Public School is Like Prison

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A great piece by John Taylor Gatt0 who is a powerful voice in the homeschooling community

My wife doesn't allow a television in our home, so when I'm traveling alone, as I often must, temptation sometimes overwhelms me and I find myself indiscriminately channel-surfing for hours, searching for what -- I don't know, perhaps a football game even in March or April, May, June, July, August.

It was on such a fruitless mission in April that I paused on the A&E channel long enough to hear that a documentary about cults was in the offing. If I watched the thing, I was promised I would learn the six secret principles of cults, how to enslave the human mind beyond its power to escape, how to imprison the spirit, bending it to the discipline of the cult. Hey, my wife wasn't around, sounded "educational" to me.

In a dreamlike state in the Howard Johnson's motel in Norwich, New York I heard that the first way to recognize a cult was that it "keeps its victims unaware." 'Why, that's just what institutional schools do,' I said to myself; I've spent the last 10 years of my life traveling a million and a half miles to bear witness to that universal crime of forced schooling I had been a party to over a 30-year public school teaching career.

Sugata Mitra & The Hole in The Wall Experiment

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Sugata Mitra is an Indian education scientist who conducted the Hole in a Wall experiments, proving that in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other.  If you've never heard of the Hole in the Wall experiment, read about it here.

How To Hack Your Education

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Dale J. Stephens is an entrepreneur who was unschooled from middle school on. He left college based on his conviction that it is not necessary for success or fulfillment, and he founded an organization called UnCollege. He is currently writing a book.

I am an elementary school dropout. At the end of fifth grade I told my parents I was bored in school. They could have told me to stick it out, that doing so would “build character.” Instead, although my mom was a public school teacher and my dad an engineer – both products of the public school system – they allowed to leave school and try unschooling, the self-directed form of homeschooling.

While my peers sat in class through middle school and high school, I found mentors, took college classes, started businesses, lived in France, worked on political campaigns and helped build a library. I created my education by taking these traditional “extracurricular activities” and turning them into a cohesive academic program.

Although I never set foot in high school, I assumed college was the next step on my path to success. After all, my peers were all going to college, my parents had gone to college and that’s what society expected. I chose a private liberal arts college, Hendrix, which promised to change my life.

At college I saw professors researching, administrators building state-of-the-art facilities and students partying. I found smart people with good ideas, but they were mostly just writing papers, not changing the world. College felt contrived, theoretical and irrelevant.

Standardized Education is Killing US Creativity

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Julie Nardone writes this amazing piece. Check out her blog here.

Buckminster Fuller said, "Look into the eyes of a newborn baby and you will see the spark and the soul of a genius."

So, why do we take that baby and spend 12-plus years schooling its genius out?

Because we've been taught to believe that time spent tethered to chairs cramming arbitrary information into our brains and spitting it onto tests constitutes learning. I don't fault anyone who supports this version of education. I did, too. I thought I could only learn from a certified teacher. I thought every year I went to school made me smarter. I thought the boredom I endured assured me a ticket to the good life.

Untrue.

I entered school curious, confident and courageous. I left a diploma and two degrees later with an injured spirit, a fear of authority and an inability to see my own strengths. During my non-work hours, I shopped at malls to fill the empty spaces in my life or watched TV until my brain went numb. It took a solid decade to unlearn the de-humanizing behavior I'd been taught to see as normal, reconnect with my genius, and understand the importance of self-directed learning.

Never Judge Someone Based on Their Schooling

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Pat Farenga is a writer and a homeschool dad to three now grown girls. He worked closely with author and teacher John Holt, and has appeared on TV and radio as a homeschool expert. The original piece can be found at his website here.

Grant Colfax, the homeschooler who made headlines in the eighties by getting accepted into Harvard and going into medical research, has now made headlines today as an adult. The San Francisco Gate reports:

President Obama on Wednesday appointed Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco's top HIV public health administrator, to head the Office of National AIDS Policy.

Grant spent much of his youth on a dairy goat farm in Northern California, helping his parents make the farm work and following his interests, such as searching for Indian arrowheads. Micki and David gave the keynote speech, How Children Learn from Everyday Life and Work, at the Growing Without Schooling 20th anniversary conference and I wrote about it on the HoltGWS site; here is an excerpt:

"Micki analyzes how education became separated from work—indeed how education demeans most work—and cites many historic examples to support her points. She then takes issue with descriptions of her family's unschooling as a sort of "physical work program" that was imposed on her family.

Deschooling For Parents

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This is written by Joanne Greco, owner of An Unschooling Life website. A mom's journey of deschooling.

In order for homeschooling/unschooling to work for us, I had to go through my own deschooling process, which was more deep rooted and tangled up than my kids deschooling was for them. Because I went to school longer than they had, and knowing the public school system from both as a student and as a parent, it was harder for me to look at education and school a different way than I had before. 

For those who’ve never heard of deschooling, it’s the process one goes through after leaving an institutionalized schooling environment. Your child probably has their natural desire to learn squashed and will need time to recover from that. With a parent’s help, they can gain back most, if not all of what they lost and begin to see the world as a place where learning is enjoyable and all around us.

So, what can the parent do to help? We have to work on changing our own preconceived notions about education, learning and school. I hear about many parents taking their kids out of school, recreating the same forced learning environment at home, only to have it come to a crashing halt with the mom feeling like a failure and the kids being miserable. Maybe, if they would have given themselves, and their children, some time to deschool, it would have turned out different for all of them.

The Origin and Evil of Public Schools - John Taylor Gatto

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John Taylor Gatto, one of the outstanding scholars and writers (see his books) in the history of American education, is not only a truth-teller about the corrupting and dangerous American compulsory school system. He is also an extraordinary teacher, once being named as Teacher of the Year for New York State. This seminar is riveting. You will find out all that the warden and guards of the local prison school want to keep from you. You will be outraged, educated, and inspired. Just as important, you'll have fun. Gatto is great.

What Medical Education Can Learn From Homeschooling

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Craig Koniver, MD, founder of Organic Medicine Now, loves to innovate and look at medicine from many outside the box angles, and as we can see, education too. The original article can be read here.

My wife and I met in medical school. Both of us went “straight through”: going from high school to college to med school. So, like most of you, we are as educated as it gets.

But when our daughter reached “school age,” we decided to homeschool her. My son who is two years younger followed in his big sister’s footsteps, and so now, we are homeschooling both of our children.

Unlike our traditional paths of education and unlike many homeschooled children, my wife uses Unschooling (also called Whole Life Learning and Interest Led Learning) as her curriculum. In fact, there is no curriculum. None. My children choose to learn what they want to learn when they want to learn it.

You see, having come from a very traditional education background to one now that is unstructured and radically outside the realm of “normal,” I have a unique perspective on what education is and how we can better medical education.

Concerned About Your Child's College & Career Success? Leave School

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Lisa Nielsen is best known as creator of The Innovative Educator blog and Transforming Education for the 21st Century learning network. Lisa is an outspoken and passionate advocate of innovative education. She is the author of the book Teaching Generation Text

When parents frustrated with school consider homeschooling, one of their first concerns is often this: 

Will homeschooling limit my child’s opportunities when it comes to college, career, and pursuing passions such as music and sports?

The answer in a word is:

“No.” 

Despite the fact that much of society has been conditioned to believe that learning and success happen as a result of teachers in school buildings, those who are living life without school know the opportunities for those who don’t follow the traditional school path are unlimited.  

Education Needs to Be Turned on It's Head

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Leo Babauta is the creator of zenhabits. He is a writer of numerous books, is a vegan and an unschooling dad.

Going through the traditional school system (in California, Washington and Guam) was never my favorite thing as a kid, but as a parent, I’ve grown to realize that the whole system is upside down.

Not the system of any particular state or nation, but system of education as a concept.
Traditionally, schools use this model:

1. Decide on what kids need to know to prepare them for adulthood.
2. Prepare a curriculum based on this.
3. Give students a schedule based on this curriculum.
4. Have educated teachers hand them the info they need, and drill them in skills.
5. The student reads, memorizes the info, learns the skills, and becomes prepared.
6. Students must follow all rules or be punished. This is actually more important than the info and skills, although it’s never said that way.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a great model. Mostly because it’s based on the idea that there is a small group of people in authority, who will tell you what to do and what you need to know, and you must follow this obediently, like robots. And you must not think for yourself, or try to do what you want to do. This will be met with severe punishment.

9 Essential Skills Kids Should Learn

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Leo Babauta is the creator of zenhabits. He is a writer of numerous books, is a vegan and an unschooling dad.

Kids in today’s school system are not being prepared well for tomorrow’s world.

As someone who went from the corporate world and then the government world to the ever-changing online world, I know how the world of yesterday is rapidly becoming irrelevant. I was trained in the newspaper industry, where we all believed we would be relevant forever — and I now believe will go the way of the horse and buggy.

Unfortunately, I was educated in a school system that believed the world in which it existed would remain essentially the same, with minor changes in fashion. We were trained with a skill set that was based on what jobs were most in demand in the 1980s, not what might happen in the 2000s.

The Emotional Abuse of Our Children: Teachers, Schools, and the Sanctioned Violence of Our Modern Institutions

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By Dr. Michael Sosteric. "You never stop to think that sending your kids to school can be a problem, but it can be. From the residential schools of First Nations infamy to the violence of straps and the horror of school yard bullying, schools are not always safe places. The truth is, children can experience physical, emotional, and even sexual abuse at the hands of students, teachers, priests. ministers, reverends, etc.. The research demonstrates that abuse of all forms undermines self esteem, lowers social productivity, causes depression, and contributes to long term social problems. Isn’t it time we recognized the horror and stopped hurting our children?" The original piece can be read at The Socjournal.

I want to start this article by doing a little thought experiment. Imagine for a moment that you are in a group of twenty people. In that twenty people there is a defined leader and that leader is responsible for motivating you, teaching you, and otherwise organizing group activities. 

Things are going along OK but then at some point the group leader decides that they aren’t happy with the activities of the group. Some of you are going to the bathroom too much, some of you are too easily distracted, and others are simply not following the rules. You, in particular, are a problem for the group leader and so in an attempt to control your behavior and enforce “the rules,” the group leader singles you out and forces you to sit in the middle of the group on the floor for a week.

Is This School Or Prison?

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Debbie Harbeson is a freelance writer, tutor, and homeschool advocate. Her website is here.

Imagine you want to leave your current job. You have decided, for whatever reason, that the position is not meeting your needs.

Even if leaving might make life hard, and it’s quite possible you will have to endure negative consequences, you are at the point where leaving and getting on with your life is the best choice.

Now imagine that your employer says you can’t leave for two years.

Next, take this scenario and imagine yourself scoffing at your employer. Imagine yourself saying you’re going to leave anyway, knowing they can’t actually kidnap you and hold you hostage. But they respond by informing you that they can “turn you in” to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles who will revoke your driver’s license for the two years they want you to stick around.

This imaginary scenario is just too unbelievable isn’t it? It’s laughable to think that an employer would try to force someone to continue showing up at a workplace for two years after he gave his notice that he was going to leave.

Nothing even close to that could ever happen in real life, right? Wrong.

Since 2006, when the compulsory school attendance age was raised from 16 to 18, creepy scenarios similar to the one described above have been happening throughout [the United States]. It is not a joke to say that schools are like prisons.

Writings by David H. Albert on School Disease & Homeschooling

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David H. Albert, father, husband, author, magazine columnist, itinerant storyteller, and speaker. His website is called Skylark Sings.

Schools are firmly embedded in the cultural, social, and economic milieu within which they operate. Within the past 150 years, their chief non-scholastic functions have been at least as important as their educational ones: to ensure that parents living in nuclear families can participate in the workforce, and so that children will not be competing for jobs with their parents in that workforce.

More than a few contemporary social critics have lamented the decline of the nuclear family. There may be some justice in this lament, but from an historical perspective, it is the virtual disappearance of the extended family, and of neighborhoods and communities that is of far greater import.

There never was a "golden age" in which as a rule extended families were able to provide for all of their children's physical, emotional, spiritual, and educational needs. But what they were able to provide was a social nexus that relied on cooperation rather than competition, and some measure of protection. Children had their own special roles to play, and examples of adults performing a variety of social and familial roles, and a space that, at its best, emphasized relationships, tolerance, and generosity. And, in the context of the extended family and community, there were both rituals and role models for situations in which one experienced trauma and adversity.

Why Public Schools Must Be Abolished

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Cevin Soling is an American writer, filmmaker, philosopher, musician, music producer and artist. He is known for his Rumpleville book series, his bands The Neanderthal Spongecake and The Love Kills Theory,  his film work includes The War on Kids. 

In 1852, Aunt Phillis’s Cabin was published.  The novel depicts a romantic vision of joyful slaves cared for by patriarchal masters.  This idealized conception of slavery was pitted against the harsh reality of free blacks in the North facing deprivations.  The prevailing myth was that slavery not only enabled the cultural superiority of the South, but also the institution benefited slaves who were not morally or intellectually fit for the freedom they found in the North.

This scenario is not unique.  The key to sustaining an abusive, oppressive system is to convince people that it holds merits for the victims.  While moral clarity might obfuscate such consideration, a legitimate case can be made that everyday life for many blacks was safer and more secure before the abolition of slavery. After all, slave owners wanted their slaves alive and healthy for work.  Some slaves even defended the institution, as was dramatically witnessed during Nat Turner’s capture. 

Homeschooling Myth #3: Mom [or Dad] Needs to Be a Teacher

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Linda Dobson debunks the homeschooling myth that the parent needs to be the teacher. Linda owns and maintains the website Parent at the Helm, and is the author of many homeschool books. .

Those  of  us  who  started  our  homeschool  journey  with  school-at-home were  usually  under  the  spell  of  this  myth,  too. 

Our  conditioning  led  us  to believe  we  had  to  don  yet  another  hat  and  stand  at  the  head  of  the  class pouring forth facts, acting as we presumed teachers are supposed to act.

There  are  two  misconceptions  rolled  into  this  one  myth.  The  first  and most  obvious  is  you  have  already  spent  years  filling  the  role  of  teacher under the label of parent. With every interaction with your child during her first  five  years  of  life  you  teach  her  with  your  words,  your  actions,  your examples.  With  your  guidance  she  learned  how  to  walk,  talk,  throw  and catch  a  ball,  ride  a  bike,  drink  from  a  cup,  kiss  good-night.  These  feats didn’t  require  a  different  hat;  they  required  your  commitment,  your  love, and your trust that when she was ready your child would accomplish all of these and more.

Inverse Proportionality and the Death of Curiosity

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Kevin Patterson is a dad who unschools. He ministered in the Holy Land for about ten years before becoming pastor of the First Baptist Church of West Townsend, MA, in 1993.  Here he introduces us to the law of inverse proportionality in regards to unschooling. Good read! His blog is Learning Always and Everywhere.

"Curiosity killed the cat..." goes the old saying. I suppose that was coined by an overwhelmed parent trying to keep a their children's exploring and questioning from getting them in trouble. I like the addendum to the saying better, though, even if it is a false rhyme: "...but satisfaction brought it back!"

Curiosity is one of our greatest gifts, at the very heart of exploring, learning, and inventing. People are born curious, and the loss of that curiosity over time is a great human tragedy. Sadly, many children who go to kindergarten bursting with an inquisitive nature gradually lose that love of learning until, just a few years later, teachers struggle to gain their interest in even the most fascinating subjects. As a one-time high school teacher, I know that frustration well. As an unschooling parent, however, I now know that this tragic loss of curiosity can be prevented! First, we have to know how it happens.