Check it out at: SchoolSucksProject.com

About

As an educator, I’ve been very lucky. I have managed to completely avoid teaching in public school. However, I was trained to teach with public school teachers, my student teaching experience was in a public high school, and in private school, invisible forces burdened me with “state standards” (no matter how hard I tried to maneuver around them). When I left private school, the system followed me into private tutoring (grades, student apathy, etc…). I was once on track to be a certified public school teacher in Massachusetts, seeking the state permission slip required to read a Department of Education-approved script they called “history,” but I quickly changed course once I became aware of what I was getting into. I told myself that I could find other ways to teach, and I have. I hope you’ll find this show to be educational and helpful!

Ambition: The end of public/government-controlled education.

Contact me at brett@schoolsucksproject.com

“School Sucks? That’s very offensive!!”

Let me explain.
School sucks is perhaps the most common phrase students use to describe their feelings about public education. Yet this seemingly bitter and reductive slogan is actually quite clever, and perhaps the most accurate and astute synopsis of the system I’ve ever heard. Here’s why:

1. The twelve-year process of an American public education has a dramatic effect on the mind of a child. When we first enter school at age six, many of our best personal attributes are already in place. We are curious, innovative, unique and creative in ways that we will rarely be able to replicate throughout the rest of our lives. But over time, school sucks those essential attributes out of too many of us…and replaces them with predictability, obedience and indifference.

2. The public school system sucks off the productive capacity of hard-working people. In other words, whether public education succeeds or fails (spoiler alert: it fails) at providing real education to the public, the cost goes up every year.

For too long, this sentiment that “school sucks” has existed only as a silent thought, a quiet mumble or a scribble on a notebook. It’s time to project this idea out into the mainstream, and to show how true it actually is. The path towards solutions begins there.