So Much Learnin'

Mucho Quotables:

"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men."
-Bill Beattie

Whoa, man. If we didn't tell you what to think, all you'd ever think about are video games. Everyone knows kids have no ideas or aspirations of their own.

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
-Flannery O'Conner

Flan!! If only you had more learnin's you'd see through your sarcasm with your educated eyes that writers do need to be stifled. The artists of the world are the ones who shake it up! Free-thinking, individualistic people are the death of mediocrity. The faithful Pillars of mundanity, mediocrity, and monotony are our only defense against natural curiosity. A belief in the Pillars is a belief in everything you are told.

"Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts."
-Henry B. Adams

Facts are all that matters, because without inert facts--everyday, filling up their lives--students would start to use their brains and begin thinking for themselves. The Pillars must be preserved at all costs.

"Theories and goals of education don't matter a whit if you don't consider your students to be human beings."
-Lou Ann Walker

We don't, so that makes any theory and goal legitimate. They're littler than us, so we have the right to step on them.

"Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion."
-Mark Twain

You think they should know? Then they would have to learn about two things: discovery and rebellion. These are bad things because kids shouldn't have the freedom to discover anything for themselves. They exist only to be workers someday, so the closest they'll ever come to discovery is having us force disconnected facts down their throat. They also shouldn't question authority, because we are bigger than them and always right. We attribute rebellion to the silly mood swings of teenagers. The sooner you induce apathy and dispassion, the better.


***Credit for this image is due to an awesome artist called Luke Chueh. (I particularly like the ones with rainbows coming out of the necks of animals with their heads cut off.)***

Tais-toi!

Fun Fact: Bet you didn't know that it's okay to tell students rudely to shut up... as long as you say it in a foreign language!


Quotables:

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
-Albert Einstein

Buddy, din't choo know that the only place learnin' happens is in school? Curiosity!? We all know that it exists simply to waste away while we fill up them kids' empty brains with facts, facts, facts. Curiosity is overrated. It killed the cat, remember? It'd kill kids' chances of being unremarkable and average, if we didn't kill it first.

"Nine tenths of education is encouragement."
-Anatole France

If this were true, then we'd have to accept the fact that kids are humans. Even worse, we'd have to 'encourage' them... what does that word mean? Does this refer to paddles, dunce caps, or tootsie pops?

"Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality."
-Beatrix Potter

Dear Beebee! What are you talking about? Had you been filled up with learnin's you could've slaved meaninglessly like an automaton rather than make up silly stories! What's originality if it keeps you from a boring, conventional job, making real money?

A Fine Day of Healthy Learnin' Indeed

It may be nearing the end of the school year, when zombie children walk outside to be blinded by the sunlight, but that sure don't mean learnin's done happening quite yet! Empty brains need a-fillin' and it's only the first of June. Little children, they own you for a whole 'nother month. (Oops. Really, they own you for the next howevermany years, but don't tell nobody.) And so here, in all its glory, is the fine day's learnin's and the evidence of a day of life well spent. You may get this day back if you steal a time machine from the aliens, but I never will. Good thing I learned all this stuff with my time(!!!):

Today in HISTORY class, I learned that when a student realizes he forgot to sign up to present a project and the teacher calls him a moron, it's funny! Laugh, zombies, laugh!

Today in SPANISH class, I learned that kids are mindless fools, who copy everything off the board without question even if they don't need to. How cheery!


Plus, the people teaching you make mistakes all the time! But they've gone to college, so it's okay.

Oh, and don't ever forget this fine tidbit of knowledge: Any problem in your school, whether it be the delicious healthy foodstuffs or the broken copy machine, is due to the economic recession, even if that problem has been going on forever! Well, there you go. Murder? Cancer? Leprosy? It's the recession. Now shut up and do your work.

Today in FRENCH class, I learned a whole bunch! Every student has a "question quota", a secret number of questions you are allowed to ask your teacher--the person in charge of feeding your curiosity--before the teacher gets sick of you. Thank God for this, because we all know no one learns by asking questions. I hear tell that this secret question number is calculated through the use of a complicated algorithm involving, among many other factors: a precise measurement of how much the teacher likes you, the teacher's general attitude on a given day, and what the teacher had for breakfast.

Always remember this during your adventures in public education: Say a teacher of a foreign language must explain, in that foreign language, that their mother is sick, and a student who is no stranger to parent loss provides a gesture of comfort. It is customary for the entire class to laugh at that student, remarking that she understood the foreign language for once.

In SCIENCE class, I learned that it's okay for the teacher to poke students and tap them on the head with yardsticks while they try to work. I also learned that it's funny when students who have trouble with the material make mistakes! So much humor, all of it derision!