Criticism of schooling

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 at least the right that people can choose where and how they are educated. These attitudes criticize the learning atmosphere and environment of school and oppose the educational monopoly of school and 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; the related belief that the school environment often prevents learning rather than encouraging the innate natural curiosity by using unnatural extrinsic pressures like grades; or the conviction that schooling is used as a form of political or governmental control for the implementation of certain ideologies in the population. Another very persistent reason is that they think that school does not prepare children for the life outside of school 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.