The lesson of my mother, of Biblical Solomon, and of my raggedy volunteer program, I mean as a lesson for all schools. When schools consume the youth of the nation in forced confinement, and force all the products of their youth to become mere paper to be thrown away, no joy is possible in the seeking of such lives. The pricing of precious time by ridiculous grade-points establishes an irrational currency by which something valuable is corrupted in the service of nonsense. The problem is that kids hardly learn at all the way schools insist on teaching. Schools desperately need a new vision of their own purpose because the vision they angrily promulgate now is a dishonest one.
Over- teaching interferes with learning.
Colonial America was massively literate without any systematic or compulsion schooling at all. Behind the mask of school necessity, valuable lessons of service and responsibility have been denied the young. By the time we release the schooled cohort at 18, most of it has been drained of vitality and the will to find joy in service to others. We have progressively stripped children of the primary experience base they need to grow up sound and whole by pricing orderly, structured confinement as a higher value. The dynamics of the destructive process are hardly visible.