The Autistic Spectrum |
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and
Get a Real Life and Education ~ Grace Llewellyn
The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at
Home ~ Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer
Things We Wish We'd Known ~ Bill Waring and Diane Waring editors, with contributions by Michael Card
Writing Skills Activities for Special Children ~ Darlene Mannix
You Can Teach Your Child Successfully: Grades 4 to 8 ~Ruth Beechick
|
Most of us were not raised in an age where home schooling was considered 'acceptable'. We were told that you must get an education
and the best place for that is public school. Where the wise, helpful teachers are just waiting to guide us to higher education
and a promising career. Times have changed. Deciding to home school can be a very frightening decision. Especially if you
have a special needs child. Because of the 'conditioning' we've received, we're not sure we're up to the challenge of being
able to supply our child(ren)with the great education we think the public school system provides. This just isn't so.
One of the hot topics now (with those opposed to home schooling or those with no experience)is the lack of 'socialization'. I am SO tired of hearing about this. 'Socialization' is frowned upon in public school. When a child tries to socialize, they're punished for talking out of turn, bothering their peers, inappropriate behavior, etc. The "social interaction" that occurs at recess and lunch are the most unstructured, unsupervised and very worst times for AS children and a recipe for disaster. These are the times my son was punched, shoved, teased, bullied and threatened. All while an aide or teacher has been present or nearby. And when my son tried to get help from the teacher, he was told that if he tattled one more time, he would lose his recess. I was told by one of my son's teachers that the first half of the school semester is a review of the previous grade. The balance of the year is spent on introducing (very slowly) new things for the current grade. What this translates to me is that our children don't get a complete education. How could they? Back in the 1800's, when just about everyone was homeschooled, it was common for people to stop their education after 8th grade. Why? They learned everything they needed to know by the end of 8th grade! I have an excerpt from a test from the 1800's down below. Lots of adults couldn't pass it today. A teacher my friend spoke with said that if the public schools 'did it right' our children could easily be completed with all 12 grades by the age of 14. You don't have to spend thousands of dollars to get textbooks. And, unless your state mandates it, you do not have to use the same curriculum as your public school. There are a ton of websites on the net that offer lesson plans, worksheets, used textbooks,etc. You'll find some of them at this site. And you can have your child tested at any time by various independent testing agencies to see how your child is doing. One of the many advantages to homeschooling is that you can stay on a subject until your child 'gets it'. Not so in public school. In a class of 28, if the majority of the children are moving along with no problem, those that aren't up to speed get lost in the shuffle. It's a sink or swim mentality. Whether 100% of the class 'gets it' is irrelevant. When you homeschool, you can go over the problem areas for as long as it takes until your child understands and is ready to move on. Support groups and the internet are invaluable. If you decide to home school, it's a good idea to join a few groups and get input from the many wonderful people on these lists. We do 'eclectic' home schooling. We use the wonderful items I find on the internet, used books, books we have here in the house (which is a ton because I'm a 'book-a-holic') CD Rom programs, workbooks from the local "School Stuff" store and Sam's Club, etc. I'll be giving you some links for used curriculum as well as lesson plans, worksheets, etc. One problem we've encountered is space! There are books everywhere! But we can live with that. :) To avoid burnout, meltdowns and frustration, we take breaks. My son gets to watch tv, read, play a game, or listen to music. Breaks usually last about 15 minutes. Also, because Steven was on an IEP with modifications, I do modify some of his work so that he doesn't become completely overwhelmed like he did at public school. You may be unpleasantly surprised when your child won't listen to you. After all, s/he is at home. It's play time! It took us a while to get into a routine but we managed it. We do still have our moments, of course. ;) You must find what is comfortable for you and your child(ren). The nice thing is, there's no time crunch. If you find one way doesn't work, ease into another mode until you find the right mix. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination. Many unschoolers know that there's something to learn at every turn ~ in a store, in the park, in the car, on vacation........ Home schoolers are in good company. Here are just a few famous people who were homeschooled or privately tutored: Albert Einstein, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, C. S. Lewis, Alexander Hamilton, Albert Schweitzer, James Madison, Noel Coward, George Rogers Clark, Abigail Adams, Winston Churchill, John Quincy Adams, Hans Christian Andersen, George Washington, Andrew Wyeth, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt, Claude Monet, Andrew Carnegie, Abraham Lincoln, Agatha Christie, Wolfgang Mozart, George Patton, Charles Dickens , Mark Twain, and Orville & Wilbur Wright to name just a few. The most important thing to remember is that no one knows your child(ren)the way you do. No one knows the way s/he learns like you do. And no one realizes just how important it is to mix learning with fun, love and humor like you do. :) Added note: My son graduated home school/high school with a B average in August of this year (2008). :) *****************************
***************************** If our children are forced into a mold, will they still be
unique? ***************************** How
is Achievement Assessed in Diagnosis of Learning Disabilities? Achievement
testing is an important part of assessment of potential learning disabilities. This achievement testing is typically conducted in a one-on-one assessment
session using a standardized test. What is a Standardized Achievement Test? Standardized achievement
tests may assess any or all of reading, math, and written language as well as subject areas such as science and social studies.
These tests are available to assess all grade levels and through adulthood. The test procedures are highly structured so that
the testing process is the same for all students who take it. How
are Standardized Achievement Tests Scored? Students'
answers are analyzed and scored according to specific guidelines required by the test publisher. The results are calculated
into a raw score. Raw scores are converted into standard scores using appropriate tables for a child's age, and in some cases, time
of school year. The resulting standard scores provide data to compare the student's abilities to others his or her age. Scores
are interpreted using terms such as average, above average, and below average. How
are Achievment Test Results Used? Achievement
tests are used to determine a student's academic strengths and weaknesses. When compared to intelligence test scores, achievement scores tell whether or not a child has the severe
difference in ability and performance that indicates a learning disability. These scores also provide important information to help develop the
child's individual education program. |
What is homeschooling?
Homeschooling refers to the education of children, typically at
home, by their parents or other guardians. This is almost always at the familys expense. Given its non-institutional nature,
homeschooling naturally lends itself to a variety of philosophies and approaches.
[For e-mail updates about homeschooling and other education options,
please click here to sign up for our newsletters and alerts.]
Will homeschooling work for my child?
No one answer fits the educational needs of all children. Yet, a
growing number of families willing to dedicate the time and resources required by home-based education find it an effective
way to educate their children. Homeschooling, however, requires a significant personal commitment by parents and guardians:
Its not a part-time job.
Serious research assessing homeschooling was relatively sparse until
recent years, but its now finding encouraging results. A 1999 study by Lawrence M. Rudner, published by Education Policy Analysis
Archives, found exceptionally high scores among 20,760 homeschooled students who took standardized achievement tests.
How widespread is homeschooling?
Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, though some jurisdictions
impose greater regulatory hurdles on it than others. In 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics estimated that
850,000 students were being homeschooled across the United States. That estimate may be low. Education Week, a publication
covering K-12 education issues, says that "[t]he consensus among those who study home schooling is that at least 1 million
U.S. children were educated at home in 1999."
Doesnt homeschooling isolate children?
Homeschooling families specifically find ways to give their children
social opportunities. Some public schools cooperate in this, allowing homeschooled children to participate in extracurricular
activities. In some areas where homeschooling is especially popular, such as parts of Texas, students form their own clubs.
There, homeschoolers sports teams even compete against teams from traditional public schools.
Some researchers who have studied homeschooled children as they
grow into adults find them to be creative, self-reliant and focused. Dr. J. Gary Knowles, of the University of Toronto, says
They're able to move into adulthood with a much better sense of self and have a very good sense as to what they want to do."
How does homeschooling work?
This is perhaps the most difficult question. Families that teach
their children at home use such a wide variety of approaches and philosophies of education that its hard to say exactly how
homeschooling is accomplished.
These are the main approaches:
What help can homeschoolers get?
Parents can buy lesson plans in all areas of study from organizations,
schools and private companies.
Support groups offer advice and sample lessons reflecting a variety
of philosophies.
For homeschooling families dealing with restrictive regulations,
or based in jurisdictions that frown on home-based learning, legal assistance is available from groups, including the Home
School Legal Defense Association.
What does homeschooling usually cost?
The cost depends largely on the approach taken by parents and guardians.
Purchasing lesson plans or hiring tutors rapidly can elevate costs. By contrast, forming cooperatives and making use of public
libraries and Internet-based resources may keep expenses down.
As an example: A January 16, 2003 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article
on homeschooling in Georgia mentions that one family, with five daughters learning at home, spends at least $2,000 annually
on homeschooling expenses such as training sessions, teaching materials and extracurricular activities.
An indirect cost may be the drop in household income if a parent
gives up a job or starts to work only part-time to stay at home and become a home-based teacher.
*****
Best and Worst States for Homeschoolers
Homeschoolers Look for Autonomy from Regulators Considering homeschooling? You might want to relocate to Alaska, Michigan, Idaho, Texas or Oklahoma. These states, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) have legal environments relatively friendly to homeschooling. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New York, North Dakota and Pennsylvania, on the other hand, impose some of the most restrictive laws on homeschooling families, according to the HSLDA. An important criterion for a states homeschool friendliness, according
to Ian Slatter , HSLDA Director of Media Relations, is the degree to which the state regulates homeschool families. As Mr.
Slatter explains it, [We see] homeschooling as the ultimate school choice. To protect that choice, the HSLDA believes
that homeschooling families must have as much autonomy as possible.
Homeschool performance doesnt change between students in the easy
states and those in the difficult ones. Theres a lot of regulation and work placed on parents in the difficult states with
no benefit.
--Ian Slatter, Director of Media Relations
Home School Legal Defense Association Least Restrictive States:
Alaska
Idaho Illinois Indiana Michigan Missouri New Jersey Oklahoma Texas Most Restrictive States:
Maine Massachusetts Minnesota New York North Dakota Pennsylvania Rhode Island Utah Vermont Washington West Virginia Of the top-rated homeschooling states, Alaska, requires no contact
between the homeschooling family and the government. Other similarly rated states require minimal contact. Some, for instance,
merely require parents who seek to homeschool to notify the superintendent or the Department of Education. In these states,
very little regulatory burden is placed on homeschool families; by and large, they are free to educate their children as they
see fit.
In low-ranked states, significant government regulation burdens
homeschooling families. These states require homeschooling families to submit portfolios of student work regularly, take standardized
tests or be otherwise evaluated by the public school system a system that often views homeschooling as competition. Furthermore,
some states, including Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have no statewide system of regulation. Instead, homeschoolers are at
the mercy of regulations imposed by their local school districts. In these states, conditions for homeschooling are inconsistent,
with families treated very well in one district but overburdened by regulations in the neighboring district.
For the Home School Legal Defense Associations information of state
regulation of homeschooling, click here.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Questioning whether it's a good idea to homeschool? Please read these articles.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~* Thousands leaving public school behind ~ By Linda B. Blackford HERALD-LEADER EDUCATION WRITER Judy Mortkowitz, a longtime public school teacher, didn't plan on home schooling her children. She was asked to -- by a Fayette County school official who said her oldest son, Jody, was having trouble in middle
school. Was it bad grades or fighting? she asked. No. The problem was that her son asked teachers questions they couldn't
answer and made them cry. Would she consider home schooling him instead? Mortkowitz would and did. Jody, 25, went to college and is now a successful freelance author and artist. Now, Judy Mortkowitz is home schooling her two younger children and seeing more and more parents join her ranks,
parents who are dissatisfied with traditional schools and want to strike out on their own. In the past year alone, the number of home-schooled students in Kentucky has surged to 12,491, a 21 percent increase
from 1999. "I think more and more people are hearing about it, and home schoolers grow up and turn out well, winning national
academic competitions on a fairly regular basis,'' said Michael Fogler, a Lexington musician and writer who has home schooled
his 13-year-old son for eight years. But the home-schooling boom in Kentucky may reignite the debate over whether home schools need some kind of oversight
to make sure home school is about school and not about dodging truancy charges. Unlike surrounding states, Kentucky has very lax laws regarding home schools, requiring little more of parents
than registering their children and opening their paperwork to state officials if needed. "It's terrible, and it's worse where we come from,'' said state Rep. Barbara Colter, R-Manchester, who tried to
pass home-school legislation in 1998. "I'm not worried about the good home schools, but we are one of the only states that
allows anybody or anything to educate a child. If the mother can't read, how can she teach?'' Reasons behind the boom Parents give a variety of reasons for choosing to teach their kids at home. "We want our children to explore and grow, we want them to know how to think and not what to think, and we can
do that with home schooling,'' Mortkowitz said. Fogler wanted a more flexible atmosphere for his son. "It was sort of to get away from the grading, ranking, tracking and competing that go on in schools,'' he said.
"I wanted to see how it would work to let the child point to his interests and follow that a little more. I think there's
a lot of cases of personalities who just don't fit well the school model, sitting still at a desk.'' Julie Ervin of Paris wanted her four sons to have a more religious education than they could get in public schools,
and Catholic schools were beyond the family's budget. The older boys now work from correspondence classes, and Ervin and her husband monitor their progress year by year
to make sure they want to continue. The boys work for four hours a day, then go to activities like piano lessons or 4-H meetings.
"We really like what we're seeing with their progress,'' she said. Untold numbers The number of home-school students now make up about 2 percent of Kentucky's school population, but that figure
might be even higher. Home-school numbers are reported by local school districts, which keep records of students who leave
public school to be educated privately or at home. So if a student has never enrolled in public or private schools, a district
won't know the student exists. The number of home schools has also jumped around the nation. In 1994, the federal government estimated the number
of students at 345,000; by 1999, it was 850,000. But the Home School Legal Defense Association in Purcellville, Va., puts
it closer to 1.5 million home-schooled students nationwide. Louie Hammons, director of pupil personnel for Garrard County, says the increased interest in home schools means
more parents are interested in doing it the right way. But there are still parents who use home school as an excuse to dodge
truancy charges, and there are people who offer to home school their children without ever having finished themselves. "There are good home schools, and there are people who abuse it,'' he said. In 1998, legislators attempted to pass laws that would require more oversight of home schools, like testing home-school
students annually -- but they were defeated by the perceived political might of several statewide Christian and home-schooling
groups. Colter, who battled the home-school groups in 1998, says she's preparing a new bill for the 2002 session that will
try to curb abuses. Her bill would require home-school students to be tested and registered, as well as make sure the educator
is educated. The two largest home-school groups, the Christian Home Educators of Kentucky and the Kentucky Home Educator Association,
have consistently opposed any attempts to regulate home schools. But in 1997, the two groups agreed to work with local districts on a set of "best practices'' to identify problem
home schools. For example, if a parent decided to start home schooling his or her child the day before the child was brought
up on truancy charges, then the groups agreed that a director of pupil personnel should check that home school, even though
that's not standard practice. Nearby states, like Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia, have some requirements for home-school teachers; although
in some states, it's only a GED. Twenty-six states nationwide require regular testing of home-school students. Parents like Fogler say they understand there are abuses in home schooling, but they think regulation attempts
will lead to too much interference from the state. "The problem is then they'll have some kind of notion about what we're supposed to do about education,'' Fogler
said. "The education level of the parents doesn't make any difference -- what does make a difference is that the parent is
thoughtful and serious about home schooling.'' Published Saturday, August 25, 2001, in the Herald-Leader ******************************************************************** The new home schoolers aren't hermits. They are diverse parents who are getting results--and putting the heat on
public schools. BY JOHN CLOUD AND JODIE MORSE Earlier this month, J.C. Penney learned the hard way just how powerful the home-schooling movement has become.
Penney's had recently started selling a T shirt that wickedly crystallized many people's assumptions about the movement: HOME
SKOOLED, giggles the shirt, which also depicts a trailer home. The folks at Penney's say they meant no harm--they didn't even
design the T, which had become popular in other stores first. But they yanked it from the shelves Aug. 8 after enraged missives
poured in from home-schooling families, some of whom threatened a boycott. Penney's should have known better. Over the past decade, the ranks of families home schooling have grown dramatically.
According to a new federal report, at least 850,000 students were learning at home in 1999, the most recent year studied;
some experts believe the figure is actually twice that. As recently as 1994, the government estimated the number at just 345,000.
True, even the largest estimates still put the home schooled at only 4% of the total K-12 population--but that would mean
more kids learn at home than attend all the public schools in Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota,
Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming combined. While politicians from Washington on down to your school board have been warring over charter schools and vouchers
in recent years, home schooling has quietly outpaced both of those more attention-getting reforms (only half a million kids
are in charter schools, and just 65,000 receive vouchers). In many ways, in fact, home schooling has become a threat to the
very notion of public education. In some school districts, so many parents are pulling their children out to teach them at
home that the districts are bleeding millions of dollars in per-pupil funding. Aside from money, the drain of families is
eroding something more precious: public confidence in the schools. Thomas Jefferson and the other early American crusaders for public education believed the schools would help sustain
democracy by bringing everyone together to share values and learn a common history. In the little red brick schoolhouse, we
would pursue both "democracy in education and education in democracy," as Stanford historian David Tyack gracefully puts it.
Home schooling forsakes all that by defining education not as the pursuit of an entire community but as the work of one family
and its chosen circle. Which can be great. Despite some drawbacks, there are signs that home-schooling parents are doing a
better job than public schools at teaching their kids. But as the number of kids learning at home grows, we should pause to
wonder: Better at teaching them what? Home schooling may turn out better students, but does it create better citizens? To see how home schooling threatens public schools, look at Maricopa County, Ariz. The county has approximately
7,000 home-schooled students. That's only 1.4% of school-age kids, but it means $35 million less for the county in per-pupil
funding. The state of Florida has 41,128 children (1.7%) learning at home this year, up from 10,039 in the 1991-92 school
year; those kids represent a loss of nearly $130 million from school budgets in that state. Of course the schools have fewer
children to teach, so it makes sense that they wouldn't get as much money, but the districts lose much more than cash. "Home
schooling is a social threat to public education," says Chris Lubienski, who teaches at Iowa State University's college of
education. "It is taking some of the most affluent and articulate parents out of the system. These are the parents who know
how to get things done with administrators." To be sure, many public schools--and their baleful unions and wretched bureaucrats, their rigid rules and we-know-best
manner--have done a lot to hurt themselves. But as the most committed parents leave, the schools may falter more, giving the
larger community yet another reason to fret over their condition. "A third of our support for schools comes from property
taxes," says Ray Simon, director of the Arkansas department of education. "If a large number of a community's parents do not
fully believe in the school system, it gets more difficult to pass those property taxes. And that directly impacts the schools'
ability to operate." Says Kellar Noggle, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators: "We
still have 440,000 kids in public schools, and some 12,000 [in home schooling] is a small number. But those 12,000 have parents
and grandparents. Sure, it erodes public support." The thus far steep growth of home schooling does have limits, as it takes a galactic commitment of time and money
and patience for a parent to spend all day, every day, relearning algebra (or getting it for the first time) and then teaching
it. It's fair to assume that a majority of parents won't want to give up those delightfully quiet hours when the kids are
at school. The softening economy may also begin to thin the ranks of home schoolers, many of whom are middle-class families
that can't afford private schools; if stay-at-home teaching parents have to take a job, free public school will start to look
very inviting. But for now, home schooling is still growing at about 11% a year, and it's no longer confined to a conservative
fringe that never believed in the idea of public education anyway. "Very different people are entering home schooling than
did 20 years back," says Mitchell Stevens, author of Kingdom of Children, a history of home schooling to be published next
month by Princeton University Press. According to the Federal Government, up to three-quarters of the families that home school
today say they do so primarily because, like so many of us, they are worried about the quality of their children's education.
A recent report by the state of Florida found that just a quarter of families in that state practice home schooling for religious
reasons. The new home schoolers haven't completely given up on public education, at least not the idea of it. "The problem
is that schools have abandoned their mission," says Luigi Manca, a communications professor at Benedictine University in Lisle,
Ill., who home schools his daughter Nora, 17. "They've forgotten about educating." William Bennett used to be the U.S. Secretary of Education, but today he travels the nation to preach the home-school
gospel. "I'm here to talk about the revolution of common sense," he told a Denver home-schooling conference in June. Working
himself up to promote K12, his slick, new, for-profit online school for home schoolers, Bennett even suggested that "maybe
we should subcontract all of public education to home schoolers." It was strange to watch a man once responsible for federal
aid to public schools urge people to desert them. Imagine if Colin Powell gave a speech saying we should disband the U.S.
Army and assemble local militias. But many are following. They are folks like Tim and Lisa Dean of Columbia, Md., working parents (he manages technical
support for the U.S. Senate; she's a part-time attorney) who home school Bitsy, 5, and Teddy, 4. Contrary to the old picture
of home schoolers, Tim doesn't leave all the teaching to his wife, and they helped start a home-school support group two years
ago that includes parents who are gay and straight; black, white, Asian American and biracial; Democrat and Republican. The conservative Christians who worked so hard in the 1980s to make home schooling legal in every state are as
committed as ever, but more politically moderate Christians have also joined the movement. Susie Capraro, who home schools
her son and daughter, used to be part of the Broward County Parent Support Group, the largest home-schooling network in Florida
and one founded on Judeo-Christian principles. Although she considers herself a Fundamentalist Christian, Capraro didn't like
group rules that keep non-Christians from leadership roles--or other exclusionary gestures, like the ice skating event that
featured only Christian music. "We wanted a place where people could get the support they needed without the religion," says
Capraro, who along with 10 families co-founded Home Educators Lending Parents Support. "[Religion is] not the purpose of our
group, but rather to get together for the best education." Today the three-year-old organization includes more than 150 families
representing Evangelicals as well as Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and others. For this story, TIME reporters interviewed more than 70 home-schooling parents around the U.S. to find the new
faces of the movement, including a biology professor at Spelman College; a midwife and artist in Canton, Ga.; an attorney
and part-time basketball coach in Houston; an Arkansas state legislator; and Leo Damrosch, a Harvard English professor who
began home schooling his sons, 10 and 13, in part because "the two writers I've studied most intensively for many years, William
Blake and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were both geniuses of astounding originality, and neither of them went to school for a single
day." Many of the home-schooling parents we met were religious, but few were home schooling only to instill values. They
had come to their decision after a variety of frustrations. Among them: the Fayetteville, Ga., school with 45 kindergartners
in one room; the school administrators in Wheaton, Ill., who were so confused over what to do with Sue McCallum's boy that
they put him in both remedial and gifted classes; the Glendale, Calif., school where Robert Phillipps' fifth-grader Bill saw
too many fistfights. These parents got fed up in different ways, but what they have in common is a willingness to sacrifice--money,
career opportunities, watching soap operas--for their children's education. Sometimes these sacrifices are small, like giving
up a dining room to make a classroom. But consider the Carnells of Columbia, Md., who started home schooling Erin, 6, because
a shoulder injury required occupational therapy that would have interfered with school hours. The Carnells decided to keep
teaching her at home because they feel they can do a better job than local schools. To teach her math and science in the mornings,
Fred, a government cartographer, works the office graveyard shift, which means he and his wife Debbie, a claims adjuster,
hardly see each other. The family rarely eats dinner together, and the parents are constantly exhausted. Says Debbie: "I have
my schedule down to the hour on an Excel work sheet." Erin will doubtless benefit educationally from her parents' exertions. But imagine what American public education
would look like if parents who currently home school flooded their local schools with all that mighty dedication instead.
One doesn't diminish a home-schooling parent's sacrifice for his child to note that he may also be abdicating some of his
responsibilities to his community. "In a home school, a parent can really insulate a child from the vibrant, pluralistic,
democratic world," says Rob Reich, who teaches political science at Stanford. Susanne Allen, 35, a home-schooling mother from
Atlanta, claims her children will be "better citizens" because home schooling gives them the opportunity to work together,
rather than sitting at individual desks. "They learn to be caring for other people by seeing an older sibling care for them,"
she says. But will that make them better citizens or just better siblings? Then again, if a parent lives in, say, California, where 30 kids pack the average third-grade classroom, who can
blame her for home schooling? If it's a choice between being good to one's family or good to one's community, it's not much
of a choice at all. Many, of course, try to be both, but some parents say the schools are too far gone. Amy Langley, who home
schools her son and daughter in Decatur, Ga., believes two-income families don't participate enough to make public schools
work. "And too much class time is spent on discipline," she says. For all that home-schooling parents give up, what are their kids getting? We know the average SAT score for home
schoolers in 2000 was 1100, compared with 1019 for the general population. And a large study by University of Maryland education
researcher Lawrence Rudner showed that the average home schooler scored in the 75th percentile on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills;
the 50th percentile marked the national average. But not all home schoolers take standardized tests, and one suspects the
better students are the ones volunteering to do so. It's also difficult to assess how a child who is home schooled would have
done in a traditional school. Because of the paucity of research, no one can say much more than this: home schooling seems
to require the same formula for success as parenting, which is to say, it can work when the parents are loving and open-minded
and dedicated. As Simon of the Arkansas department of education says, "You've got examples of very well-structured home schools
and total disasters, just like you do in the public schools." Certainly the old suspicion of the academic credentials of home-schooled kids has waned; perhaps three-quarters
of universities now have policies for dealing with home-schooled applicants, according to Cafi Cohen, author of The Homeschoolers'
College Admissions Handbook. Today Harvard admissions officers attend home-schooling conferences looking for applicants, and
Rice and Stanford admit home schoolers at rates equal to or higher than those for public schoolers. These schools compete
for students like L.J. Decker, 17, from Katy, Texas, who scored 1560 on the SAT and was part of a team of home schoolers who
won the Toshiba ExploraVision contest for their idea of a futuristic scuba device that would use artificial hemoglobin to
convert the oxygen in water into air. Some colleges, like Kennesaw State University in Georgia, aggressively recruit home schoolers. Justin Tomczak,
22, now a sales associate for Salomon Smith Barney, was one of them. After he arrived at Kennesaw several years ago, he started
a group for home-schooled kids, but today home schoolers have become so integrated into campus life that the group has pretty
much disbanded. "Back then, [other students] thought we were religious weirdos who couldn't cope," he says. "Now the perception
is totally different." That's partly because the old canard that home schoolers are hermits has largely been disproven. In fact nearly
1 in 5 takes at least one class in a public or private school, according to the Federal Government. Home schoolers participate
in extracurricular activities too. Many of the home-schooling parents interviewed by TIME were just as busy as any parents
scheduling baseball practices and ballet classes. Judi Thomas of Marietta, Ga., says her daughter Juliet, 9, "has tap and
ballet on Tuesdays; Wednesdays, there's choir; Thursdays, she has classes with other home schoolers; Fridays, there's usually
a play date or a field trip." Home schooling's successes didn't come easily, though the practice is actually an old tradition. In the early years
of this country, most children were educated at home, either by parents or tutors. Public education started in the middle
of the 19th century. When, in the 1960s, a leftist education reformer named John Holt began pushing home schooling as an alternative
to conformist public schools, his ideas were seen as fringe. Home schooling was illegal in many states until the 1980s and
'90s, when well-organized evangelical Christians adopted home schooling as a way to escape what they saw as the creeping disorder
of the campus. Today home schoolers run one of the most effective lobbies in Washington, with connections all the way to the White
House, where the President recently hosted a reception for home-schooled students. Bush's Under Secretary for Education Eugene
Hickok told Time that "we cannot blame people for exercising their choices and home schooling until we have some real changes
out there." Despite its growing acceptance, there are nagging shortcomings to home schooling. If you spend time with home schoolers,
you get a sense that some of them have missed out on whole swaths of childhood; the admirable efforts by their parents to
ensure their education and safety sometimes seem to have gone too far. In 1992 psychotherapist Larry Shyers did a study while
at the University of Florida in which he closely examined the behavior of 35 home schoolers and 35 public schoolers. He found
that home schoolers were generally more patient and less competitive. They tended to introduce themselves to one another more;
they didn't fight as much. And the home schoolers were much more prone to exchange addresses and phone numbers. In short,
they behaved like miniature adults. Which is great, unless you believe that kids should be kids before they are adults. John McCallum, 20, of Wheaton,
Ill., began learning at home after fourth grade. On the whole, he valued the experience. But if he could change anything about
his teen years, he would want more interaction with people his age. "I don't date, and that's something I attribute to home
schooling," he says. Or consider Rachel Ahern, 21, of Grand Junction, Colo., who never set foot in a classroom until she went
to Harvard at 18. As a child, she socialized with older kids and adults at church and in music classes at a nearby college.
"I never once experienced peer pressure," she says. But is that a good thing? Megan Wallace of Atlanta says if she had gone
to high school, "I would have gotten into so much trouble." One could argue that kids need to get into a certain amount of
trouble to learn how to handle temptations and their consequences. "Home schoolers are often very astute," says Richard Shaw, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale. "But they
often have to learn how to live with others." Even the new home-schooling parents, who are keenly aware of this problem and
try to ensure their children interact with others, sometimes miss the point. Half a dozen families told TIME that the only
aspect of school their kids say they miss is riding the bus. So some of them have arranged for their children to have their
own private rides on a school bus. But the singular experience of going to school with other kids on the bus--which is at
once terrifying and liberating--can't be mimicked in private. The same blinkered approach can extend to academics. "I make pretty much all the decisions about what to study,"
says Maren McKee, 15, of Naperville, Ill., who left public school after third grade. "I wasn't interested in math or composition,
so I didn't really do it. I liked to dance." But now McKee, who is dyslexic, realizes she will need more than dance steps
to get into college. "My mom and I are going to spend this whole year on math and learning to write," she says, perhaps not
fully appreciating that both of those skills can take much longer than a year to learn. Brie Finegold, 22, a graduate of the University of North Texas, says she did fine without the traditional classroom.
"I got to do volunteer work at the food bank at my synagogue and apprentice to a dance company when I was a teenager, when
others my age were sitting in classrooms," she says. But volunteering and dancing aren't necessarily better than chemistry
and poetry. The basic function of a liberal education is to expose people to fields they normally wouldn't investigate. Whether
you believe the purpose of education is to shape one's character in a democracy or to prepare Johnny for his job, neither
is accomplished when kids get to study only what they want. But what if your educational goals are simpler? Skeet Savage, mother of six in Covert, Mich., argues that "graduation
isn't the ultimate goal for my children. Learning is." There's a little tributary that runs off the home-schooling river called
unschooling that espouses such ideas. About 7% of home schoolers today describe themselves as using no particular curricular
plan, according to the National Home Education Research Institute. Not all these people would embrace the term unschooling,
which sounds so anti-intellectual, but many of them follow the path of no paths, allowing their children to pursue their own
interests. The idea is that kids learn best when they determine what to study and when. "I tried to bring the classroom into
the home but quickly discovered that wasn't the best way to bring out the strengths in my children," says Savage, whose children
are 15 to 28. Instead, she practices what she calls "natural home schooling," using real-life projects as teaching opportunities:
caring for animals on the family farm, building an addition on the house, designing graphics for the family company (which
publishes Christian home-schooling material). Of her three children over 18, none has gone to college. Of course, unschooling lies at an extreme. Home-schooling families fall along a continuum between copying the traditional
classroom and "learning" by building Mommy and Daddy a lovely cedar deck. The success of the venture may depend more on the
parents than the kids. If they are like Marilyn and Gene McGinnis of Atlanta, devout Mennonites who nonetheless make a conscious
effort to teach their children about other cultures and religions, home schooling can broaden and enrich children's minds
as much as any schooling. Home schooling also works when parents are like the Deckers in Katy, Texas, parents of five, who
were humble enough to get help from another home-schooling parent for a child of theirs who was struggling with spelling.
"You have to feel like you're on a mission," says Ronnie Palache, who pulled Spencer, 9, from fourth grade in Tarzana,
Calif., because the boy was bored and unchallenged but also has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. "I wake up every
morning saying two things to myself: 'I'm on a mission to have Spencer turn out O.K.' and 'I have to live outside the box.'"
And even then maybe it's not enough. Robert Phillipps of Glendale, Calif., began home schooling Bill, 15, and Denise,
11, four years ago. He works hard at it and carefully tracks what his kids are learning. But he can't provide an art class
at home even though Denise likes to sketch, and ice skating three days a week has to count for PE. The kids read great books,
but they have no one outside the family with whom to discuss them during class. As Phillipps says, "There is no one to hide
behind. What you do is yours." But if home schooling is flawed, and our public schools are weathered, some believe there's a way to improve both
by reinvesting home schoolers in their communities and making public schools more nimble. A few school districts are showing
the way. In some states, including California and Texas, school districts now allow home-schooled kids to sign up for such
offerings as a physics class or the football team. A growing number of districts are opening resource centers where home schoolers
come for class once or twice a week. In Orange County, Calif., two school districts have combined two reform ideas by opening
charter schools that offer home-schooling programs. This cooperation is largely motivated by self-interest--many schools can regain at least a percentage of their
per-pupil funding by counting home schoolers, who get more options without being fully part of the system. "These programs
can win parents back when they see the school is willing to offer alternative forms of education," says Patricia Lines, a
senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and one of the foremost experts on home schooling. "There's something
very efficient about [traditional] schooling, and home schooling isn't exactly efficient." That's one reason Time found so
many home schoolers who had formed de facto "schools" that offer science labs and basketball teams. But this healthy synergy would require both public school administrators and home schoolers to stop being so suspicious
one another. That may take years. Too many public school administrators silently agree with what Wayne Johnson, president
of the California Teachers Association, says in objecting to any public expenditure on home schoolers: "Putting money into
home schooling is throwing money down a rathole. You have no idea if that money is being spent properly or children are benefiting."
For their part, many home schoolers take the hard line of the movement's leading advocacy group, the Home School
Legal Defense Association. It avoids representing home schoolers who are trying to get access to public school services that
their taxes help fund. Many home schoolers feel that exposes the movement to too much government interference. "We are really
afraid," says James Carper, an education historian at the University of South Carolina, who home schools. "When public schools
extend the opportunity to become involved, it is inevitably going to compromise our independence." But newer apostles of home schooling like William Bennett believe the future holds more cooperation. He says school
administrators will work to develop a "Chinese-menu-style education," for instance, that allows home schoolers to have a math
class here and a band course there without buying the whole K-12 puu-puu platter. On the other hand, it remains to be seen
whether public schools can still play a vital role in communities if they become simply another consumer good pushed by market
forces and not a common good that transcends them. August 27, 2001 Vol. 158 No. 8 - Time Magazine ******************************************************************** http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/articles/vol6iss1/schoolprison.html By John Taylor Gatto It was on such a fruitless mission in April that I paused
on the A&E channel long enough to hear that a documentary about cults was in the offing. If I watched the thing, I was
promised I would learn the six secret principles of cults, how to enslave the human mind beyond its power to escape, how to
imprison the spirit, bending it to the discipline of the cult. Hey, my wife wasn't around, sounded "educational" to me. And, the television intoned in order, a cult controls its
victims' time and environment (by this time I was sitting up with pen and pad taking notes), creates fear and dependency,
suppresses old customs, instills new beliefs, and allows no criticism. "But, but," I heard my conscience sputtering, "that's
the perfect formula for a government school." School was structured to be an expression of cult discipline! School was a cult,
not unlike the murder cult Princess Grace ended her days on earth a member of, or the legendary Thuggee in British India which
worshipped Kali, the Destroyer! Prison, as we have evolved it following British and Hindu
models, seeks to impose the same discipline on its serious recruits, breaking them to an understanding of their own profound
worthlessness. It should be no secret to anyone reading this that in America, the land of the free, more people are imprisoned,
by far, than in any nation past or present, including Communist China or Stalin's Soviet Union. Prison in America is a booming
business, incarcerating about five times the percentage of our population who were jailed in the middle of the Great Depression.
Some fiendish spirit is loose in our land whose bleak heart can only be plumbed by seeing the correspondences among cults,
prisons, and schools. The structures in which students are confined along with their
certified handlers long ago exceeded any human scale, they are megalithic constructions designed to emphasize the insignificance
of the indwelling population, and the stark power of their invisible masters. Yet both the anonymity of the operatives and
the inhumanity of the architecture have a subtler side, too, a side which can only be appreciated when you realize that its
purpose is to make us childish. Before you begin to blame the childish for being that way
and join the chorus of those defending the general imprisonment of adults and the schooling by force of children because there
isn't any other way to handle the mob, you want to at least consider the possibility that we've been trained in childishness
and helplessness for a reason. And that reason is that helpless people are easy to manage. Helpless people can be counted
upon to act as their own jailers because they are so inadequate to complex reality they are afraid of new experience. They're
like animals whose spirits have been broken. Helpless people take orders well, they don't have minds of their own, they are
predictable, they won't surprise corporations or governments with resistance to the newest product craze, the newest genetic
patent -- or by armed revolution. Helpless people can be counted on to despise independent citizens and hence they act as
a fifth column in opposition to social change in the direction of personal sovereignty. Some kids become too wordlessly angry at this deal to conform
to the patterns laid down in 12 years of forced training; for these a graduate school or schools are created; for most it
is the school of poverty and marginalization; for some, the school called jail. Jail is a place where the bare bones of forced
schooling become exposed and highlighted: Both school and prison are high security institutions, cut
off from the general society. The possibilities of learning in either place are so strictly limited that only a few survive
this training intact. Both make us helpless to direct our own lives. Prison is only a more stringent refresher course for
angry and confused souls who retain some notion of personal independence, however warped or grotesque the natural impulse
has become. Corporate culture has become a resonator of low-level fearfulness
to such an extent that we gladly throw huge numbers of our fellow human beings in jail, just as we abandon our children to
penal institutionalization in schools; the constant presentation of prison as our salvation, or school as the essential trainer
of children, makes us all prisoners. It corrupts our inner life, it divides us from one another so that relationships lifelong
are thin and shallow. School teaches us to divorce one another, to put aside loyalty for advantage, to quell our inner voices,
subordinating them to management. The people who inflict these things on the rest of us are
insane, however normal their words and countenances appear. Hard as that is to believe, you must remember that this nation
became rich, powerful, and the free-est place in civilized human history without any forced schooling-or prisons-to speak
of. In spite of their neat suits, white shirts, and calm ways of speaking, the folks who build and maintain forced institutional
schooling-as well as professionalized institutional mass incorporation-are insane, sick people cut off from human understanding,
cut off from the hopes and dreams of ordinary humanity. School also trains us to accept a gigantic government with
multiple police forces whose need is to control all significant decisions, even in private lives. The monstrous government
with its comprehensive surveillance, its theft of your money, its ability to confine those who resist indoctrination, is the
perfect mirror imitation of a command economy where "work" is mostly defined in corporate boardrooms, where the wishes and
plans of a few CEOs and their families are imposed on the lives of all. These are the new nobility, bidding fair over the
past several decades to extend their rule over the entire planet. Welcome to the American empire which has replaced both Republican
and Democratic forbears. I don't think so, but the road away from it will be long and
difficult. There is no mechanism in existence through which its antithesis can be mobilized except the individual family,
the particular family, the unique family. Associations of families which waste their time in wholesale opposition to the thing
are doomed, I believe, to disappointment. We will not see this power rolled back in our lifetimes. The miracle we're after at large is available to each on of
us in small right now. First you have to break the invisible chains that schooling has laid on your own mind; you need to
stop defining yourself by what you buy or who approves of you. Stop being fearful of new experiences or at least press on
regardless of your fear. Teach them to challenge the world around them, to take risks.
Teach them the junk they put in their minds through television, indeed through all forms of commercial entertainment, is propaganda
of one sort of another. Mr. Gatto's website is: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having
nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and
literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are
common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might
as well know what they are:
The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where
you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that
if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased
dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is
a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make
the kids like it -- being locked in together, I mean -- or at the minimum, endure it. If things go well, the kids can't imagine
themselves anywhere else; they envy and fear the better classes and have contempt for the dumber classes. So the class mostly
keeps itself in good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged competition like school. You come to know your place.
Nevertheless, in spite of the overall blueprint, I make an
effort to urge children to higher levels of test success, promising eventual transfer from the lower-level class as a reward.
I insinuate that the day will come when an employer will hire them on the basis of test scores, even though my own experience
is that employers are (rightly) indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come to see that truth and [school]teaching
are incompatible.
The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out
of your class except by magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.
The second lesson I teach kids is to turn on and off
like a light switch. I demand that they become totally involved in my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation,
competing vigorously with each other for my favor. But when the bell rings I insist that they drop the work at once and proceed
quickly to the next work station. Nothing important is ever finished in my class, nor in any other class I know of.
The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so
why care too deeply about anything? Bells are the secret logic of schooltime; their argument is inexorable; bells destroy
past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same
even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indifference.
The third lesson I teach you is to surrender your will
to a predestined chain of command. Rights may be granted or withheld, by authority, without appeal. As a schoolteacher I intervene
in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behavior
that threatens my control. My judgments come thick and fast, because individuality is trying constantly to assert itself in
my classroom. Individuality is a curse to all systems of classification, a contradiction of class theory.
Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away
for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway
on the grounds that they need water. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in children angry, depressed or exhilarated
by things outside my ken. Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn,
exist.
The fourth lesson I teach is that only I determine what
curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). This power lets me separate
good kids from bad kids instantly. Good kids do the tasks I appoint with a minimum of conflict and a decent show of enthusiasm.
Of the millions of things of value to learn, I decide what few we have time for. The choices are mine. Curiosity has no important
place in my work, only conformity.
Bad kids fight against this, of course, trying openly or covertly
to make decisions for themselves about what they will learn. How can we allow that and survive as schoolteachers? Fortunately
there are procedures to break the will of those who resist.
This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good
people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people,
better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. It is no exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends
upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if kids weren't trained in the dependency lesson: The social-service
businesses could hardly survive, including the fast-growing counseling industry; commercial entertainment of all sorts, along
with television, would wither if people remembered how to make their own fun; the food services, restaurants and prepared-food
warehouses would shrink if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to cook for them.
Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering would go too -- the clothing business as well -- unless a guaranteed supply
of helpless people poured out of our schools each year. We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are
told because they don't know any other way. For God's sake, let's not rock that boat!
In lesson five I teach that your self-respect should
depend on an observer's measure of your worth. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged. A monthly report, impressive in
its precision, is sent into students' homes to spread approval or to mark exactly -- down to a single percentage point --
how dissatisfied with their children parents should be. Although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection
goes into making up these records, the cumulative weight of the objective- seeming documents establishes a profile of defect
which compels a child to arrive at a certain decisions about himself and his future based on the casual judgment of strangers.
Self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical
system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never a factor in these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests
is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People
need to be told what they are worth.
In lesson six I teach children that they are being watched.
I keep each student under constant surveillance and so do my colleagues. There are no private spaces for children; there is
no private time. Class change lasts 300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels. Students are encouraged
to tattle on each other, even to tattle on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own child's waywardness,
too.
I assign "homework" so that this surveillance extends into
the household, where students might otherwise use the time to learn something unauthorized, perhaps from a father or mother,
or by apprenticing to some wiser person in the neighborhood.
The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be
trusted, that privacy is not legitimate. Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential thinkers; it was a central
prescription set down by Calvin in the Institutes, by Plato in the Republic, by Hobbes, by Comte, by Francis Bacon. All these
childless men discovered the same thing: Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under central control.
It is the great triumph of schooling that among even
the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different
way to do things. Yet only a very few lifetimes ago things were different in the United States: originality and variety were
common currency; our freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world; social class boundaries were relatively
easy to cross; our citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do many things independently, to think for
themselves. We were something, all by ourselves, as individuals.
It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy
and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen
behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you.
We've had a society increasingly under central control in
the United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green
highway signs we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics
of drugs, suicide, divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste in the U.S., products of the dehumanization
of our lives, the lessening of individual and family importance that central control imposes.
Without a fully active role in community life you cannot develop
into a complete human being. Aristotle taught that. Surely he was right; look around you or look in the mirror: that is the
demonstration.
"School" is an essential support system for a vision of social
engineering that condemns most people to be subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows to a control point as it ascends.
"School" is an artifice which makes such a pyramidal social order seem inevitable (although such a premise is a fundamental
betrayal of the American Revolution). In colonial days and through the period of the early Republic we had no schools to speak
of. And yet the promise of democracy was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise by bringing to life
the ancient dream of Egypt: compulsory training in subordination for everybody. Compulsory schooling was the secret Plato
reluctantly transmitted in the Republic when he laid down the plans for total state control of human life.
The current debate about whether we should have a national
curriculum is phony; we already have one, locked up in the six lessons I've told you about and a few more I've spared you.
This curriculum produces moral and intellectual paralysis, and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to reverse its
bad effects. What is under discussion is a great irrelevancy.
None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impregnable
to change. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people; there is no right way. There is no "international competition"
that compels our existence, difficult as it is to even think about in the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the
contrary. In every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient. If we gained a non-material philosophy that found
meaning where it is genuinely located -- in families, friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and
rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy -- then we would
be truly self-sufficient.
How did these awful places, these "schools", come about?
As we know them, they are a product of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution
among our industrial poor, and partly they are the result of the revulsion with which old-line families regarded the waves
of Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigration -- and the Catholic religion -- after 1845. And certainly a third contributing cause
can be found in the revulsion with which these same families regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after
the Civil War.
Look again at the six lessons of school. This is training
for permanent underclasses, people who are to be deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius. And it
is training shaken loose from its original logic: to regulate the poor. Since the 1920s the growth of the well-articulated
school bureaucracy, and the less visible growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling exactly as it is, have
enlarged schooling's original grasp to seize the sons and daughters of the middle class.
Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that
he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would
take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself,
since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things
that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult -- by insisting they be taught by pedagogical
procedures.
With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, is
it any wonder we have the national crisis we face today? Young people indifferent to the adult world and to the future; indifferent
to almost everything except the diversion of toys and violence? Rich or poor, schoolchildren cannot concentrate on anything
for very long. They have a poor sense of time past and to come; they are mistrustful of intimacy (like the children of divorce
they really are); they hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive, violent, timid in the face of the unexpected,
addicted to distraction.
All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are magnified to
a grotesque extent by schooling, whose hidden curriculum prevents effective personality development. Indeed, without exploiting
the fearfulness, selfishness, and inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all, nor could I as a certified
schoolteacher.
"Critical thinking" is a term we hear frequently these days
as a form of training which will herald a new day in mass schooling. It certainly will, if it ever happens. No common school
that actually dared teach the use of dialectic, heuristic, and other tools of free minds could last a year without being torn
to pieces.
Institutional schoolteachers are destructive to children's
development. Nobody survives the Six-Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method is deeply and profoundly
anti-educational. No tinkering will fix it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive rethinking that schools
require would cost so much less than we are spending now that it is not likely to happen. First and foremost, the business
I am in is a jobs project and a contract-letting agency. We cannot afford to save money, not even to help children.
At the pass we've come to historically, and after 26
years of teaching, I must conclude that one of the only alternatives on the horizon for most families is to teach their own
children at home. Small, de- institutionalized schools are another. Some form of free-market system for public schooling is
the likeliest place to look for answers. But the near impossibility of these things for the shattered families of the poor,
and for too many on the fringes of the economic middle class, foretell that the disaster of Six-Lesson Schools is likely to
continue.
After an adult lifetime spent in teaching school I believe
the method of schooling is the only real content it has. Don't be fooled into thinking that good curricula or good equipment
or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered
come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves
and their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love -- and, of
course, lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the
time left after school. But television has eaten most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar
to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left
to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will
insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that
we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School
is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school
and win awards doing it. I should know.
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