Fascinating! While I did not have collective thoughts (outside of exposure to Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education” which showed me in lyric and video and song the general idea that school was overpowering and turned us into zombies or meat and that rebellion was possible (the scene where they threw all the desks outside and burned them if I remember it correctly), which I didn’t connect to myself)…
… 11 years old is approximately the time that I realized that teacher’s had little special knowledge:
The teacher was out for a few minutes and I walked up to her desk, curious about her “Teacher’s Edition” of the textbook.
It looked the same as ours, only slightly thicker.
When I peeked inside, it had EXACTLY the same text as ours, but with the addition of the answers to all of the questions they gave us. It had “helpful hints” on what to say to the class, and I saw in the text what she told us just a few minutes ago, in a book written by the same people that wrote ours.
Lightbulbs went off in my head when I realized the teachers only needed access to a *little* more knowledge than us in order to teach. Red text in her book told her what to say, and any one of US could easily take her place and read the same text she did.
She already had us grading and evaluating each other’s work a good amount of the time; picking up other people’s spelling errors or grammar mistakes was easier than picking up our own so it worked well.
It was a powerful sensation; they were bigger and older yes but mostly what they had was PHYSICAL ACCESS to extra knowledge we didn’t and they held that from us, feeding it to us in little bits and pieces on a schedule as shown to them in a book.
Yes, they had more than that as well, but that was my first inkling that it might be possible to be self-taught at my own pace as there was no secret to “being taught”; I liked learning, some other kids didn’t but had I been able to be self-paced in those subjects, all the teacher could contribute is “attaboys” and “good jobs”.
It wasn’t the kind of revolutionary that discovering AS Neil’s Summerhill and John Holt’s books at 13/14 was but it was a glimpse that hierarchy was rather arbitrary.