Please turn off your brains now, class.

Struggle defines our life. It builds character, and inspires men to built fantastic machines to overcome them. Our technological advancement only happens because of some problem somewhere. But along the way, some overly-bright young lad had and great idea and said "hey, I have a great idea! If trials make us better, lets make our own! Lets force every child from birth to endure a 12-year boot camp, where we take normal interesting things and dilute them with falsehoods and half-truths, and it will be so cry-your-eyes-our boring that our children will learn exonentialy from it!"

In an ideal world, this man would have been shot within moments of speaking such profanity. But alas, he and his followers went on to found the modern education system as we know it.

You see, there is a reason test scores have dropped like a rock in the last decade (even more since then). We know longer learn because we want to, we learn because we must (or so they tell us). So we learn to regurgitate facts and figures on command, while still being dumb as a rock. We have teachers who don't really like to teach (thanks to the unions), we have textbooks that our propaganda (and sometimes downright racist), and we have kids that take drugs and alcohol just to cope with the tedium.

I just got back from the SAT. I feel good about it, I didn't have any issues, and answed most questions with confidence. BUT, I still feel terrible. The test admister admisisterd more then just my test, she administered the mental equivalent of a poison shot. She treated me like a mentally-defunct jelly blob. Wild monkeys could have followed those directions faster then she read them.

It's the whole "Now class, stay together" mentality that bugs me. They pause for hours between simple chores that most people don't give second thought to, and then dare to ask if I need help or more time. NO! For the last time, I DON'T need help putting my calculator under my desk! They read so many do-nots that I really should assume that I can do things that they don't say I can't. They didn't tell me not to jab pencils in they eyeballs of myself or someone sitting around me, but they did tell me not to smoke during the test! I felt sub-human for the duration of the entire test. But that's not the worst.

The worst is that I would have been used to all this if I wasn't homeschooled. I would be numb to it's hand-holding, and my interest in any academic studies would have been killed off. It's the reason I'm homeschooled now, after all. I just stopped paying attention in class, stopped doing homework, and it showed. If you look in schools today, your find that the bright ones are the ones doing drugs. Want to take a swing as to why?