I recently saw a sign in the highway median exhorting parents to “prevent summer knowledge loss” or something of the like. It was an ad for a local business called Knowledge Points, who apparently want you to believe that institutionalized instruction is the best way to learn.

KP isn’t just helping kids get ahead in their schooling industry rankings. They’re telling us that unless kids are being instructed, they will not learn. They exploit parents’ desires to use the measurable achievements of their offspring as status symbols. This is runoff from the authoritarian cultural sewage that values instruction and supervision over initiative and independence. And it feeds on the instructed practice of letting others determine what you should value.

Breaks from the schooling environment allow children and young adults to discover the world that school intentionally insulates them from, and explore how they relate to the larger environment. I don’t think they’ll get that valuable experience from a diagnostic assessment in Upper Level Walmart Plaza.

In my novella Bring a Gun to School Day, a seventeen-year-old who wants to bring down the school system that has long taunted him meets a new federal bureaucracy looking for enemies to justify its mission. Get free shipping on Bring a Gun to School Day at ArisePress.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under libertarian. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.