Lately I've been heavily contemplating my exit from society. I don't know what options Scripps offers, but I've been wanting more and more to find a legally-sanctioned way of not going to school. I heard somewhere that there's some thing where you get your week's homework every monday and you turn it in completed the next week, which would be nice, but it also might get awfully lonely. Here's my reasoning for this change:

1. Compulsory schooling is the basis for a culture (our culture) that is ruthless, feckless and greedy. It takes you at a young, impressionable age and teaches you to be subservient, defeatist office worker. It disrupts every natural learning process and basically puts cages around your mental abilities. Pick up a copy of Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto.

2. The pacing. I don't need to be pulled around by bells anymore. I wake up every morning at 5:50, which doesn't help my mood. The bleak, uncaring atmosphere and the regimentation of it all make it seem more like a penal facility than a place of learning. It's needlessly exhausting and is really taxing my mental health.

3. I want time to develop my personal interests, and in the process, myself. At this age, it is crucial to try and explore yourself, because you're finally able to make some semblance of the world and how you view it and the people in it now will effect your opinions for a long time. I know your personality is constantly changing and under attack throughout your entire life, but I can't afford to have eight or nine hours of my time as a child eaten up by this monster determined to break my spirit. I've recently discovered a love for film in myself that I never noticed before, and I'm considering a career as a director. Naturally I'd like to devote some time to exploring this option, but with so much homework I don't really have enough time to give the notion the treatment it deserves.

4. School was founded as a means of social programming. It is meant to make children obedient and submissive for easy control, even when they're adults. It is also designed to break existing family bonds. "If we use schooling to break children away from parents--and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schoos in 1850 - we're going to continue to have the horror show we have right now." (Gatto, 37)

5. The average mental capacity of a homeschooled child is five to ten years more advanced than that of one who has been publicly schooled. Consider that.

In a nutshell.