What is Homeschooling/Autodidact learning?
HomeSchooling Homeschool Facts is the brainchild of a consortium of homeschool parents, licensed educators, counselors and researchers. We are passionate about education choice, and especially the parent's right to choose their child's education.
Years ago, when we came to homeschooling, there was little information available, and even less homeschool support. Over the past couple of years, we have collected information about and for homeschoolers. We would like to share it with you.
Please feel free to browse our shelves, complete a survey, and contribute to this collection. If you belong to a homeschool support group, please check out our state-by-state listings and make sure your group's information is up-to-date. All homeschool support group listings are FREE.
We will never claim to know everything there is to know about homeschooling, in fact, we continue to learn every day from all the homeschoolers we have met around the world. If you see something that doesn't ring true, please let us know. Your opinion counts.
Why Homeschool:
Homeschooling is the single fastest growing educational trend in the United States, and that trend is expanding worldwide. Dr. Brian Ray, one of the leading homeschool researchers, estimates that homeschooling has increased 15% per year over the past several years. While accurate statistics regarding the number of families homeschooling is difficult to come by, Dr. Ray’s estimates are supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Household Education Survey program.
In 1999, the Department of Ed estimated that there were about 850,000 homeschoolers nationwide, and had increased to about 1.1 million by 2003. Ray’s estimated that there were between 1.7 and 2.1 million homeschoolers at the end of that period, and that currently, there are between 2.5 and 4 million homeschoolers nationwide.
It is not hard to see why. Every day there are reports about how our traditional education systems are failing to keep pace with business and industry, and indeed, worldwide education systems, in preparing our nation’s youth to enter the workforce. Students in Japan, India and China spend more time in school, and far surpass our nation’s youth in Math and Science. So how do homeschoolers do, comparatively?
Socially: There is a common myth that homeschooling produces social misfits. This myth partially arises from an assumption that traditional education systems provide “normal” socialization activities. Dr. Raymond Moore, in his book Better Late than Early writes that “The idea that children need to be around many other youngsters in order to be ‘socialized’ is perhaps the most dangerous and extravagant myth in education and child rearing today." There is ample research that indicates that because home schooled students are exposed to a wider variety of people and situations, they learn to get along with a variety of people, making them socially mature and better able to adjust to new situations.
In their Communities: Many non-homeschoolers believe that homeschooling can turn out better students, but because homeschool students are educated in greater isolation from the world, they are less politically and socially involved. This concern comes at a great time, for homeschoolers at least. The first generation of homeschoolers has now grown up and entered the workforce. Dr. Ray surveyed over 7,000 adults who had been home schooled and compared them against their more traditionally educated peers. His research found that:
Colleges and Universities all around the nation have realized the positive benefits of attracting homeschoolers. Research indicates that homeschoolers who have gone to college have no social skill deprivation, exhibit greater leadership skills, demonstrated stronger work ethic and had higher moral values, integral in their college success.
Homeschooling is obviously not for everyone. However, it is also an education option that should be considered for any family that does not feel their student’s needs are being met in traditional educational systems. At Homeschool Facts, we are not anti-public education, we are pro-education choice. We support the parent’s right to choose which educational environment will work best for their child. As you read our pages, and ponder your options, we hope that you will find encouragement here. We appreciate your feedback.
http://www.homeschoolfacts.com/pages/index.php/Best_in_Class
Student Liberation Articles, Book Excerpts, and Videos << Previous | Next >>
Grace Llewellyn Teenage Liberation Handbook (excerpt)
John Taylor Gatto Seven Lesson Teacher
Schools Don't Educate
The Curriculum of Necessity
Against School
Alan Watts The Unsettling Truth About Life (video)
Career Advice (video)
Derrick Jensen Why Do I Hate School? (excerpt)
Why School? (excerpt)
Compulsory Schooling (excerpt)
Barbara Ehrenreich The Higher Education Scam
Daniel Greenberg Fishing (a chapter from Free at Last)
Matt Hern Promise of Deschooling (off site)
Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance (off site)
Erica Goldson Valedictorian Speech
Inge Bell Grades (excerpt)
Jan Hunt Learning Through Play
Stephen Cullen Parents Suck (excerpt)
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner The Hidden Curriculum (excerpt)
Peter Gray (more) Children Educate Themselves
School is Prison
The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents
Alfie Kohn Talking Back to Our Teachers
Unconditional Parenting: Chapter 1 (off site)
The Case Against Competition
Punished by Rewards (excerpt)
In Pursuit of Affluence, at a High Price
A.S. Neill Summerhill (excerpt) (pdf)
Anti-School Quotes "I Hate School" Quotes
Emma Goldman The Child and Its Enemies
Sarah Fitz-Claridge School Phobia
Anonymous Why Not to Trust Your School
Carl Rogers (more) Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Radical Youth School is Boring
Daniel Pink Surprising Truth about Motivation (video)
David H. Albert Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow. (excerpt)
John Holt Instead of Education (excerpt)
True Learning (excerpt)
How Children Fail (excerpt)
The Right to Control One's Learning
Noam Chomsky (more) The Function of the Schools
Jan Matthews The Role of Schooling
The History of Schooling
Theories of Schooling
Notes on the Poverty of Student Life
Jeff Schmidt Disciplined Minds (excerpt)
Thomas Gordon How Children Really React to Control (excerpt)
Daniel Quinn Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
Jules Henry School Training (excerpt)
School Nightmare (excerpt)
Sugata Mitra New Experiments in Self-Teaching (video)
Paul Lockhart A Mathematician's Lament (excerpt)
Wikipedia The Milgram Experiment
Ron Miller The Student Revolt Against Alienation (excerpt)
Blake Boles College without High School (excerpt)
More Articles, Book Excerpts, and Videos << Previous | Next >>
Jonathan Kozol Extreme Ideas (excerpt)
Jerry Mintz The Magic of Democracy
Ken Macrorie A Vulnerable Teacher (excerpt)
Matt Groening School is Hell Comic Strip (off site)
Jerry Farber Conformity in Schools (excerpt)
Erich Fromm Forward to A.S. Neill's Summerhill (off site)
Laurie A. Couture Can't Reform a System Based on Oppression
Gordo Unlearning School
Taking the SAT
Growing without Schooling Unschooling Quotes
The Teenage Liberation Handbook (excerpt) By Grace Llewellyn
Not Back to School Camp
How strange and self-defeating that supposedly free countries should train their young for life in totalitarianism.
Do you go to school? Yes? Then...
...YOU ARE NOT FREE
The most overwhelming reality of school is control. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read and to a large extent what you think. In school you can't control your own life. Outside of school you can, at least to the extent that your parents trust you to. 'Comparing me those who are conventionally schooled,' writes 12-year old unschooler Colin Roch, 'I like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot'.
The ultimate goal of this book is for you to start associating the concept of freedom with you, and to start wondering why you and your friends don't have much of it, and for you to move out of the busy-prison into the meadows of life. There are lots of very good reasons to leave school but, to my idealistic American mind, the pursuit of freedom encompasses most of them and outshines the others.
If you look at the history of freedom, you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is 'normal' and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different. There was a time when many black slaves took a sort of pride - or talked as if they took pride - in how well-behaved and hardworking they were. There was a time when most women believed - or talked as if they believed - that they should obey and submit to their husbands. In fact, people within an oppressed group often internalize their oppression so much that they are crueler, and more judgemental, to their peers than the oppressors themselves are. In China, men made deformed female feet into sexual fetishes, but it was the women who tied the cords on their own daughter's feet.
Obviously, black and female people eventually caught sight of a greater vision for themselves, and change blazed through their minds, through laws, through public attitudes. All is not well, but the United States is now far kinder to people of color and with mammary glands than it was 100 years ago. What's more, these people are kinder to themselves. The dream bigger dreams, and flesh out grander lives, than picking cotton for the master or making a martini for the husband.
Right now, a lot of you are helping history to repeat itself; you don't believe you should be free. Of course you want to be free - in various ways, not just free of school. However, society gives you so many condescending, false, and harmful messages about yourselves that most of you wouldn't trust yourselves with freedom. It's all complicated by the fact that the people who infringe most dangerously and inescapably on your freedom are often those who say they are helping you, those who are convinced you need their help: teachers, school counselors, perhaps your parents.
Why Do I Hate School? An excerpt of Walking on Water by Derrick Jensen
It should surprise us less than it does that the educational system destroys students's souls. From the beginning, that has been the purpose. Don't take my word on this: Take it from the people who set up the system. In 1888 (and I'm indebted to the great website The Memory Hole and the great educator and writer John Taylor Gatto for collecting these quotes on the primary purpose of industrial education), the Senate Committee on Education, nervous about the high quality of education provided by nonstandardized, localized schools (where--the horror! the horror!--teachers actually taught students to think for themselves!), reported, "We believe that the education is one of the primary causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."
Industrial educators set out to rectify this problem. How? As industrial educator and philosopher John Dewey said, "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
Next question: What are the proper social order and the right social growth? In 1906, Elwood Cubberly, who later became dean of education at Stanford, gave his answers: Schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
Then in 1906, the Rockefeller Education Board, major backer of the movement for compulsory public schooling, gave its reasons for putting its money into that movement: "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [i.e., the development of children's intellects and characters in homes and local schools] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not seach for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesman, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in a imperfect way."
Those in charge could not have been clearer. William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education from 1889 to 1906, wrote: "Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
Finally, bringing this around not only to students' relationships to themselves but to the land, Harris also stated, "The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. ...It is to master the physical self, to transend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."
No wonder we all hate school.
And the fact that we do hate school is a very good thing. It means we're still alive.
Grades (excerpt from This Book is Not Required -2nd edition) By Inge Bell
We are so used to the system that it seems inevitable. Most people have to admit to themselves that, if grades were to disappear tomorrow, they might never learn another set of irregular verbs and might, indeed, just lie down and not move for a very long time. Naturally! This is a result of the system, not a reason for it. Having been bullied all your life into learning things you didn't much want to know, you would, indeed, quit if you could and so, perhaps, would most of your professors. I suspect, though, that in a few months you would get up, look around, and begin to take an altogether different sort of interest in altogether different kinds of knowledge.
Why do our schools function in this way? Why is intellectual curiosity regularly killed in order to teach discipline? Why do our schools give even seven-year old children failing grades? Whenever sociologists see a system operating in "dysfunctional" ways, they suggest that we have not discovered the "real" function of the system. A hint is given us here in the fact that the only schools which don't beat up their students emotionally are a few private and public schools which serve the rich. The real purpose of school is to make people obedient to authority. The mindlessness of school is meant to prepare people for unquestioned acceptance of the mindlessness of most jobs. And, perhaps most importantly, it is the job of schools to convince those who will have lousy jobs and low wages that their fate is their fault...that they just weren't smart enough (translate, deserving enough) to do any better.
Hidden Curriculum An excerpt of The Medium is the Message By Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
In order to understand what kinds of behaviors classrooms promote, one must become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them. What students do in the classroom is what they learn, and what they learn to do is the classroom's message. Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at last pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true. They are rarely encouraged to ask substantive questions, although they are permitted to ask about administrative and technical details (How long should the paper be? Does spelling count? When is the assignment due?) It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. Examine the types of questions teachers ask in classrooms, and you will find that most of than are what might technically be called "convergent questions", but which might more simply be called "Guess what I'm thinking" questions. Here are a few that will sound familiar:
What is a noun?
What were the three causes of the Civil War?
What is the principal river of Uruguay?
What is the definition of a nonrestrictive clause?
What is the real meaning of this poem?
How many sets of chromosomes do human beings have?
Why did Brutus betray Caesar?
So, what students mostly do in class is guess what the teacher wants them to say. Constantly, they must try to supply the Right Answer. It does not seem to matter if the subject is English or history or science; mostly, students do the same thing. And since it is indisputably (if not publicly) recognized that the ostensible 'content' of such courses is rarely remembered beyond the last quiz (in which you are required to remember only 65 per cent of what you were told), it is safe to say that just about the only learning that occurs in classrooms is that which is communicated by the structure of the classroom itself. What is this hidden curriculum? What are these messages? Here are a few among many, none of which you will ever find officially listed among the aims of teachers:
Recently we attended a party at which the game Trivia was played. One young man sat sullen and silent through several rounds, perhaps thinking that nothing could be more dull. At some point, the question arose, "What was the names of the actor and actress who starred in My First Nighter?' From somewhere deep within him an answer formed, and he quite astonished himself, and everyone else, by blurting it out. (Les Tremaine and Barbara Luddy.) For several moments afterwards, he could not conceal his delight. He was in the fifth grade again, and the question might have been, "What is the principal river of Uruguay?" He had supplied the answer, and faster than anyone else. And that is good, as every classroom environment he'd ever been in had taught him.
Watch a man -say, a politician -being interviewed on television, and you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none to give, even if you don't understand the question, even if the question contains erroneous assumptions, even if you are ignorant of the facts required to answer. Have you ever heard a man being interviewed say, "I don't have the faintest idea", or "I don't know enough even to guess", or "I have been asked that question before, but all my answers to it seem to be wrong?" One does not 'blame' men, especially if they are politicians, for providing instant answers to all questions. The public requires that they do, since the public has learned that instant answer giving is the most important sign of an educated man.
What all of us have learned (and how difficult it is to unlearn it!) is that it is not important that our utterances satisfy the demands of the question (or of reality), but that they satisfy the demands of the classroom environment. Teacher asks. Student answers. Have you ever heard of a student who replied to a question, "Does anyone know the answer to that question?" or "I don't understand what I would have to do in order to find an answer", a "I have been asked that question before and, frankly, I've never understood what it meant? Such behavior would invariably result in some form of penalty and is, of course, scrupulously avoided, except by 'wise guys'. Thus, students learn not to value it. They get the message. And yet few teachers consciously articulate such a message. It is not part of the 'content' of their instruction. No teacher even said: "Don't value uncertainty and tentativeness. Don't question questions. Above all, don't think." The message is communicated quietly, insidiously, relentlessly and effectively through the structure of the classroom: through the role of the teacher, the role of the student, the rules of their verbal game, the rights that are assigned, the arrangements made for communication, the 'doings' that are praised or censured. In other words, the medium is the message.
Have you ever heard of a student taking notes on the remarks of another student? Probably not. Because the organization of the classroom makes it clear that what students say is not the 'content' of instruction. Therefore, it will not be included on tests. Therefore, they can ignore it.
Have you ever heard of a student indicating an interest in how a textbook writer arrived at his conclusions? Rarely, we would guess. Most students are unaware that textbooks are written by human beings. Besides, the classroom structure does not suggest that the processes of inquiry are of any importance.
Have you ever heard of a student suggesting a more useful definition of something that the teacher has already defined? Or of a student who asked, "Whose facts are those?" Or of a student who asked, "What is a fact?" Or of a student who asked, "Why are we doing this work?"
Now, if you reflect on the fact that most classroom environments are managed so that such questions as these will not be asked, you can become very depressed. Consider, for example, where 'knowledge' comes from. It isn't just there in a book, waiting for someone to come along and 'learn' it. Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: once you have learned how to ask questions -relevant and appropriate and substantial questions-you have leaned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. Let us remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing (partially and temporarily) somebody else's answers to somebody else's questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important and intellectual ability man has yet developed -the art and science of asking questions -is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not 'taught' in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued. It is doubtful if you can think of many schools that include question asking, or methods of inquiry, as part of their curriculum. But even if you knew a hundred that did, there would be little cause for celebration unless the classrooms were arranged, so that students could do question asking; not talk about it, read about it, be told about it. Asking questions is behavior. If you don't do it, you don't learn it. It really is as simple as that.
If you go through the daily papers and listen attentively to the radio and watch television carefully, you should have no trouble perceiving that our political and social lives are conducted, to a very considerable extent, by people whose behaviors are almost precisely the behaviors their school environments demanded of them. We do not need to document for you the pervasiveness of dogmatism and intellectual timidity, the fear of change, the ruts and rots caused by the inability to ask new or basic questions and to work intelligently towards verifiable answers.
The best illustration of this point can be found in the fact that those who do question must drop out of the Establishment. The price of maintaining membership in the Establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority
"I Hate School" Quotes Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.
Bertrand Russell
It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere - mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self... Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are (they are much the same in most countries), how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and aesthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.
Charles Silberman
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
Agatha Christie
What we learn to do, we learn by doing.
Thomas Jefferson
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself
Galileo
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Alexandre Dumas
Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.
John Holt
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
John Taylor Gatto
It is an iron law of education that rigid systems produce rigid people, and flexible systems produce flexible people.
Roland Meighan
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework’.
John Taylor Gatto
The 145 year-old system we are still trying to use after 145 years of failure must be scrapped and replaced. Small improvements, even if attainable, will not stave off collapse.
Leslie A. Hart
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Jacob Brownowski
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Kirkegaard
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E.M. Forster
We prefer that they [the children] should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not, - how much does the youth know when he has finished his education - but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care?
Charlotte Mason
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Emma Goldman
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
Anatole France
To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
Benjamin Jowett
The newer and broader picture suggests that the child emerges into literacy by actively speaking, reading, and writing in the context of real life, not through filling out phonics worksheets or memorising words.
Thomas Armstrong
Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?
Daniel Goleman
I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.
Sarah Undset, Nobel Laureate
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
Trevelyan
I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
Petronius (Satyricon)
I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.
Edward Grieg
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents, so they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
St. Augustine
Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.
Edward Fiske
I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.
Thomas Edison
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Thoreau
I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world, so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster.
Edward de Bono
Education should not be associated with scholasticism. There are men who have never seen the inside of a university who are superior to those and worth more to society than those who carried away the highest honors. Herbert Spencer spent three years at school in all his life. Spinoza spent a very few years and then was expelled. Francis Bacon, the man who gave us all the fundamentals of what we call now the scientific method, went to school three years, revolted against Aristotle and left the halls of learning in a huff. Actually, as one walks down the halls of learning and looks at the busts of great, therein, he is struck by the fact that almost none were formally educated but took the world for their texts and professors. One might almost say that a professional educator is one who worships a dead illiterate. And one, with some research, might validly conclude that the surest way to succeed in any profession is to study something else at school.
L. Ron Hubbard
It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn.
Charles Handy
By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
John Taylor Gatto
Childhood placed at a tangent to adulthood, perceived as special and magical, precious and dangerous at once, has turned into some volatile stuff - hydrogen, or mercury, which has to be contained. The separate condition of the child has never been so bounded by thinking, so established in law as it is today......How we treat children really tests who we are, fundamentally conveys who we hope to be.
Marina Warner
Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do. These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, 'hyper' children - all words invented by adults in defence of their misunderstanding.
Often it was not in school, but outside of it - in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school - that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its time bound regularity.
James Hillman
We live in a hierarchical world in which we defend ourselves ....from our eternal infancy and childhood by insisting on a graded, necessary elevation through learning and technological sophistication out of the child into the adult. This is not a true initiation that values both the previous form of existence and the newly attained one; it is a defence against the humiliating reality of the child.
Education means "to lead out." We seem to understand this as leading away from childhood, but maybe we could think of it as eliciting the wisdom and talents of childhood itself. As A.S.Neill, founder of the Summerhill School, taught many years ago, we can trust that the child already has talents and intelligence. We believe that the child intellectually is a tabula rasa, a blank blackboard, but maybe the child knows more than we suspect.
An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.
Thomas Moore
I think children can be very cruel especially in adolescence and if you are slow, and I was (I was in a school which was quite competitive) you do get a lot of slamming about from the other kids. I don't know about girls, but I know that boys are very cruel and very tough. It built up a tremendous resentment in me because I was also bad at sport and athletics and all I could do was play the piano. So I always got the sense in my adolescent years that 'Oh, Hopkins, you know he's, well he's not worth much, or he's a failure.
Anthony Hopkins
The opportunity to develop and practise social skills in school is quite limited. Children spend nearly all their time in school with other children born during the same academic year as themselves, and a great deal of time outside school as well. In school, there is little social contact with younger or older children and even less with adults. It is easy to see how peer mores, values and codes of behaviour become entrenched, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and the threat of ostracism or exclusion from the group for those who do not. Moreover, up to one and a half hours a day in school is specifically set aside for social recreation in the playground, where children are thrown together with nothing much to do. It is not surprising that playground hierarchies emerge and bullying is rife.
Alan Thomas
The consequence is that the 'social' skills acquired are those which may be essential for survival in school but have little applicability in the outside world. There is virtually no opportunity to relate socially to adults in school in order to learn wider social skills. Ironically, such skills can only be learned outside school hours. Teachers do, of course, set up social scenarios and discuss with children how to behave in given social circumstances. But these are no substitute for learning through real-life, dynamic social contact.
Rabindranath Tagore
School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.
Rabindranath Tagore
For thousands of years, in thousands of places, families educated their own. This tradition changed not because a better method was found but because economic conditions required it. To work one had to lreave one's children; one's children, furthermore, had to be trained for tasks no-one in their purview could be seen doing. For these reasons institutionalised schooling was invented' and while it adequately addressed a set of economic problems it inspired a new set of human ones that are psychological, emotional, and even spiritual in nature.
I do not pine for a different place and time. I only point out what we have traded off. I think certain good things are recoverable, though without the life that once surrounded them they must inevitably take on different meanings. One of these is the tradition of parental and communal responsibility for the daily instruction of the young. Today this is denied us because teaching has been institutionalised, a convenience in a time of industry and profit when citizen-labourers perform economic functions more efficiently without children present. But for whom is such a state of affairs indeed convenient?
Learning theory tells us to teach children as individuals who learn in their own unique manner. The finest possible curriculum is precisely the one that starts with each child's singular means of learning. Instruction and guidance are best provided by those with an intimate understanding of the individual child and a deep commitment to the child's education. these principles derive not merely from the homeschooling movement but from contemporary research into how children learn. They are not merely adages fabricated by homeschoolers but precepts grounded in a science that should inspire us to reconsider both our roles as parents and the shape of public education.
David Guterson
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E.M. Forester
What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.
We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from being engaged in.
Howard Gardner
Everyone, at present, is in favour of having students learn the fundamentals. For most people, 'the three R's', or some variation of them, represent what is fundamental to a learner. However, if one observes a learner and asks oneself, "What is it that this organism needs without which he cannot thrive?", it is impossible to come up with the answer, "the three R's".
English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again.
Postman & Weingartner
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
Henry Adams
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
Alec Bourne
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Laurence Lee
The world does not pay for what a person knows. But it pays for what a person does with what he knows.
Hellen Keller
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.
Albert Einstein
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less "showily". Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's mentor and friend.
School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children’s conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, ... are prohibited.
Count Leo Tolstoy
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
George Bernard Shaw
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
H.L. Mencken
Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Benjamin Disraeli
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.
John Updike
In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.
William Duane "Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky," 1822
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
William Glasser
It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
Benito Mussolini; from "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932.
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education; from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935.
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
Ludwig von Mises
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
John Dewey
I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
Carl Rogers
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
Lillian Smith
You Can't Reform a System Based on Oppression By Laurie A. Couture
Original Article
Talk of "education reform" is viral all over the internet. Despite multiple failed attempts at "reform" over the past decades, society refuses to think outside the "box" of schooling and consider a radical return to how children learned for millennia- By playing, living and doing! Teachers and others in the field of education continue to propose that the oppressive, prison-like institution where children are forced to stay seated in a building all day pumping out paperwork can and should be reformed! When democratic schooling, homeschooling and unschooling advocates attempt to join the conversation and offer models that are successful and truly radical, they are often met by educators and their supporters who dismiss these models as idealistic and not "realistic" for "everyone". Additionally, people seem not to be aware of the fact that despite talks of reform, the needs, voices and leadership of the people who are the most adversely affected by public schooling- youth- are left out of the conversation. Sadly, when the voices of public school youth do reach the movement, they often represent the most compliant and academically engaged students. Their requests tend to be benign, suggesting that minds and bodies trained by the system for so long are unable to fathom what they have lost of their childhoods and what they truly need in order to thrive. The cries of "end school!" from the voices of the artists, rebels, misfits and other children failed most severely by schooling rarely make it to the table. In this post I answer questions about how "education reform" can be truly child-centered, radical and real.
How can we save our public schools and reform them?
How can we reform a system that was historically founded (in 1852) for the purpose of oppressing children, preventing critical thinking and engineering a more obedient citizenry? How can we reform a system where, in 2011, children need a doctor's note to go to the bathroom when needed, a federal "504 Plan" to eat when hungry, a diagnosis of being brain disordered with a subsequent federally mandated special education "IEP" in order to be taught in a hands-on manner and where a teenager has to be diagnosed as "severely disabled" or unteachable and sent to a "therapeutic school" in order to have physical activity between classes? Do we truly believe that a place that runs this contrary to the needs and humanity in children can be "reformed"?
"Adults would not get the severity of the human rights violations in the public school system even if they were put back in it (this is not referring to all you epic radicals out there- you know who you are). The reason? The boiling frog syndrome. The adults who don't get it are already broken and they would be mentally blind to all of the wrongs that go on, including to themselves." -My son, Brycen R. R. Couture How can we teach so that children care about their education?
The belief that children need to be "taught" is based on the arrogant, adult-centered belief that children are unmotivated, blank slates who will not learn unless adults force it upon them, usually in unpleasant ways. Nature endows ALL children with the passion and ability to learn what they need and want to learn on their own. Adults should not "teach" anything unless it is requested by the child- Teaching interferes with the child's natural process of learning, inventing and creating. Unsolicited teaching interferes with children following their own innate ideas, hunches, interests and modes of expressing their conclusions, brilliance and creativity. Youth care about learning when they are the driving force behind their learning process and when they are doing what they love. Adults can be the guides and facilitators if children desire their help. In public school, education is about force-feeding children, then expecting them to swallow what is irrelevant without gagging, regurgitate it for a grade- and act like they care!
Will allowing children to use technology such as iPads, iPods and smart phones in the classroom transform public education?
I don't see how adding devices could "transform" anything; lap tops have already been added to some schools; adding hand-held devices simply adds technology to the building, like adding paper and pencils and other inventory. Adding technology doesn't change the power structure. Teachers dictate the use of every single object in a school, so how could adding devices "transform" anything? We had a Commodore and an IBM PC computer in my elementary school, supposedly revolutionary. Nothing changed- School was still just as oppressive and abusive, we simply had a distraction from the tedium. I'm sure when toilets and ovens were added to schools, people thought that would revolutionize schooling too, but children soon found out that no one could use those appliances without permission.
Teachers use technology to control children, and hand-held devices would be no different- Teachers control the activity and purpose of the device and how and when it will be used. No doubt any use outside of the teacher's prescription would be cause for punishment. Technology can also be used to abuse and violate children as well. For example, one high school issued bugged laptops to children. The web cams in the laptops were randomly activated by school authorities to spy on youth in their own homes, often in their bedrooms, with some allegations that youth were being photographed undressing or in other situations intending to be private. The issue came to light only after a youth was punished at school for allegedly being caught "taking drugs"; the boy had actually been eating Mike and Ike candy!
Rather than a gesture of bringing technology into the classroom, technology should be used to eradicate the classroom and the prison model of "going to school".
Will changing middle school and high school scheduling to allow for longer classes, labs and more time for research and inquiry lead to radical change in public education?
Proposing a mainstream solution like tooling with already oppressive systems such as scheduling, is not a radical solution. Block scheduling, six-day scheduling, 90 minute classes and any other type of scheduling at the middle and high school level creates an environment that fails to respect the basic physiological needs of older children. As children are shuffled further up in the 12 school "grades", it becomes increasing difficult, if not nearly impossible in some schools, to meet their basic health and biological needs. Most teachers at the higher grade levels refuse to allow children to use the toilet in class, and the three to five minutes between classes makes it nearly impossible for children to use the toilet between classes. The youth that I have worked with over the years report that ninety minute classes only increase this distress. Likewise, scheduling at the higher grades leaves some youth with lunch times that are well past noon time. Some youth report eating as late as 1:30 with, of course, no snack time in the morning! Finally, "block scheduling" or 90 minute classes mean more time that children are sitting sedentary and immobile. Truly, "block scheduling" is a health risk to youth! A true radical solution is to abandon the current institution entirely.
If we tore down the current public educational system, what would replace it and how would it work?
John Taylor Gatto proposed a radical solution that would be in alignment with nature, humane treatment of children and a democratic society: Abolish forced public schooling as it is now and establish the entire community as a community learning experience for people of all ages. Children would lead their own learning in a non-compulsory manner. Everyone, from the youngest child to the seniors in nursing homes would be welcomed to facilitate classes, and children and adults can attend - or opt out- at their choosing. Public dollars would be used to fund the necessary supplies and assist mentors of any age or specialty.
If the entire city or town were set up as a learning community for children to explore, apprentice, find resources, collect mentors and to be free to teach, attend or not attend classes, this would be the "educational reform" that would truly heal children and our culture. In open learning communities, children would have all of their bodily, developmental, emotional, social, intellectual and creative needs met. Art galleries, libraries, historical centers, community centers and cafes would all be hubs. Hopefully, diverse businesses would open their doors to be part of the process as well. The now abandoned school buildings would be used as resources and spaces, not as prisons. Anyone would be free to facilitate or attend classes, play in the gym, use the equipment, cook meals, hold meetings, clubs, groups, shows, etc.
What about children who are abused and neglected at home or who are living in poverty?
In the case of children who are abused and neglected at home, or who are living in poverty, these learning communities would be able to embrace and care for these children and identify their families for help much more genuinely than the current public school system. The current system abuses and neglects children in so many ways, causing double the distress and trauma to children already suffering at home. In 19 states, it is actually legal for children to be beaten by school staff with a wooden board. Boys and African American children are the primary targets of all forms of school corporal punishment. Even in the case of a special teacher who provides comfort, the distressed child is still expected to focus on and keep up with irrelevant school work to maintain "grades". When learning communities encompass use of all of the public spaces in towns and cities (including hopefully businesses as well), there are more places of refuge and resource for impoverished families and children suffering abuse and neglect.
How will learning disabled children get services?
Children are born to be natural learners. It is forced education that destroys this and creates the idea of "learning disabilities" and "under-achievement". It is the public school system's unnatural method of forcing all children to perform certain mental functions all at the same ages in the exact same developmentally inappropriate manner that produces the illusion of "learning disabilities". There are no learning disabled people. Every human child is born with the capability to learn, regardless of their organic intellectual endowment. If allowed to learn through play and by following their interests, children of any ability will naturally learn in the ways that best suit their unique learning style and sensory modality. Loved ones and community members can support, mentor, scaffold and celebrate children's developmentally appropriate learning processes in manners more diverse and helpful than the current system offers. Children will not be forced to endure rigorous testing that leads to labels (such as "ADHD") and drugs, nor will their parents be forced to fight Goliath special education teams to win a few token "services".
It is a democratic society's duty to educate its children- How will children learn if they aren't taught?
Point blank, children have a birth right to live their lives in freedom and with joy, through play. That is true democracy! Children should not be forced to go to any building, or be forced to "learn" anything any adult believes they should "learn". The element of force immediately negates democracy and becomes the antithesis to freedom. That homogenized education for the masses is possible is a myth; forced "education" is inhumane and immoral on so many levels. It instantly indicts and imprisons all children for the implied "crime" of being under the age of 18 and dictates them under the control of adults who should have no natural power over their lives. There should be no "debate" about human rights issues. Forced education causes apathy, docility, obedience and lack of questioning and critical thinking. It destroys passion, natural learning ability and interferes with the individual "callings" of each human being. Children learn what they need to learn by being loved and cared for by their parents and loved ones. Children learn by living, playing, exploring, creating and being a part of their families, circles of friends and communities. This delicate process must be restored, because this is how true learning occurs.
That all sounds idealistic. In the meantime, don't we need to start slow, educate people and reform what we have to work with now?
I will say it again and again, we have to stop talking about reforming the current system- You can't reform a system that was BUILT with the INTENT to oppress children! "Reform" has been attempted over and over since forced schooling was instituted in 1852. The pendulum has swung in all directions, but most aggressively since the 1980's towards increased drudgery and developmentally inappropriate practice for children. The only function of "reforms" is to lightly shuffle a few cards to quiet dissent, prime children to take their place in the "global marketplace" and to make matters easier for the adults. The end result is always the same: Children are oppressed, stuck in buildings, sitting in chairs, with teachers forcing upon them something irrelevant to their lives. School continues to steal their free time, commit human rights violations against their bodies and minds and confine them. School continues to prevent children from doing what nature intended- Playing, running, jumping, climbing, exploring, creating, socializing and inventing. We can't reform a paradigm that runs as deep and as thick as this one. The "free school" movement of the late 60's and early 70's showed that public schools want no part of democratic learning environments; the federal government uses public education as a tool for their much larger agenda of globalization. As long as we look to the problem as a solution, we will never get out of the boxed idea that children must have something done TO them by "expert" adults. The belief that adults must educate, confine, deprive, "discipline" and force is the paradigm that needs to change.
How can children playing all day, doing whatever they are interested in doing, be realistic for society?
The question is, how have we allowed our society to get to a place where what is natural is not realistic for society? All mammal children learn by playing. Human children learned through play, exploration and interest-led pursuits since the dawn of humanity because this is nature's intent for children. Should we be questioning why our society thinks it is unrealistic for children to learn the way they are wired to learn?
This idea of democratic learning sounds too radical and experimental- Can it be done in modern times?
Unschoolers, relaxed homeschoolers and children in democratic schools demonstrate everyday, year after year, as they have for decades that interest-led, play-based, democratic learning grows joyful, intelligent, creative, brilliant, confident, successful and passionate children! Summerhill, The Sudbury Valley School, The Albany Free School and many other democratic schools highlighted in books by A.S. Neill, Jerry Mintz, Ivan Illich, Matt Hern and others have been running democratically, with children learning freely for years. If these schools can pull it off with such success, why not public schools? Some of the most innovative minds in history and in the world today never attended school. In fact, many unschooled and homeschooled children run businesses, are public speakers, authors, performing musicians, artists, artisans or inventors and some even attend college early. Homeschoolers and unschoolers are diverse and come from every political orientation and walk of life, including single, low-income parents.
If we eradicated public education as we know it, would society collapse?
The institutionalized oppression of children will hopefully collapse and lead to a return to more natural ways of parenting, learning and living. Children raised in environments with strong parent-child attachments and joy based living and learning will thrive! They will give way to a compassionate, empowered, innovative generation who actually cultivate a more humanitarian and environmentally sensitive society!
"I used to think it was impossible to collapse the school system. not anymore. Now I can see just how possible it truly is! School is obsolete." -Laurette Lynn The Unplugged Mom How can I get involved in real educational change?
Listen to the children and what they are telling us about what they need! My son, who was in public school prior to him joining my life through adoption, endured day care, preschool and public school. As an unschooler who has "detoxed" the past seven years from schooling, here are his words: http://www.laurieacouture.com/2011/10/what-children-really-want-to-tell-teachers/
Join the Occupy Education movement! Start by uploading a photo of how you occupy education. Here is my "How I Occupy Education" photo: http://occupyedu.tumblr.com/post/12095324731/i-occupy-education-by-unschooling-my-teen-son-and
Here is my son, Brycen's "How I Occupy Education" photo: http://occupyedu.tumblr.com/post/12095357337/im-brycen-and-im-a-17-year-old-boy-i-occupy
Write a blog post about how you are occupying education.
Organize an Occupy event at your state's Department of Education and literally occupy by educating others that reform of the current system misses the point.
Of course, the best way to "Occupy Education" is to walk out of the school system hand in hand with your children and begin an unschooling journey!
"The choice is in our hands. We can continue the 19th century-style sausage factory method of schooling. Or we can tear down the institutionalized barriers that impede learning and create a 21st century-style learning society." -Wendy Priesnitz, Author of Challenging Assumptions in Education and Editor of Life Learning magazine
A Vulnerable Teacher (excerpt) By Ken Macrorie
During my three years in the Army I had time to decide I wanted to go back to college and become an English Professor. So I did that. For the subsequent twenty-five years I have been paid by the citizens of North Carolina, New York, California, and Michigan to do something called "teach" their children in universities. For the first seventeen years, many of the days went like this:
The students were sitting out there in straight rows looking over the backs of other students in the row in front--at me. Often I began my sentences "Of course--" because I had been over the material many times and read it in the books and articles of authorities.
The students were not responding to my statements. I saw a fellow furtively spreading the school paper on the writing arm of his chair. A girl near the window was gazing out toward the sun. Most of the students were not thinking about what I was saying. Or questioning it. They were writing it down in their notebooks. Not all of it, but the high points--as I and dozens before me had ordered them to do. That means they were generalizing and abstracting what I said, although that had usually already been generalized and abstracted.
The best students (meaning those who got the highest grades) were putting down those of my statements likely to appear in the next quiz or the final exam. They would have been idiots to have spent their time writing down what interested them most. It was what interested me most that they concetrated on. Of course.
Up there at the lectern--or if I was affecting nonchalance and sitting on a table, my loud socks displaying an inch of skin above them--I was talking on my own. Every minute was mine, and the silences frightened me when I departed from notes and for a few seconds couldn't remember what I wanted to say next. The students knew that what I would say was all mine, not theirs; and the chances were high that it would always be mine, for they would be giving it back to me soon on answer sheets and forgetting it the next morning. All mine, but "very important," as I said again and again during the lecture.
(I am looking back now and describing my teaching with insight I didn't possess in those days.)
From the lectern I kept insisting that it was all important, because the students did not seem aware that any of it was important. Many apparently did not think the course important. (Another of-course course whose materials belonged completely to me. What might actually be important in it for them was beyond their conjecture.) They had not been invited to bring any of their experience to bear upon the experience I was generalizing about. There were no handles for them. Finally, all they could guess is what might be important for me as I made up the test.
As I lectured, sometimes they could see I was warming up, getting in a stew or ecstasy about something, and they could guess that the idea counted for me. But it probably would not count for me in the test because I would be scholarly, objective. I making up the questions I would be careful not ask something I felt strongly about, for later in grading I might show prejudice. So they saw--ot thought they say--that even my commitments were weak; and they were influenced not to reveal their commitments, and finally not to commit themselves at all in matters intellectual, social, or artistic, or whatever the bent of the course.
"Of course" was a fit phrase for me to strew through my lectures. It said there would be no surprise in that followed. It established my superiority. I generalized, abstracted, and then explained. I did not give the listeners two facts and challenge them to make something of them. Instead I quickly categorized the two and from the moment on those facts resided in drawers that I would pull out when I felt the need to. The listeners were not expected to go poking around in drawers when the impulse moved them, or to open an unlabled drawer, or to stuff an empty one with any of their possesions.
As the years went by, I lectured less and less and conducted "discussions" more and more. I dominated the discussions. They became questions and answer sessions in which I asked a question and then answered it myself with a little lecture.
For seventeen years I heard my students repeating badly to me what I had said to them and hundreds before them. I read their tired, hurriedly written papers conveying in academic dialect what they thought proper to give Teacher. One day in May in an Advanced Writing class I finally exploaded. "I can't stand to read this junk any longer. Go back and write down as fast as you can whatever is in your mind--for fifteen minutes. Write so fast you can't think of punctuation or spelling or how you're going to say it. I would like for a change to read some truth that counts for you."
Against School By John Taylor Gatto
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
~http://www.studentliberation.com/llewellyn-liberation-handbook.html
Years ago, when we came to homeschooling, there was little information available, and even less homeschool support. Over the past couple of years, we have collected information about and for homeschoolers. We would like to share it with you.
Please feel free to browse our shelves, complete a survey, and contribute to this collection. If you belong to a homeschool support group, please check out our state-by-state listings and make sure your group's information is up-to-date. All homeschool support group listings are FREE.
We will never claim to know everything there is to know about homeschooling, in fact, we continue to learn every day from all the homeschoolers we have met around the world. If you see something that doesn't ring true, please let us know. Your opinion counts.
Why Homeschool:
Homeschooling is the single fastest growing educational trend in the United States, and that trend is expanding worldwide. Dr. Brian Ray, one of the leading homeschool researchers, estimates that homeschooling has increased 15% per year over the past several years. While accurate statistics regarding the number of families homeschooling is difficult to come by, Dr. Ray’s estimates are supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Household Education Survey program.
In 1999, the Department of Ed estimated that there were about 850,000 homeschoolers nationwide, and had increased to about 1.1 million by 2003. Ray’s estimated that there were between 1.7 and 2.1 million homeschoolers at the end of that period, and that currently, there are between 2.5 and 4 million homeschoolers nationwide.
It is not hard to see why. Every day there are reports about how our traditional education systems are failing to keep pace with business and industry, and indeed, worldwide education systems, in preparing our nation’s youth to enter the workforce. Students in Japan, India and China spend more time in school, and far surpass our nation’s youth in Math and Science. So how do homeschoolers do, comparatively?
Socially: There is a common myth that homeschooling produces social misfits. This myth partially arises from an assumption that traditional education systems provide “normal” socialization activities. Dr. Raymond Moore, in his book Better Late than Early writes that “The idea that children need to be around many other youngsters in order to be ‘socialized’ is perhaps the most dangerous and extravagant myth in education and child rearing today." There is ample research that indicates that because home schooled students are exposed to a wider variety of people and situations, they learn to get along with a variety of people, making them socially mature and better able to adjust to new situations.
In their Communities: Many non-homeschoolers believe that homeschooling can turn out better students, but because homeschool students are educated in greater isolation from the world, they are less politically and socially involved. This concern comes at a great time, for homeschoolers at least. The first generation of homeschoolers has now grown up and entered the workforce. Dr. Ray surveyed over 7,000 adults who had been home schooled and compared them against their more traditionally educated peers. His research found that:
- Ninety-five percent of homeschoolers had an adequate comprehension of politics and government, compared to 65% of U.S. adults.
- Seventy-one percent of homeschool graduates participate in ongoing community service activities, including politics, compared to 37% of adults in similar ages.
- Eighty-eight percent of HS graduates are members of organizations (community groups, church, or professional organizations) compared to 50% of U.S. adults.
- Significantly, 76% of homeschool graduates voted in a national or state election within the past 5 years, compared to 29 percent of similar U.S. adults.
Colleges and Universities all around the nation have realized the positive benefits of attracting homeschoolers. Research indicates that homeschoolers who have gone to college have no social skill deprivation, exhibit greater leadership skills, demonstrated stronger work ethic and had higher moral values, integral in their college success.
Homeschooling is obviously not for everyone. However, it is also an education option that should be considered for any family that does not feel their student’s needs are being met in traditional educational systems. At Homeschool Facts, we are not anti-public education, we are pro-education choice. We support the parent’s right to choose which educational environment will work best for their child. As you read our pages, and ponder your options, we hope that you will find encouragement here. We appreciate your feedback.
http://www.homeschoolfacts.com/pages/index.php/Best_in_Class
Student Liberation Articles, Book Excerpts, and Videos << Previous | Next >>
Grace Llewellyn Teenage Liberation Handbook (excerpt)
John Taylor Gatto Seven Lesson Teacher
Schools Don't Educate
The Curriculum of Necessity
Against School
Alan Watts The Unsettling Truth About Life (video)
Career Advice (video)
Derrick Jensen Why Do I Hate School? (excerpt)
Why School? (excerpt)
Compulsory Schooling (excerpt)
Barbara Ehrenreich The Higher Education Scam
Daniel Greenberg Fishing (a chapter from Free at Last)
Matt Hern Promise of Deschooling (off site)
Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and Anarchist Resistance (off site)
Erica Goldson Valedictorian Speech
Inge Bell Grades (excerpt)
Jan Hunt Learning Through Play
Stephen Cullen Parents Suck (excerpt)
Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner The Hidden Curriculum (excerpt)
Peter Gray (more) Children Educate Themselves
School is Prison
The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents
Alfie Kohn Talking Back to Our Teachers
Unconditional Parenting: Chapter 1 (off site)
The Case Against Competition
Punished by Rewards (excerpt)
In Pursuit of Affluence, at a High Price
A.S. Neill Summerhill (excerpt) (pdf)
Anti-School Quotes "I Hate School" Quotes
Emma Goldman The Child and Its Enemies
Sarah Fitz-Claridge School Phobia
Anonymous Why Not to Trust Your School
Carl Rogers (more) Regarding Learning and Its Facilitation
Personal Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Radical Youth School is Boring
Daniel Pink Surprising Truth about Motivation (video)
David H. Albert Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow. (excerpt)
John Holt Instead of Education (excerpt)
True Learning (excerpt)
How Children Fail (excerpt)
The Right to Control One's Learning
Noam Chomsky (more) The Function of the Schools
Jan Matthews The Role of Schooling
The History of Schooling
Theories of Schooling
Notes on the Poverty of Student Life
Jeff Schmidt Disciplined Minds (excerpt)
Thomas Gordon How Children Really React to Control (excerpt)
Daniel Quinn Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
Jules Henry School Training (excerpt)
School Nightmare (excerpt)
Sugata Mitra New Experiments in Self-Teaching (video)
Paul Lockhart A Mathematician's Lament (excerpt)
Wikipedia The Milgram Experiment
Ron Miller The Student Revolt Against Alienation (excerpt)
Blake Boles College without High School (excerpt)
More Articles, Book Excerpts, and Videos << Previous | Next >>
Jonathan Kozol Extreme Ideas (excerpt)
Jerry Mintz The Magic of Democracy
Ken Macrorie A Vulnerable Teacher (excerpt)
Matt Groening School is Hell Comic Strip (off site)
Jerry Farber Conformity in Schools (excerpt)
Erich Fromm Forward to A.S. Neill's Summerhill (off site)
Laurie A. Couture Can't Reform a System Based on Oppression
Gordo Unlearning School
Taking the SAT
Growing without Schooling Unschooling Quotes
The Teenage Liberation Handbook (excerpt) By Grace Llewellyn
Not Back to School Camp
How strange and self-defeating that supposedly free countries should train their young for life in totalitarianism.
- No, David wait until after class to use the bathroom.
- Unfortunately, your daughter would rather entertain the class than participate appropriately.
- Carter, if I have to ask you again to sit down, you'll be taking a trip to the office.
- I'd love to hear what you have to say, Monty, but you need to raise your hand first.
- Tonight you need to finish the exercises on page 193 and read the next section.
- Marisa, I need a written explanation as to why you didn't give in your homework today.
Do you go to school? Yes? Then...
...YOU ARE NOT FREE
The most overwhelming reality of school is control. School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read and to a large extent what you think. In school you can't control your own life. Outside of school you can, at least to the extent that your parents trust you to. 'Comparing me those who are conventionally schooled,' writes 12-year old unschooler Colin Roch, 'I like comparing the freedoms of a wild stallion to those of cattle in a feedlot'.
The ultimate goal of this book is for you to start associating the concept of freedom with you, and to start wondering why you and your friends don't have much of it, and for you to move out of the busy-prison into the meadows of life. There are lots of very good reasons to leave school but, to my idealistic American mind, the pursuit of freedom encompasses most of them and outshines the others.
If you look at the history of freedom, you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is 'normal' and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different. There was a time when many black slaves took a sort of pride - or talked as if they took pride - in how well-behaved and hardworking they were. There was a time when most women believed - or talked as if they believed - that they should obey and submit to their husbands. In fact, people within an oppressed group often internalize their oppression so much that they are crueler, and more judgemental, to their peers than the oppressors themselves are. In China, men made deformed female feet into sexual fetishes, but it was the women who tied the cords on their own daughter's feet.
Obviously, black and female people eventually caught sight of a greater vision for themselves, and change blazed through their minds, through laws, through public attitudes. All is not well, but the United States is now far kinder to people of color and with mammary glands than it was 100 years ago. What's more, these people are kinder to themselves. The dream bigger dreams, and flesh out grander lives, than picking cotton for the master or making a martini for the husband.
Right now, a lot of you are helping history to repeat itself; you don't believe you should be free. Of course you want to be free - in various ways, not just free of school. However, society gives you so many condescending, false, and harmful messages about yourselves that most of you wouldn't trust yourselves with freedom. It's all complicated by the fact that the people who infringe most dangerously and inescapably on your freedom are often those who say they are helping you, those who are convinced you need their help: teachers, school counselors, perhaps your parents.
Why Do I Hate School? An excerpt of Walking on Water by Derrick Jensen
It should surprise us less than it does that the educational system destroys students's souls. From the beginning, that has been the purpose. Don't take my word on this: Take it from the people who set up the system. In 1888 (and I'm indebted to the great website The Memory Hole and the great educator and writer John Taylor Gatto for collecting these quotes on the primary purpose of industrial education), the Senate Committee on Education, nervous about the high quality of education provided by nonstandardized, localized schools (where--the horror! the horror!--teachers actually taught students to think for themselves!), reported, "We believe that the education is one of the primary causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes."
Industrial educators set out to rectify this problem. How? As industrial educator and philosopher John Dewey said, "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth."
Next question: What are the proper social order and the right social growth? In 1906, Elwood Cubberly, who later became dean of education at Stanford, gave his answers: Schools should be factories "in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products...manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry."
Then in 1906, the Rockefeller Education Board, major backer of the movement for compulsory public schooling, gave its reasons for putting its money into that movement: "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [i.e., the development of children's intellects and characters in homes and local schools] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not seach for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesman, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in a imperfect way."
Those in charge could not have been clearer. William Torrey Harris, U.S. commissioner of education from 1889 to 1906, wrote: "Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual."
Finally, bringing this around not only to students' relationships to themselves but to the land, Harris also stated, "The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places. ...It is to master the physical self, to transend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world."
No wonder we all hate school.
And the fact that we do hate school is a very good thing. It means we're still alive.
Grades (excerpt from This Book is Not Required -2nd edition) By Inge Bell
We are so used to the system that it seems inevitable. Most people have to admit to themselves that, if grades were to disappear tomorrow, they might never learn another set of irregular verbs and might, indeed, just lie down and not move for a very long time. Naturally! This is a result of the system, not a reason for it. Having been bullied all your life into learning things you didn't much want to know, you would, indeed, quit if you could and so, perhaps, would most of your professors. I suspect, though, that in a few months you would get up, look around, and begin to take an altogether different sort of interest in altogether different kinds of knowledge.
Why do our schools function in this way? Why is intellectual curiosity regularly killed in order to teach discipline? Why do our schools give even seven-year old children failing grades? Whenever sociologists see a system operating in "dysfunctional" ways, they suggest that we have not discovered the "real" function of the system. A hint is given us here in the fact that the only schools which don't beat up their students emotionally are a few private and public schools which serve the rich. The real purpose of school is to make people obedient to authority. The mindlessness of school is meant to prepare people for unquestioned acceptance of the mindlessness of most jobs. And, perhaps most importantly, it is the job of schools to convince those who will have lousy jobs and low wages that their fate is their fault...that they just weren't smart enough (translate, deserving enough) to do any better.
Hidden Curriculum An excerpt of The Medium is the Message By Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
In order to understand what kinds of behaviors classrooms promote, one must become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them. What students do in the classroom is what they learn, and what they learn to do is the classroom's message. Now, what is it that students do in the classroom? Well, mostly, they sit and listen to the teacher. Mostly, they are required to believe in authorities, or at last pretend to such belief when they take tests. Mostly, they are required to remember. They are almost never required to make observations, formulate definitions, or perform any intellectual operations that go beyond repeating what someone else says is true. They are rarely encouraged to ask substantive questions, although they are permitted to ask about administrative and technical details (How long should the paper be? Does spelling count? When is the assignment due?) It is practically unheard of for students to play any role in determining what problems are worth studying or what procedures of inquiry ought to be used. Examine the types of questions teachers ask in classrooms, and you will find that most of than are what might technically be called "convergent questions", but which might more simply be called "Guess what I'm thinking" questions. Here are a few that will sound familiar:
What is a noun?
What were the three causes of the Civil War?
What is the principal river of Uruguay?
What is the definition of a nonrestrictive clause?
What is the real meaning of this poem?
How many sets of chromosomes do human beings have?
Why did Brutus betray Caesar?
So, what students mostly do in class is guess what the teacher wants them to say. Constantly, they must try to supply the Right Answer. It does not seem to matter if the subject is English or history or science; mostly, students do the same thing. And since it is indisputably (if not publicly) recognized that the ostensible 'content' of such courses is rarely remembered beyond the last quiz (in which you are required to remember only 65 per cent of what you were told), it is safe to say that just about the only learning that occurs in classrooms is that which is communicated by the structure of the classroom itself. What is this hidden curriculum? What are these messages? Here are a few among many, none of which you will ever find officially listed among the aims of teachers:
- Passive acceptance is a more desirable response to ideas than active criticism.
- Discovering knowledge is beyond the power of students and is, in any case, none of their business.
- Recall is the highest form of intellectual achievement, and the collection of unrelated 'facts' is the goal of education.
- The voice of authority is to be trusted and valued more than independent judgment.
- One's own ideas and those of one's classmates are inconsequential.
- Feelings are irrelevant in education.
- There is always a single, unambiguous Right Answer to a question.
- English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again. (The Vaccination Theory of education?)
Recently we attended a party at which the game Trivia was played. One young man sat sullen and silent through several rounds, perhaps thinking that nothing could be more dull. At some point, the question arose, "What was the names of the actor and actress who starred in My First Nighter?' From somewhere deep within him an answer formed, and he quite astonished himself, and everyone else, by blurting it out. (Les Tremaine and Barbara Luddy.) For several moments afterwards, he could not conceal his delight. He was in the fifth grade again, and the question might have been, "What is the principal river of Uruguay?" He had supplied the answer, and faster than anyone else. And that is good, as every classroom environment he'd ever been in had taught him.
Watch a man -say, a politician -being interviewed on television, and you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a good thing to give an answer even if there is none to give, even if you don't understand the question, even if the question contains erroneous assumptions, even if you are ignorant of the facts required to answer. Have you ever heard a man being interviewed say, "I don't have the faintest idea", or "I don't know enough even to guess", or "I have been asked that question before, but all my answers to it seem to be wrong?" One does not 'blame' men, especially if they are politicians, for providing instant answers to all questions. The public requires that they do, since the public has learned that instant answer giving is the most important sign of an educated man.
What all of us have learned (and how difficult it is to unlearn it!) is that it is not important that our utterances satisfy the demands of the question (or of reality), but that they satisfy the demands of the classroom environment. Teacher asks. Student answers. Have you ever heard of a student who replied to a question, "Does anyone know the answer to that question?" or "I don't understand what I would have to do in order to find an answer", a "I have been asked that question before and, frankly, I've never understood what it meant? Such behavior would invariably result in some form of penalty and is, of course, scrupulously avoided, except by 'wise guys'. Thus, students learn not to value it. They get the message. And yet few teachers consciously articulate such a message. It is not part of the 'content' of their instruction. No teacher even said: "Don't value uncertainty and tentativeness. Don't question questions. Above all, don't think." The message is communicated quietly, insidiously, relentlessly and effectively through the structure of the classroom: through the role of the teacher, the role of the student, the rules of their verbal game, the rights that are assigned, the arrangements made for communication, the 'doings' that are praised or censured. In other words, the medium is the message.
Have you ever heard of a student taking notes on the remarks of another student? Probably not. Because the organization of the classroom makes it clear that what students say is not the 'content' of instruction. Therefore, it will not be included on tests. Therefore, they can ignore it.
Have you ever heard of a student indicating an interest in how a textbook writer arrived at his conclusions? Rarely, we would guess. Most students are unaware that textbooks are written by human beings. Besides, the classroom structure does not suggest that the processes of inquiry are of any importance.
Have you ever heard of a student suggesting a more useful definition of something that the teacher has already defined? Or of a student who asked, "Whose facts are those?" Or of a student who asked, "What is a fact?" Or of a student who asked, "Why are we doing this work?"
Now, if you reflect on the fact that most classroom environments are managed so that such questions as these will not be asked, you can become very depressed. Consider, for example, where 'knowledge' comes from. It isn't just there in a book, waiting for someone to come along and 'learn' it. Knowledge is produced in response to questions. And new knowledge results from the asking of new questions; quite often new questions about old questions. Here is the point: once you have learned how to ask questions -relevant and appropriate and substantial questions-you have leaned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. Let us remind you, for a moment, of the process that characterizes school environments: what students are restricted to (solely and even vengefully) is the process of memorizing (partially and temporarily) somebody else's answers to somebody else's questions. It is staggering to consider the implications of this fact. The most important and intellectual ability man has yet developed -the art and science of asking questions -is not taught in school! Moreover, it is not 'taught' in the most devastating way possible: by arranging the environment so that significant question asking is not valued. It is doubtful if you can think of many schools that include question asking, or methods of inquiry, as part of their curriculum. But even if you knew a hundred that did, there would be little cause for celebration unless the classrooms were arranged, so that students could do question asking; not talk about it, read about it, be told about it. Asking questions is behavior. If you don't do it, you don't learn it. It really is as simple as that.
If you go through the daily papers and listen attentively to the radio and watch television carefully, you should have no trouble perceiving that our political and social lives are conducted, to a very considerable extent, by people whose behaviors are almost precisely the behaviors their school environments demanded of them. We do not need to document for you the pervasiveness of dogmatism and intellectual timidity, the fear of change, the ruts and rots caused by the inability to ask new or basic questions and to work intelligently towards verifiable answers.
The best illustration of this point can be found in the fact that those who do question must drop out of the Establishment. The price of maintaining membership in the Establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority
"I Hate School" Quotes Almost all education has a political motive: it aims at strengthening some group, national or religious or even social, in the competition with other groups. It is this motive, in the main, which determines the subjects taught, the knowledge offered and the knowledge withheld, and also decides what mental habits the pupils are expected to acquire. Hardly anything is done to foster the inward growth of mind and spirit; in fact, those who have had the most education are very often atrophied in their mental and spiritual life.
Bertrand Russell
It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere - mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, or pleasure in creating, or sense of self... Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are (they are much the same in most countries), how oppressive and petty are the rules by which they are governed, how intellectually sterile and aesthetically barren the atmosphere, what an appalling lack of civility obtains on the part of teachers and principals, what contempt they unconsciously display for students as students.
Charles Silberman
I am entirely certain that twenty years from now we will look back at education as it is practiced in most schools today and wonder that we could have tolerated anything so primitive.
John W. Gardner
We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein
I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.
Agatha Christie
What we learn to do, we learn by doing.
Thomas Jefferson
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself
Galileo
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it.
Alexandre Dumas
Children do not need to be made to learn about the world, or shown how. They want to, and they know how.
John Holt
The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders.
John Taylor Gatto
It is an iron law of education that rigid systems produce rigid people, and flexible systems produce flexible people.
Roland Meighan
It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its ‘homework’.
John Taylor Gatto
The 145 year-old system we are still trying to use after 145 years of failure must be scrapped and replaced. Small improvements, even if attainable, will not stave off collapse.
Leslie A. Hart
It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it.
Jacob Brownowski
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
Kirkegaard
Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
E.M. Forster
We prefer that they [the children] should never say they have learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not, - how much does the youth know when he has finished his education - but how much does he care and about how many orders of things does he care?
Charlotte Mason
No one has yet realized the wealth of sympathy, the kindness and generosity hidden in the soul of a child. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure.
Emma Goldman
An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
Anatole France
To teach a man how he may learn to grow independently, and for himself, is perhaps the greatest service that one man can do another.
Benjamin Jowett
The newer and broader picture suggests that the child emerges into literacy by actively speaking, reading, and writing in the context of real life, not through filling out phonics worksheets or memorising words.
Thomas Armstrong
Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?
Daniel Goleman
I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes.
Sarah Undset, Nobel Laureate
Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.
Trevelyan
I believe that school makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and hear nothing of ordinary life there.
Petronius (Satyricon)
I have not the least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what was evil and left the good untouched.
Edward Grieg
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents, so they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education. School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.
John Updike
I learned most, not from those who taught me but from those who talked with me.
St. Augustine
Trying to get more learning out of the present system is like trying to get the Pony express to compete with the telegraph by breeding faster ponies.
Edward Fiske
I remember that I was never able to get along at school. I was always at the foot of the class.
Thomas Edison
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Thoreau
I have not done a full survey or review of education systems around the world, so that the views I express are based on personal experience. I would say that all education systems I've had contact with are a disgrace and a disaster.
Edward de Bono
Education should not be associated with scholasticism. There are men who have never seen the inside of a university who are superior to those and worth more to society than those who carried away the highest honors. Herbert Spencer spent three years at school in all his life. Spinoza spent a very few years and then was expelled. Francis Bacon, the man who gave us all the fundamentals of what we call now the scientific method, went to school three years, revolted against Aristotle and left the halls of learning in a huff. Actually, as one walks down the halls of learning and looks at the busts of great, therein, he is struck by the fact that almost none were formally educated but took the world for their texts and professors. One might almost say that a professional educator is one who worships a dead illiterate. And one, with some research, might validly conclude that the surest way to succeed in any profession is to study something else at school.
L. Ron Hubbard
It is tempting to impose our goals on other people, particularly on children or our subordinates. It is tempting for society to try to impose its priorities on everybody. The strategy will however be self-defeating if our goals, or society's goals, do not fit the goals of the others. We may get our way but we don't get their learning. They may have to comply but they will not change. We have pushed out their goals with ours and stolen their purposes. It is a pernicious form of theft which kills the will to learn.
Charles Handy
By bells and many other similar techniques they (schools) teach that nothing is worth finishing. The gross error of this is progressive: if nothing is worth finishing then by extension nothing is worth starting either. Few children are so thick-skulled they miss the point.
John Taylor Gatto
Childhood placed at a tangent to adulthood, perceived as special and magical, precious and dangerous at once, has turned into some volatile stuff - hydrogen, or mercury, which has to be contained. The separate condition of the child has never been so bounded by thinking, so established in law as it is today......How we treat children really tests who we are, fundamentally conveys who we hope to be.
Marina Warner
Children present the best evidence for a psychology of providence. Here I mean more than providential miracles, those amazing tales of children falling from high ledges without harm, buried under earthquake debris and surviving. Rather, I am referring to the humdrum miracles when the mark of character appears. All of a sudden and out of nowhere a child shows who she is, what he must do. These impulsions of destiny frequently are stifled by dysfunctional perceptions and unreceptive surroundings, so that calling appears in the myriad symptoms of difficult, self-destructive, accident-prone, 'hyper' children - all words invented by adults in defence of their misunderstanding.
Often it was not in school, but outside of it - in extracurricular activities or during time spent altogether away from school - that calling appeared. It is as if the image in the heart in so many cases is hampered by the program of tuition and its time bound regularity.
James Hillman
We live in a hierarchical world in which we defend ourselves ....from our eternal infancy and childhood by insisting on a graded, necessary elevation through learning and technological sophistication out of the child into the adult. This is not a true initiation that values both the previous form of existence and the newly attained one; it is a defence against the humiliating reality of the child.
Education means "to lead out." We seem to understand this as leading away from childhood, but maybe we could think of it as eliciting the wisdom and talents of childhood itself. As A.S.Neill, founder of the Summerhill School, taught many years ago, we can trust that the child already has talents and intelligence. We believe that the child intellectually is a tabula rasa, a blank blackboard, but maybe the child knows more than we suspect.
An eternal question about children is, how should we educate them? Politicians and educators consider more school days in a year, more science and math, the use of computers and other technology in the classroom, more exams and tests, more certification for teachers, and less money for art. All of these responses come from the place where we want to make the child into the best adult possible, not in the ancient Greek sense of virtuous and wise, but in the sense of one who is an efficient part of the machinery of society. But on all these counts, soul is neglected.
Thomas Moore
I think children can be very cruel especially in adolescence and if you are slow, and I was (I was in a school which was quite competitive) you do get a lot of slamming about from the other kids. I don't know about girls, but I know that boys are very cruel and very tough. It built up a tremendous resentment in me because I was also bad at sport and athletics and all I could do was play the piano. So I always got the sense in my adolescent years that 'Oh, Hopkins, you know he's, well he's not worth much, or he's a failure.
Anthony Hopkins
The opportunity to develop and practise social skills in school is quite limited. Children spend nearly all their time in school with other children born during the same academic year as themselves, and a great deal of time outside school as well. In school, there is little social contact with younger or older children and even less with adults. It is easy to see how peer mores, values and codes of behaviour become entrenched, resulting in considerable pressure to conform and the threat of ostracism or exclusion from the group for those who do not. Moreover, up to one and a half hours a day in school is specifically set aside for social recreation in the playground, where children are thrown together with nothing much to do. It is not surprising that playground hierarchies emerge and bullying is rife.
Alan Thomas
The consequence is that the 'social' skills acquired are those which may be essential for survival in school but have little applicability in the outside world. There is virtually no opportunity to relate socially to adults in school in order to learn wider social skills. Ironically, such skills can only be learned outside school hours. Teachers do, of course, set up social scenarios and discuss with children how to behave in given social circumstances. But these are no substitute for learning through real-life, dynamic social contact.
Rabindranath Tagore
School forcibly snatches away children from a world full of the mystery of God's own handiwork, full of the suggestiveness of personality. It is a mere method of discipline which refuses to take into account the individual. It is a manufactory specially designed for grinding out uniform results. It follows an imaginary straight line of the average in digging its channel of education. But life's line is not the straight line, for it is fond of playing the see-saw with the line of average, bringing upon its head the rebuke of the school. For according to the school life is perfect when it allows itself to be treated as dead, to be cut into symmetrical conveniences. And this was the cause of my suffering when I was sent to school....my mind had to accept the tight-fitting encasement of the school which, being like the shoes of a mandarin woman, pinched and bruised my nature on all sides and at every movement. I was fortunate enough in extricating myself before insensibility set in.
Rabindranath Tagore
For thousands of years, in thousands of places, families educated their own. This tradition changed not because a better method was found but because economic conditions required it. To work one had to lreave one's children; one's children, furthermore, had to be trained for tasks no-one in their purview could be seen doing. For these reasons institutionalised schooling was invented' and while it adequately addressed a set of economic problems it inspired a new set of human ones that are psychological, emotional, and even spiritual in nature.
I do not pine for a different place and time. I only point out what we have traded off. I think certain good things are recoverable, though without the life that once surrounded them they must inevitably take on different meanings. One of these is the tradition of parental and communal responsibility for the daily instruction of the young. Today this is denied us because teaching has been institutionalised, a convenience in a time of industry and profit when citizen-labourers perform economic functions more efficiently without children present. But for whom is such a state of affairs indeed convenient?
Learning theory tells us to teach children as individuals who learn in their own unique manner. The finest possible curriculum is precisely the one that starts with each child's singular means of learning. Instruction and guidance are best provided by those with an intimate understanding of the individual child and a deep commitment to the child's education. these principles derive not merely from the homeschooling movement but from contemporary research into how children learn. They are not merely adages fabricated by homeschoolers but precepts grounded in a science that should inspire us to reconsider both our roles as parents and the shape of public education.
David Guterson
School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.
E.M. Forester
What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers -- they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The single most important contribution education can make to a child's development is to help him towards a field where his talents best suit him, where he will be satisfied and competent. We've completely lost sight of that. Instead we subject everyone to an education where, if you succeed, you will be best suited to be a college professor... And we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.
There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities that will help you get there.
We should use kids' positive states to draw them into learning in the domains where they can develop competencies....You learn at your best when you have something you care about and can get pleasure from being engaged in.
Howard Gardner
Everyone, at present, is in favour of having students learn the fundamentals. For most people, 'the three R's', or some variation of them, represent what is fundamental to a learner. However, if one observes a learner and asks oneself, "What is it that this organism needs without which he cannot thrive?", it is impossible to come up with the answer, "the three R's".
English is not history and history is not science and science is not art and art is not music, and art and music are minor subjects and English, history and science major subjects, and a subject is something you 'take' and when you have taken it, you have 'had' it, and if you have 'had' it, you are immune and need not take it again.
Postman & Weingartner
The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a closet.
Henry Adams
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of facts.
James Baldwin
A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled.
Alec Bourne
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyfull of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Laurence Lee
The world does not pay for what a person knows. But it pays for what a person does with what he knows.
Hellen Keller
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly.
Albert Einstein
I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less "showily". Let him come and go freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself... Teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experiences.
Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's mentor and friend.
School is established, not in order that it should be convenient for the children to study, but that teachers should be able to teach in comfort. The children’s conversations, motion, merriment are not convenient for the teacher, and so in the schools, which are built on the plan of prisons, ... are prohibited.
Count Leo Tolstoy
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
George Bernard Shaw
The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.
School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency.
H.L. Mencken
Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Benjamin Disraeli
The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.
John Updike
In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey.
William Duane "Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky," 1822
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
William Glasser
It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.
Benito Mussolini; from "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932.
Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.
Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education; from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935.
Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought.
Ludwig von Mises
Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming where everyone is interdependent.
John Dewey
I believe that the testing of the student's achievements in order to see if he meets some criterion held by the teacher, is directly contrary to the implications of therapy for significant learning.
Carl Rogers
Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.
Lillian Smith
You Can't Reform a System Based on Oppression By Laurie A. Couture
Original Article
Talk of "education reform" is viral all over the internet. Despite multiple failed attempts at "reform" over the past decades, society refuses to think outside the "box" of schooling and consider a radical return to how children learned for millennia- By playing, living and doing! Teachers and others in the field of education continue to propose that the oppressive, prison-like institution where children are forced to stay seated in a building all day pumping out paperwork can and should be reformed! When democratic schooling, homeschooling and unschooling advocates attempt to join the conversation and offer models that are successful and truly radical, they are often met by educators and their supporters who dismiss these models as idealistic and not "realistic" for "everyone". Additionally, people seem not to be aware of the fact that despite talks of reform, the needs, voices and leadership of the people who are the most adversely affected by public schooling- youth- are left out of the conversation. Sadly, when the voices of public school youth do reach the movement, they often represent the most compliant and academically engaged students. Their requests tend to be benign, suggesting that minds and bodies trained by the system for so long are unable to fathom what they have lost of their childhoods and what they truly need in order to thrive. The cries of "end school!" from the voices of the artists, rebels, misfits and other children failed most severely by schooling rarely make it to the table. In this post I answer questions about how "education reform" can be truly child-centered, radical and real.
How can we save our public schools and reform them?
How can we reform a system that was historically founded (in 1852) for the purpose of oppressing children, preventing critical thinking and engineering a more obedient citizenry? How can we reform a system where, in 2011, children need a doctor's note to go to the bathroom when needed, a federal "504 Plan" to eat when hungry, a diagnosis of being brain disordered with a subsequent federally mandated special education "IEP" in order to be taught in a hands-on manner and where a teenager has to be diagnosed as "severely disabled" or unteachable and sent to a "therapeutic school" in order to have physical activity between classes? Do we truly believe that a place that runs this contrary to the needs and humanity in children can be "reformed"?
"Adults would not get the severity of the human rights violations in the public school system even if they were put back in it (this is not referring to all you epic radicals out there- you know who you are). The reason? The boiling frog syndrome. The adults who don't get it are already broken and they would be mentally blind to all of the wrongs that go on, including to themselves." -My son, Brycen R. R. Couture How can we teach so that children care about their education?
The belief that children need to be "taught" is based on the arrogant, adult-centered belief that children are unmotivated, blank slates who will not learn unless adults force it upon them, usually in unpleasant ways. Nature endows ALL children with the passion and ability to learn what they need and want to learn on their own. Adults should not "teach" anything unless it is requested by the child- Teaching interferes with the child's natural process of learning, inventing and creating. Unsolicited teaching interferes with children following their own innate ideas, hunches, interests and modes of expressing their conclusions, brilliance and creativity. Youth care about learning when they are the driving force behind their learning process and when they are doing what they love. Adults can be the guides and facilitators if children desire their help. In public school, education is about force-feeding children, then expecting them to swallow what is irrelevant without gagging, regurgitate it for a grade- and act like they care!
Will allowing children to use technology such as iPads, iPods and smart phones in the classroom transform public education?
I don't see how adding devices could "transform" anything; lap tops have already been added to some schools; adding hand-held devices simply adds technology to the building, like adding paper and pencils and other inventory. Adding technology doesn't change the power structure. Teachers dictate the use of every single object in a school, so how could adding devices "transform" anything? We had a Commodore and an IBM PC computer in my elementary school, supposedly revolutionary. Nothing changed- School was still just as oppressive and abusive, we simply had a distraction from the tedium. I'm sure when toilets and ovens were added to schools, people thought that would revolutionize schooling too, but children soon found out that no one could use those appliances without permission.
Teachers use technology to control children, and hand-held devices would be no different- Teachers control the activity and purpose of the device and how and when it will be used. No doubt any use outside of the teacher's prescription would be cause for punishment. Technology can also be used to abuse and violate children as well. For example, one high school issued bugged laptops to children. The web cams in the laptops were randomly activated by school authorities to spy on youth in their own homes, often in their bedrooms, with some allegations that youth were being photographed undressing or in other situations intending to be private. The issue came to light only after a youth was punished at school for allegedly being caught "taking drugs"; the boy had actually been eating Mike and Ike candy!
Rather than a gesture of bringing technology into the classroom, technology should be used to eradicate the classroom and the prison model of "going to school".
Will changing middle school and high school scheduling to allow for longer classes, labs and more time for research and inquiry lead to radical change in public education?
Proposing a mainstream solution like tooling with already oppressive systems such as scheduling, is not a radical solution. Block scheduling, six-day scheduling, 90 minute classes and any other type of scheduling at the middle and high school level creates an environment that fails to respect the basic physiological needs of older children. As children are shuffled further up in the 12 school "grades", it becomes increasing difficult, if not nearly impossible in some schools, to meet their basic health and biological needs. Most teachers at the higher grade levels refuse to allow children to use the toilet in class, and the three to five minutes between classes makes it nearly impossible for children to use the toilet between classes. The youth that I have worked with over the years report that ninety minute classes only increase this distress. Likewise, scheduling at the higher grades leaves some youth with lunch times that are well past noon time. Some youth report eating as late as 1:30 with, of course, no snack time in the morning! Finally, "block scheduling" or 90 minute classes mean more time that children are sitting sedentary and immobile. Truly, "block scheduling" is a health risk to youth! A true radical solution is to abandon the current institution entirely.
If we tore down the current public educational system, what would replace it and how would it work?
John Taylor Gatto proposed a radical solution that would be in alignment with nature, humane treatment of children and a democratic society: Abolish forced public schooling as it is now and establish the entire community as a community learning experience for people of all ages. Children would lead their own learning in a non-compulsory manner. Everyone, from the youngest child to the seniors in nursing homes would be welcomed to facilitate classes, and children and adults can attend - or opt out- at their choosing. Public dollars would be used to fund the necessary supplies and assist mentors of any age or specialty.
If the entire city or town were set up as a learning community for children to explore, apprentice, find resources, collect mentors and to be free to teach, attend or not attend classes, this would be the "educational reform" that would truly heal children and our culture. In open learning communities, children would have all of their bodily, developmental, emotional, social, intellectual and creative needs met. Art galleries, libraries, historical centers, community centers and cafes would all be hubs. Hopefully, diverse businesses would open their doors to be part of the process as well. The now abandoned school buildings would be used as resources and spaces, not as prisons. Anyone would be free to facilitate or attend classes, play in the gym, use the equipment, cook meals, hold meetings, clubs, groups, shows, etc.
What about children who are abused and neglected at home or who are living in poverty?
In the case of children who are abused and neglected at home, or who are living in poverty, these learning communities would be able to embrace and care for these children and identify their families for help much more genuinely than the current public school system. The current system abuses and neglects children in so many ways, causing double the distress and trauma to children already suffering at home. In 19 states, it is actually legal for children to be beaten by school staff with a wooden board. Boys and African American children are the primary targets of all forms of school corporal punishment. Even in the case of a special teacher who provides comfort, the distressed child is still expected to focus on and keep up with irrelevant school work to maintain "grades". When learning communities encompass use of all of the public spaces in towns and cities (including hopefully businesses as well), there are more places of refuge and resource for impoverished families and children suffering abuse and neglect.
How will learning disabled children get services?
Children are born to be natural learners. It is forced education that destroys this and creates the idea of "learning disabilities" and "under-achievement". It is the public school system's unnatural method of forcing all children to perform certain mental functions all at the same ages in the exact same developmentally inappropriate manner that produces the illusion of "learning disabilities". There are no learning disabled people. Every human child is born with the capability to learn, regardless of their organic intellectual endowment. If allowed to learn through play and by following their interests, children of any ability will naturally learn in the ways that best suit their unique learning style and sensory modality. Loved ones and community members can support, mentor, scaffold and celebrate children's developmentally appropriate learning processes in manners more diverse and helpful than the current system offers. Children will not be forced to endure rigorous testing that leads to labels (such as "ADHD") and drugs, nor will their parents be forced to fight Goliath special education teams to win a few token "services".
It is a democratic society's duty to educate its children- How will children learn if they aren't taught?
Point blank, children have a birth right to live their lives in freedom and with joy, through play. That is true democracy! Children should not be forced to go to any building, or be forced to "learn" anything any adult believes they should "learn". The element of force immediately negates democracy and becomes the antithesis to freedom. That homogenized education for the masses is possible is a myth; forced "education" is inhumane and immoral on so many levels. It instantly indicts and imprisons all children for the implied "crime" of being under the age of 18 and dictates them under the control of adults who should have no natural power over their lives. There should be no "debate" about human rights issues. Forced education causes apathy, docility, obedience and lack of questioning and critical thinking. It destroys passion, natural learning ability and interferes with the individual "callings" of each human being. Children learn what they need to learn by being loved and cared for by their parents and loved ones. Children learn by living, playing, exploring, creating and being a part of their families, circles of friends and communities. This delicate process must be restored, because this is how true learning occurs.
That all sounds idealistic. In the meantime, don't we need to start slow, educate people and reform what we have to work with now?
I will say it again and again, we have to stop talking about reforming the current system- You can't reform a system that was BUILT with the INTENT to oppress children! "Reform" has been attempted over and over since forced schooling was instituted in 1852. The pendulum has swung in all directions, but most aggressively since the 1980's towards increased drudgery and developmentally inappropriate practice for children. The only function of "reforms" is to lightly shuffle a few cards to quiet dissent, prime children to take their place in the "global marketplace" and to make matters easier for the adults. The end result is always the same: Children are oppressed, stuck in buildings, sitting in chairs, with teachers forcing upon them something irrelevant to their lives. School continues to steal their free time, commit human rights violations against their bodies and minds and confine them. School continues to prevent children from doing what nature intended- Playing, running, jumping, climbing, exploring, creating, socializing and inventing. We can't reform a paradigm that runs as deep and as thick as this one. The "free school" movement of the late 60's and early 70's showed that public schools want no part of democratic learning environments; the federal government uses public education as a tool for their much larger agenda of globalization. As long as we look to the problem as a solution, we will never get out of the boxed idea that children must have something done TO them by "expert" adults. The belief that adults must educate, confine, deprive, "discipline" and force is the paradigm that needs to change.
How can children playing all day, doing whatever they are interested in doing, be realistic for society?
The question is, how have we allowed our society to get to a place where what is natural is not realistic for society? All mammal children learn by playing. Human children learned through play, exploration and interest-led pursuits since the dawn of humanity because this is nature's intent for children. Should we be questioning why our society thinks it is unrealistic for children to learn the way they are wired to learn?
This idea of democratic learning sounds too radical and experimental- Can it be done in modern times?
Unschoolers, relaxed homeschoolers and children in democratic schools demonstrate everyday, year after year, as they have for decades that interest-led, play-based, democratic learning grows joyful, intelligent, creative, brilliant, confident, successful and passionate children! Summerhill, The Sudbury Valley School, The Albany Free School and many other democratic schools highlighted in books by A.S. Neill, Jerry Mintz, Ivan Illich, Matt Hern and others have been running democratically, with children learning freely for years. If these schools can pull it off with such success, why not public schools? Some of the most innovative minds in history and in the world today never attended school. In fact, many unschooled and homeschooled children run businesses, are public speakers, authors, performing musicians, artists, artisans or inventors and some even attend college early. Homeschoolers and unschoolers are diverse and come from every political orientation and walk of life, including single, low-income parents.
If we eradicated public education as we know it, would society collapse?
The institutionalized oppression of children will hopefully collapse and lead to a return to more natural ways of parenting, learning and living. Children raised in environments with strong parent-child attachments and joy based living and learning will thrive! They will give way to a compassionate, empowered, innovative generation who actually cultivate a more humanitarian and environmentally sensitive society!
"I used to think it was impossible to collapse the school system. not anymore. Now I can see just how possible it truly is! School is obsolete." -Laurette Lynn The Unplugged Mom How can I get involved in real educational change?
Listen to the children and what they are telling us about what they need! My son, who was in public school prior to him joining my life through adoption, endured day care, preschool and public school. As an unschooler who has "detoxed" the past seven years from schooling, here are his words: http://www.laurieacouture.com/2011/10/what-children-really-want-to-tell-teachers/
Join the Occupy Education movement! Start by uploading a photo of how you occupy education. Here is my "How I Occupy Education" photo: http://occupyedu.tumblr.com/post/12095324731/i-occupy-education-by-unschooling-my-teen-son-and
Here is my son, Brycen's "How I Occupy Education" photo: http://occupyedu.tumblr.com/post/12095357337/im-brycen-and-im-a-17-year-old-boy-i-occupy
Write a blog post about how you are occupying education.
Organize an Occupy event at your state's Department of Education and literally occupy by educating others that reform of the current system misses the point.
Of course, the best way to "Occupy Education" is to walk out of the school system hand in hand with your children and begin an unschooling journey!
"The choice is in our hands. We can continue the 19th century-style sausage factory method of schooling. Or we can tear down the institutionalized barriers that impede learning and create a 21st century-style learning society." -Wendy Priesnitz, Author of Challenging Assumptions in Education and Editor of Life Learning magazine
A Vulnerable Teacher (excerpt) By Ken Macrorie
During my three years in the Army I had time to decide I wanted to go back to college and become an English Professor. So I did that. For the subsequent twenty-five years I have been paid by the citizens of North Carolina, New York, California, and Michigan to do something called "teach" their children in universities. For the first seventeen years, many of the days went like this:
The students were sitting out there in straight rows looking over the backs of other students in the row in front--at me. Often I began my sentences "Of course--" because I had been over the material many times and read it in the books and articles of authorities.
The students were not responding to my statements. I saw a fellow furtively spreading the school paper on the writing arm of his chair. A girl near the window was gazing out toward the sun. Most of the students were not thinking about what I was saying. Or questioning it. They were writing it down in their notebooks. Not all of it, but the high points--as I and dozens before me had ordered them to do. That means they were generalizing and abstracting what I said, although that had usually already been generalized and abstracted.
The best students (meaning those who got the highest grades) were putting down those of my statements likely to appear in the next quiz or the final exam. They would have been idiots to have spent their time writing down what interested them most. It was what interested me most that they concetrated on. Of course.
Up there at the lectern--or if I was affecting nonchalance and sitting on a table, my loud socks displaying an inch of skin above them--I was talking on my own. Every minute was mine, and the silences frightened me when I departed from notes and for a few seconds couldn't remember what I wanted to say next. The students knew that what I would say was all mine, not theirs; and the chances were high that it would always be mine, for they would be giving it back to me soon on answer sheets and forgetting it the next morning. All mine, but "very important," as I said again and again during the lecture.
(I am looking back now and describing my teaching with insight I didn't possess in those days.)
From the lectern I kept insisting that it was all important, because the students did not seem aware that any of it was important. Many apparently did not think the course important. (Another of-course course whose materials belonged completely to me. What might actually be important in it for them was beyond their conjecture.) They had not been invited to bring any of their experience to bear upon the experience I was generalizing about. There were no handles for them. Finally, all they could guess is what might be important for me as I made up the test.
As I lectured, sometimes they could see I was warming up, getting in a stew or ecstasy about something, and they could guess that the idea counted for me. But it probably would not count for me in the test because I would be scholarly, objective. I making up the questions I would be careful not ask something I felt strongly about, for later in grading I might show prejudice. So they saw--ot thought they say--that even my commitments were weak; and they were influenced not to reveal their commitments, and finally not to commit themselves at all in matters intellectual, social, or artistic, or whatever the bent of the course.
"Of course" was a fit phrase for me to strew through my lectures. It said there would be no surprise in that followed. It established my superiority. I generalized, abstracted, and then explained. I did not give the listeners two facts and challenge them to make something of them. Instead I quickly categorized the two and from the moment on those facts resided in drawers that I would pull out when I felt the need to. The listeners were not expected to go poking around in drawers when the impulse moved them, or to open an unlabled drawer, or to stuff an empty one with any of their possesions.
As the years went by, I lectured less and less and conducted "discussions" more and more. I dominated the discussions. They became questions and answer sessions in which I asked a question and then answered it myself with a little lecture.
For seventeen years I heard my students repeating badly to me what I had said to them and hundreds before them. I read their tired, hurriedly written papers conveying in academic dialect what they thought proper to give Teacher. One day in May in an Advanced Writing class I finally exploaded. "I can't stand to read this junk any longer. Go back and write down as fast as you can whatever is in your mind--for fifteen minutes. Write so fast you can't think of punctuation or spelling or how you're going to say it. I would like for a change to read some truth that counts for you."
Against School By John Taylor Gatto
I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.
Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.
The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover that all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools - with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers - as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight - simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.
But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not
to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else. Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.
The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens in order to render the populace "manageable."
It was from James Bryant Conant - president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century - that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."
~http://www.studentliberation.com/llewellyn-liberation-handbook.html