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Antiwork

Teaching should be a relationship, not a job.

In our modern society, the role of a teacher is a job, that is, something done for money. It needs specialized training and a lot of compensation. A lot of the teachers hate interacting with the students. They think the students show no respect to them. Often true, but they really don't understand why. Prior to the invention of schools as we know them, there was no profession of “teacher”. Instead, children were taught things by adults they knew personally. They were directly immersed in the environment where adults worked. Adults did not just teach them facts – they taught them how to socialize. In such an environment, children are always expected to take part in the social lives of adults and learn their cultural behaviour from them. Nowadays, however, children spend extended amounts of time separated from their parents (and other relatives) and are under the authority of adults…


In our modern society, the role of a teacher is a job, that is, something done for money. It needs specialized training and a lot of compensation. A lot of the teachers hate interacting with the students. They think the students show no respect to them. Often true, but they really don't understand why.

Prior to the invention of schools as we know them, there was no profession of “teacher”. Instead, children were taught things by adults they knew personally. They were directly immersed in the environment where adults worked. Adults did not just teach them facts – they taught them how to socialize.

In such an environment, children are always expected to take part in the social lives of adults and learn their cultural behaviour from them. Nowadays, however, children spend extended amounts of time separated from their parents (and other relatives) and are under the authority of adults who tend to not know them at a personal level. There is only one adult in a classroom but twenty to thirty children. For these two reasons, children are instead forced to rely on other children for their social needs.

This creates a conflict of interest. The teachers think they can tell children what to do in academic matters. The children, however, prefer not to listen to them, because the teacher is not a social authority figure to them. Instead, they listen to the demands of other children. The children think they have the right to tell other children how to behave and scold them for not acting in accordance with their standards. The school staff stay completely out of it. Apparently, they are there to teach the children – except when they're not.

The government doesn't teach them how to socialize with the children. Why? Because you can't treat socialization as work to hand in to the teacher – that is, to simulate working for a boss. They care about profit, not mutual aid. Correspondingly, their education system cares about good grades, not mutual relationships.

As an example, the teachers separate themselves from the students at lunchtime. They do not think meals are a time for nurturing the children who they are responsible for. Instead, they see it as much-needed relief from the hard work of interacting with the children. They can assign page after page of work to do, every single day, but sitting down with the children and communicating with them is far too much.

There are many children who are excluded from the social environment. They think it is because the other kids are mistreating them, or because they are innately bad at communicating. In reality, it is because the people in the social environment are, well, children, and have absolutely no obligation to provide for another child's needs. The teachers are the ones who should be doing that. An education without a social life is not an education.

We have been taught that teaching children is not an innate capability of ours. That teachers need to be bossed around by the government in order to do their job, that children hate to learn by default. This is a lie created by capitalism, and too many adults do not understand this. I think teachers would receive far more respect from the students if they did.

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