Do we really need school?
I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what?
We can’t blame it on reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that over used justification to rest.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln… they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school.
And the people who were UNschooled: Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry, like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead.
We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think "success" is synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense.
And plenty of people throughout the world today find ways to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons.
Divide Children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it will be unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely.
This might well be called "the conformity function." because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - So much for making kids their personal best.
Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior
The system is useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers.
In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.
In an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era - marketing.
Theorists from Plato to Rousseau knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.
Our schools are. .. factories in which the business of the school is to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.
It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives.
Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself: easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children. Happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair.
School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone; they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired, quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more important life, and they can.
Our schools are laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.
If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do.
We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
*Extra facts as to why I chose this option for my child:
Active shooter drills are conducted in over 95% of schools which is associated with high rates of depression, stress and anxiety.
There have been over 900 incidents of gunfire on school grounds in the last 10 years.
There have been over 120 school shootings since 2018…. 42 shootings in 2021 and 46 in 2022 alone.
There have been over 404 school shootings since columbine (1999) and over 370,000 school students have experienced gun violence since then.
Bullying- most times your child is silent about it . Bullying has grown insane so has youth suicide.
Incidents where students tease, steal food or money, inflict physical harm, or progressively use more abusive or hurtful language, can often be dismissed by teachers and go unreported by the children who experience the bullying.
Parents who homeschool as a result of their child being bullied often report significant academic improvement, as well as greater personal happiness. Concerns about socialization are often reduced, because parents are able to remove bullies from their children’s lives, and structure new social experiences for their kids. They also have better control over the positive relationships their children already had, and can encourage those more.
Dissatisfaction with academic instruction is the second highest reason why parents decide to homeschool their children
With the implementation of Common Core in many states many parents believe that the quality of education in today’s public schools has declined
Homeschooling gives parents more control over what their kids are learning
Parents should be wary of projects that want to reframe history or train children to see injustice all around them
With homeschooling, parents are able to use a state approved curriculum, and provide the personalized instruction that is often missing in today’s public schools. Parents also can supplement their children’s learning with additional lessons. And they can spend as little time, or as much time as needed on each subject to ensure their children are learning the material and feel confident they have mastered the course lessons.
Home schooled children typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests. This is true regardless of the parent’s income or if they have experience teaching.
With homeschooling you can improve the child’s social interactions by tailoring social interactions that support their values.
Homeschooling parents can do this by taking the course curriculum, and making the world around them the classroom. While most public school students spend large amounts of time in classrooms listening to lectures (over 150 days per school year), homeschool students have more activities that take place outside of the home. With a flexible homeschool curriculum, families are better able to go to museums, parks, and historical sites, and participate in community service activities as part of their daily learning.
The impact of homeschooling in this manner often improves emotional and psychological development in children. It also strengthens family connections.
This way kids gain a greater awareness of the world around them, and can develop a stronger sense of civic responsibility.
Parents have an opportunity to create an environment where their kids enjoy learning.
In most public schools, there is a lot of pressure being placed on kids. More and more, kids are stressed over the volumes of homework, the need to memorize a lot of information, and the daily routine of being forced to do things without any input into their learning. After a while, learning ceases to be fun and engaging.
Indoctrination education:
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies.
Indoctrinating children with radical racial propaganda.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID relief that went to school districts, reportedly including $46 billion to teach critical race theory — with $9 billion for CRT in New York schools.
Not only are public schools force-feeding these lies to students, but they’re also keeping parents in the dark.
But parents deserve the truth about what their children are learning.
Public schools are trying to divide the next generation of Americans based on race. There’s a word for that—racism. But parents—and teachers who truly care about their students—can fight back
What about the conversations about sex and how a child identifies are being taught in elementary school classrooms.
Truth is, no one advocates bullying gay kids. All children deserve kindness. But that doesn’t mean kindergarteners should be instructed in how boys can transition to become girls and girls to become boys. They are to young to understand this type of information and nearly half of teachers agree these issues don’t belong in the classroom.
Radical agendas undermine parental rights and put students at risk.
Teachers are told- parents, are not entitled to know their kids’ identities.
Gender fluid bathrooms are becoming a thing- so what if a kid in the school is a sex offender- does not identify as a girl but puts on a dress to sneak into the girl’s bathroom…..
People who are indoctrinated with a certain narrative or ideology do not arrive at the intended conclusions through their own thinking, but hear the same thing repeated in a million different ways until they finally take it as unquestionable truth.
Because indoctrination happens in the absence of thinking, many teachers who engage in indoctrination do so unconsciously. They themselves take what they’re given and pass it along without thinking. Ideologues often intervene at this level by writing the scripts for teachers, which is how these topics become included in their lessons.
The teacher must use a standard curriculum - not because it is the best approach for encouraging an individual child to learn the things that need to be known - but because it is a convenient way to handle and track large numbers of children.
Curriculums should help guide the teacher to create lessons and use materials that will train the students to think and function independently. Instead, most public school curricula adopt the common core - Common Core has facilitated progressive indoctrination by smothering independent thought and stifling intellectual development.
Both literary and historical content is drained of relevance or meaning. While students learn to process data, they do not think about anything in particular.
Math and science are hurt even more by Common Core’s obsession with the process over the product.
Reaching the right answers means very little in Common Core math. It is more important that students learn various arbitrary methods through which they can arrive at an answer. Students receive more credit for following a needlessly complicated breakdown, complete with color-coding and an array of abstract terms, for relatively simple computation. Word problems also loom large, causing teachers to spend less time on their subject and more time teaching students to highlight the right terms.
Needless to say, some students can make their way through the Common Core curriculum without knowing much about science or math at all.
Common Core proponents will say that this teaches students “metacognition”––thinking about thinking––and pushes students to learn how to learn. In reality, kids stop thinking, since it’s all pointless.
It is hard to learn how to think when there is nothing real to think about.
This means that people don’t really need to think critically and understand why they believe what they do. They just need to have the right viewpoint and force others to conform like they’ve been forced to conform. They engage in arguments where the loudest voice wins because no one’s points are better than another. They pressure instead of persuade.
Teaching, by contrast, is what will sustain our culture and bring out its virtues. It fosters the presence of active thought––not uniform thought––and it is what will ultimately mend and civilize our sorely divided country.
In the interests of managing each generation of children, the public school curriculum has become a hopelessly flawed attempt to define education and to find a way of delivering that definition to vast numbers of children.
The traditional curriculum is based on the assumption that children must be pursued by knowledge because they will never pursue it themselves.