Zera's Room: Notebook: Commentary A Commentary on the Dictatorship Over America's Youth Otherwise Known as School Zera Anderson Honors American Lit., pd. 2 October 2, 1997 The domineering effect school has over our minds is shameful. They have the ultimate power: to teach what they want to teach and ignore other properties other individuals might deem important. They suppress the creative spirit's drive to search out knowledge for yourself. Instead they leave us like computers, storing the data they give us away in our memory banks only to be used when retrieved by the programmer. Schools control what we learn and at what point in life we learn it. They have the power to stump the creative mind of a six year old child or expand it beyond measure. School must walk a delicate line between supporting a students talents and interests or to only teach the basics in a bland, boring manner. That form of teaching produces sterile minds instead of enriching them. In many schools this bland way of teaching is embraced by administrators. The special few who have the gift to expand a childšs mind are often shunned. Those bland, sterile teachers spoon feed the knowledge to us. They crush the creative spirit to search out knowledge on your own. The students sit at their desks writing down lecture notes (if even that) while there minds wander else where; then at the time of the test they study those notes. There is no absorption of knowledge or retained information. School ends up being a long nap with your eyes open. Some students might not mind or even notice that therešs something wrong, but for those who do school becomes an unbearable torture. The knowledge flows from mouth to pen in a monotone way with no experiments, or searching for the answers, or researching on your own. It is in this way that students are programmed, packaged, and set out on there own. To learn the lessons all over again the hard way. All they have to say the years of home work is a stamp on their packaging called a diploma. The schools donšt properly train students for the out side word. Out there people expect you to come up with your own information. And what happens to all those dreams that we imagined ourselves doing in school; that art career we were going to have or that writing job we were going to get. It all becomes the dust left behind in the tracks we made trying to survive with our less than sufficient schooling. We reach out the fingers of our minds to creativity and inspiration; to expand our knowledge and further our education. We stub our fingers on walls, restrictions and barriers stopping the expanse of our minds and binding them with barbed wires. The wires' stings and pricks serve as a constant reminder that there is no freedom especially in the mind and the pursuit of intellectual contentment. Copyright 1997, P. F. Anderson & Zera Anderson. Back to the notebook. Turn around, back to the room. Return to the Second Floor Balcony. Return to Dreamhouse Homepage. Last modified November 16, 1997. URL of current page: http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~pfa/dreamhouse/zrm/ntbk/zyouth.html