by Nathan McKaskle

“The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.” – George Bernard Shaw

Let’s face it, you’ve heard it before and have probably said it yourself, school sucks! I first said it when I was eight years old and I’ll say it again today. From the very first day of first grade onward I can still recall the dull atmosphere and senseless, mind numbing work, briefly interrupted by an hour on the playground, where it was not uncommon to encounter a bully with their own set of plans for me.

I remember that throughout school I was always blamed if not punished for my lack of attention span and the weak performance that followed. Nobody bothered to question the school’s mind crushing, unequivocally droll method of teaching, it was always taken as a given fact of reality, an obstacle placed firmly in the way of my otherwise relentless curiosity and interest in the world.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when a business is funded by force (taxation), there’s no need for the expenditure associated with your average client facing enterprise with a focus on satisfied customer feedback, since you can never lose a customer to the competition. It only makes sense that you get a faulty product, as I’m sure you can imagine how you might feel about the value of a salesman’s vacuum cleaner if he came to your door with a gun, instead of a pitch.

Sure, the child could be moved to a private school, but the parents (and even single men and women without children) are still forced to pay for public school, and this is the problem.

Imagine having to continue paying a monthly bill to AT&T when you got fed up and switched to Sprint. Of course AT&T would have bad service if this were the case, since they would never really lose a customer. This is because there is a gun in the room, everybody knows this when it comes to government services like public school, but few will work to persistently point it out.

One persistent podcaster, Brett Veinotte, a former history and mathematics teacher at Great Expectations school in Manchester, VT, is working hard to do just that. He runs the School Sucks Podcast, a show of high production quality that will have you pulling your child out of public school, and perhaps the hair out of your head, before you can say “school sucks!”.

Brett completed masters level coursework in education leadership and the certification program in secondary education at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and has worked for the public school system in the past. If you’re truly interested in why your child may be doing poorly in school, why he or she may have trouble paying attention or why teachers would want to suggest that your child is “in need” of medication, his podcast can really help shine a light on the situation.

Brett offers a verbally acute perspective on the topic of public schools and begins with the basic foundations of how public schools operate, by pointing out that “gun in the room“.

He calls it “the end of public education”, a subtitle of more than one meaning that will make more and more sense as you traverse the series. You’ll learn quickly how and why — as you might have seen in Pink Floyd’s music video, “the Wall”, the minds of children are run down the conveyor belt of assembly line “education” and crushed in the sausage grinder of mass conformity.

When I volunteered as a “Big Brother” for an organization called “Big Brothers and Big Sisters“, which provides mentors for some of these poor victims of state education, I was assigned to a young child at a local public school for one hour each week.

When I saw the kind of military style obedience training that children were being subjected to, I was utterly heart broken. The system of rewards and punishments had them all trained like robots, marching down the hall in single file lines and were frequently run through a course they called “physical education”.

Seeing the expression of relief on my “little brother’s” face, after I had come just in time to pull him away from this basic training style course, allowed me to ask what he thought of it, to which he responded by conveying his seething hatred. I don’t blame him. I’d observed this gym coach in action, to say that he was kind of a jerk would be an understatement.

I would often ask him, as I watched him do his school work, why he would work particular math problems in a particular way, or write sentences in a systematic, confusing and inefficient style. He had no idea, “theirs is not to question why”, as Alfred Lord Tennyson would put it. It was obvious to me that he was only doing it out of fear of the looming consequences, should he dare explore the option of doing things differently.

It would be great if children were able to explore and do things differently, as this is their natural state as humanity’s youngest little scientists. Wouldn’t it be great if educators had the incentive to do things differently too? Instead, like that vacuum cleaner salesman with the gun, you’d more likely be blamed for misuse of the vacuum cleaner than seeing his product repaired or improved.

It has been my experience and observation so far that people find it far easier to drug, punish or reward children for the sake of cruel convenience than to ask:

“What is wrong with the school and family environment?”

And why should they ask? It is far easier to blame the victim than to take responsibility for their victimization.

It is this blame the victim mentality that is at the core of any institution that funds itself through force.

With that, I commend the work that Brett is doing to turn this titanic, societal ship around and I highly recommend his incredibly educational podcast full of eye opening truth and enlightening ideas about how education could work in a truly free society.

Nathan McKaskle lives in Philadelphia, PA. When he is not delivering new content to the readers of Lost Liberty Café and studying philosophy as well as psychology, he is working as a Citrix Server Administrator at a major import/export company.