Why Is School Is Bad For Children Essay

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“A child learning to talk does not learn by being corrected all the time – if corrected to much, he will stop talking”(3). This article has changed my opinion on starting to send children to school as young as four years old. Children that young are still trying to figure things out by themselves, nothing good will come out of making them sit in a classroom for hours. Children shouldn’t be bombarded with rules the minute they step foot in a school building. It changes their perspective on how the world works. Children feel pressured enough at school, adding ways to test their knowledge isn’t going to prove anything. A change in the grading system might be what we need. In “School is Bad for Children”, John Holt explains his view on how school …show more content…

Almost as if when a student gets a good grade they should thank their teacher for brainwashing them. “Lets get rid of all this nonsense of grades, exams, marks. We don’t know now, and we never will know, how to measure what another person knows or understands”(4). Not knowing how to measure what another person knows is applied to all ages. Just because you don’t understand the subject of a test doesn’t mean you can’t get anywhere in life. Exams are a bad way of testing your knowledge at any age. “Our compulsory school-attendance laws once served a humane and useful purpose. They protected the children’s right to some schooling, … Today the laws help nobody”(3) Holt explains that keeping kids in school who don’t want to be there costs “an enormous amount of time and trouble”(3). Even if the teacher was trying to teach the child something useful, him not wanting to be there is a waste of time for them both. It is hard for the child to learn anything in school that helps his growth. What’s the point of attending school if you are not learning anything by yourself, and you can’t make decisions for yourself. “He learns that in real life you don’t do anything unless you are bribed, bullied or conned into doing it,”(2). In “School Is Bad for Children,” John Holt is explaining how school actually takes away most of the learning from children. From starting school at age four, and through the harsh grading system, along with being bombarded with rules the minute the step into school, nothing good can come out of it. After reading this article, I’ve come to realize how manipulating the American school system

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