Anti-school sentiment

I was home schooled almost entirely, graduating at 17 with scores better than 94% of American high schoolers. My graduated siblings have had similar results. Our communication skills have been well developed through extensive reading and writing under my mom's instruction. (She is a talented writer) Dad has a degree in biology and oversaw our math and science work.

My only regret is that my education did not have more of a concentration on the classical trivium, literature, and languages. Socially I have had no problem adapting to people and situations.

I think a small, highly competitive private school is a wonderful option for concerned parents, or homeschooling combined with some classes that allow the students to experience peer competition under more advanced teaching than parents may be able to provide.

Unfortunately home schooling in some families is really 'no schooling', and child development may be impaired. As in anything, there are excesses and abuses.

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Originally Posted by estelwen

Unfortunately home schooling in some families is really 'no schooling', and child development may be impaired. As in anything, there are excesses and abuses.

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I agree. I think the best we can do is to enhance the natural feelings people already have: as parents, the freedom and responsibility to help their children learn, and as learners, the freedom and responsibility to explore the unknown, formulate, evaluate, and if necessary revise conclusions, and, finally, repeat, for fun and profit. Public school seems to me to do the opposite in all these areas, not because of teachers, but because it is compulsory, and the material and timing are decided externally.

The fact that power corrupts and these decisions on timing and material are up to people in power only exacerbates it.

The idea of providing education to kids whose parents wouldn't help is a good one. It should be executed by people who have *earned* respect in their communities, and left free of the corrosive effects of national politics (and even local politics if possible). This does happen - when a child asks the grocery store manager questions and the manager, encouraged by the enthusiasm of a child, explains how the grocery business works, or when any adult honors a child's curiosity by sharing his or her knowledge of the world. "Don't talk to strangers" needs a qualifier: "... unless an adult who loves you is listening too."

Today education has little to do with creativity and more and more with occupation, profession, business in reality. We do not hold masters' degree out of our natural tendency to creativity, but education is packaged, traded and we buy education with money and sell them.

Particularly in Asian countries parents invest huge sums in education.l They want their kids to be doctors, engineers, lawyers and the like and to that end they engage their children in study and they study painstakingly in order to pay the debts of their parents. This is called the commercialization of educatio.

Parents put too much pressures on their kids from their early stages of life or when their in their primes when they could be more imaginative or creative they have rather been robotic or mechanic and no creativity can be expected from such children

As such I am not for the institutionalization of education at all. Let educational system is restored to some ancinet Vedic system in which kids were taught under the guidance of great saints not in schools but in som hermitages