more appropriate. I will never thank you, nor will I ever thank public school teachers unless they see through the system and secede, starting their own private learning institutions to help stick a dagger into the State’s propaganda and looking at students as individuals, not assets that will help them get more funding.
Screw (almost) every single one of you.
More than just a rant about public school teachers
Once upon a time, I’d have ranted and left it at that. But I started self directing my own learning and ended up making a living in everything you said I couldn’t make a living in. That includes sports writing, digital product creation, and even writing books with themes that include how 100 percent privatized, market-based education works.
If you’re curious, then check out the first three chapters of my young adult academy fantasy, The Arcane Prophecy, and meet the protagonist, Yote Diamondback. Yote’s about to enter Arcane Elemental Academy, an umbrella institution that hosts 32 schools that are always looking to maximize their services for students.
And if a school underdelivers, then guess what? They’re out, while another school profits from offering top-notch service. Oh, and I say ‘profit’ in a positive light, because it’s what any smart business should strive for.
So check it out, and know that I never bothered asking for permission to just write that damn story. And no, your reading classes didn’t do anything to inspire my fiction. I’d been reading fiction since before I stepped foot into preschool, so the Miss Carolines of that old school had their own Scout Finch to deal with.
Check out the first three chapters.
