r/AntiSchooling

Don't you guys think that school is too much for a kid like spending 8 hours sitting in which you are sleep deprived and unable to sit on that hard wooden chairs also have to study,do homework , complete copies, participate,mantain attendance,sort things with friends ,give exam, do more optional shit,listen all the scolding and still never ending isn't it too much for a kid aging from 3 years to 17 years

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I'm from near Welshpool in Wales, 19M, autistic, i play guitar, I'm good at fiddling with electronics, I'm very close to my mum, and right now I'm friendless. I'm completely uninterested in "romance".

We've always found the best place for me in the alternative education community and made some excellent friends there. My upbringing has always been child-led and I've been empowered to follow my interests and self-learn at my own pace, and now after all that i do not want to move on to overly structured, scripted education such as college, or get some Sisyphean 9-5 job, especially after seeing so many people struggle. I want to do something really worthwhile that i enjoy.

We travel long distances and can meet up anywhere within about 2 hours if it's worthwhile. The rest of the information that follows is supplementary and if you can't be bothered, you needn't read it.

In my early teens i fell in with the wrong people and became friends with a couple engaging in underage sex. I wasn't yet aware of the implications of this and put up with it, even as they increasingly tried to involve me, by just treating it as a joke. Fortunately they're not in my life anymore.

My dad has nothing to do with us and my extended family has cut us out. Since i turned about 16 we've been losing my friends. Some were a bit nasty anyway, some changed and became unbearable, some vanished inexplicably. I was planning to jam and possibly form a band with 3 friends and they've completely disappeared. I'm not clingy or demanding, i have the bad examples set me by my dad and the couple i mentioned to bias me against that behaviour. I just can't understand where all my friends went.

More understandably, some have just moved on to college, and even if i wanted to, my friend group was so scattered (we had friends as far as Worcestershire) that i couldn't follow them in if i wanted to. One old friend is a Polish immigrant and would probably be looked on by the government as a squatter if he didn't take that path. He still finds time to drop me a line every few weeks.

When i was 17 i was wandering around a park with my mum while my sister hung out with her friends. I sat around, queued for the swings, wandered, i had no friends to hang with, and then someone called park security and told them i was a paedophile staring at children - in fairness i look mature and beardy. I was lucky my mum was there, and they were embarrassed when they tried to arrest a 17-year-old, but still... now I'm old, i can't go to the park and exercise, i can't wander about on my own for fear it'll happen again.

We don't live a cloistered existence, we always follow our interests and go to interesting places, but still, apparently there's not much we can do. We've searched for and continue to try neurodivergent and homeducation groups of all kinds throughout Wales and the West Midlands, but this is long enough already and i can't be bothered to write a full account to justify myself to whoever you are.

Anybody out there?

Not getting it. Is it like people fool each other with just education and don't talk mainly about how incentives work, finances work, and systems work, and keep binding kids and making them with weak accountability and responsibility and poor understanding, making them abysmal at taking risks? What I mean by business is that they keep filling their pockets and make systems around it to stay in that loop forever...

Like, for example, understand the classic example of Countries in South Asia, Africa, and Other countries too

edit -- Like, more specifically, the school's responsibility is to complete the bookish education, whatever is part of the curriculum, like thats needs to be completed and pass tests? And you're educated if you pass (rotten education system)

Sorry guys and gals for asking this question, but I felt this for 10+ years; education itself is a complex question

School is such a boring place... I feel like I'm wasting my life and time being here, learning things I don't even like. If only I could finish my studies without any effort... But there's no such thing as a free lunch. The thought of wasting most of my life going to school makes me feel terrible.

I wrote a 20,000-word pseudo-academic paper criticizing China’s education system and published it on Notion.Please feel free to use Notion’s built-in translation feature.

China’s high-pressure, exam-driven education system has drifted so far away from anything resembling actual education that, to me, it looks more like a form of forced labor imposed on children who are treated as if they were born under a suspended death sentence.

So I gave it a name: **“suspended-death-sentence forced-labor education.”**

From childhood, parents and teachers teach you that falling behind means failing at life. Then you are filtered, stage after stage, through exams, scores, rankings and academic credentials.

Learning gradually turns into endless standardized and repetitive problem-solving. And in order to keep that machinery running, schools extend their control into almost every part of a student’s life: time, discipline, sleep, privacy, family relationships and even relationships between classmates.

The result is often the exact opposite of what education is supposed to achieve.

Students spend years being trained to look for standard answers, then are expected to become innovative adults. Their goals and schedules are dictated to them for most of their childhood, then they are blamed for lacking initiative and self-discipline. They are taught that mistakes carry humiliation and punishment, then suddenly expected to take risks, experiment and accept responsibility once they enter the real world.

In many public high schools in provinces such as Hebei, Henan, Shandong and Shanxi, the style of management is, apart from the absence of electric shocks and sexual abuse, disturbingly similar to China’s notorious “internet addiction” boot camps.

Unsurprisingly, environments like these can contribute to depression, anxiety, trauma symptoms, learned helplessness and serious long-term psychological problems.

The claim that the Gaokao is fundamentally “fair” also deserves much more scrutiny.

Human ability takes countless forms, yet students are compressed into a handful of academic subjects and a single numerical score. That score is then used to allocate access to universities, credentials, jobs and, indirectly, social status.

Everyone taking an exam under standardized rules may look fair on paper. But hardly anyone asks the more basic question: is this actually a scientifically meaningful way to evaluate human ability in the first place?

And graduation does not make the system disappear.
School rankings become workplace KPIs. Standard answers become “what the boss wants to hear.” Anxiety about university admissions becomes anxiety about age, career progression, housing and marriage. As children, people are monitored by teachers and parents. As adults, many simply learn to monitor, pressure and punish themselves.
Then the cycle reproduces itself.

The children who grew up under this system eventually become parents, teachers and managers, and repeat the same methods on the next generation.

“We went through the same thing when we were young.”
That one sentence has probably justified an astonishing amount of damage.

What fascinates me most is that, within the Great Firewall, a system with such an appalling record can still be celebrated as proof that “Chinese basic education is the best in the world.”

Its failures are almost visible in the people it produces.
At the lower end, you get people who are extremely good at repeating whatever everyone else says, even when it means confidently turning reality upside down. At the higher end, many of the people with the most ability spend enormous effort trying to leave the country.
Quite a spectacle.

The system has managed to satisfy neither the ideal purpose of education nor, in many cases, even the goals of the authorities who built and defended it.

Outside places like the Soviet Union, Iran or North Korea, it is genuinely difficult for me to think of many education systems that combine this degree of academic pressure, social control, psychological damage and self-congratulation quite so effectively.

And perhaps the most disturbing question is this:
Why does a system like this keep reproducing itself, generation after generation?

This is only just my opinion