School is Bad for Children and Unnecessary Today

School is considered a place that children must attend and be educated to become a good human being. However, it is often argued whether school is still necessary for educating children or it is destroying students with traditional methods. From my perspective, with traditional teaching methods, school now is not favorable to students to adapt themselves in future life. Firstly, schools put the children on a production line, so their innate abilities are limited. It is believed that children are born with the curiosity, enriched imagination and desire to grow up, follow what seniors have done. However, in school, students are compelled to follow paradigms such as a fixed process of solving a problem or an ideal thought to analyze a poem. All works of children at school will be evaluated based on the standard given by teachers, so any ideas that are different or do not fit the set mold will be rejected and marked down. Robinson (2009) also noticed that within school systems, students are taught that being wrong is the worst outcome. For these above reasons, the fear of making mistakes and being different stops children from developing their creativity. Secondly, the inborn talents under school’s control are also belittled in order to spend more time for some other subjects considered to be more important such as Math, Physics, and Chemistry.

According to Staff (2018), many dancers, artists, and musicians have had their potentials wasted because school systems do not have enough time or patience to guide them to follow the right direction as they were born to be. Without enough attention of school for students’ specific ability, ultimately, these talents would gradually become wasteful, which might result in a “robot school”- where all students were set up with the same program. Additionally, schools with scoring and competitive education system create a small society in which bullying mostly happen. According to the article “Why does bullying happen” – published on Australia government’s newspaper, schools are where bullying usually happen due to its unintentional formation of competitive and hierarchic environment with tests, scores and learning competitions. Through all learning activities at school, children are naturally affected by jealousy, misunderstanding with others’ achievements, hence, violence or bullying is unavoidable. Moreover, the NICHD survey (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development) also showed that bullying tends to happen most often in and around schools, specifically in those areas where there is little or no adult supervision.

Students now spend most of their time at school for both learning and playing with friends, and half of school time is under no protection of teachers. For all these reasons, I think without school there will be no more children who are the victim of bullying and isolation. On the other hand, some people claim that only in school can students gain practical knowledge which helps them in the social milieu. However, I believe this idea to be a very shortsighted view. According to Peter Gray (2013), school nowadays is a product of history which does not fit the children in modern life, and specifically in the need of experiencing. Instead of gaining realistic knowledge which is supposed to be important and useful in daily life, students are forced to spend all school time on only theoretical knowledge but no practice.

Along with the development of the world, recently, there are various ways – besides schooling – for students to acquire knowledge while they can still keep the passion and motivation for learning such as online courses or some short-term experiencing projects. Take research of Sugata Mitra as an example, children of a small village attending in this research did not go to school but learn about bacteria and viruses via Internet; after that, they can use what they have learned in preventing digestive disease among villagers. This research also has shown that people of all ages learn best when they are self-motivated, finding the knowledge that they are curious to know, and following their own real-life goals; in such situation, learning becomes more joyful. In conclusion, school might be still a preference for parents to educate their children, but it is actually no longer necessary in modern life. More or less, parents should have a thoughtful decision when choosing the most suitable method for educating children to enhance their innate abilities.