A Case for Homeschooling

[JohnnyL]

Strawberry,

I love the things you've shared! WOW. I always tell people the USA is #1 in educational research in the world, and #1 in NOT implementing it. These are powerful mind-bending information points.

[Strawberry]

Strawberry,

I love the things you've shared! WOW. I always tell people the USA is #1 in educational research in the world, and #1 in NOT implementing it. These are powerful mind-bending information points.

Thank you Johnny, I'm so glad someone is getting something from these posts. Honestly I'm using this thread as a place to post things I want to remember in case I have to defend my choice to homeschool........again. I am glad others benefit as well. I LOVE to hear people's thoughts on what I share.

So, here is another one I came across today.

OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2014
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2014
We Don't Need No Education
At least not of the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind. As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set 'em free.

By: BEN HEWITT

New
SHARES

Rye Hewitt putting his pack basket, which he wove himself, to good use. He and his brother Fin learned how to make the wooden baskets from a friend of the family who also unschools her children. Photo: Penny Hewitt

In early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of late summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. Outside the boys’ bedroom window, the leaves on the maples are just starting to turn.


School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly. Faded and frayed thrift-store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts with knife sheaths. In each sheath, a fixed-blade knife.

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the ground-level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour, a yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working-class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some other project: tillering a longbow of black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve caught. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge, and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

Or maybe the boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.

Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?

There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.

It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.


A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.


A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.

It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was John Holt, a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in How Children Fail in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.

Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”

Holt died in 1985, having authored 11 books on child development. But along with veteran teacher John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, he popularized a movement. Well, maybe popularized is a tad generous; while it’s generally accepted that unschoolers comprise about 10 percent of the 1.8 million American children who learn at home, hard numbers are scarce.

In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website JohnHoltGWS.com. “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”

I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.


And it can happen anywhere; these concepts are not the sole domain of rural Vermont hill farmers living out their Jeffersonian fantasies. Kerry McDonald left a career in corporate training to unschool two of her four children in Boston, though her husband, Brian, still works as a technology consultant. “The city is our curriculum,” says McDonald. “We believe that kids learn by living in the world around them, so we immerse them in that world.” Their “classrooms”—sidewalks, museums, city parks—may appear drastically different from those of my sons. But the ethos remains the same, that a child’s learning is as natural and easy as breathing.

Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.

To the extent that I hadn’t demonstrated these qualities previously, the arrival of my 16th birthday provided ample opportunity, rooted in two events of great and lasting importance. The first, of course, was the acquisition of my driver’s license. This came with a craptastic Volkswagen Rabbit that my mother had driven for the past half-dozen years and sold to me for $200.

The second was the quiet arrival of Vermont’s minimum dropout age. More than three million American teens leave school annually, a number that makes up about 8 percent of the nation’s 16-to-24-year-olds. Dropouts comprise 75 percent of state inmates and 59 percent of those in federal prison. They earn, on average, $260,000 less than graduates over their lifetimes.


My 16th birthday came on November 23, 1987; by the end of that day, my freshly minted driver’s license was cooling in my wallet. And by the midpoint of my junior year, I had pointed that little Rabbit, already bearing the scratch-and-dent evidence of my negligence, out of my high school’s parking lot for the last time.

The irony of my dropping out can hardly be overstated. At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins—was employed by none other than Vermont’s Department of Education. My mother graduated from Iowa’s Grinnell College and was a substitute teacher. My family’s immersion in structured education was total. It wasn’t merely the medium through which my parents made their way in the world: it provided the means to support their children, one of whom was now flipping the proverbial bird to the very hand that fed.

It might lend a degree of credibility to my role as my children’s primary educator if I could report that I dropped out of high school for reasons of virtue, perhaps to pursue a rigorous course of self-directed study in thermonuclear engineering or to dig wells in some impoverished sub-Saharan village. But the truth is, I left public school because I was bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.


Fin and Rye drying foraged chokecherries. The boys know where to find wild mushrooms and berries, "and lord knows what else [they] are eating out there," Hewitt writes on his blog. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom. Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell.

Peter Gray knows just how I felt. Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who wrote the 2013 book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, is unsparing in his criticism of compulsory education. “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,” he says. “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is. School deliberately removes the environmental conditions that foster self-directed learning and natural curiosity. It’s like locking a child in a closet.”

What kids need instead, Gray contends, is exploration and play without supervision. It is this that allows them to develop self-determination and confidence. If he’s right, current educational trends are not promising: in 2012, five states voted to increase the length of the school year by no less than 300 hours.

Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like Waldorf, the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.

Sending our children to a Waldorf school was never an option for us, if for no other reason than tuition, which can run as high as $30,000 a year. But when Fin turned five, the age at which we deemed it necessary to introduce some structure to his days, Penny and I sought to integrate aspects of the Waldorf curriculum into his learning. We purchased reams of thick craft paper, along with pastel crayons and watercolor paints. Penny arranged a small “schooling” station at our kitchen table, under the assumption that our firstborn would sit contentedly, expressing his innate creativity even as he learned the rote information necessary to navigate the modern world.


The Hewitt family (plus goat). They've lived and worked on their Vermont farm for over two decades. Photo: Penny Hewitt;
It was, to put it mildly, a flawed assumption. Fin chafed at every second of his perceived captivity. Crayons were broken and launched at innocent walls. Pages of extremely expensive paper were torn to flaky bits. Bitter tears were shed, even a few by our son. It was an unmitigated disaster.

It was also a watershed moment for our family. Because as soon as we liberated ourselves from a concept of what our son’s education should look like, we were able to observe how he learned best. And what we saw was that the moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand: an excavator that not only rotated, but also featured an extendable boom; a popgun fashioned from copper pipe, shaved corks, and a whittled-down dowel; even a sawmill with a rotating wooden “blade.”

In other words, the moment we quit trying to teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.

In my early twenties, having passed my General Educational Development test and endured two semesters in Vermont’s state college system, I lived for a time in a $75-per-month bungalow just outside the bucolic Vermont village of Warren. This was at the apex of my immersion into bicycle racing and backcountry skiing, and I worked infrequently in a bike and ski shop, subsisting on the time-honored action-sports diet of boxed noodles, canned tuna, and expired Clif Bars liberated from the shop’s dumpster.

The bungalow was attached to a rambling, ranchlike structure that looked out over the valley; it was one of those seventies-era, quasi-communal homesteads that carried the lingering scent of sandalwood incense and the fetid body odor unique to heavy tofu consumption. A sign by the door read Resurrection City. Resurrection from what? I had no idea, and no one seemed to know.


During my yearlong tenure at Camp RC, as it was affectionately known, the main house was occupied by a single thirtysomething fellow named Donald who homeschooled his two young sons, Crescent and Orion. Or maybe he unschooled them. I do have a vague recollection of them sitting at a table, studying… well, something. But, for the most part, the boys ran wild, exploring the surrounding woods. On weekends, Donald packed up his orange VW van and drove with Crescent and Orion to bike races and music festivals, where they hawked vegetarian burritos. By the ages of six and eight, the boys were prepping orders and making change.

I was blown away. And jealous. This was the childhood I wished I’d had, equal measures freedom, responsibility, and respect, with none of the rote soul-crushing memorization that had soured me on school. Sure, Crescent and Orion could be a bit wild—I once found the front bumper of my truck kissing a spruce tree that stood between the driveway and the house—but they were precocious and self-aware, brimming with confidence and curiosity. They looked you in the eye and spoke in full sentences. They were constantly running and laughing and playing. I’m not sure how else to put it except to say that never before had I known kids who so fully embodied childhood.

When Penny, then my girlfriend, came to visit, she noticed it, too. “Those kids are amazing,” she said. “I didn’t even know there were kids like that.”

Fin and Rye almost always wake up before dawn. We do not have an alarm clock, but early rising is our habit, ingrained over the decade and a half we’ve run our small farm. We tend to chores as a family: Penny heads to the barn to milk cows, I move the rest of the herd to fresh pasture and slop the pigs, and the boys feed and water their dwarf goats, Flora, Lupine, and Midnight.


The "cafeteria". The Hewitts run a diversified farm with gardens, an orchard and blueberry patch, and livestock—they also sell their produce. Photo: Penny Hewitt
By seven the chores are finished and we convene at the wide wooden table for breakfast—eggs, usually, and bacon from last year’s pigs. After breakfast, I repair to my desk to write and Penny heads to the fields or orchard. Fin and Rye generally follow their mother before disappearing into the woods. Sometimes they grab fishing poles, uncover a few worms, and head to the stream, returning with their pockets full of fish, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. Occasionally I join them, and these journeys are always marked by frequent stops, with one boy or the other dropping to his knees to examine some small finding, something I would have blithely, blindly stumbled over.

“Papa, look, wild onions.” And they’ll dig with their young fingers, loosing the little bulbs from the soft forest soil. Later, we’ll fry them in butter and eat them straight from the pan, still hot enough that we hold them on the tips of our tongues before swallowing.

Other times, they work on one of the shelters that they always seem to be constructing; their voices carry across the land as they negotiate materials and design.

“Fin, let’s put the door on this side.”

“Did you say ten and three-eighths or ten and five-eighths?”

“Rye, we need another pole on this end.”


These shelters are so prolific that occasionally I come across one I hadn’t even known existed, and I can see the evolution of the boys’ learning in the growing soundness of these humble structures. Winter’s first big snowfall no longer spells collapse; the boys have learned to slope the roof and to support the ridgepole at its center. They face the openings southward and build on a piece of well-drained ground. They use rot-resistant cedar for anything that will contact the soil.


The boys cleaning the garlic crop. The Hewitts all tend to their farm as a family. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them could operate the tractor and, in a pinch, drive the truck with a load of logs. They split firewood alongside us, swinging their mauls with remarkable accuracy. They are both licensed hunters and own .22 rifles and 20-gauge shotguns. They wear belt knives almost everywhere, oblivious to the stares of the adults around them, some concerned, some perplexed, and some, it often seems to me, nostalgic.

Our sons are not entirely self-taught; we understand the limits of the young mind and its still-developing capacity for judgment. None of these responsibilities were granted at an arbitrary, age-based marker, but rather as the natural outgrowth of their evolving skills and maturity. We have noticed, however, that the more responsibility we give our sons, the more they assume. The more we trust them, the more trustworthy they become. This may sound patronizingly obvious, yet I cannot help but notice the starring role that institutionalized education—with its inherent risk aversion—plays in expunging these qualities.

Our days do have structure: chores morning and evening, gardens to be turned and planted, berries to be picked and sold, all these things and so many more repeating in overlapping cycles. But even within these routines, Fin and Rye determine how their days will be spent. Often they disappear for hours at a time, their only deadline being whichever meal comes next. On their backs, they wear wooden pack baskets that they wove under the tutelage of a friend who also unschools her children. When they return, the baskets are heavy with the small treasures of their world and their heads are full of the small stories of their wandering: the moose tracks they saw, the grouse they flushed, the forked maple they sat beneath to eat snacks. “The bark felt thick,” Fin tells me. “It’s going to be a hard winter.”

Which brings us to the inevitable issue of what will become of my boys. Of course, I cannot answer in full, because their childhoods are still unfolding.

But not infrequently I field questions from parents who seem skeptical that my sons will be exposed to particular fields of study or potential career paths. The assumption seems to be that by educating our children at home and letting them pursue their own interests, we are limiting their choices and perhaps even depriving them. The only honest answer is, Of course we are. But then, that’s true of every choice a parent makes: no matter what we choose for our children, we are by default not choosing something else.

I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so later than is expected. They can add and subtract and multiply and divide. I can report that they do indeed have friends, some who attend school and some who don’t, and their social skills are on par with their peers. In fact, Penny and I often hear from other adults that our sons seem better socialized than like-aged schoolchildren. Fin and Rye participate in a weekly gathering of homeschooled and unschooled kids, and Fin attends a weekly wilderness-skills program. In truth, few of their peers are as smitten with bushcraft as they are, and sometimes they wish for more friends who share their love of the wild. But even this is OK; the world is a place of wondrous diversity, and they must learn that theirs is not the only way.


What if they want to be doctors? They will be doctors. What if they want to be lawyers? They will be lawyers. Peter Gray, he of the 
belief that school is prison, has studied graduates of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, where “students” as young as four enjoy complete autonomy to design their own course of study, even if that involves no studying at all, and found that they have no difficult gaining entry to elite colleges, nor in achieving high GPAs. A home-based education, even one as unstructured as my sons’, does not preclude acceptance into a university; in fact, many colleges have developed application processes geared specifically toward homeschooled students, and while there are no major studies of unschoolers exclusively, homeschoolers are significantly more likely to take college-level courses than the rest of us.

“I look back at unschooling as the best part of my life,” Chelsea Clark told me between classes at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she was accepted on full scholarship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the university’s undergraduate program. “It was a huge advantage, actually. I had the confidence of knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t burned out on classroom learning like most college kids.” Chelsea was unschooled throughout her high school years in the small town of Dorchester, South Carolina.

Still, perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify. Diabetes rates among school-age children are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese has nearly tripled since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly. They sit.

Inactivity is also bad for the brain. A 2011 study by Georgia Health Sciences University found that cognitive function among kids improves with exercise. Their prefrontal cortex—the area associated with complex thinking, decision making, and social behavior—lights up. The kids in the study who exercised 40 minutes per day boosted their intelligence scores by an average of 3.8 points.

Yet the physical and cognitive implications of classroom learning have played minor roles in our decision to unschool Fin and Rye. It’s not that I don’t want them to be healthy and smart. Of course I do—I’m their father.

But, in truth, what I most want for my boys can’t be charted or graphed. It can’t be measured, at least not by common metrics. There is no standardized test that will tell me if it has been achieved, and there is no specific curriculum that will lead to its realization.

This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.

I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that.



Ben Hewitt’s new book is Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting Off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World. He blogs at benhewitt.net.

[mes5464]

Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation

[JohnnyL]

Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation

Oh, my!! Utah is going less government??

[Strawberry]

Not really a case for homeschooling - but leaning toward making the case for children to be children while in their younger years which is something.

Why Preschool Shouldn't Be Like School

New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire.

By Alison Gopnik
Illustration by Alex Eben Meyer. Click image to expand.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law—the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn't very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity—abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition—one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley—suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

What do we already know about how teaching affects learning? Not as much as we would like, unfortunately, because it is a very difficult thing to study. You might try to compare different kinds of schools. But the children and the teachers at a Marin County preschool that encourages exploration will be very different from the children and teachers in a direct instruction program in South Side Chicago. And almost any new program with enthusiastic teachers will have good effects, at least to begin with, regardless of content. So comparisons are difficult. Besides, how do you measure learning, anyway? Almost by definition, directed teaching will make children do better on standardized tests, which the government uses to evaluate school performance. Curiosity and creativity are harder to measure.

Developmental scientists like me explore the basic science of learning by designing controlled experiments. We might start by saying: Suppose we gave a group of 4-year-olds exactly the same problems and only varied on whether we taught them directly or encouraged them to figure it out for themselves? Would they learn different things and develop different solutions? The two new studies in Cognition are the first to systematically show that they would.

In the first study, MIT professor Laura Schulz, her graduate student Elizabeth Bonawitz, and their colleagues looked at how 4-year-olds learned about a new toy with four tubes. Each tube could do something interesting: If you pulled on one tube it squeaked, if you looked inside another tube you found a hidden mirror, and so on. For one group of children, the experimenter said: "I just found this toy!" As she brought out the toy, she pulled the first tube, as if by accident, and it squeaked. She acted surprised ("Huh! Did you see that? Let me try to do that!") and pulled the tube again to make it squeak a second time. With the other children, the experimenter acted more like a teacher. She said, "I'm going to show you how my toy works. Watch this!" and deliberately made the tube squeak. Then she left both groups of children alone to play with the toy.

All of the children pulled the first tube to make it squeak. The question was whether they would also learn about the other things the toy could do. The children from the first group played with the toy longer and discovered more of its "hidden" features than those in the second group. In other words, direct instruction made the children less curious and less likely to discover new information.

Does direct teaching also make children less likely to draw new conclusions—or, put another way, does it make them less creative? To answer this question, Daphna Buchsbaum, Tom Griffiths, Patrick Shafto, and I gave another group of 4-year-old children a new toy. * This time, though, we demonstrated sequences of three actions on the toy, some of which caused the toy to play music, some of which did not. For example, Daphna might start by squishing the toy, then pressing a pad on its top, then pulling a ring on its side, at which point the toy would play music. Then she might try a different series of three actions, and it would play music again. Not every sequence she demonstrated worked, however: Only the ones that ended with the same two actions made the music play. After showing the children five successful sequences interspersed with four unsuccessful ones, she gave them the toy and told them to "make it go."

Daphna ran through the same nine sequences with all the children, but with one group, she acted as if she were clueless about the toy. ("Wow, look at this toy. I wonder how it works? Let's try this," she said.) With the other group, she acted like a teacher. ("Here's how my toy works.") When she acted clueless, many of the children figured out the most intelligent way of getting the toy to play music (performing just the two key actions, something Daphna had not demonstrated). But when Daphna acted like a teacher, the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution.

As so often happens in science, two studies from different labs, using different techniques, have simultaneously produced strikingly similar results. They provide scientific support for the intuitions many teachers have had all along: Direct instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions.

Why might children behave this way? Adults often assume that most learning is the result of teaching and that exploratory, spontaneous learning is unusual. But actually, spontaneous learning is more fundamental. It's this kind of learning, in fact, that allows kids to learn from teachers in the first place. Patrick Shafto, a machine-learning specialist at the University of Louisville and a co-author of both these studies; Noah Goodman at Stanford; and their colleagues have explored how we could design computers that learn about the world as effectively as young children do. It's this work that inspired these experiments.

These experts in machine learning argue that learning from teachers first requires you to learn about teachers. For example, if you know how teachers work, you tend to assume that they are trying to be informative. When the teacher in the tube-toy experiment doesn't go looking for hidden features inside the tubes, the learner unconsciously thinks: "She's a teacher. If there were something interesting in there, she would have showed it to me." These assumptions lead children to narrow in, and to consider just the specific information a teacher provides. Without a teacher present, children look for a much wider range of information and consider a greater range of options.

Knowing what to expect from a teacher is a really good thing, of course: It lets you get the right answers more quickly than you would otherwise. Indeed, these studies show that 4-year-olds understand how teaching works and can learn from teachers. But there is an intrinsic trade-off between that kind of learning and the more wide-ranging learning that is so natural for young children. Knowing this, it's more important than ever to give children's remarkable, spontaneous learning abilities free rein. That means a rich, stable, and safe world, with affectionate and supportive grown-ups, and lots of opportunities for exploration and play. Not school for babies.

Correction, March 17: This sentence originally omitted the names of two of the study's researchers. (Return to the corrected sentence.)


In schools we are taught what to think. When you can't think for yourself it's easy to enslave you. We each should grow at our own pace, and trust the learning process. We desire to learn and grow. Sometimes I think formal schooling at a very young age teaches that desire out of us, making it harder for us to fulfill our divine earthly mission. A good point was made in the article, which my husband often asks me (out of fear that we aren't teaching our children well enough) - how do you measure learning anyway?

[Strawberry]

Setting Children Up to Hate Reading
FEBRUARY 2, 2014 BY NANCY BAILEY 157 COMMENTS

Any educator or parent who understands the beauty of reading and the importance of helping a child learn to do it right was appalled to read two recent articles about the subject. Both should make all of us concerned that children are being set up to hate reading. They are being pushed to read earlier than ever before!

Consider the February 1, 2014, headlines of The Oregonian: “Too Many Oregon Students Unready for Kindergarten State Officials Lament.” Seen HERE.

What is the crisis?

“The typical Oregon kindergartner arrived at school last fall knowing only 19 capital and lower-case letters and just seven letter sounds out of at least 100 possible correct answers, the state reported Friday.”
“They also were shown a page with 110 letter sounds on it. The average kindergartner could pronounce just 6.7.”
“Gov. John Kitzhaber, in prepared remarks, called the results ‘sobering’”…
“‘Things have changed in terms of what is expected when students start kindergarten,’ said Jada Rupley, Oregon’s early learning system director. ‘We would hope they would know most of their letters and many of their sounds.’”
Politicians, venture philanthropists, and even the President, make early learning into an emergency. What’s a poor kindergartener or preschooler to do when they must carry the weight of the nation on their backs—when every letter and pronunciation is scrutinized like never before?

Unfortunately, many kindergarten teachers have bought into this harmful message. Many have thrown out their play kitchens, blocks, napping rugs, and doll houses believing it is critical that children should learn to read in kindergarten!

[Imp. Note…there are also many great kindergarten teachers who work very hard to “cushion the blow” of the harmful reforms they are being forced to do. I understand that. It is easy for those of us who are no longer teaching to tell those who are that they should take a stand. Well in today’s draconian environment it could cost them their job! Still many teachers walk the tightrope daily trying to do what’s right for their children. You know who you are and I thank you!]

A new study through the University of Virginia has determined that kindergarten is the new first grade! The study, by Bassok and Rorem, from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, “used two large nationally representative datasets to track changes in kindergarten classrooms between 1998 and 2006.” They found “that in 1998, 31 percent of kindergarten teachers indicated that most children should learn to read while in kindergarten. By 2006, 65 percent of teachers agreed with this statement. To accommodate this new reality, classroom time spent on literacy rose by 25 percent, from roughly 5.5 to seven hours per week.”

What’s wrong with these high-stress pictures?

There is a mistaken idea of what young children should be able to do—what is age-appropriate. Here’s a list of what “typical” children know upon entering kindergarten, from the National Center for Education Statistics report Entering Kindergarten: Findings from the Condition of Education 2000:

Sixty-six percent of children entering kindergarten recognize letters in the alphabet.
Sixty-one percent of children entering kindergarten know you read left to right.
Many kindergartners do not yet possess early reading skills.
Children might not point to letters representing sounds.
New kindergartners might not be able to read basic words by sight yet.
Only 1 in 50 actually read basic and complex words entering kindergarten.
Note this is what occurs but isn’t what young children should necessarily be doing when it comes to reading.

Don’t believe me? Pick up any book about normal reading development and you will find that young children progress when they are ready—at their own pace.

The American Academy of Pediatrics notes the critical factor as to how a student will learn to read “is not how aggressively,” the child is given instruction, but rather their “own enthusiasm for learning.” They also state that many early learning programs “interfere with the child’s natural enthusiasm” by imposing on children to “concentrate on tasks” when they aren’t ready.

Why are young children being made to learn at a faster rate? Why is there this mistaken notion that children’s brains have somehow evolved to a higher level where they are supposed to read earlier and earlier?

All of this emergency talk has filtered into America’s classrooms. That’s why kindergarten teachers now believe all children must learn how to read in kindergarten. Having worked for years with reading and language problems in middle and high school students, I can tell you these new reading requirements for young children are terribly worrisome—even dangerous.

Many children will not be ready—not because they’re slow, not because they have learning disabilities, but because they’re normal and moving along at their own pace! The door should be opened to them in kindergarten and beyond to learn how to read in a relaxed manner. Even when a child has difficulty learning to read (dyslexia for example), you don’t attack the problem by pushing the child to read beyond what is considered normal.

When kindergarten teachers expect every kindergartner to focus on reading and learn it at that age, it opens the door for all kinds of problems. Here are a few:

No Joy in Reading. Children learn to hate reading. When you assess children too early, currently done in kindergarten with Response to Intervention testing like DIBELS, children learn reading is a chore. It becomes something serious—even fearful for a young child.
Vocabulary Emphasis. Most memorization is boring. When teachers focus on vocabulary acquisition and word recognition, young children lose interest in the stories. Curiosity is squelched. Some sight word instruction is fine, of course, but focusing so much and tracking every word as a data point is obsessive.

Self-Fulfilling Prophesy. If a kindergartener is not reading yet (normal), but they are treated like they have a problem, they really could develop a problem.

Loss of Cognitive Ability/Play. Heavily focusing on reading, at the expense of other important kindergarten tasks, like play, destroys critical aspects of learning. Without play, children lose the ability to think about things on their own. How does this toy work? How do I put the blocks together to build a house? What can I create on my own?
Loss of Self-Worth. It is fine for some children to show up reading in kindergarten, but children who are not reading yet (perfectly normal) may lose the feeling of self-worth. They could also act out becoming a behavior problem. Adults, after all, never trusted them to learn some things on their own.

Reading Ability Isn’t Everything. Kindergarten students who already read fluently might have other problems that are overlooked by the teacher. Or they become bored because they are given nothing new to learn.

A Lack of Socialization. We know through research, like the study notes above, that socialization at this period of development is important, but with the total emphasis on learning to read at such a young age, socialization skills, including play, are pushed aside. Students miss out on developing relationships with other children. How will they get along later interacting with others as adults?

Too Competitive. Children are taught at an early age that they must compete and win in order to receive approval. They don’t learn to care about others. They know some students read better or worse than they do. The emphasis is on reading not on the students and who they are.
Disadvantaged Children. While some students from poor backgrounds may not have been exposed to books and a good reading environment early on, pushing them to read through assessment and drill could squelch their interest in reading forever.
Research. Pushing children to read too soon defies past research by many recognized and well-regarded developmental psychologists and educators whose studies have stood the test of time.

While kindergarten is now the new 1st grade, in 10 more years will kindergarten be the next 2nd or 3rd grade? When will the current reformers be satisfied? When will they quit demeaning children and making them jump through inappropriate developmental hoops?

Enough is enough! Let children be children. Let them be their age. Bring back the joy of learning to read.
http://nancyebailey.com/2014/02/02/sett ... e-reading/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;



Glad to see another article like this. Of my 3 that can read none of them learned before they were 8 or 9. My now 8 year old is pretty much teaching himself and it's fun to watch how his eyes light up as he figures this out. Breaks my heart, but before I knew better with my oldest I pushed and forced her into formal learning when she was 4, she developed anxiety because of it. I backed off, she learned to read at age 8 and loves it - she's thriving in the private school she's attending. We just need to trust. Human beings come to earth with a love of learning. I believe the school systems teach their love of learning and creativity right out of the children.

[Rose Garden]

My three oldest all learned to read at the same time. My oldest tried but it was difficult for her so I tried not to push. She suddenly became interested when she was 8 and her reading skills took off. My third child loved reading from the start and was learning to read at 4, which is right when her older sister was reading. My second seemed totally uninterested and I wondered if he would ever learn, just because he didn't seem to want to. But when he saw his older sister learn to read, his interest was piqued and he wanted to learn too.

So my struggle was never motivation, but trying to find ways to get all the work done and teach them to read at the same time. They used to all lay on the floor next to me while I did the dishes, spelling out words they got stuck on. Sometimes it was all three at once and I'd have two kids at a time spelling to me. It was crazy! And awesome!

My little brother got the idea in school that he wasn't a good student. He to this day sees himself as a non-reader, even though he'll work his way through 3 inch books on computer code that would leave the rest of us running for cover. He never did well on tests, even when he knew the stuff.

I remember the joy of those days with my kids, dealing with the craziness of trying to keep up with their desire to read. It was delightful. And then on the other hand, I think of the damage in my brother who was taught first and foremost in school that he wasn't good enough. Force will never inspire joy.

[Strawberry]

I don't necessarily agree with this teachers political leanings and that "education has not been made a priority" because I think the PTB's version of "education" (read brainwashing) has been made priority and had more than enough money thrown at it. Some good points are made here. One of my favorites being -

" I'm so sorry that you are made to believe that the only learning that counts is the kind of learning that happens in schools. And only then the kind of learning that happens in a classroom. But not all that you learn in a classroom. Only the things that will be on the test, count. "


Dear Students: An Apology From A Teacher (http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/lizanne-fo ... 40108.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

Dear High School Students in the 21st century,

A new semester begins next week and I find myself feeling compelled to apologize to you. Despite our best efforts, we teachers have failed to persuade the people who have the political power to change our public education system, to do so. We can't seem to convince our premier that an investment in your education is an investment that we will all benefit from, an investment that would not cost us polluted water and toxic air.

So, until your education needs prevail over the needs of foreign corporations, please accept this apology from me.

I'm sorry that you have to be at school so early each morning despite neuroscience research indicating that teen brains do not function optimally until 10 a.m.

I'm sorry that you have to ask my permission to leave the classroom to pee even though you have a driver's licence and a part-time job, and are making significant decisions about your post-secondary life right now.

I'm sorry that you are forced to sit for six hours each school-day despite research that reveals the detrimental cognitive and health effects of excessive sitting.

I'm sorry that you are age-batched, forced to move through the school system with people your own age as though chronological age had anything to do with intellect, maturity, skills or ability.

I'm sorry that many of you who struggle to cope in school do not get any learning support because prevailing economic policy does not prioritize funding your needs.

I'm sorry that you have to study subjects that you are not interested in at a time when the sum total of human knowledge is doubling every 12 months.

I'm sorry that you are made to believe that there is a scarcity of A grades for which you have to compete, when all human progress has been the result of collaboration, often considered "cheating" in schools.

I'm sorry that you have textbooks with outdated information and classroom technology that is not maintained and practically obsolete.

I'm sorry that what is being called personalized learning is not actually personal at all. Truly personal learning costs too much, you understand?

I am sorry, that despite all the hype, based on the current government's track record, the recently announced BC Innovation Strategy, is unlikely to yield any significant changes apart from new ways to count what you do in schools.

But most of all, I am sorry that the education system is focused on your participation in an extractivist economy while our environment, without which there would be no economy, undergoes a climate crisis that will force a rapid reconfiguration of all that we currently do socially, politically, and economically, and for which you will be utterly unprepared.

I am so very sorry.

I wish you had not had your curiosity crushed by classroom conformity.

I wish I could wave a magic wand to give you the kind of school that would have spaces in which you could examine and explore, experiment and experience learning in diverse ways.

I wish I had the power to re-ignite the passion for learning so evident in your eyes in the weeks before your first day of school.

I wish I could help you to remember that before you were a student, you were a scientist, experimenting, discovering, questioning, making connections.

You were a poet too... remember how you'd describe things in ways that amused and amazed the adults around you?

You were born to learn. You cannot not learn.

I'm so sorry that you are made to believe that the only learning that counts is the kind of learning that happens in schools. And only then the kind of learning that happens in a classroom. But not all that you learn in a classroom. Only the things that will be on the test, count.

I wish I could whisk you away to other places where the public education system is prioritized by politicians who believe that the characteristics of their country's future society depends on the characteristics of their current education system.

At a time when all our lives depend on ingenuity to solve our most intractable problems, we are wasting your minds' potential for creative solutions. Adolescence is when we humans reach the peak of our cognitive development. Evidence of your amazing "out of the box" thinking and your capacity to create solutions is everywhere these days.

I wish I could show the powers-that-be what they need to see before they can clearly see what you can do, if you only had the chance. If only ...

Sincerely,
A Teacher

[Strawberry]

As if we need another reason.......

Data Collection at Schools: Is Big Brother Watching Your Kids?

Photo by Sam Edwards/Getty Images

Most people need at least a shred of privacy in their lives — and are even more fiercely protective of it when it comes to their kids. It’s why an increasing number of moms and dads are feeling betrayed by their children’s schools, who often collect and use sensitive data on students like a valuable form of currency.

VIDEO: High Schooler Catches Teacher Bullying Him on Camera

"It’s crazy. It’s creepy. Why are they collecting all this data on our children, and what are they doing with it?" says Colorado mother of three Traci Burnett in speaking with the Gazette, a Colorado news outlet, for a story this week about kids and privacy in that state. But many parents across the country believe that schools gather too much personal information about their children and families — typically in the name of bettering student achievement — and now national legislators are considering various new laws on data privacy.

According to EPIC’s student privacy project director Khaliah Barnes, who wrote on the topic for the New York Times in December, “The collection of student data is out of control. No longer do schools simply record attendance and grades. Now every test score and every interaction with a digital learning tool is recorded. Data gathering includes health, fitness and sleeping habits, sexual activity, prescription drug use, alcohol use and disciplinary matters. Students’ attitudes, sociability and even ‘enthusiasm’ are quantified, analyzed, recorded and dropped into giant data systems.” The rampant data collection, she added, “is not only destroying student privacy, it also threatens students’ intellectual freedom. When schools record and analyze students’ every move and recorded thought, they chill expression and speech, stifling innovation and creativity.” Some cafeteria software, according to Marketplace, tracks eligibility for free and reduced-price lunches, including sensitive financial data about a student’s family such as weekly income and alimony payments.

STORY: Why Oklahoma Lawmakers Voted to Ban AP U.S. History

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-partisan research organization, reports that students’ personal information is often collected through in-school surveys, sometimes for commercial use. Congress most recently addressed such surveys in the No Child Left Behind Act, providing parents and students the right to be notified of, and consent to, the collection of student information, though it allows for many exceptions.

And while federal laws protect children’s privacy, most have loopholes. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), for example, doesn’t cover online educational data or third-party vendors, and is up for Congressional revision. A hearing in Washington earlier this month addressed how emerging technology affects student privacy, and what additional protections are needed. “Think George Orwell and take it to the nth degree,” explained Fordham University Professor Joel Reidenberg, when asked what information would be available in one findable place on any particular preschool through college student.

The concerns have prompted President Obama to propose the Student Digital Privacy Act, to ensure that data collected in the educational context is used only for educational purposes. The bill would prevent companies from selling student data to third parties for purposes unrelated to the educational mission, and from engaging in targeted advertising to students based on data collected in school – though it would still allow for research initiatives to improve student learning outcomes, as well as efforts by companies to improve their learning technology products.

“The Education Department and the Federal Trade Commission could and should do more to protect student privacy,” wrote EPIC president Marc Rotenberg in a statement submitted to the recent Congressional hearing. “But because they have not, meaningful legislation will provide a private right of action for students and their parents against private companies that unlawfully disclose student information.” Recently, as just one example, the statement explained, EPIC filed an extensive complaint with the FTC concerning the business practices of Scholarships.com. “The company encouraged students to divulge sensitive medical, sexual, and religious information to obtain financial aid information,” Rotenberg explained. “The company claimed that it used this information to locate scholarships and financial aid. Scholarships.com, however, transferred the data to a business affiliate that in turn sold the data for general marketing purposes.”

Jules Polonetskys, the executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, wrote in the New York Times that he believes transparency is key. Most important, to build trust in the new technology, parents need to be kept in the know. The paramount concern of schools and tech and data companies should be making sure parents and students understand why and how technology and data are being used to advance learning, how the information collected is protected in the process and what the schools are doing to safeguard protected information.”

It’s an idea that Colorado mom, Traci Burnett, can get behind. “I think people have forgotten these are my kids, not the school’s,” she told the Gazette. “When you start linking all this data — my kid’s biometrics, with an address, a juvenile record, voter registration, you get a profile, and there’s so much wrong with that. The danger is that the information doesn’t need to be in the hands of the state or federal government. It reminds me of China — we’re going to flow you to the correct job so you can be productive in our society.”

https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/data-co ... 95072.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[mes5464]

“Student Success Act” to Crush Religious Freedom, Private School Autonomy, Parental Rights: #NO on HR5 74 comments

This one is such a betrayal.

I’ve never been so shocked and angry over a proposed Congressional bill that I burst into tears. Not until tonight.

I’d been quietly reading and taking notes on H.R. 5, “Student Success Act” (SSA) when my husband simply, offhandedly asked me how I was doing. Though I’d been quiet, I was boiling over as I read tucked-away portions of this 600+ page bill which, despite the local-control-touting, anti-Common Core-sounding words (on page 10 and elsewhere), is terrible. When my husband asked how I was doing, I stood up, walked to the couch and explained through my hot, angry tears what destruction and reduction of vital freedoms will take place if this bill passes:

It ends private schools’ religious freedom from government control. It harms funding freedom in private schools. It puts into question parental rights and control over education. It pushes sameness of testing. Those are just a few things. There are more.

[KMCopeland]

“Student Success Act” to Crush Religious Freedom, Private School Autonomy, Parental Rights: #NO on HR5 74 comments

This one is such a betrayal.

I’ve never been so shocked and angry over a proposed Congressional bill that I burst into tears. Not until tonight.

I’d been quietly reading and taking notes on H.R. 5, “Student Success Act” (SSA) when my husband simply, offhandedly asked me how I was doing. Though I’d been quiet, I was boiling over as I read tucked-away portions of this 600+ page bill which, despite the local-control-touting, anti-Common Core-sounding words (on page 10 and elsewhere), is terrible. When my husband asked how I was doing, I stood up, walked to the couch and explained through my hot, angry tears what destruction and reduction of vital freedoms will take place if this bill passes:

It ends private schools’ religious freedom from government control. It harms funding freedom in private schools. It puts into question parental rights and control over education. It pushes sameness of testing. Those are just a few things. There are more.

Although I haven't spent a lot of time on this, I did look at your link.

The website says that HR5, called "The Student Success Act" which title I'll admit, should not be taken at face value, says it's going to do this to private school autonomy:

"PRIVATE SCHOOL AUTONOMY: GOVERNMENT-APPOINTED OMBUDSMEN WILL MONITOR COMPLIANCE"

and this to private school funding:

"PRIVATE SCHOOL FUNDING – PRIVATE SCHOOLS MUST CONSULT WITH PUBLIC DISTRICTS WHICH ENFORCE EQUALITY"

But just a very superficial skimming of the actual bill, which you can find at https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-con ... use-bill/5" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; (which bill was sponsored by a Republican member, and passed by a Republican House in 2013) says this about the first of those two things:

"(Sec. 120) Requires states to designate an ombudsman to ensure that private school children receive educational services and benefits that are equitable to those received by public school children under subpart 1."

and this about the second:

"Directs states, rather than LEAs, to provide or arrange for the provision of such services and benefits to private schools in certain circumstances."

So while the website presents this as some big attack on private schools, I have a hunch that's not exactly true. If you read the dramatic ("hot angry tears" no less) story on the home page carefully, a reasonable conclusion is that this is yet another online presence provided by the corporate forces that have their greedy eyes on this country's public education system, intended to encourage you to help them get it.

Don't do it.

[mes5464]

More African Americans are Abandoning State-Run Schools and opting for Homeschool

According to National Home Education Research Institute, approximately 220,000 African American students are being homeschooled. Black families are one of the fastest growing home school demographic.

[Strawberry]

Interesting MES5464 - here is one about boys.

Why schools are failing our boys

My 8-year-old son has been struggling in school. Again.

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school – Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. – have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.

My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.

The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.

Does that sound dramatic to you? Perhaps. After all, most of us go through school and somehow survive more or less intact. But if you really think about it, you might remember what you hated about school. You might remember that it took you years after school to rediscover your own soul and passions, and the courage to pursue them.

The stress of school, of trying to fit into an environment that asks him to suppress the best parts of himself, recently had my son in tears. Again.

[Read: Why we have to stop labeling our boys]

He hasn’t been allowed outside at school all week; it’s too cold. Yet this son has spent happy hours outside at home this week, all bundled up, moving snow with the toy snowplow, creating “snowmobile trails” in our yard with his sled and shoveling both our walk and our neighbors. Because he wants to.

This morning, as always, my son was up and dressed before the rest of the household; he likes time to play Minecraft before school starts. But he also cleaned the dirty glass on the woodstove, started the fire and brought wood into the house. Because he wants to.

And it hit me this morning: He would have done great in Little House on the Prairie time.

We’re reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, one of the books in the Little House series, aloud right now. Back then, boys (and girls) primarily learned by doing. Kids between the ages of 5 and 18 weren’t corralled into schools and kept apart from real life; out of necessity, boys worked on the farms and girls helped in the house. Entire families worked together to survive, and along the way, boys and girls learned how to function in the real world.

That’s the kind of learning my son craves.

Kids haven’t changed much over the past 150 years; our society has. So while my son still needs movement, still craves real-world learning, physical labor and ways to contribute to his family and his world, he’s expected to spend most of his time in a desk, in a classroom, with 20-some other kids his age. He’s not allowed to go outside at school when it’s too cold or wet; he’s expected to sit quietly in the library or auditorium during recess time. He’s allowed few opportunities for “real” work; today, when you hand an 8-year-old a saw or allow him to start a fire, people look at you askance.

One hundred and fifty years ago, my son would have been considered a model boy. Today, more often than not, he’s considered a troublemaker due to his failure (or inability?) to conform to the expectations of the modern educational system.

I understand that society today is much different than society in the 1800s. Most of that change is good; I applaud antibiotics and equality. I’m a big fan of the internet and indoor plumbing. But at the same time, I think our current approach to education fails to honor the needs of children, especially the needs of our boys.

Boys today aren’t fundamentally different than the boys of 150 years ago. Yet today, they’re confined to classrooms, expected to remain still for the majority of the day, and barely allowed to tackle meaningful labor or the real world until they reach the magical age of 18. Is it any wonder our boys are struggling?

Statistically speaking, boys now lag behind girls on every single academic measure; they also get in trouble and drop out of school much more frequently than girls. There are fewer boys in college than girls, and far more lost 20-something boys than 20-something girls.

Our boys are not the ones who are failing; we are the ones failing our boys.

My son’s struggles break my heart. I worry that they’ll break his spirit next. For now, I wipe his tears, e-mail his teacher, allow him outside every chance I get and share his story, because I want other parents of boys to know they are not alone. I want them to know that the problem is not their son, but rather a system that is failing far too many boys.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pare ... -our-boys/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


One thing I see is the feminization of boys. A gal that took a birthing class with me 6 years ago just posted on facebook today a picture of her just 6 year old boy in his new (thrift-store bought) very girly dress that he picked out and proudly wore to school today. Keeping Portland weird? Or is that happening elsewhere too?

[JohnnyL]

One thing I see is the feminization of boys. A gal that took a birthing class with me 6 years ago just posted on facebook today a picture of her just 6 year old boy in his new (thrift-store bought) very girly dress that he picked out and proudly wore to school today. Keeping Portland weird? Or is that happening elsewhere too?

Not the first time it's happened.

There wouldn't be a first time with my son.

[mes5464]

Interesting MES5464 - here is one about boys.

Why schools are failing our boys

My 8-year-old son has been struggling in school. Again.

Re-entry after winter break has not been easy for him. The rules and restrictions of school – Sit Still. Be Quiet. Do What You Are Told, Nothing More, Nothing Less. – have been grating on him, and it shows. His teacher recently emailed me; she’d noticed a change in his behavior (more belligerent, less likely to cooperate) and wanted to know if there was anything going on at home.

My guess, I said, was that he was upset about having to be back in school after break. I was right.

The lack of movement and rigid restrictions associated with modern schooling are killing my son’s soul.

Does that sound dramatic to you? Perhaps. After all, most of us go through school and somehow survive more or less intact. But if you really think about it, you might remember what you hated about school. You might remember that it took you years after school to rediscover your own soul and passions, and the courage to pursue them.

The stress of school, of trying to fit into an environment that asks him to suppress the best parts of himself, recently had my son in tears. Again.

[Read: Why we have to stop labeling our boys]

He hasn’t been allowed outside at school all week; it’s too cold. Yet this son has spent happy hours outside at home this week, all bundled up, moving snow with the toy snowplow, creating “snowmobile trails” in our yard with his sled and shoveling both our walk and our neighbors. Because he wants to.

This morning, as always, my son was up and dressed before the rest of the household; he likes time to play Minecraft before school starts. But he also cleaned the dirty glass on the woodstove, started the fire and brought wood into the house. Because he wants to.

And it hit me this morning: He would have done great in Little House on the Prairie time.

We’re reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, one of the books in the Little House series, aloud right now. Back then, boys (and girls) primarily learned by doing. Kids between the ages of 5 and 18 weren’t corralled into schools and kept apart from real life; out of necessity, boys worked on the farms and girls helped in the house. Entire families worked together to survive, and along the way, boys and girls learned how to function in the real world.

That’s the kind of learning my son craves.

Kids haven’t changed much over the past 150 years; our society has. So while my son still needs movement, still craves real-world learning, physical labor and ways to contribute to his family and his world, he’s expected to spend most of his time in a desk, in a classroom, with 20-some other kids his age. He’s not allowed to go outside at school when it’s too cold or wet; he’s expected to sit quietly in the library or auditorium during recess time. He’s allowed few opportunities for “real” work; today, when you hand an 8-year-old a saw or allow him to start a fire, people look at you askance.

One hundred and fifty years ago, my son would have been considered a model boy. Today, more often than not, he’s considered a troublemaker due to his failure (or inability?) to conform to the expectations of the modern educational system.

I understand that society today is much different than society in the 1800s. Most of that change is good; I applaud antibiotics and equality. I’m a big fan of the internet and indoor plumbing. But at the same time, I think our current approach to education fails to honor the needs of children, especially the needs of our boys.

Boys today aren’t fundamentally different than the boys of 150 years ago. Yet today, they’re confined to classrooms, expected to remain still for the majority of the day, and barely allowed to tackle meaningful labor or the real world until they reach the magical age of 18. Is it any wonder our boys are struggling?

Statistically speaking, boys now lag behind girls on every single academic measure; they also get in trouble and drop out of school much more frequently than girls. There are fewer boys in college than girls, and far more lost 20-something boys than 20-something girls.

Our boys are not the ones who are failing; we are the ones failing our boys.

My son’s struggles break my heart. I worry that they’ll break his spirit next. For now, I wipe his tears, e-mail his teacher, allow him outside every chance I get and share his story, because I want other parents of boys to know they are not alone. I want them to know that the problem is not their son, but rather a system that is failing far too many boys.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pare ... -our-boys/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


One thing I see is the feminization of boys. A gal that took a birthing class with me 6 years ago just posted on facebook today a picture of her just 6 year old boy in his new (thrift-store bought) very girly dress that he picked out and proudly wore to school today. Keeping Portland weird? Or is that happening elsewhere too?

I do like this article and agree with much of it. I would support going back to an apprentice form of education.

[Strawberry]

I do like this article and agree with much of it. I would support going back to an apprentice form of education.

MES5464 SO glad you feel that way. I hope others do too! That's exactly what I"m planning on doing with my children as they get older. Christ apprenticed, if it was good enough for him........

[mes5464]

“A” Student Booted by College Because He was Homeschooled

Diploma Issues

During the application process the family met with admissions staff and informed them that Jacob had been homeschooled. Jacob’s enrollment agreement, signed by the college president, Ms. Sharron Stephens, even acknowledged his homeschooling background.

His enrollment completed, Jacob eagerly began his studies and finished his first two courses, psychology and Introduction to Computers, in January, receiving A’s in both.

As a requirement for Student Success Strategies, one of his next courses, Jacob met with President Stephens. In the course of the interview, Ms. Stephens rediscovered that Jacob was homeschooled and took issue with his education.

“Your homeschool diploma isn’t state recognized. We can’t mess with our federal funding by having people with unaccredited diplomas here,” she reportedly said. The president had Jacob called to the financial aid office after class and gave him one day to produce an “accredited” diploma.

The next day Jacob was called out of his lecture and attempted to explain again to the president that his diploma was valid. Ms. Stephens refused to listen and suggested he take the GED. When he attempted to attend his next class, the school sent him directly to Ms. Stephens who kicked him out and informed him that he was an intelligent young man who would do well on the GED.

“It was a shock,” said Jacob. “She signed the letter acknowledging that I had been homeschooled and then kicked me out. It hurts me that she would do that to me. I don’t want to be negative, but I do feel like it was discriminatory.”

[Rose Garden]

It obviously had nothing to do with education.

[Strawberry]

It obviously had nothing to do with education.

As my dad says (about nearly everything government related) "It's all about power and control." :ymdevil:

[Strawberry]

Be My Guest: Unschooling Reflects Current Cognitive Research
by Chris Mercogliano on February 12, 2014

Wendy Priesnitz is the editor of Life Learning Magazine, the author of twelve books, and the mother of two adult daughters who learned without school.

As I wrote recently in Life Learning Magazine, unschooling is the way of the future, for all ages. So I’m always surprised that so many people think it is wrong, weird, or witless…or even anti-intellectual. In fact, it’s just the opposite; our current education systems are based on outdated science, and unschooling reflects current cognitive research.

When schools were created, it was thought that learning was a sequential process that involved structure, uniformity, and memorization, and relied on extrinsic motivation and control – things like praise, rewards, and punishment. Now science knows differently; modern cognitive research is demonstrating that learning is open-ended and spontaneous, and that people – including children – learn best when they are intrinsically motivated and can build on their everyday experiences.

There are different types of motivation, which researchers generally group into intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is about free choice, pleasure, a sense of satisfaction, and the desire to fill a physical, intellectual or emotional need. If we eat our dinner because we enjoy the taste of the food, the company, and our surroundings, and feel good afterwards, we’re intrinsically motivated. We might research a topic on the Internet out of curiosity or for the fun of learning something new – that’s intrinsic motivation too.

If, on the other hand, we undertake that research in order to get a good mark on a term paper, we are extrinsically motivated. Likewise, when a parent tells a child that she’ll get ice cream if she finishes her peas, the parent is using extrinsic motivation to create the behavior he desires in his daughter. (And we could safely assume that the little girl isn’t intrinsically motivated to eat her peas!) Extrinsic motivation involves doing something in order to earn external rewards such as praise, money, or grades, or to avoid punishments.

They’re not exact opposites, and are not necessarily exclusionary. Most of us need and benefit from extrinsic motivation from time to time. We might need the motivation of regular weigh-ins to keep on a diet, for instance. And even though we may be intrinsically motivated by the challenge of running a marathon, we sometimes will employ a dose of extrinsic motivation to keep us training through the long haul.

The Impetus to Learn
Intrinsic motivation leads to optimum learning, according to modern cognitive science. It’s something most parents intuitively know. Just watch any infant and you‘ll have evidence that children are naturally curious and interested in learning, exploring, and mastering challenges. They don’t need to be motivated to learn, nor taught how to do it.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, developmental psychologists at the University of Rochester, capped thirty years of research on the subject in 1985 by calling this “Self-Determination Theory.” Their work confirms that children are born with an innate desire to explore their internal and external surroundings in an attempt to understand and master them. They believe that the impetus to learn comes from within and isn’t separate from the activity itself. In fact, they say that allowing children the freedom to pursue their interests without interference is essential to creativity and learning – that is, self-determination is crucial for kids.

There are other things beyond interest and self-determination that support intrinsic motivation. In a 2004 book entitled Learning Disabilities: The Interaction of Students and Their Environments, Syracuse University psychologist Corinne Roth Smith says that interest isn’t sufficient. “A sense of competence (‘I can do this’), autonomy (‘I am making the decision to do this’), and relatedness (‘I feel secure and supported in doing this’) supports this intrinsic motivation,” she writes.

Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Mark R. Lepper, a professor at Stanford University, published a paper in 1987 entitled “Making learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivation.” They noticed that most students find school boring and require extrinsic motivation to goad them into undertaking educational activities. Recognizing that video gaming is intrinsically motivating for kids and wondering how that differs from the school environment, they identified four major factors that lead to intrinsic motivation: challenge, curiosity, control, and fantasy.
In the words of Australian educational psychologist John B. Biggs, the intrinsic motivation resulting from these factors is “deep” learning, versus the shallower type that may be more about obedient memorization than real learning.

Sidetracking Learning
Researchers have discovered that offering external rewards for an already intrinsically rewarding activity can actually make the activity less rewarding. David G. Myers, a professor of psychology at Hope College in Michigan, says that unnecessary rewards can carry hidden costs to learning. “Most people think that offering tangible rewards will boost anyone’s interest in an activity. Actually, promising children a reward for a task they already enjoy can backfire, according to the research. In experiments, children promised a payoff for playing with an interesting puzzle or toy later play with the toy less than do children who are not paid to play. It is as if the children think, ‘If I have to be bribed into doing this, then it must not be worth doing for its own sake.’ ”

Richard A. Griggs, Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, goes further, suggesting that many students will become suspicious when extrinsic motivation is used. In his text Psychology: A Concise Introduction, he writes, “With the addition of extrinsic reinforcement, the person may perceive the task as over-justified and then attempt to understand their true motivation (extrinsic versus intrinsic) for engaging in the activity.”

Some have even suggested outright that school as we know it inherently impedes learning. Educator and psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote in his 1966 book Toward a Theory of Instruction that, “The will to learn becomes a ‘problem’ only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined, and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning.”

Deci and Ryan concur. In a 2000 paper published in the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, they wrote, “Because intrinsic motivation results in high-quality learning and creativity, it is especially important to detail the factors and forces that engender versus undermine it.” One of those negative forces, they say, is extrinsic rewards, along with threats, bribes, deadlines, directives, and imposed goals.

This is just a small and simplistic sampling of the new thinking that demonstrates why unschooling works, and why our current memorization-based education systems are in trouble, in spite (or because) of increased testing and competition. Science has moved past the thinking of Behaviorists like Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner, but most schools – and some homeschoolers – are still trying to educate kids via programmed instruction and the threat/reward mentality. And while some teachers try to use tools like Malone’s and Lepper’s principles of challenge, curiosity, self-control, and fantasy in their classrooms, but they are restricted by the structure of schools and school systems.

Unschoolers, on the other hand – or “life learners” as I prefer to say today – can create an environment that is the perfect catalyst for children’s “self-determination.” In doing so, we are providing for our children and youth the opportunity to learn from activities that are based on their own interests and that satisfy their innate psychological needs for competence and autonomy. Many of us began allowing children to do what comes naturally to them long before science proved it was the best way for kids to learn. I hope science can somehow, eventually, trump the vested financial interests of the education industry so all children can learn as Nature intended.

http://www.chrismercogliano.com/be-my-g ... -research/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Strawberry]

Because we need more reasons to keep our children home.......

New Bill Would Have Teachers Diagnose Psychological Issues in Children and Report them to Police

Dallas, Texas – Texas State Representative Jason Villalba (R-Dallas) is once again in the spotlight after submitting yet another Orwellian proposal, H.B. 985.

Villalba first raised the ire of civil libertarians by proposing a bill, H.B. 2006, which would have eliminated the religious exemption for vaccination, essentially creating a forced government vaccination program without exception.

More recently, Villalba was thrust into the national spotlight when he proposed H.B. 2918, which would usurp citizens of the ability to hold law enforcement accountable for their actions. The bill would negate the people’s ability to create an accurate and impartial record of police interactions by restricting citizens from filming within 25 feet of an officer.

Now with H.B. 985, Villalba intends to give school officials the authority to force psychological screenings of students that teachers and staff diagnose as having mental health issues.

Once the process is set in motion by school officials, parents would be forced to take their child to a mental health professional within 30 days, under threat of suspension of the child from school.

“ …the requirement that the parent or guardian, before the expiration of the 30-day period, to avoid suspension of the student under this section, take the student to the nearest local mental health authority or a physician specializing in psychiatry to receive a mental health screening and a certificate of medical examination for mental illness, as described by Section 533.03522(c), Health and Safety Code, that contains the examining physician’s opinion that the student is not a danger to self or others.”
While under suspension the child would still receive an education, but they would be sent to an “alternative school.”

School administrators would be required under the law to provide the student’s name, address, and information regarding the complaint to the local mental health authorities and the police department upon verification of the complaint.

(i) A school counselor or a principal who receives notice
under. Subsection (b) about a student who subsequently is subject to
a notice of intent to suspend under Subsection (g) shall:
(1) provide the student’s name and address and
information concerning the conduct or statement that led to the
notice of intent to suspend to:
(A) the school district police department, if the
school counselor or principal is employed by a school district and
the district has a police department;
(B) the police department of the municipality in
which the school is located or, if the school is not in a
municipality, the sheriff of the county in which the school is
located; and
(C) the local mental health authority nearest the school;

Teachers have enough on their academic plates without them being forced to become armchair psychologists in the classroom.

Also, it is highly inappropriate and dangerous for unqualified teachers to play the role of child psychiatrists. Unless they’ve had special training and are certified to diagnose the disorders, it can also be illegal.

We are already witnessing the damage caused by parents believing teachers who think that every child who acts out in their classroom has ADHD. It’s called The Ritalin Explosion.

The idea that students’ personal information would be submitted to mental health facilities and police departments for complaints initiated and investigated by only school officials also causes serious concern.

Is it really necessary to criminalize kids based upon a teacher’s unprofessional assessment of a kids mental health? And what about the student that is mentally healthy, but simply defiant?

Perhaps rather than attempting to legislate away this perceived problem by criminalizing “problem” children, there is a better way. Villalba would have been better served by using his position to help create a program to build sustainable bridges of communication between parents and administrators that assist in identifying and combating mental health problems in students.

Instead, like so many tyrants before him, Villalba tries to solve complex problems using the force of the state.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/bill-t ... xVme51P.99" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Fiannan]

Kids haven’t changed much over the past 150 years; our society has. So while my son still needs movement, still craves real-world learning, physical labor and ways to contribute to his family and his world, he’s expected to spend most of his time in a desk, in a classroom, with 20-some other kids his age. He’s not allowed to go outside at school when it’s too cold or wet; he’s expected to sit quietly in the library or auditorium during recess time. He’s allowed few opportunities for “real” work; today, when you hand an 8-year-old a saw or allow him to start a fire, people look at you askance.

The Chinese have the right idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jksj4ZSBX-0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Strawberry]

I suppose I could have put this in the "get off psychotropic drugs" thread too? Or a mental health thread? The tyranny thread? I find this very interesting. What do you think?

Societies With Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness

By BRUCE LEVINE, PH.D.

Featured Blogs August 30, 2013
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far less mental illness. This reality has been buried, not surprisingly, by uncritical champions of modernity and mainstream psychiatry. Coercion—the use of physical, legal, chemical, psychological, financial, and other forces to gain compliance—is intrinsic to our society’s employment, schooling, and parenting. However, coercion results in fear and resentment, which are fuels for miserable marriages, unhappy families, and what we today call mental illness.

Societies with Little Coercion and Little Mental Illness

Shortly after returning from the horrors of World War I and before they wrote Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were given a commission by Harper’s Magazine to write nonfiction travel articles about life in the South Pacific. Their reports about the islands of Paumoto, Society, and the Hervey group were first serialized in Harper’s and then published in the book Faery Lands of the South Seas (1921). Nordhoff and Hall were stuck by how little coercion occurred in these island cultures compared to their own society, and they were enchanted by the kind of children that such noncoercive parenting produced:

“There is a fascination in watching these youngsters, brought up without clothes and without restraint. . . . Once they are weaned from their mothers’ breasts—which often does not occur until they have reached an age of two and a half or three —the children of the islands are left practically to shift for themselves; there is food in the house, a place to sleep, and a scrap of clothing if the weather be cool—that is the extent of parental responsibility. The child eats when it pleases, sleeps when and where it will, amuses itself with no other resources than its own. As it grows older certain light duties are expected of it—gathering fruit, lending a hand in fishing, cleaning the ground about the house—but the command to work is casually given and casually obeyed. Punishment is scarcely known. . . . [Yet] the brown youngster flourishes with astonishingly little friction—sweet tempered, cheerful, never bored, and seldom quarrelsome.”
For many indigenous peoples, even the majority rule that most Americans call democracy is problematically coercive, as it results in the minority feeling resentful. Roland Chrisjohn, member of the Oneida Nation of the Confederacy of the Haudenausaunee (Iroquois) and author of The Circle Game, points out that for his people, it is deemed valuable to spend whatever time necessary to achieve consensus so as to prevent such resentment. By the standards of Western civilization, this is highly inefficient. “Achieving consensus could take forever!” exclaimed an attendee of a talk that I heard given by Chrisjohn, who responded, “What else is there more important to do?”

Among indigenous societies, there are many accounts of a lack of mental illness, a minimum of coercion, and wisdom that coercion creates resentment which fractures relationships. The 1916 book The Institutional Care of the Insane of the United States and Canada reports, “Dr. Lillybridge of Virginia, who was employed by the government to superintend the removal of Cherokee Indians in 1827-8-9, and who saw more than 20,000 Indians and inquired much about their diseases, informs us he never saw or heard of a case of insanity among them.” Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in his 1980 book Schizophrenia and Civilization, states, “Schizophrenia appears to be a disease of civilization.”

In 1973, Torrey conducted research in New Guinea, which he called “an unusually good country in which to do epidemiologic research because census records for even most remote villages are remarkably good.” Examining these records, he found, “There was over a twentyfold difference in schizophrenia prevalence among districts; those with a higher prevalence were, in general, those with the most contact with Western civilization.” In reviewing other’s research, Torrey concluded:

“Between 1828 and 1960, almost all observers who looked for psychosis or schizophrenia in technologically undeveloped areas of the world agreed that it was uncommon… The striking feature… is the remarkable consensus that insanity (in the early studies) and schizophrenia (in later studies) were comparatively uncommon prior to contact with European-American civilization… But around 1950 an interesting thing happened… the idea became current in psychiatric literature that schizophrenia occurs in about the same prevalence in all cultures and is not a disease of civilization.”
Yet Torrey is an advocate of the idea that severe mental illness is due to biological factors and not social ones, and he came to be responsible for helping build the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) into a powerful political force. How does Torrey square his ideas that mental illness is due to biological factors with his own research that shows that severe mental illness is highly associated with European-American civilization? For Torrey, “Viruses in particular should be suspect as possible agents.”

Torrey’s suspected biochemical virus agents have never been found, and so why has he not considered the toxic effects of coercion? Torrey is a strong advocate of coercive treatments, including forced medication. And so, perhaps his blindness to the ill effects of coercion compels him—even after discovering the strong relationship between European-American civilization and severe mental illness—to proclaim that mental illness could not be caused by social factors.

While Torrey researched records in New Guinea, Jared Diamond has actually worked with the New Guinea people for nearly a half century, spending extended periods of time with different groups, including those hunter-gatherer tribes in New Guinea (and other small-scale societies) whose parenting creates an abundance of nurturance and a minimum of coercion.

Diamond, in From the World Until Yesterday (2012), reports how laissez-faire parenting is “not unusual by the standards of the world’s hunter-gatherer societies, many of which consider young children to be autonomous individuals whose desires should not be thwarted.” Diamond concludes that by our society’s attempt to control children for what we believe is their own good, we discourage those traits we admire:

“Other Westerners and I are struck by the emotional security, self-­confidence, curiosity, and autonomy of members of small-scale societies, not only as adults but already as children. We see that people in small-scale societies spend far more time talking to each other than we do, and they spend no time at all on passive entertainment supplied by outsiders, such as television, videogames, and books. We are struck by the precocious development of social skills in their children. These are qualities that most of us admire, and would like to see in our own children, but we discourage development of those qualities by ranking and grading our children and constantly ­telling them what to do.”
Emotional and Behavioral Effects of Coercion

Once, when doctors actually listened at length to their patients about their lives, it was obvious to many of them that coercion played a significant role in their misery. But most physicians, including psychiatrists, have stopped delving into their patients’ lives. In 2011, the New York Times (“Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy”) reported, “A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients.” As the article points out, psychiatrists can make far more money primarily providing “medication management,” in which they only check symptoms and adjust medication.

Since the 1980s, biochemical psychiatry in partnership with Big Pharma has come to dominate psychiatry, and they have successfully buried truths about coercion that were once obvious to professionals who actually listened at great length to their patients—obvious, for example, to Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) and R.D. Laing (The Politics of Experience, 1967). This is not to say that Freud’s psychoanalysis and Laing’s existential approach always have been therapeutic. However, doctors who focus only on symptoms and prescribing medication will miss the obvious reality of how a variety of societal coercions can result in a cascade of family coercions, resentments, and emotional and behavioral problems.

Modernity is replete with institutional coercions not present in most indigenous cultures. This is especially true with respect to schooling and employment, which for most Americans, according to recent polls, are alienating, disengaging, and unfun. As I reported earlier this year (“Why Life in America Can Literally Drive You Insane, a Gallup poll, released in January 2013, reported that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become, and by high school, only 40% reported being engaged. Critics of schooling—from Henry David Thoreau, to Paul Goodman, to John Holt, to John Taylor Gatto—have understood that coercive and unengaging schooling is necessary to ensure that young people more readily accept coercive and unengaging employment. And as I also reported in that same article, a June 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 70% of Americans hate their jobs or have checked out of them.

Unengaging employment and schooling require all kinds of coercions for participation, and human beings pay a psychological price for this. In nearly three decades of clinical practice, I have found that coercion is often the source of suffering.

Here’s one situation that I’ve seen hundreds of times. An intelligent young child or teenager has been underachieving in standard school, and has begun to have emotional and/or behavioral problems. Such a child often feels coerced by standard schooling to pay attention to that which is boring for them, to do homework for which they see no value, and to stay inside a building that feels sterile and suffocating. Depending on the child’s temperament, this coercion results in different outcomes — none of them good.

Some of these kids get depressed and anxious. They worry that their lack of attention and interest will result in dire life consequences. They believe authorities’ admonitions that if they do poorly in school, they will be “flipping burgers for the rest of their lives.” It is increasingly routine for doctors to medicate these anxious and depressed kids with antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs.

Other inattentive kids are unworried. They don’t take seriously either their schooling or admonitions from authorities, and they feel justified in resisting coercion. Their rebellion is routinely labeled by mental health professionals as “acting out,” and they are diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder. Their parents often attempt punishments, which rarely work to break these kids’ resistance. Parents become frustrated and resentful that their child is causing them stress. Their child feels this parental frustration and resentment, and often experiences it as their parents not liking them. And so these kids stop liking their parents, stop caring about their parents’ feelings, and seek peers whom they believe do like them, even if these peers are engaged in criminal behaviors.

In all societies, there are coercions to behave in culturally agreed-upon ways. For example, in many indigenous cultures, there is peer pressure to be courageous and honest. However, in modernity, we have institutional coercions that compel us to behave in ways that we do not respect or value. Parents, afraid their children will lack credentials necessary for employment, routinely coerce their children to comply with coercive schooling that was unpleasant for these parents as children. And though 70% of us hate or are disengaged from our jobs, we are coerced by the fear of poverty and homelessness to seek and maintain employment.

In our society, we are taught that accepting institutional coercion is required for survival. We discover a variety of ways—including drugs and alcohol—to deny resentment. We spend much energy denying the lethal effects of coercion on relationships. And, unlike many indigenous cultures, we spend little energy creating a society with a minimal amount of coercion.

Accepting coercion as “a fact of life,” we often have little restraint in coercing others when given the opportunity. This opportunity can present itself when we find ourselves above others in an employment hierarchy and feel the safety of power; or after we have seduced our mate by being as noncoercive as possible and feel the safety of marriage. Marriages and other relationships go south in a hurry when one person becomes a coercive control freak; resentment quickly occurs in the other person, who then uses counter-coercive measures.

We can coerce with physical intimidation, constant criticism, and a variety of other means. Such coercions result in resentment, which is a poison that kills relationships and creates severe emotional problems. The Interactional Nature of Depression (1999), edited by psychologists Thomas Joiner and James Coyne, documents with hundreds of studies the interpersonal nature of depression. In one study of unhappily married women who were diagnosed with depression, 60 percent of them believed that their unhappy marriage was the primary cause of their depression. In another study, the best single predictor of depression relapse was found to be the response to a single item: “How critical is your spouse of you?”

In the 1970s, prior to the domination of the biopsychiatry-Big Pharma partnership, many mental health professionals took seriously the impact of coercion and resentful relationships on mental health. And in a cultural climate more favorable than our current one for critical reflection of society, authors such as Erich Fromm, who addressed the relationship between society and mental health, were taken seriously even within popular culture. But then psychiatry went to bed with Big Pharma and its Big Money, and their partnership has helped bury the commonsense reality that an extremely coercive society creates enormous fear and resentment, which results in miserable marriages, unhappy families, and severe emotional and behavioral problems.

http://www.madinamerica.com/2013/08/soc ... l-illness/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Rose Garden]

Very interesting. My experience would indicate that what this article says is true.

Some time ago I stopped fixing my kids disagreements and began requiring them to do it themselves. My job was to referee. I watched to make sure no one hit or used force to get what they wanted, but refused to make the decision for them. I noticed something quite interesting. In these situations, it was usually the older child who would give in to what the younger child wanted. Having taken away the physical advantage, the spiritual strength won out.

[Strawberry]

Your Parental Rights Don’t Exist When You Send Your Kid To Public School

A week or two ago I received a message from a notorious fugitive named Julie Giles. She complained that she’d recently been arrested, shackled, and cuffed for barbaric and shocking crimes against humanity. The courts determined that she was a threat to herself, her family, and her community, therefore she was seized and charged like the scurrilous criminal she so clearly is.

What were these depraved acts, you ask? What sort of atrocities had she committed? What kind of vile transgressions led to her being chained and perp-walked like Charles Manson? Why does this previously law abiding middle aged woman now have her very own mugshot on file over at central booking?

Well, her son missed class a few times.

Gasp.

You see, according to the compulsory attendance policy at her kid’s public school in Georgia, the district will magnanimously allow a parent to keep their kid home from school up to five times in a year without a doctor’s note. Once they exceed that magically arbitrary fifth “unexcused” absence, every succeeding incident must be specifically prescribed by a medical professional. Even if the parent feels the child should stay home, the school will not allow it unless a doctor agrees. Otherwise, the parent could be thrown in jail, which is a totally reasonable response.


Julie’s son unfortunately made the mistake of getting sick more times than the school allows, and so a warrant was issued for his mom’s arrest.

Keep in mind, this is not a unique or uncommon situation. Julie is only the latest in a long, long, long line of parents who have been violently reminded that we live in a fascist state where liberty is, increasingly, a mere fiction.


A Gofundme account has been set up to help the family deal with the legal expenses, but even if she avoids jail time for her sins, the shame and embarrassment won’t necessarily dissipate so quickly.

Now, we might all be feeling exhausted by the constant onslaught of stories about government busybodies bullying parents and children in the name of “education” or “safety” or whatever, but I think a few things need to be said about this latest bit of insanity:

First, it bears emphasizing that this is insanity. A reasonable person could reach no other conclusion. If you laugh it off, shrug your shoulders and say, “well, that’s the law,” you are a weak, cowed, subservient, un-American, self-hating vassal and you should be ashamed of yourself. Yes, it might be “the law,” but it’s a tyrant’s law. It’s a bad law. It’s a stupid law. It’s a law that says a bureaucrat should exercise greater control over your child than you. It’s a law that ought to be broken and ignored and demolished. It’s a law that has no right to exist in the first place.

Second, Julie tells me that her son is an Honor Roll student who averaged a 91 in all of his classes this year. He missed 12 days (although he did have a doctor’s note for some of them, and three were due to a school wide virus that was severe enough to be reported on the local news) and still aced his assignments. That means the absences had no negative impact on him academically.

Third, clearly a note from a parent should be required when a student doesn’t show up to school. Kids these days: sometimes they like to cut class and hide in the woods behind the soccer field out back. Or they go to the IHOP down the street and feast on pancakes until someone dimes them out to the assistant principal. Or, you know, some other random example. The point is, requiring a note from a parent makes sense. But requiring a note from a doctor means the parent’s word isn’t good enough. It means parents are stripped of their authority to decide whether their own children should go to school on a particular day.

Fourth, find me one doctor who considers this a good policy. Do you think your daughter’s pediatrician wants to have his waiting room clogged by kids with simple colds and stomach bugs? Aside from the financial strain on the parent, think about the strain it puts on these doctor’s offices – not to mention what it does to insurance rates. If I took my kids in every time they had a virus or a bad case of the sniffles, I’d be bankrupt by the end of the year.

Kids get sick. When kids spend a lot of time with other kids in enclosed environments, they get sick even more. Usually, a day’s rest, a few bowls of soup, and plenty of fluids are all they need to feel better. At a certain point, as a parent, you begin to understand this reality and elect not to make a doctor’s appointment over every tummy ache or sore throat. In fact, it’s often better not to take them to the doctor because that’s where sick people congregate. A really good way to make your kid go from kind of sick to really sick is to drag their weakened immune system to a place where more serious germs are prowling for a fresh respiratory system or digestive tract to infiltrate.

Great plan, school system!

But, fifth, that’s all irrelevant. The point is that I am a parent. A father, in my case. As a father, I have been endowed by God with a certain fundamental authority over my progeny. He has given them to me and to my wife. He has entrusted them to our care. They are ours. We don’t own them like objects or slaves, but they are our jurisdiction and responsibility.

They are my children. I don’t own them like objects but they are my jurisdiction and responsibility.
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Yes, a parent can rightly lose that authority. If they treat their kids in abusive, violent, and heinous ways, their God-given parental rights can be taken from them — just as any right can be taken from people who reveal themselves to be a danger to those around them. These people, for instance, who locked a 5-year-old child in a closet and nearly starved him to death obviously deserve to have all of their rights permanently rescinded. Unlike Julie Giles, these despicable people ought to be chained and locked in a cage like dogs.


But just because a small percentage of parents have acted in monstrous and unspeakable ways doesn’t mean all of us should be covered in a cloak of suspicion. Just because a minority have been exposed as fatally sadistic and incompetent doesn’t mean we should all be micromanaged and infantilized. And, importantly, just because a certain number of parents fall somewhere on the scale between “selfish idiot” and “murderous wretch” doesn’t mean public schools suddenly become defacto daddies to every single child within a 20-mile radius of their building.

Schools are just schools. They are places that teach students how to say the ABCs, how to add two plus two, and how to use lube and get abortions. You know, the basic stuff. They are not foster parents. They are not kings. They are not gods.

Our children are not owed to them. They exercise no ownership over them. In a free country (so, not this one) a school would be a tool for parents to use. A place to which parents delegate some temporary and conditional authority. Authority that can be revoked at any time, for any reason. Period.

In a nation where liberty is cherished and protected, I can take my kids out of school because they’re sick, or because I want to bring them on an educational trip to Gettysburg or Fort McHenry, or because there’s a personal or family matter that needs to be attended to, or because I just feel like it, damn it. All the school needs to know or deserves to know is that I, the parent, have given my child permission to miss classes for the day. I do not need permission from the school in order to grant permission to the being my wife and I have conceived and raised and housed and fed and loved and funded for his entire life.

In a nation where the family is revered as sovereign and sacred, this is how it would be.

Tragically, we don’t live in that nation.

We live in one where this kind of outrageous nonsense happens on a regular basis.

Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t call it outrageous. “Outrageous” means: “grossly offensive to the sense of right and decency; highly unusual or unconventional; extravagant; remarkable.”

It is certainly grossly offensive that a woman can be put in chains for keeping a sick kid home from school, but is it highly unusual or remarkable?

Not really.

Every state in America has compulsory education laws on the books. In every part of this country there are government buildings where all kids nearby are automatically required to assemble six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for at least 12 years. In these buildings, they are taught whatever a bunch of government bureaucrats think they should be taught; and they are subjected to whatever ideas, policies, propaganda, and rules the government thinks they should be subjected to; and every day their identities, belief systems, and futures are shaped and molded according to the whims of the state.

There are things you can do to circumvent or avoid this process, but there are plenty of regulations in place to make that more difficult. And aside from the regulations, our society is so profoundly centered around the compulsory government education system that many of us have become dependent upon it. While we whine and cry about so many other government intrusions, none of them — not a single one — has been as effective at fundamentally changing our values and our views on life as compulsory government schooling.

Because the government requires our kids to leave us at the age of four or five, and spend most of their time in these giant factory-like structures where they are constantly deconstructed and reassembled in the image of the state, we have ourselves adopted the belief that things should be this way. We’ve arrived at the near-universal conclusion that the home is just a place where everyone returns at the end of the day, after spending most of their time serving at the behest and under the authority of teachers, bosses, and coworkers.

In the modern arrangement, the only family member who actually spends significant time in the home is the dog. For everyone else, it’s just a place to sleep before you go your separate ways again in the morning. It’s a staging ground of sorts. It’s a temporary break from the more important business of sitting at a desk in a school building or a cubicle.


If that’s all a home and a family really are, then I suppose compulsory government education makes sense. If kids aren’t meant to spend extensive amounts of time in their homes and around their parents, then the law should indeed protect them from the very damaging effects of prolonged parent-exposure.

But if the home and the family are more than that — if they are, far from an hindrance, actually the most valuable and natural context for education and growth — then compulsory attendance laws are counterproductive, abominable, and absurd. They penalize a parent for being around their kid too much. They force a divide between parent and child, and insist that the two must have a verified medical excuse if they wish to be together during “school hours.”

So if this is built on a false premise — if it is, in fact, wrong to assume that families should ideally be pulled apart and separated for most of the day, every day – then what happened to Julie Giles is a (common and predictable) atrocity. In that case, compulsory attendance should be abolished, and as a result, public education itself should be called into question. In fact, all of our modern notions about education, the family, and the home ought to be reexamined and ultimately upended.

In the mean time, though, while we await the general reawakening of the American people, the best course of action, individually, is to search for alternatives outside of government education. Homeschool is a great choice. If you can’t do that, look into private schools or charter schools. If all else fails, I always suggest releasing your child into the wilderness to be raised by coyotes before sending them to government educational factories. They’ll probably end up more mentally and emotionally adjusted than they would in our current public school system.

In lieu of all of those options, public school might be your only remaining choice. If you go that route, just realize what it means. You are forfeiting your parental rights. The schools have made this terrible and unconstitutional fact clear, and the courts have backed them up. Make sure you understand that going in.

And, as a side note, make sure your kid is taking his vitamin C. After all, if he gets a cold you might end up in prison.

Listen to Matt’s latest podcast here. Contact with general comments and speaking engagement requests at [email protected]. If you are a homeschooler or would like to learn more about homeschooling and related issues, come to the Great Homeschool Convention in Ontario, California.

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