STUDY WITH ALFONS

I meant to continue to write about compulsory schooling and its devastating effects on society. This topic is in my blood now. And about the failure of homeschooling. And why homeschooling might be even worse than compulsory schooling in schools. For it takes the worst of schooling even deeper into families and communities, into their very homes, making it even more troubling. iPads and video chat and temp teachers. Like a virus traveling from the nose downwards and nesting itself deep into the lungs, and from there entering the bloodstream, sickening the whole system.

But I also wanted to share a positive outlook, what I see is uplifting and emotionally helpful. I recall the saying, “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.” I have the story in my brain (or wherever words and pictures and such are stored in the physical body), but appear empty handed, I didn’t write anything for a full week; because I didn’t have the time to write it down in a mode of conciseness and precision.

So, maybe tomorrow. Today I need to finish a text for a lesson I taught online in German language. A financially almost fruitless endeavour. The Euro is crashing, my small savings in my savings account disappearing, any income in Euro flushed down the same spillway. Luckily my patrons in the English speaking world support me in USD, which seems to be stable. Yet, Austrian German is my mother-tongue, and I want to share my work with the German speaking folk as well. Would there was hope. At least they hand us that, with a smile.

So we rented a scooter and drove criss-cross over the Island of Phu Quoc, Vietnam. Here’s two pictures where the ever present, extreme environmental destruction and extreme littering is drowned out by the magnificent colours of the land:

While driving two things impressed me, monumentally:

1. On the side of a road I saw a small sized, yet grown cow. Not one of these over-engineered industrial cows from which 10 gallons of milk are drawn every day of their short lives, but a cute little cow. And with her was a calf, a cute litte baby cow half her size. The calf was busy drinking her milk. What a sight! A natural sized cow roaming about under the sky, not in a box, not barb-wired in, with her calf, which was drinking its mother’s milk! This truly touched me.

2. Then later, on the side of the road, I saw children playing, jesting, running about. They were maybe 3 to 8 years old, with strong black hair, barefoot, with no other things on them than simple clothes. I saw children playing with sticks, children riding bicycles, and even some children riding 50ccm motorbikes, all making joyful faces. These children are not locked in, not confined to gated spaces, not under surveillance, neither under supervision. They are roaming about freely under the sky, making up their own games and stories. How amazing is that?! This almost blew my mind, I haven’t seen such a thing in—what seems like—decades.

These children reminded me of my own childhood on the countryside. The stupid school I had to endure was in one town, my family’s home was in the next. My father used to drop me off at school in the mornings. And every day, after the unnaturally long hours were over, the ordeal of sitting still in the government’s indoctrination facility, the time that was stolen from children, families and communities, I had the free choice of walking home. Or riding my bicycle, or taking a bus. Even hitchhiking was an option. I was free to make my own choices and to design my own routes. I would walk and wander and think, let my mind run loose, try different pathways, experience all weather and seasons. The road went alongside the lake, then up the mountain, through the lower part of the forest. I would play with the children from the farm that was on the edge of the forest, explore the forest with its ants and insects, foxes and badgers, trees and dying streams. The only thing that was expected of me was that I be home before dinner.

While we were driving on a scooter over that island in Vietnam, at least for some long minutes, I went into a mode of thoughtfulness. I was thinking of the essays of John Taylor Gatto’s book Dumbing Us Down; about the differences between networks and communities, between institutions and families, and how compulsory schooling took down the world as it was for millions of years. A quote came to mind:

“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.”

I’ve just skipped through an interview with one of the world’s top trauma experts, Dr. Gabor Maté, On How Trauma Fuels Disease, on the Rich Roll Podcast. He makes great points with his thesis of culture vs biology, but like seemingly most everyone else, ignores the elephant in the room. His lack of criticism of compulsory schooling stands out like a sore thumb, given the examples in the interview, and how many times he mentions schools, for example, in his book When The Body Says No… thirty-one times; without notably criticising schools themselves even once.

I’ve left a comment on the video, expecting the comment to be either deleted, ignored, or criticised, something like that. But then I’ve actually gotten a great comment on my comment, by Jayzin C:

“This is a really great point. I went to a great public school and was never bullied, but recently at age 36 I’ve thought about the fact that we all had to physically sit there for 6 hours a day with only a little recess or gym in between. How insane? [..] That must’ve had serious impact on our bodies and minds. I know it has for me.”

I agree. Each day schools granted and denied us basic human rights, when we were children, such as: the access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. As kids they tried to make us feel indifferent to constant surveillance, age-segregation, bells and confinement, busy work, studying random, unrelated topics, accepting whoever stood before us as authority, sitting in silence without movement for hours on end, et cetera, et cetera, et cet·er·a.

Homework: make a list of all the things they tried to make you feel indifferent to.

This morning, while working on the table of contents for my blog, I’ve come up with my own thesis on trauma healing. In my first draft Trauma comes and goes in 6 steps:

1. Hurting – the traumatic event that actually hurts whether we know it or not
2. Shock – the inability to cope with the immensity of the hurting event
3. Acceptance – the past can’t be changed, so we accept both, that the event has happened as well as our current state of being
4. Anger – first step of healing
5. Rejection – not going there anymore, making sure it will not happen again
6. Outgrow – find new ways, grow into new habits

Uh, what a nice 6 steps, innit?! Not bad for someone who’s not working for a hospital, who doesn’t have agreement contracts with insurance companies, and who isn’t an international bestseller and trauma expert… innit?

My neighbours somehow convinced me to join their 6k morning runs. Three times a week at 5:30am, at the break of dawn. Pretty awesome actually. Especially since I have the luxury of taking naps afterwards.

Jogging in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, figure that. That’s actually possible because of the lockdowns and the New Normal, in terms of air quality. Also, I live in one of the cleaner areas in the city. As most everywhere else, there’s no notable sidewalks or parks here, however traffic in the early mornings is slow enough to use the streets for running.

One of the things you would notice about this area is, that it’s jam packed with hyper-expensive schools and pre-schools. Very fancy daytime detention centers. Facilities in which children are temporarily confined, denied a variety of freedoms and trained to adapt a mindset of obedience, under the authority of the state or state licensed private organisations. In some streets these facilities are built almost back to back, with very prominent roadside advertising billboards in between them. As I limped-by by the tenth or so, I asked myself, “Am I too upset about schools? Do I take my critique too far? Shouldn’t I focus more on my running?”

I recalled Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. “Now at age 48, shouldn’t I have reached the stage of acceptance already?” I thought.

But then I also recalled the great Alice Miller, I paraphrase into a first-person perspective:

“After having experienced child maltreatment it is not enough to grieve about what happened, as psychoanalists assume. It is indispensable to rebell against the endured cruelty, as well as clearly recognize and reject it. Only this way we become free of the tendency to unconsciously repeat the same pattern. The suppressed rage subsists in our bodies if it was never consciously experienced, nor expressed.”

I was thinking, “True that. I haven’t even started to feel angry. My rage is just in its feebly beginnings. I will write more about what compulsory schooling really is, about its unreformable, psychopathic nature. And how I clearly reject it, as my professional choices are proof of. I will not hold back.”

As I passed by another fan·cy-schman·cy Kindergarten, I suddenly saw it very clearly: Children are experts at studying the feelings, expressions and behaviour of adults, the grown-up’s interactions and daily routines, as the child’s mission is to become a member of society, be a valuable part of their community. All this is taken from children at the doorstep of Kindergarten.

Children are grouped by age. They are put into cells they call classrooms, together with a (quite often stressed-out by the burden of responsibility) woman with a shrill, loud voice. Not only is a whole range of freedoms taken from the children, such as privacy and the right to refuse compliance, but worst of all, they are robbed of context.

Small wonder I felt so alienated in Kindergarten myself, when I was a child. Children are removed from their parents, their parent’s work and life reality, and put in a room with children the same age. There’s nothing of importance to do or learn, no mind to study. And soon enough, in the absence of meaning, the children will stumble into games and quarrels of hierarchy, social class, possession of items, levels of compliance and playing favourites, and so forth, and so forth.

Right there at the doorstep of Kindergarten the processing begins. Even the most well-meaning, hard working educator does not stand a hint of a chance to help it. And if they try, they will burn out quicker than you can say Herbert Freudenberger. Stripping meaning and context from human lives is the very nature of the psychopathic, narcotic compulsory schooling. It’s the system’s design, and it’s perfectly resilient against change or reform.