School, as they read the book, works like a jungle

The notes are a reading of the book Why Is This Not Called Youth?. One heading in the notes calls school a jungle. School, they write, works through violence and oppression. Classrooms are neither equal nor even. On one side a harsh teaching still holds; on the other, a chaos that goes by the name of “open education” has made life harder.

The school system, they say, cannot even out educational opportunity, and it has a paradoxical effect on how funds are shared. Through its own hierarchy it trains students to accept a social hierarchy in which power and privilege are already joined. It also grants, or withholds, the right to enter other institutions: fail to follow the school’s instructions, and other organisations will judge a person unfit for a decent place. For now, they add, school education holds a near monopoly as the only method for teaching almost a billion children.

People and knowledge treated as things to be handled

School, they write, treats people and knowledge as objects that can be handled. In that handling, other sides of the person are trampled, and unwanted by-products appear; the cost, when a human being is made an object of manipulation, is high. A person successfully processed by the curriculum, they say, will have lost the capacity to govern their own fate.

In every generation, they add, school introduces the myth of modern production and consumption: what can be consumed must first be produced, and what is produced must be consumed. Not only ordinary goods but services, and knowledge itself, are turned into daily commodities. Students are raised to be well fitted for competition between persons, classes and states. School selects them by marks and supplies them to organisations, like a large machine for manpower. A society that distributes according to ability, they write, is a hell for everyone.

Korean students, and questions about work

Korean university students, the notes say, inevitably ask, when they choose work, whether a job will pay enough that money need not be a worry, and whether it is stable enough that dismissal is not a fear. In practice, hundreds of thousands apply to the civil service, and annual pay has become a chief reason for choosing a firm. Few, they think, choose work for the love of the task, or for aptitude and a sense of achievement. Money, on this account, is freedom: people become slaves to it not because they are chasing happiness, but so that freedom itself will not be taken away. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of the book Why Is This Not Called Youth?.

Last updated: 15 November 2026