Criticism of schooling

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Anti-schooling activism, or radical education reform, describes positions that are critical of school as a learning institution and/or compulsory schooling laws; or multiple attempts and approaches to fundamentally change the school system. People of this movement usually advocate alternatives to the traditional school system, education independent from school, the absence of the concept of schooling as a whole, or the right that people can choose how, where and with whom they are educated.

These attitudes criticize the learning atmosphere and environment of school and oppose the educational monopoly of school and the conventional standard and practice of schooling for reasons such as:

• regarding the use of compulsory schooling as a tool of assimilation;
• the belief that an overly structured and predetermined learning system can be detrimental for children and would encourage certain temperaments while inhibiting others;^[1]
• the related belief that the school environment prevents learning rather than encouraging the innate natural curiosity by using unnatural extrinsic pressures such as grades and homework;^[2]
• the view that school prescribes students exactly what to do, how, when, where and with whom, which would suppress creativity,^[3]
• and/or the conviction that schooling is used as a form of political or governmental control for the implementation of certain ideologies in the population.^[4]

Another very persistent argument of anti-schooling activists is that school does not prepare children for life outside of school,^[5] and that many teachers do not have a neutral view of the world because they have only attended academic institutions a large part of their life.

Others criticize the forced contact in school and are of the opinion that school makes children spend a large part of their most important development phase in a building, in seclusion from society, exclusively with children in their own age group, seated and entrusted with the task of obeying the orders of one authority figure for several hours each day, while almost everything they do is assessed, which would be a dehumanizing experience.^[6]

Some may also feel a deep aversion to school based on their personal experiences or question the efficiency and sustainability of school learning and are of the opinion that compulsory schooling represents an impermissible interference with the rights and freedoms of parents and children; and believe that schools as a vehicle for knowledge transfer are no longer necessary and increasingly becoming obsolete in times of rapid information procurement, e.g. via the internet, and therefore generally consider compulsory education with evidence-based learning-oriented online schools or autodidactism to be more sensible than the traditional cohort-based physical schools.^[7]