Part of our problem is that those twelve years of schooling are in large part an enormous wast of time, because very little of the true, the good, and the beautiful is learned there. School is the asylum where we send children whom we do not know what to do with otherwise. They learn no grammar there, very little history, no geography, very little of their language’s literary heritage. They get some math, but in a protracted and mind-dulling way, and some science, but very little of the world that is near their hands and eyes. Boys especially are bored to tears by it all, and then the remedy comes in the form of drugs, because they cannot pay attention to what is not worth attending to in the first place. … School as it is now constituted wastes even more than time: it wastes life itself. It drags out its days and years in weariness, conformity to the political insanity of the day, writing by formula and not by art, and reading mostly junk, the educational equivalent of styrofoam, soft pornography, and mass-produced French fries.
Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.141, 142
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