• 2025-11-07 *

My curiosity wasn’t piqued by schooling. If anything, my experience has been the school system punishing me for ever thinking for myself and asking questions. My desire to know and understand was sparked by my being a child, of course, but what cultivated it were my grandpa’s retelling of stories about ages of old, about the places he’d been to and ancient cultures he’s read about; my mom’s reading me bedtime stories, playing pretend with me and caring for me tirelessly while always nudging me to express myself creatively; my dad sharing his hobby of reading about astronomy, physics and metaphysics with me; my aunt having extensive philosophical discussions about society, language, etymology and cultural movements’ contributions to it with me; and my other aunt telling me about the different places she’s seen and the exciting people she’s met as a student from the periphery in the big city. It made me realize that the world I knew was a minuscule part of all that is out there, and so my questions scaled accordingly and with time.

As you can see, I was incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by great people who did not punish me for asking “why” repeatedly; something a great many little people like I was don’t have the luxury of growing up with. These adults were very much unlike my school teachers. Schooling almost killed my spark of life. I wish this was anecdotal, like one bad school or one bad teacher or just me. I’ve been to many schools across borders, three in Austria alone. I’ve met plenty of people from various countries where I would learn in casual conversation—time and again—that school was a place to learn how to despise learning. I might be attracting people with similar school experiences to mine, who knows.1

It may be that the school’s claimed raison d’être is being a place of learning. In practice, that is secondary if not tertiary to how the school is as an institution. I’ll explain at the end what I’d like schools to be like. Schools are a place of discipline with the intended goal of training children to become soldiers without a weapon. It is the State mirrored in a microcosm of infinite policing, trying of the vulnerable and popularity contests, and thus an arena for power struggle. It is a place of unrelenting domination by many different actors. And lastly, it is (frequently) the first major encounter with unrestrained power over (vulnerable) individuals. You may have read thus far and wondered why I have such a hateful view of schooling. Let me tell you about the history of schooling in my part of the world, which thanks to colonialism has a legacy spanning the whole world, and what atrocities it enabled (and can still enable because the core “mechanics” haven’t changed).

In the 18th century, when the Habsburg monarchy was struggling to maintain power as people were rejecting its absolute rule, Maria Theresa—mother of Marie Antoinette of the famous “Let them eat brioche!”-quote—as well her son Joseph II., who she co-ruled with, decided to “modernize” their state by starting to count people as a resource with a regular census taking place, numbering houses and keeping extensive records of who lived on their land including where they lived, how many lived on a given piece of land, their religion/confession, ethnicity2, gender identity3, occupation4, and working age and/or able-bodied members of a household among other things. This was necessary to know how many people would be able to hold a weapon in case the rulers decided to war with others of their caliber and to make calculations about the Economy™️. Not all of that was logged on the first decree, although those registers were extended over time with more columns.

Together they would go on to pass a decree making school attendance compulsory for every boy until the age of 12 or for six years. You’d think they were two enlightened co-monarchs as especially Joseph II., and many others like him at the time, liked to think of themselves that suddenly believed education was essential to a well balanced individual after centuries of seeing the educated peasant as the cancer cell of the state. It certainly is surprising why he would instate such a system until you dig into the social circumstances at the time. Children of peasant parents would grow up working on their farms from their childhood onwards. Suddenly, there’s this new technology that makes a great many peasants leave the typical work regimen of the countryside to work the assembly line at the factory, leaving the kids without an occupation and the necessary training to work the assembly line more efficiently than their parents did.

You see, the school with all its stringent rules and classes that start and end at the ring of a bell, all the obedience asked of a helpless kids and punishments passed for a simple disobedience, all the regimentation, judging and policing, was not a place of learning. It was a place of teaching the obedience to authority and the ability to work the inhumane assembly line for next to nothing. Of course, there were schools for learning. They were just gated to the aristocracy and still suffered from the same requirement of obedience which was so integral to any expression of European “civilization”. Moreover, these reforms and others that built on them in the 19th century took place around a time of continuous revolts across the continent, so it was essential to control the children’s understanding of the world, and more importantly of the state and its institutions.

Later, the Nazis would input all personal metadata into IBM’s Keypunch devices to pick up every person with an established slur against in order to send them to concentration camps. Collecting all that information together with new technology, made it easy for Nazis to break into the intended person’s home in the middle of night, auction their belongings and systematically exterminate entire segments of the population without needing the build the infrastructure to identify them at all. Schools played a central role in their project, allowing them to train young people to become blind to the “wrong kind” of misery, namely the misery of “Untermenschen”. The worst part about this is that nothing has changed about the power structures that made the Final Solution possible in the first place.

Now that we have the bits of history5 It is essential that one thing is clear: I’m not advocating for homeschooling or whatever the crunchy, right wing libertarians and religious fanatics are doing in the US and elsewhere.

What I’m asking for is for us to collectively reimagine what schools could offer the generations of kids to come. However, whatever we conceptualize has to do away with existing schools. Schools should neither be compulsory nor standardized. This might make our society less “productive,” although that sounds like a feature, not a bug to me. Our planet and ecology could use some rest and so could our bodies. Yes, every kid should be able to choose to learn how to read and write if they choose to (which they likely will anyway, if we make learning attractive and fun which is our imperative). That much standardization is already enough, not to mention that society at large and schools in particular most be decentralized to each locus’ customs and the children’s choices. School should be a choice made because it’s superior in the eyes of the child. They should be able to start and stop whenever they choose to, and they should be able to decide what to learn and who to learn with, whether that’s other kids or adults. Freedom of association has to start as early as the child expresses a choice. Children may not be able to say what exactly bothers them, but they are more than capable of identifying whether something is doing them no good.

Children are people, goddammit! Let’s treat them as such!

P.S.: I’m open to supplying references for anything I’m saying here on-demand. More importantly, please let me know if I’ve made any mistakes so I can correct them.

Until I started conducting my own empirical research or read up into the literature supporting my claims. For now, we’re staying unscientific here ;)↩ 1.

Austria-Hungary was multi-ethnic, yet, not a pluralist society in today’s sense as people of different ethnicities did not interact as much with each other as we do today.↩ 1.

A trans woman could legally become a woman, thereby lose all her rights as a legal man.↩ 1.

Even sex work, because sex workers had to register themselves as such, undergo regular health checks and pay taxes like everybody else, etc. It was a frowned upon profession, but a profession with an income to be taxed nonetheless.↩ 1.

By far not doing the complexity of the topic justice here, but this post is already long enough and my goal is to nudge you to think, not to educate per se.↩

#2025