Hikikomori (or school refusal)

Hikikomori - that is a nice word.  What the hell does it mean?  Well if you look it up on Wikipedia you will find it is about the same thing as "School Refusal".

I read an article by Jenn Ashworth (a British Author) yesterday.  It was titled "Why I refused to go to school" and began with the sentence: "Who wants to be locked into a room with 30 people dressed just like them, to be startled by a bell every 35 minutes, to queue for lunch for 40 minutes and be made to stand outside in the cold twice a day?' Jenn Ashworth most definitely did not…"

It is worth a read and basically it is Jenn explaining her childhood and how she simply refused to go to school.  Jenn makes a perfectly understandable case for a child not wanting to go to school.  She compares schools with prisons (which she has worked in) and suggests no adult would volunteer for that.  She also revisited Larches House which was a place she was sent to try to "help" her get back into school.  The head teacher at Larches said "Phobics and refusers aren't lumped in with the naughty kids any more." and there lies the problem for me.

Although Jenn explains her reasons and understands why she didn't want to attend school she doesn't address the burning issue that when she was young she was regarded as "naughty".  This appalling culture, which professes to abhor bullying, repeatedly threatened her mother with prison if she didn't "make" her child go to school.  Bullying by proxy; The sophisticated way to do it.

Unfortunately the corollary of Jenn's missive is that when you finally understand what it is like to be another person their actions make sense and you drop the negative judgemental interpretation.  They used to shoot "cowards" who ran away from a battle in this country until they realised people were shell shocked.

Schools are state controlled indoctrination machines.  They are primarily inhuman and separate the child from the already dysfunctional nuclear family at an age that is shameful.  And they do it by law.  Any child who is acting as a healthy human being will resist school like a pig would an abattoir if it knew what it was.  Why do we criticise children for their creative perception and their deeply human understanding?  Why do we persist in perceiving children as somehow "wrong" when they show traits that we know in our hearts, we agree with?  Why do we have to "invent" mental conditions or illnesses (like ODD) to excuse the fundamentally "human" behaviour of children?  The sooner we stop complying with the cultural oppression by proxy the sooner the human race can get on with living in happy harmony with its environment.

A cautionary note to any parents reading this; Don't bully your children because you are afraid of what the state will do to you.  That makes you part of the hierarchy of oppression.  We rate people like Albert Einstein as super human and yet he hated school and explains why with good reason.  At the age of 7 he threw a chair at a teacher.  He said that schools are designed to stop people thinking, that conformity is the worst enemy of creativeness.  Why don't we actually listen to the people we regard as great.  But that goes for Christianity as well so what the hell;  Maybe we are a lost cause anyway so we might as well continue to rape the planet and abuse our children.