Leave Them Kids Alone

It absolutely fascinates me that elementary schools and the like are so big on encouraging children to "be themselves". Not that this is bad advice, because trying to be someone ELSE always inevitably leads to being a complete twat, but because it's so much of a contradiction to everything else they try to pound into you during the primary years of education. Everyone has to do well in every single subject, or else they'll get held back* and have to do all that crap all over again,

See, there's no specialization in elementary school,** or even high school (in America at least). Every kid has to learn the same stuff, and are not allowed to choose the things THEY want to learn. Now obviously, there's some base knowledge that everyone needs, like basic math and reading, but there's a point where you should start focusing on the things that are important to you. Why force a kid who has absolutely no math skills to take a higher math course? He's not getting enough out of it to be worth the stress. Same thing with forcing someone who loves math and science to analyze the symbolism in a book. It isn't worth their time.

Forcing elemtary school kids to wear uniforms makes me vomit too. What does this accomplish? It doesn't benefit the kids, it mostly just makes them miserable. Yeah, let's stifle any individuality they might have had. They don't need to have identities, they're just kids! Yeah, turns out that kids aren't as rock-stupid as most adults think they are. They're ignorant at times, but they aren't stupid. Most of them anyway. And they really, really hate that you think they are.

*Which is just an incredibly good way to completely embarass and emasculate a kid.
**Unless you go to one of those hippie schools where all they do is talk about feelings all day. This would be fine if the real world were anything like that.