Anti-school sentiment

[Dave Scotese]

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction. I have three kids and I work from home, so we enrolled in CAVA, which is a homeschool program. I started reading about education and have come to view school as quite damaging. If non-fiction is tolerated here, I'm interested whether anyone has read anything by John Taylor Gatto or Grace Llewellyn.

Great literature helps the human race make progress toward healthier lives for those it touches - spiritually (as opposed to religiously), socially, and intellectually. I think the two authors I mentioned above have done and continue to do great work in this way, but as I said, it's non-fiction.

My dream is to help popularize their work and the work of others who have a good sense of how destructive school is.

[backline]

We home-schooled our youngest son, after I became aware that the local schools had lost control of the grounds and spent most of the time trying to baby-sit the students assigned to their care.
Our youngest was able to graduate with a High School diploma and go on to College, something none of his siblings was able to remotely approach (for various reasons).

I'm grateful my wife was able to shoulder much of the actual daytime hours spent. I think the greatest educational benefit was the extensive traveling we were able to do. The National Parks Service, and other resources, were also a great thing in our son's education. Today he is a well rounded individual with a broad base of experiences. He also relates very well with others.
Before he left Verizon Wireless he was a top salesman making more income than I was after 30 years on my blue-collar job.

I'd say it's a successful alternative. I can't think of any detriments that would apply to our son, concerning home-schooling (AKA as Alternative Family Education, around here).

[Dave Scotese]

Interestingly enough, I had an idea before I turned negative on school itself. My idea was that kids in high school should be teaching the kids in grade school. Now that I understand what school is all about, I think a simple "babysitting" service would be ideal. Grace Llewellyn provides many examples of teenagers doing useful things with their lives while opting out of school - though I haven't gotten to that part of her book yet. Perhaps running a babysitting service is one of them.

In Dumbing Us Down, Gatto describes community and how compulsive schooling kind of crowds it out of the lives of people - parents and children alike - by disallowing freedom of association: kids are kept away from adults except for "certified educators", including their own parents, and also kept away from kids of different ages for the most part, and forced to spend time with the other kids in their class.

[The Comedian]

I have a great faith in the school system with some criticisms that go along with that faith, however.

Unfortunately, I have not read the books that you have written of here or I would eagerly participate in the discussion.

[Apocrypha75]

We home-schooled our youngest son, after I became aware that the local schools had lost control of the grounds and spent most of the time trying to baby-sit the students assigned to their care.
Our youngest was able to graduate with a High School diploma and go on to College, something none of his siblings was able to remotely approach (for various reasons).

I'm grateful my wife was able to shoulder much of the actual daytime hours spent. I think the greatest educational benefit was the extensive traveling we were able to do. The National Parks Service, and other resources, were also a great thing in our son's education. Today he is a well rounded individual with a broad base of experiences. He also relates very well with others.
Before he left Verizon Wireless he was a top salesman making more income than I was after 30 years on my blue-collar job.

I'd say it's a successful alternative. I can't think of any detriments that would apply to our son, concerning home-schooling (AKA as Alternative Family Education, around here).

I don't have children myself and live in the UK but I find the concept of home schooling very interesting. When I look back upon my own 'standard' schooling I can see the flaws and how we were battery hens, rather than students; being force-fed the bare essentials and not allowed to wriggle or explore outside a religiously enforced curriculum. My teachers were also less than enthusiastic and let 'text books' do the teaching.

I would imagine home schooling to be a much more rewarding experience where the adult in the scenario also stands to gain much: in terms of further education through the teaching of subjects in which they only have a rudimentary understanding themselves; the additional time spent with the child, which no doubt enhances the parent/child bond further and finally, knowing that you are taking responsibility of equipping your child for the life that lays before them.

I know the experts will go on about the socialising aspects of schooling, but I (and I speak from experience) fail to see the benefits of a schooling system where bullying can become a dominant force and de-rail the educational process; I even experienced bullying at a faculty/teaching level. With knowledge and understanding (two automatic results of a decent education) children would be better equipped to deal with the the less rewarding aspects of social interaction (bullying, prejudice etc) and would have the confidence (another side product of a great education) to counter the unfortunate problems that sometimes surface in the playgrounds and classrooms.

I think the way forward is a combination of home schooling ( for education ) and traditional schooling (for team building, interaction etc) -- or something like that. Obviously other social commitments would need to change to allow this to happen (working hours etc) but that is a discussion for another place and time.

I guess I'm jaded and some of you guys may have had an exemplary experience in regard to your own state run schooling, but I like to see progress and I personally feel schooling is stuck in a traditional rut.

[meh!]

When you say a 'combination' that seems to really just have in mind what I would consider the ideal upbringing. Going to school and having family that is interested in learning. The most important thing your school or family could do is foster your own desire to learn.

That said, I disagree with actual homeschooling on principle.

[Apocrypha75]

When you say a 'combination' that seems to really just have in mind what I would consider the ideal upbringing.

That's what I was going for. The ideal upbringing.

Going to school and having family that is interested in learning. The most important thing your school or family could do is foster your own desire to learn.

So true, yet i'd be interested to see how many parents make a significant contribution to their children's education (beyond helping with the odd bit of homework etc). I think the main consensus in society today is that 'learning' happens in schools and it is left as such. If a child happens to go to a school where 'learning' is hindered by rogue elements among the pupils or a disaffected staff, and that child's potential is destroyed as the ultimate result, then it is a tragedy.

My suggestion is that a shift occurs where the lion share of education/learning occurs at home and the part of the schools as the hub of learning is depreciated; although enhanced in it's role as a platform to encourage socialisation/interaction/debate etc. I think in a lot of cases kids play up at school by challenging teacher authority and getting away with it. I think the authority challenge would still occur in a home schooling environment, but it is less likely that the child would get away with it; purely because of the relationship with the parent (the cat is never away for the mouse to play). As a by-product I would guess that more (genuine) learning takes place in a home schooled environment than in in the typical school setting.

You might make a case that some parents aren't fit to educate their own children. I'd make a case that some teachers aren't. I think if socially ingrained that if/when you had children you would be required to educate your child at home for so many years, rather than farm them out to a state run institution, the effect might be dramatic.

I must admit, I do not want my own chequered schooling history to take precedent here,as I fully acknowledge other people have had much better experiences. I am merely throwing some ideas out there regarding changes in the 'tried and tested' schooling, that could benefit kids that fall through the cracks at school and even increase the potential of those that don't.

That said, I disagree with actual homeschooling on principle.

I respect that. but why do you disagree with it?

[Dave Scotese]

When you say a 'combination' that seems to really just have in mind what I would consider the ideal upbringing. Going to school and having family that is interested in learning. The most important thing your school or family could do is foster your own desire to learn.

That said, I disagree with actual homeschooling on principle.

I'm curious too. What is the principle?

[Dostoyevsky]

Even though its been 8 years since I attended school in a non-university setting the experience is still fresh in my mind. Unfortunately in Florida most English classes before high school are geared towards teaching children how to pass the "FCAT", a state standardized test with no educational value whatsoever in which average school scores determines funding.

The required reading in high school English classes these days seems to be centered around Politically Correct bull****. I remember a reading list composed of Native Son, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Invisible Man, Maya Angelou and other similar books. I dont mind one or two of these books being on the reading list but having a reading list composed of books about "diversity" is killing the diversity of the reading list.

I dont plan on home schooling my children when I eventually have some in the future because the social interaction is too important IMO but I definitely plan on supplementing their education at home.

[Dave Scotese]

I dont plan on home schooling my children when I eventually have some in the future because the social interaction is too important IMO but I definitely plan on supplementing their education at home.

A healthy social life requires much more that indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were. It starts with a solid sense of self-esteem and self-awareness. It builds in time -- time to spend with other people in worthwhile, happy activities where no one loses, no one is forced to participate, and where conversation and helping one another are not outlawed.

- Grace Llewellyn, in The Teenage Liberation Handbook, how to quit school and get a real life education.

However, I understand your point. I have three daughters and they all participate in a cheerleading and gymnastics program. The age-differentiated relationships they have there are far more stable and helpful than the nearly non-existant (usually antagonistic, if they existed at all) ones they had at school.

[curlyqlink]

Great literature helps the human race make progress toward healthier lives for those it touches

Does it? Is that the purpose of literature, a kind of aid to cultural hygiene?

I'd say one of the blessings of literature is that it helps force one to be honest. To face up to things that he would prefer not to face. Or would never have dreamt of facing.

As for home schooling, I would think it would promote insularity. Defend a young mind from facing ideas deemed "offensive". Which, to my way of thinking, is the exact opposite of the purpose of education. The exact opposite of the purpose of the arts.

[higley]

It depends on the school and the child. As an only child, and considering my personality, I can only imagine how socially handicapped I'd have been had I been home schooled, or even not enrolled at a daycare at a young age. Then again, both my parents worked and I was raised in an excellent school system so I am speaking from that perspective. My schools offered things my parents couldn't, and my parents sought to supplement my learning by encouraging me to pursue academic interests outside of class.

Out of curiosity, your phrasing suggests that you came to view school as destructive only after you read this particular literature.

[backline]

...If a child happens to go to a school where 'learning' is hindered by rogue elements among the pupils or a disaffected staff, and that child's potential is destroyed as the ultimate result, then it is a tragedy...

That was the exact situation with our youngest son, which is why I dis-enrolled him.
As we home schooled him there were many events and projects where the kids in the program came together, and their were also social opportunities at the school that our son could attend.
In our case, Alternative Family Education was still administered by the local school district. There was a circuit teacher who monitored his progress and made sure he covered what he would have covered in corporate classes on campus.
He had no trouble entering and socialising in College, and as I said he is very people oriented now, and has made a good living in sales so far.

I should also point out that he was in regular school until Jr High when a transfer into another school opened up some untenable situations.

Free education in Public Schools is a great concept, depending on how it is administered. When it is derailed by any of an increasingly distracting trend societally, and the legal system hamstrings authority, the individual students suffer, if not all, ultimately.

[Dave Scotese]

Does it? Is that the purpose of literature, a kind of aid to cultural hygiene?

I'd say one of the blessings of literature is that it helps force one to be honest. To face up to things that he would prefer not to face. Or would never have dreamt of facing.

As for home schooling, I would think it would promote insularity. Defend a young mind from facing ideas deemed "offensive". Which, to my way of thinking, is the exact opposite of the purpose of education. The exact opposite of the purpose of the arts.

Hygiene... You funny! But yes, facing ugly truths is one of the major ways that literature improves the health of a life.

And, yes, tragically, many parents homeschool their children in order to protect them from "offensive" ideas. Despite this, the average homeschooler seems to be in a better position than the average public-schooler - according to standardized tests first off, but then also if measured in terms of being successful and satisfied with their own lives once they have "grown up".

As for my own kids, I found that school protects them from way too many "offensive" ideas that I think are excellent opportunities for learning. One of the most striking is historical controversy, such as the authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Of course, the worst example of an "offensive idea" that school "protects" children from is the idea that children learn better without school than they do with it. Who went to school to learn how to walk? Or talk?

If you happen to read any Llewellyn or Gatto, let us know what you think. I think it may change your ideas on insularity a bit.

It depends on the school and the child. As an only child, and considering my personality, I can only imagine how socially handicapped I'd have been had I been home schooled, or even not enrolled at a daycare at a young age. Then again, both my parents worked and I was raised in an excellent school system so I am speaking from that perspective. My schools offered things my parents couldn't, and my parents sought to supplement my learning by encouraging me to pursue academic interests outside of class.

Out of curiosity, your phrasing suggests that you came to view school as destructive only after you read this particular literature.

We took our kids out of school before I ever heard of Llewellyn or Gatto. I had suggested it to my wife because of my own past:

• I learned my trade - software - before school offered to teach it.
• I was tutoring college students in math classes I never took - after getting a C and a D in lower level math classes. I was able to understand the concepts, but I never bothered memorizing them. This highlights one of the problems with school: it teaches you more to pass tests, than to solve real-world problems using specialized knowledge.
• My college degree is in cognitive science, where I discovered that people learn by doing, and what we do in school is not real life, but rather dealing with fellow immature students and avoiding punishment from authorities and getting busy-work done so we can watch TV or go out with friends.
• School attendance is not voluntary. If the parents or children don't like it, they have to go through hoops to get out of it. This kind of captive audience always degrades the effectiveness of any endeavor.
• School is not funded by people who willingly purchase the service, but rather through taxes. This is another aspect of an endeavor that tends to degrade its effectiveness.

After taking our kids out, I heard of Gatto's Underground History and started reading it online, then bought the book. It's an ugly truth and learning it pissed me off, so now I'm doing whatever I can to encourage others to do their own exploration on the subject, and to protect their own children from the "combine" (from Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, courtesy of Grace Llewellyn).

What strikes me about these anti-school writings is that so many of the unpopular ideas they put forward match up with ideas I came up with on my own.

[kiki1982]

I don't regard school as something damaging, but education shouldn't stop in school or when the child gets out of it for the day. It shouldn't stop with homework. If a child is to become a socially able person who has interests apart from hanging around on the streets with friends, hanging in front of the tv or playing computer games, it is upposed to have parents who foster other interests apart from what is done at school.

But I disagree about home schooling. There is no parent, who can truly teach his/her kid(s) on a high school level for every subject. That is, of course, why teachers need to have a qualification in the subject they teach (or that is the meaning in the system anyway). I am great at languages, I know four and a fifth a little, and my husband knows 11. If I or he had had home schooling, I would have known 3 (German my parents didn't know), and I would never have become interested in it having had no adequate source for it. My husband had known nothing but English, as his parents are monolingual and not intelligent to say the least. I am crap at physics, yet I would not want to deprive my children of any knowledge, even if they had to learn until they collapsed for a test. It serves a purpose, because we get to understand how electricity works, 'communicating barrels', the tube of Torricelli and all that stuff. I couldn't understand it and was crap at exams, and every exam of that subject was a scary thing, but some of it stayed in my mind, and I am thankful for it. Had I been fostered only in what interested me (which can also be done, by the way, in a Montessori school), I would have had a serious deficiency in my education and knowledge of the physical world. Until 18 I was bombarded with knowledge in Dutch, French, English, German, Maths, Physics, Biology, Geography, Chemistry, Religious Education, History, Physical Education, Computer Science, Latin (only 2 years), Greek (only 6 months), Technology, Drawing (doubtful quality), Technical Drawing, Music, Esthetics (Arts nd the history of it). I think that is it. My parents had never been able to teach me all that.

I was also an only child, like Higley. I would have been deprived of any serious social contact and the experince of a group all the time. Home schooling looks interesting, but as I said, there is no parent who can teach all those subjects. I am an intelligent person, and my husband too, but I am modest enough to acknowledge that even an Einstein would not attempt this list.

Furthermore, there seems to be a class of home schooling advocates who oppose Darwin's theory and go for Creationism. Nothing against religion, as I am a Catholic, but there are bounderies to religion and it should not be mixed with reality. Allowing those people to do home schooling damages the eductaional level of their children and society is saddled with ignorant people.

That is not to say that children do not need to learn outside of school. I regularly went to exhibitions of art (both modern and classical), history, my father was a great reader, my mother a great musician. I had musical education from the age of 8 in a music academy, but I learned to play the recorder by myself, although I advanced much more when I had a teacher. My parents never wearied of helping me with homework, taking me somewhere, handing me material, but they would never have considered to do any home schooling, because they are of the same opinion as I.

Going to school is stepping out of the knowledge of your parents and it hands you a lot more possibilitie to learn and discover other subjects than the subjects your parents are good at. A parent cannot teach Chinese if he doesn't know it. A teacher can. I would have been stuck with Duch and at best French. My father doesn't know any German and my mother does very bad German, her only knowledge resulting from singing Bach. Fortunately I had a very good teacher and discovered a flair for the language. So much, that I went to study it after. I had no help from home, as I did better than my two parents at it. My father was a crap teacher, so asking him something (about Maths mostly), I rather didn't because he used to solve it for me and to say it was simple. For him maybe, but not for me, naturally.

My fetish for literature I did not get from my father, but from myself. I discovered adult literature because of a book review for school (you see it does work!). Up to that point I hated reading books, because, as I understand now, it wasn't interesting enough psychologically. I could find nothing in children's books, so I didn't read. Because of that one book, I discovered there was something to read. Had I had nothing but my own fancy, I would still be at the same stage. It was because of being coerced into reading, that I chanced to take that book and that I discovered a great love for reading... My French teachers didn't do much for reading and I have to thank Dumas himself for writing so very accessibly.

Besides, learning as you like as a child and in an ideal environment, with a teacher all to yourself, or at least not to share with 20 others, is a bad image of the world, because in the real world, one gets coerced into doing a lot of things with people one doesn't like. Even as an independent worker, one is bound by laws one cannot change. Had I not been coerced in doing things I didn't like (Physical Education, Physics, Chemistry and the like) and at a time I didn't like , I had never understood the concept of the necessity to do them when and despite I didn't like them.

And yes, I was bullied at some point (not really badly). But that passed soon, and I had a regular group of five friends. I think I have lost them now, as I find that they have become too conventional and as I have moved abroad. Being a loner, I don't mind so much. We have great neighbours, so they are all interested in a talk...

But I suppose education in Belgium is not really so much focussed on the passing of tests, but rather your knowledge is tested. I am not aware of state-written tests, but the level of education is high compared to the US f.e.

The thing is, look for a good level school. If you child gets bullied, and that totally wrecks its life, then by all means do disenroll it, but do not take it entirely out of school. Just look for another school. Foster its talents, but sometimes a little coercing doesn't go amiss. I don't want to make myself any illusions of being an admirable all-rounder who perfectly knows any subject. Until I meet one such a person (which will never happen), I do not consider home schooling an option.