School vs Work

I think school. At least you get paid for work

I think school also. A lot of times you can quit your job when it gets too bad and in my experience you're treated with less respect in school than even at a shitty job. No where I've worked have workers been against each other like I've seen high schoolers acting. College is better than work, except that you have to pay for it.

Dunno man, school is pretty bad because you have to tame your intellect and interests around getting grades, which turns me off doing the work in the first place.

On the other hand, work is way more mindless.

The thing that made me become an anarchist was that when i'm told to do something, have no choice and know its pointless, i don't want to do it.

I couldn't be a trot even if i wanted to

To be honest, I prefer work to university as well, even though I got University for free. But then, I did stupid subjects which have loads of classes and homework. If I had done some fluffy arts/humanities course I'm sure I would have had a great time

I dropped out of one the above-mentioned fluffy (and in this case ridiculously expensive) arts degrees as soon as I got a half decent paying job. Turns out getting paid at a somewhat tolerable job feels a lot less pathetic than going deep into debt for an arts degree that doesn't even better one's prospects for making a livable wage. So I agree, work beats school.

put this in libcommunity please.

Schools sucks, full of dickheads and you haven't matured enough to tell them to do one. Well that was my experience anyway.....

No way, school is way better than work for the following reasons:

a) all your friends are there.. at work you just get some guy who's 'alright' and really you only talk about work.. at school you talk about all kinds of stuff like 6th form girls you want to have sex with (and never will or even would because the thought of it frightens your penis into your stomach)..
b) you can piss around way more at school and its way funnier than anything you can do at work (basically go on the internet or have a conversation with someone you don't actually like..)
c) you get regular breaks.. two hours in the morning, break time.. two more, lunch time.. one more, and you go home.. at 3:30pm!
finally d) you know it will end one day.. with work it literally is 'revolution or death (or marrying a millionaire)'.. I think that's the thing that sucks most about work (and probably why so many of us keep plugging away at this communism business..)

still is my experience.
except thanks to endless readings of critiques of political economy in my own time, i can dick people over in my politics class in argument if they try to speak up for capitalism. so i keep my political dignity intact at least

If you lot had bothered learning something important like the physical sciences, or engineering, or medicine, maybe you'd enjoy school more. What's the point going to uni if you're going to get the same value you'd get from shooting the shit with well-educated people in a pub only watered down by being sober and in class?

i actually argue less well if i'm on any kind of drug other than coffee, i can't keep my dialectical way of thinking together otherwise.
the worst thing was when i got high with some friends and they asked me to explain anarchism. luckily they still thought it sounded interesting because they were more stoned.

I'm terrible in the pub. after a few beers are just devolve into a deluge of swear words and hyperbole....

i was once talking to someone about anarchism at a party (yes i am that fun) and had someone else butt in and say
'but, lyke, the thing is about anarchy, is; what then?'. it pissed me off no end

Well, that pretty much happens every time if I bring up anarchy at a party.

If I bring up anarchy at a party I'm forced to clean up and disinfect the carpet. Well, it's hard to digest.

Communism came up in conversation at a party I was at today. needless to say it ended in someone telling me I should leave their place (a squat ironically).

Its moments like this you really how much of an ideological up hill struggle we have to go up

Fuck sake, are you lumpens serious? Work, especially uber-alienated office dronery, is obviously the worst thing that can happen to you outside of full buttrape. How is this even debatable?

I think it is almost wrong to make such a massive distinction between school and work. School is an antechamber to the world of work. You are being trained for it in terms of the curriculum you learn but even more they teach you to accept work's arbitrary hierarchy and life of drudgery and boredom. Alienation in bourgeois society doesn't only happen at the point of production and perhaps school is part of the mode of production in the sense that it provides workers for capital. It was the experience of alienation and authoritarian attitudes in school that made me first become interested in anarchy. However, literally no one knew anything about it and my history teachers mocked Marx when I brought it up. So uniform was my "education" in this respect that I actually ended up repudiating Marx myself for a few years and ended up in a general teenage rebelliousness until I left school and had a bit more freedom to think for myself. I live in France so I wasn't there, but one of the great things it seemed to me about what happened in London in response to the cuts was school kids actually reacting to their alienation in political acts of vandalism and facing off against police authority. Imagine all of the violence of inner city schools turned against state and capital as part of a mass movement rather than against teachers and other kids. So its not so much a question of school being worse than work but rather how the two are related.

probably working in a school

as anarchists, or at least people that are against capitalism, I guess we all should be saying work. Your time at school is meant to be the best days of your life, but when your an anarchist in school and when you start to realize how its all about indoctrination etc and how all of your friends are so un aware, its hard to think work, which in rare cases can be something that you love doing and get paid well for, is always the worse of the two. But I guess it all comes to down to your personal experience of school, although Id suggest being anarchists would make our experiences more likely to be more negative than positive. As for my personal experience, on one hand I could say its been relatively fine in that Ive got the grades, not been bullied that much and most of the teachers have been alright. On the other hand, I see through their presentation of the world of work as meritocratic and instead see the education system as merely another agent of control in the hands of the state and the rich. My school is a business and enterprise specialist school supposedly, so I like to think my moaning is a little more justified also

school is preparation for work. kids dont get paid for being there but theyre punished if they decide not to go. i suppose its a bit like a pre-recruitment office, they take the money alloted to children by central and local government and use it to pay for their own staff and stuff. then they claim that the training they provide will prepare the kids for society and the workplace. any benefits the kids themselves think theyre getting from it that are not 'career' related are just side effects - things like making friends or having the odd teacher you actually like or even enjoying the lessons are just nice side effects, they arent the purpose of school and they arent universally enjoyed.

you dont have to register your kids for school though. you can opt out. theres plenty of other, better, exciting, inspiring, interesting, less inhumane, less mechanical, things that kids can find to do with their time.

School. At least with work you have the chance of doing something you enjoy.

Oh on the subject of school and education hear is an interesting article in the economist: http://www.economist.com/node/18741484?story_id=18741484

Arf, a blast from the past seeing you here! (Apologies for the derail)

couldnt resist the topic

I think such a comment is quite disrespectful towards art. If art was so easy to understand, we would be all watching the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, reading Shakespeare, listening to Bach, studying the paintings of Picasso and the Operas of Puccini. The reason everyone isn't is because art is complex and requires effort and time to master.

When it comes to creating -- never mind appreciating -- art, that's even harder. I do know that there are arts students who don't have much interest in art (film studies courses across Britain can attest to this), but the ones who do are some of the hardest working students i've met.

I find such an attitude for an anarchist to be ridiculous. Firstly, not everyone goes to university to improve their job prospects. In fact, such a view of university is a very conversative idea of what university should offer its students.

The reason I am going to university is because it allows me three years of relative freedom to study a subject I am interested in and want to learn more about (Politics). I am not going to university to get a job and I am already fed up of people, including my parents, criticising me for daring to want to learn rather than make money doing something I hate.

Of course, I realise that capitalism has increasingly marginalised universities and imposed economic pressures on them to produce skilled wage-slaves, but that doesn't mean I have to subscribe to this view of education. I know I will be in debt after I finish, and I will need to get money somewhere, but so fucking what? If every life decision was based on how much money I could make out of it, I would be living the life of a well heeled capitalist.

To be honest, if you took an arts course for any other reason than you were interested in art, you deserve everything you get.

I agree with everything here said. However to provide with side effects useful to analyse the main purposes and light the burden of the technical slave-training is worth the effort imo.

The Unschooling movement seem to be saying the right thing, but I want to read a few works written by their main ideologues to understand it better.

As long as the education system is the tool of the ruling class, I refuse to subject any future children to such horrors. I had the benefit of attending a Catholic school which is just your average state school peppered with a bit more dogma. Not being allowed to acknowledge Comic Relief because 1% or less of the money raised went to abortion clinics in Africa was a highlight.

Aflwydd, you're going to a right bummer when you find out some people do 'understand' Tarkovsky, Bach and Shakespeare but think it's a load of shite. Because horses for courses.

I'm yet to meet someone who has studied art and reached the conclusion that art is a load of shite, as one of the reasons that people study art is because they don't think it's a load of shite.

I've been on enough art forums and read enough art criticism to become aware of this. It's not a mythical elitist conspiracy to think Bach, Tarkovsky, and Shakespeare are great artists; it's as close to an objective view when it comes to art that there is.

There's a big difference between studying art and watching a film or reading a book and saying, "That's shit" without providing a good reason for such a dismissal.