Deschool Yourself: Writings by David H. Albert on School Disease & Homeschooling

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.

Even as contemporary culture threatens what remains of community and family life, and heaps economic stresses on top of that, schools have become the central organizing nexus of American life, and the eviscerated avatar of the extended family. Schools have become obsessively focused upon what their guardians have come to believe is cognitive development, while at the same time disregarding children's emotional and physical needs. Instead of enabling and empowering children, it too often emotionally impoverishes them. Touch of any kind is forbidden, and even the suggestion of it is considered potentially deviant. The idea that a child can regulate her own bodily functions is absolutely anathema.

All school time from first bell through dismissal has become so programmed that children have little opportunity to build real interpersonal rapport, and certainly none with people who are not the same age. Free time in friendly neighborhoods has disappeared in an avalanche of homework. The incessant emphasis on individuality and individual performance, competition, passing and failure conveys, despite any single teacher's good intentions, a general disrespect for the importance of relationships and the development of compassion or empathy.

And, to be fair, in the press schoolteachers, often well-intentioned, have less and less control over the process and the product of their work, if they ever really had any.

What we are left with is the relentless march of regimentation, and a resigned acceptance by children that education simply means not being listened to. In the struggle to deal with the stresses and humiliations they early begin to associate with education, and an impoverished home and community life that often fails to provide the resilient ground necessary for recovery, children and, later, adults, become acclimated to their own powerlessness. Recent estimates are that teenagers now experience clinical depression at rates some ten times greater than only two generations ago. And the medical community has come to the growing recognition that individuals who experience high levels of stress or trauma early in life, and are powerless to change it, are more likely to experience heart disease, obesity, cancer, immune system problems, and other physical sequelae as adults.

The transgenerational transmission of trauma (from parent to child) is now an accepted part of the psychosocial landscape and the medical literature. It is not so much of a stretch to suggest similar effects of chronic stress upon children, of school disease, being transmitted as well. Whether, in addition, there are epigenetic impacts (the 'turning on' of specific, and often negative, genetic proclivities that will be passed down) is something about which at this time we can only speculate. I have my hunches.

We know what to do about it, don't we?

Homeschooling is a both creative tonic and therapeutic intervention for the preservation and restoration of health - the health of children, parents, families, and communities. It begins with the knowledge that we, as parents, are indeed experts, and, in the context of an abundant home and community life, can take responsibility for the health and healthy development of our children. It acknowledges that each of our children is utterly unique, and that the cultivation of this uniqueness is our gift to the world.

It continues with the shared knowledge that there is no such thing as healthy cognitive development in children absent the fostering of a rich physical, emotional, and spiritual life (or its secular equivalent), and that such development is dependent upon vibrant, self-chosen social networks characterized by diversity in age and interest. It is based in a secure understanding that healthy learning most often occurs in the convergence of a community of learners, both children and adults, filled with mentors, models, and individuals prepared to share their leadings, passions, and even obsessions.

Successful homeschooling flows from a firmly rooted faith that our children are blessed with everything they need in order to learn, and that most of our job as parents consists of enabling them to discover it for themselves. And, for us, it means reclaiming rather than dispossessing ourselves as well.

Homeschooling means rejecting the educational re-enactment of survival of the fittest (and wealthiest) and thrives on an appreciation that the cultivation of cooperation, mutual goodwill, and the balancing of interests, beginning in healthy families, is critical to the survival of the species. Homeschooling recognizes that there is an ecology of learning, and that failure to honor it, places the health of our children and communities in peril.

I began this essay with a meditation on the reality of trauma in our world. You and your children will experience it at one time or another. But the purposeful infliction of trauma or of chronic stress in the name of education will not make you or your children more resilient. So if there is one thing I want you to take away from this essay, it is to strive as much as you can to remove trauma and stress from the business of learning. If the math problem isn't figured out today, it will still be there next week, next month, next year. If your child is struggling with languages, chances are that France will still be around for another 50 years, and if she really intends to learn the language, I trust that it will remain open to prolonged stays. View lack of understanding today as symbolic of entire worlds yet to be captured through our respective developmental telescopes. And they will be. Whether we are six or 60, there is so much yet to be seen, until as the poet Keats reminds us (even as he fails a history test), we and our children can be.

David H. Albert Books (click the images for details)