Should public education be abolished?

Or maybe it just shouldn't be mandatory

“Mouchette” in Bresson's movie. She didn't like school either.

So, because I started making videos about the Ukraine war — remember that? It seems it is still going on, but I'm not sure — I used to have a few Russian viewers, although I am not sure they are still there. Hello? Dobry den?

Anyway, what happened was that I was going to take a break, but I decided to talk about this subject because I met a Russian girl the other day. Really nice girl, we were casually waiting for a train and it wasn't coming and we just had a nice conversation about art, history, Russia and so on. And nothing else happened — nothing ever happens — just a brief but nice conversation with a stranger, but it reminded me that these kind of things are becoming rare in the West.

I mean, Western women are bombarded with so much radical feminist propaganda, and men are bombarded with so much anti-white male hatred, that men and women are increasingly suspicious of each other. If you start a similar conversation with a Western woman, even if it's just to ask for information, she may give you that look of “Oh gee, another creep that wants to have sex with me, leave me alone". That is, if she even lifts her face from her phone.

And sometimes it's not about flirting or that you are interested in the person, sometimes it's really just about talking or actually asking for information.

And I remember that not so long ago, a similar thing happened with a Polish girl that I met in a museum, she was also so very nice and polite. So it seems to me that Eastern European women are still more, you know, normal. Probably the men are more normal too.

Things like this make me think about visiting and learning more about Eastern Europe.

Eastern European men

Western men

But anyway, what I was going to say was something completely different, what happened is that we talked a bit about Russian literature, and I showed the Dostoevsky book I had with me, and she said that many young people in Russia don't like Dostoevsky because they are forced to read it in school.

And the same is true in other countries. In Italy students have to read Dante, and in Germany they have to read Goethe, and in England they have to read Shakespeare, and many find it boring, even if those are all great writers, the best each country produced. But, it's true, they are not for everyone. Or maybe when you're sixteen is not the best time to read those old books.

I remember that I also didn't like the books I was forced to read in school, but I read a lot of other stuff. And later on I also read, or re-read, some of those books that I had to read in school, and ended up enjoying them.

So maybe I was just not ready for them yet.

Reading should be a pleasure.

Why force people to read? It seems kinda stupid and counterproductive.

Of course the same is true of Math, and Geography, and History, and so on. Why do people have to learn all this stuff that most of them will never need?

We tend to have an extremely negative view of the Middle Ages. In movies, it is always portrayed as a terrible time, dirty, smelly, full of diseases and fanaticism. But it was not like that. In many ways, life was normal for most people. You farmed, you went to the market, you married, you had children. Just normal stuff.

A while ago I saw this awful Italian movie about Dante, who lived in the 1300s. At one point they show him taking a dump outdoors. At another time they show him having sex with a fat and toothless prostitute. Why?!? The only reason was to show the Middle Ages and Dante in the ugliest way possible.

In those times, there was no public school. The rich would have private tutors. Monks and some nuns would learn to read. But the rest of the population would not study things they didn't need. The young would become apprentices for a job, and learn the skills they needed for that, and that was it.

Even my grand-grandparents, who lived in a small town Italy in the 19th century, they never learned to read and write. They became apprentices and then started working.

Today everybody is supposedly educated, even overeducated, but what good is it for?

You can be in the university until your thirties and have a PhD diploma in Ethnic Studies, and then you're jobless and in debt, basically forever.

And are people really smarter and more knowledgeable than they were in other previous centuries? It doesn't seem so to me. People worship the trashiest celebrities imaginable and their idea of success in life is being trashy and stupid.

We actually live in a very anti-intellectual age. In other centuries, people of culture really had a culture, but, today, even upper-class people tend to be very ignorant.

Public education as we know it today was invented in the 19th century because people were moving from the countryside to the cities, to work in factories instead of in farming. Well, you had religious schools before, which I guess was the origin of the concept, but mandatory public education started really in the 19th century.

Public education today serves two basic purposes that have nothing to do with education. One is as a daycare for children and teens. I mean, for parents, staying with kids the whole day can be tiresome, and usually both parents have to work anyway. But even if one manages to stay home, I know people who do homeschooling, and it can be exhausting. It's not as easy as it seems. And hiring private tutors is expensive. So school is a place where you drop your kid and don't have to worry about him for the whole day.

The second purpose is brainwashing. I mentioned for example the feminist propaganda. This really worked. I mean, I teach university students, and they're all repeating stuff about feminism and how women are being horribly oppressed in the West, and how every man is a potential rapist, and how other races are being oppressed by the white man, who is to blame for everything and so on.

A lot of it comes from the TV, the culture at large, but a lot of it also comes from public education, from pre-school all the way to the university

I remember during the covid era that they were teaching kindergarten children about face masks and social distancing and so on. Today they teach gender stuff. Anything but, you know, something you may actually need.

Also, public schools feel like a prison for a lot of students. You have to be there when you'd prefer to be somewhere else, you may suffer bullying, there's a lot of social competition, there are fights.

Sometimes even the quality of teaching is very bad. I know people who graduated from high school and they hardly could spell.

And many people remain with traumas from their school years that they carry for their whole life.

I don't know, it doesn't seem a very healthy place for a child. And yet, most governments will force you to do it.

Should public education be abolished? Shouldn't we just accept that education is not for everyone? I think most people would be content in just learning reading, basic math, and then just acquiring a basic skill in a trade and starting to work.

For others, that are more intellectual or artistically minded, or that require more advanced skills for their chosen profession, they could go on to a university — which should be a place nor for everyone, but just for those who are really interested in learning.

We would save a lot of money, and most people would be happier.

But the governments wouldn't be able to brainwash people so easily, and parents wouldn't know what to do with their children all day long, so there's the rub.

On the other hand, I am not completely sure that abolishing it completely is the best idea, because it seems to benefit at least some people. Personally, I never had too many problems at school, I studied for many years from pre-school to PhD, and now in my old age I am even thinking of going to art school again.

In olden times, even cats had to go to school.