School is the Bubble

Tweet

A thoughtful writing by Lisa Bentley, an author, and the owner of Do Life Right website. Her and her family have been featured on CNN regarding unschooling. Read the original article at her website, Do Life Right

I was recently reminded with the chaos regarding homeschooling legalities in California how many people have the misconception that homeschooling families are putting their children into artificial bubbles and not allowing them to be in the “real world”. Talking about this topic on an Unschooling list, a friend of mine, Kim, said,” And yes, people do think we keep our kids in a bubble. If they only realized that school is the bubble.”

That’s exactly it! School is the bubble.

Do you not think this is true?

• Where else in the world are people put into groups of 15-40 people that are born within a 12 month time frame of them, shuffled into a room with only 1 adult to “supervise” for 6 or more hours a day?
• Where else do you have to raise your hand to ask permission to use a toilet or to get a drink of water?

Why Dont Students Like School

Tweet

Here's another great piece published in 2009 by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College with a blog called Freedom to Learn. You can read this original article here.

Someone recently referred me to a book that they thought I'd like. It's a 2009 book, aimed toward teachers of grades K through 12, titled Why Don't Students Like School? It's by a cognitive scientist named Daniel T. Willingham, and it has received rave reviews by countless people involved in the school system. Google the title and author and you'll find pages and pages of doting reviews and nobody pointing out that the book totally and utterly fails to answer the question posed by its title.

Willingham's thesis is that students don't like school because their teachers don't have a full understanding of certain cognitive principles and therefore don't teach as well as they could. They don't present material in ways that appeal best to students' minds. Presumably, if teachers followed Willingham's advice and used the latest information cognitive science has to offer about how the mind works, students would love school.

Talk about avoiding the elephant in the room! 

John Taylor Gatto Videos

Tweet

John Taylor Gatto interviewed by Dr. Carlo Ricci on Unschooling.
 

Part 1:

Part 2:

Deschooling Society

Tweet

The first paragraph of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

The Promise of Deschooling

Tweet

Matt Hern is the director of the Purple Thistle centre, an alternative youth program in Vancouver, BC. He holds a a PhD in Urban Studies from the Union Institute. An accomplished writer and public speaker, he has written three books: Deschooling Our Lives, Field Day: Getting Society Out of School, Everywhere All the Time and Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better. He lives with his partner and two daughters in East Vancouver. Visit his website here.

It is virtually anathema in our culture, but I want to argue here that our society needs far fewer schools, not more.

I believe that schools as we have conceived them in the late-20th Century are a parasite on our communities, a burden to our children and are the very essence of a hierarchical, anti-ecological culture.

I further contend that dissolving the school monopoly over our kids may well hold the key to reconstructing our communities around local control and participatory democracy.

Fortunately, there are a phenomenal number of alternatives to schools and schooling already flourishing in every community across the continent, representing a major threat to centralized institutional control. The abject failure of monopoly, state-controlled, compulsory schooling is evident to anyone who looks.

The nightmare of schooling is costing our kids, our families and communities dearly in every way.

Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education

Tweet

This is an insightful piece by Peter Gray who is a research professor of psychology at Boston College, is a specialist in developmental and evolutionary psychology, and an author. He has a blog at Psychology Today called Freedom to Learn. Here he discusses seven reasons why compulsory school is harmful to people.  You can find the original piece here.

"In my last post I took a step that, I must admit, made me feel uncomfortable. I said, several times: "School is prison." I felt uncomfortable saying that because school is so much a part of my life and the lives of almost everyone I know. I, like most people I know, went through the full 12 years of public schooling. My mother taught in a public school for several years. My beloved half-sister is a public schoolteacher. I have many dear friends and cousins who are public schoolteachers. How can I say that these good people--who love children and have poured themselves passionately into the task of trying to help children--are involved in a system of imprisoning children? The comments on my last post showed that my references to school as prison made some other people feel uncomfortable also.

Sometimes I find, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me and others feel, I have to speak the truth. We can use all the euphemisms we want, but the literal truth is that schools, as they generally exist in the United States and other modern countries, are prisons. Human beings within a certain age range (most commonly 6 to 16) are required by law to spend a good portion of their time there, and while there they are told what they must do, and the orders are generally enforced. They have no or very little voice in forming the rules they must follow. A prison--according to the common, general definition--is any place of involuntary confinement and restriction of liberty.