salon aritcle: "An Unschooling Manifesto"

[emazur]

http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2009/04/25.html

Great article (not too long either), and talks about a new book about unschooling with this passage:


The world of the classroom is so unlike anything the real world has to offer – with the exception of other classrooms – that kids can excel at school only to find themselves utterly lost in the real world. Some people think this is the result of failed schooling, but a few of us suspect otherwise. We suspect that this sense of displacement and confusion is actually the result of schooling that succeeds in its most basic unwritten objective: to keep you dependent, timid, worried, nervous, compliant, and afraid of the World. To keep you waiting. To keep you manageable. To keep you helpless. To keep you small.

Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.

It is not up to teachers or school administrators to figure out what you should be or do. It’s not up to the State, it’s not up to your guidance counselors. It’s not up to your parents. What you do with your life ought to be up to you. What you learn ought to be up to you. How you navigate the world and create your place in it ought to be your decision. Your life belongs to you. School does its best to disabuse you of this notion. Unschooling celebrates it. Unschooling puts the responsibility for creating a satisfying life squarely where it belongs: in the hands of the one living it.

[Working Poor]

I home schooled my children because I wanted to make sure they knew how to read, write, reason, and love to learn. All of them speak at least two languages other than English and all did very well in college.
I took them to art museums, concerts of all kinds, and they traveled the world because I wanted them to know the world they are in. All but the youngest are in business for themselves.

Hey I know I am a little bit proud. I love children even mine.

[Original_Intent]

Wow that is me to a T. I did incredible in school; I have felt largely lost and have gone from one decently-paying but very unsatisfying job to another.

I am 45 years old and honestly not the first clue what I wnat to be when i grow up. Wish I could make a living selling freedom, I would love that.

[Working Poor]

Wish I could make a living selling freedom

You can! Find your freedom product and go for it.

[silverhawks]

I have three daughters; my eldest went through easily the worst high school system I have seen in my entire life. Often, my wife and I would remark that the outside looked just like a prison; high metal fences, topped with razor wire - pointing in.

Some of the massive, jarring inconsistencies I encountered there:

* The school principal's "vision" was for every child to leave high school being able to read and write a coherent sentence in English. This is NOT a joke or an exaggeration. At the high school induction evening, some parents got up and applauded that, leaving the rest of us sitting there looking at each other, wondering whether we had just fallen into the Twilight Zone.

* It was also the principal's "mission statement" to teach a 100% unified curriculum; to be able to walk from room to room and hear the same unbroken lesson taught no matter where he was at the time. Again, no joke, no exaggeration. No consideration was given to learning speed, learning style, teaching styles.

* "No Child Left Behind" was the order of the day, with the smarter, brighter kids dragged back down to a slow, uniform crawl; even when the "slower" kids started to improve, they would be pushed back down. I often remarked to my wife that it seemed as if the school was churning out products rather than educating kids or giving them a love of learning, products aimed at becoming only button-pushers.

* Some days, classes wouldn't do homework, so the teacher would let them skip it, and have them watch a movie instead.

* The students were forced into mad, stressful dashes from one class to another, given minutes between school bells to go from one side of the school to the other. I discovered this on a parent-teacher's evening when I had to follow my daughter's schedule in order to speak with her teachers.

* The food served at the school was abominable; most students relied on the battery of corporate-sponsored vending machines loaded up with soda and snacks in order to make it through the day.

* The school administration building was an absolute wreck; the windows were cracked and broken, and in some cases were falling out of the frames. I found out later that our district received a lion's share of government funding - yet we were constantly short of text books, basic supplies, and the school library and science labs were in a permanent state of construction, leaving children unable to check out books or conduct practical experiments.

* Conversely, the administrator and his girlfriend (who happened to be his assistant) both drove matching Lexuses.

* My daughter's history teacher apparently trying to teach her class about the struggles in Ireland and the IRA by watching "The Devil's Son", a Hollywood movie starring Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt.

* My daughter's Armenian language teacher allowing her class to wear iPods in class and listen to music - when she was meant to be teaching them a spoken language.

* An English teacher who literally spoke in monotone. I have great concentration, but I could barely keep my eyes open through a parent-teacher conference with him; I don't know how my daughter could possible manage it in a classroom, or pay attention to any knowledge of literature or grammar passed along in that way.

If this sounds over-the-top or hellish - it was. These are only the incidents which immediately spring to mind.

My daughter's experiences in middle school were roughly the same standard - for example, her middle school did not have a principal, instead it had three vice-principals, all of which dictated different rules to different classrooms. This made for a chaotic and confusing environment for the teachers to operate in, and this stress was passed down to the students.

Unschooling looks like it should be the form of education for a free and enlightened society; because the one we have now is made to churn out drones.

[silverhawks]

Wow that is me to a T. I did incredible in school; I have felt largely lost and have gone from one decently-paying but very unsatisfying job to another.

I am 45 years old and honestly not the first clue what I wnat to be when i grow up. Wish I could make a living selling freedom, I would love that.

Same here. I know that I'm at least as twice as intelligent as anyone I've ever worked for - maybe not quite as modest though ;) - and would love to help people break their dependence on government, utilities and corporations.

[mellamojuana]

Silverhawks, did you do any investigating re daughter's unsavory school?

Betcha there is some major theft of the trove taken from taxpayers. Alliteration not intended. Just popped out. Too many seem to think that if it's tax money, it is fine to steal it. Apparently, money is not going to improve your area schools.

[silverhawks]

Silverhawks, did you do any investigating re daughter's unsavory school?

Betcha there is some major theft of the trove taken from taxpayers. Alliteration not intended. Just popped out. Too many seem to think that if it's tax money, it is fine to steal it. Apparently, money is not going to improve your area schools.

A lot of parents and teachers thought that the Superintendent and his girlfriend were embezzling funds, simply because their lifestyles were about 1000x better than any of their subordinates. I really am not kidding about the admin building either - the amount of money coming into the district simply didn't add up to what was actually there.

Checking briefly, the education budget for that district as of 2006 was as follows:

Total operating budget: $31,691,000
Total federal aid: $16,801,918
Total Federal Direct Aid Per Pupil: $266

Compare that to the district where we're living now:

Total operating budget (2006): $201,400,000
Total federal aid (2006): $6,834,715
Total Federal Direct Aid Per Pupil: $1

As you can guess, there is a VISIBLE difference between schools and quality of education.

I still think a free market system would be best though, combined with unschooling :)

And by the way - my eldest daughter's school was, according to statistics, the BEST in the entire district.

Give that some thought.

[mellamojuana]

I'm sure some student (achievement/learning) scores can be manipulated, too, to prove how great the place is. Eh, what? Scary.

[acptulsa]

It's a wonderful thing to be able to think and to reason. My parents would seldom answer my questions directly; instead I was walked through ways to reason things out. Schools, by contrast, are far more often spoon-feeders. They seem to have no interest or intent in being 'user manuals of the mind'.