Among the many illusions society clings to, 'school' is one of the most damaging.  So ingrained is the sado-masochistic concept of school in the human psyche that people laugh and smile when a parent says: "She hates school." As if that is supposed to be the normal, natural reaction to a place of learning.

"We all hate school!  School is boring!"  Yet society expects high academic results by the end of our experience at this contemptible place.

If school held any interest for children, they would willingly attend, as they do in some countries.  Unfortunately, the school systems in most countries are fiercely anti-educational, limiting learning to boxes called classrooms, instead of experiencing all aspects of life.

John Taylor Gatto identifies school years as a time when you 'grow older but never grow up'. 

Or as the great John Holt put it: "School is where you go to learn how to be stupid."

The basis of our schooling is militaristic, conformist and ludicrously academic, and even though it causes harm, we are so inured to the damage that we consider it all worthwhile.  Nothing much has changed for at least half a millennium, evidenced by two of the greatest minds England has produced, Shakespeare and Blake - both poorly schooled but highly educated.  They have given us a glimpse of how school has remained unaltered and unchallenged for 400 years:

In As You Like It, Jaques observes:

"The whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school"

William Blake's poem The School Boy is equally damning:

"...to go to school in a summer morn,
O! it drives all joy away;
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.

Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning's bower,
Worn thro' with the dreary shower."