Old School. Like Get With The Times, School.

It's so wonderful to not have to raise your hand to talk. 

And so I'll do just that.

Every Sunday night, I’m reminded of how downtrodden and miserable so many kids are at the prospect of going back to school the following Monday. Like they're somehow going back to a child labor camp to mechanically stamp lifeless, paper eyes onto carnival dolls for 8 hours straight. 

If schools were a place of true exploration, a place where they learned to generate ideas, were allowed to speak freely and openly about world issues, and rewarded for questioning the garden-variety vanilla topics, kids would more than likely find school as a place they were watered, and brought back to life.

What we seem to have now, is an itchy blanket of similar-brained higher-ups, not teaching you as much as -- Training You-- to be rated based on your ability to regurgitate standardized information. Information that exists already. What they're ultimately generating, are students who can produce guaranteed, correct answers to questions that were already once asked. 

What we don’t have enough of, are the encouragements of creative thought, mental expeditions, the bravery to ask unique questions, an incentivizing teaching community whose priorities are about fostering an outpouring of highly individualized young adults, who stoically  and fearlessly discuss the 'what ifs', and who have the determination to answer questions in unique ways, developing a thicker skin around being 'wrong' ...because their answers were original, and not cookie cutter, and boldly delve into a new way of what truly works for them, versus staying with an old academic model with antiquated dogmatic teachings. 

No matter what the school, be it privatized or public, there seems to be a serious deficit in the insistence of creative thought, and mandates of fresh approaches and solutions, that would undeniably spark and awaken a sense of wonder, originality and defined purpose in young, developing minds. 

My gut tells me if the latter were the case, and rigid thinking became the thing that was frowned upon, and playful mental exploration, mindfulness, open-ended thinking, and free-associative thoughts were the factors that were rewarded, most kids would be psyched to go back to school.

My point of view isn’t about trying to eliminate the requisite of an education. Quite the opposite. Learning is SO important. 

I myself hope to always be a student in all areas of life, a white belt in all I pursue, learning and being challenged every minute that I’m alive. And I wish the same for my kids, and yours. 

Learning in any area of life, is an endless process and includes far more than text books. 
It includes not just factual information, but a deeper look into our own minds, a newer level of self-discovery and awareness. It requires playing, no matter what your age, exposure to a multitude of lifestyles, facing adversities, asking questions, failing, asking more questions, failing again, asking questions about those questions, asking questions about those question's questions, challenging ‘the obvious', tirelessly researching what you're told, and consistently embracing a buttload of critical thinking and compassion. Cannot forget to be human in all of this searching.

All this needs to happen, and happen more. 

At one time, this learning building called 'school', used to be the only place available for anyone to learn. 

Schools as we know them were first created in 1837. 

Schools were actually created before the first postage stamp was even invented. Yet here we are today, 2017, still sitting in horribly lit classrooms, on coccyx-bone-unfriendly desk chairs, carting around 40lb backpacks like some old Grecian mule, saddled with hours and hours of homework about some book that was written 50 years ago that no one should give a shit about anymore, and thumbing through yellowing pages of tome-sized textbooks that harbor decades of archived student's boogers. 

The approach feels a bit mothball'y.

We currently have more information available to us on a 4"x 2" device in our back pockets, 24 hours a day, than probably most every school and worldwide university combined. And with every passing year, this is exponentially more true.

We can learn anywhere, at any time, about any thing, or anyone. We can laugh while we're learning, and never even get out of bed. And while I'm not recommending living in your sheets, I'm also not recommending living with your SAT tutor.

If you dread getting out of bed every morning to go to your job, then you're at the wrong job. 
If you dread getting out of bed every morning because of school, then you're not being taught the right way.

Yet somehow, parents think that kids don't know about this phone invention. This endless stream of information unifying us with the rest of the world. That the breadth of a Smartphone's abilities somehow skirted their children's awareness. 

That even though kids too, have access to this truly godlike, infinite universe of information via 'their stupid phone', 24 hours a day...in spite of knowing that, parents still feel their kids should be equally excited about sitting in a school learning about Napoleon, Trigonometry, and The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. 

That regardless of kid's current ability to learn and peruse whatever it is that interests them, they should still be jumping high in the air with unadulterated excitement, repeatedly kicking their glittery heels together, at the crack of 6 am, like some fairy-dusted leprechaun, as they load their drained, uninspired selves onto a squeaky, yellow prison bus, at the anticipation of being shipped back to the grey, dispirited, fluorescent lit corridors of an institution that grades them and judges them strictly on memory retention, and their ability to return a library book on time. 

A flower cannot blossom with a rubber band tied around it's bud.

These dinosaur schools with their dinosaur curriculums need to be flushed down their dinosaur toilets, along with their dinosaur standardized ACT, SAT, and other groupthink testing methodologies, and while they're at it, also flush their frightening, outmoded notions of cafeteria 'nutrition', which here in America, at best is commercial grade inmate slop. 

The only vibrant color you'll ever see on a cafeteria plate in America will be from the blue dyes in the Slurpees that look like something made by Windex. 

If we want smart, sharp thinkers, we need foods that nourish brains, and mend and generate healthy cells. We need fresh green foods, organic fruits and vegetables, not more breads and crackers and pretzels and pizzas and colorless prefabricated chunks of wan, dead food. I'd personally rather eat the toenail clippings of a sewer inspector.

Breakfast offerings at American learning establishments usually begin with a choice of fried flour balls, (also known as 'Cake In The Morning'), made with a daunting list of petro chemicals and preservatives and dyes, a pot of waxy chocolate chips, and as an added health bonus, it's the size of my head. Don't get me started on the rest of the 'foods' that come off that militarized, submarine grey, Sysco truck. Otherwise we will slip into a greasy ditch of harsh criticisms that I'll never make my way out of.

But while I'm on the subject of Sysco, the proud nutritionless sponsor of most schools, I need to finish.

I've noticed they've recently, (and quite deceptively) re-sided their dingy 18 wheelers, that used to look like an office furniture delivery truck, into trucks with glossy posters that are exploding with an array of colorful fruits and vegetables, attempting to convince parents that their loving children are now eating like they've landed in some sublime, Utopian Paradise of Goodness run by Ghandi, vs. the reality, which is hoards of despondent, grade-worried, sugar-saturated kids sitting slumped over a cafeteria bench, stuffing the same nutritionally debilitated chow into their faces as Charles Manson currently does in California State Prison.

It's time we collectively rethink all this zombie, auto-pilot paper-shuffling, grade-driven, moldy, school life monotony.

We need a new, fresh, healthy school model for the new age of learning. Something that will get everyone excited again, excited to participate in, teachers included, and get these kids off these effing depression and focus pharmaceuticals, which are sadly given as a result of thinking that there's something wrong with your kid because he/she is bored to smithereens. (whatever those little things are). 

In reality their lack of interest is because they're spending their days and nights, their entire childhood, consumed in a confining template of unoriginality, misaligned with their true spirit, their inner colors slowly erased over the years, and their souls molded into a smoldering vat of conformity.

There's one thing my long and strangely varied life has taught me, and lo and behold, it wasn’t learned in school. 

It's that there’s an enormous difference between being educated, and being truly intelligent. 

I know a lot of people who are absolutely brilliant, who weren't conventionally schooled. Conversely, I also know equal amounts of people who -were- conventionally schooled, even Ivy Leagued, who are dim, small-minded, uncurious, set in their way of thinking, and are about as interesting to talk with as talking to a bowl of wet tube socks.

Before good grades, or killer SAT scores, I hope far beyond anything else, that all kids, both big and small, carry with them at all times, a profound, intellectual curiosity and desire to expose and involve themselves in a plurality of subjects. To me, this is learning. 

Doing well on your SAT’s? Well, I'm probably one of the few parents who would feel a quiet shred of disappointment that my kids toiled and clawed their dermis off to remember stuff that has basically zero purpose in this diverse, ever-changing projection called 'real life'.

Last Thursday was the first day back for everyone's kids after summer break. 
Pulling up to the school that morning, looking around at the droves of 'Senior Girls' all dressed the same, all flipping pink boas over their shoulders, all wearing pink skirts, pink socks, and pink shirts, and all with 'SENIOR GIRLZZZZZZZ!!!” unintelligibly scribbled all over their cars with crayons and shaving cream, along with all the other sad-school-attendees, I too couldn't help but feel a little depressed. 

So that's it? That's the culmination of a daunting 12 years of schooling, at one of the supposed ‘BEST SCHOOLS IN THE EAST!’?  
The big finale to show everyone how much you've learned and grown, how far you’ve come, is tritely expressed by acting the same, dressing the same, and expressing yourselves the same exact way as all the other senior girl predecessors, while being collectively and predictably boring and unoriginal.

But hey, ya did good on the SAT’s.

Yay school. Your boring adult-making factory is working. 

Congratulations. 

You get an A.