"I have learned
that what I have not
d r a w n
I have never
r e a l l y
S E E N."
-frederick frank
I pen this on the first page of my journals now.
Since mostly what I draw are my kids, and as they're ever-changing, it's a good reminder to pay attention.
We homeschool our 4 kids, so I've got a lot of time to Really See them. People are always asking, "What's a day in your life like?" I'm learning that homeschooling is more living than I knew one could have in 24 hours, hence the "life-in-a-day" title. This journal attempts to answer that question.
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Another reply I feel like posting here
matt z just commented on the post "September 28-29, 2009 "Education is method whereby one acquires a higher grade of prejudices"-L Peter" on Life in a Day
Hey big sis. I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on how public schools could be improved. I know there are seemingly endless challenges with the system(s) as is, but from a public policy and community perspective it seems that some form of public education MUST work in this country. If every parent with the means and care to homeschool pulled their children out of public school, we'd experience what we see in most urban core schools -- an aggregation of children with dis-engaged parents, which debilitates the entire system. For me, public (or non-home) schooling is a point of community participation. Sending our children to learn with our community's children is as much for the rest of them as it is for us. Not to mention that something like 70% of our nations families are both working and not able to home-school, which makes a functioning public school system ever more important.
What do you think? I deal with public school education policy for Pennsylvania a fair amount, and I can tell you it's challenging. But there are truly bright spots in the system, and some excellent things happening that we need to encourage.
Looking forward to reading your thoughts.. ;)
For some context, my question comes from a guy that lives in a truly struggling urban school district not unlike most urban SDs in the nation, and not only for Eliot but for the long-term health of our community we're thinking alot about education options. How to do retain young families in a urban area that desperately needs reinvestment, with a terrible school district.
People with means leave the community once their kid turns 5 and the remnant is aggregate poverty, disinvested neighborhoods and classrooms, and a generation of people left behind. Many of these same kids filling our public schools are in single parent or financially struggling families that have no other option but public school. One way or another, it seems we all bear the burden of a not providing easily accessible excellent education options -- and its not only urban areas. Many of the most challenged schools are now in rural areas, because they have the same issues with disengaged parents, trouble retaining/attracting excellent teachers, stranded costs in pensions/inefficient bldgs, all on top of a quickly aging and eroding tax base.
An educated society though not dependent on a public educational infrastructure, seems very dependent on a public that prioritizes education as a communal goal -- not an individual goal.
Hi Matt,
Your questions have driven me back to John Taylor Gatto, whom I consider to be one of the most clear-headed and unabashedly vocal crusaders for revamping an educational method that clearly does not work. If you are as serious in your musing as you seem to be, I recommend some essays written by this former NY State Teacher of the Year:
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
We Need Less School, Not More http://www.spinninglobe.net/lesschool.htm
The Psychopathic School http://www.sntp.net/education/gatto.htm
And an interview: http://cengiz.akinli.org/~maat/archive/may1/gatto.htm
A lot of what I have to say is influenced by Mr. Gatto, and my diatribe will make more sense if you read him.
(Watch him too:
This is kind of Meka Unleashed - sorry about that. Homeschooling is my passion.
I'm not usually one to suspect conspiracy theories, and, up until I realized how un-American it is considered to say, "We homeschool our kids," you would have rightly pegged me to be a-political. But to keep one's children out of The System, to prevent their undergoing the initiation process that many consider necessary for "proper socialization" and "cultural integration" is to proclaim loudly that Schooling does not equal Learning, and more to the point: it doesn't contribute to the raising of people who are fully human.
Schools are designed to raise leagues of Worker Bees, people accustomed and content to be the cogs in our economic wheel, (and the fact that big industries have big stakes in the whole process is not a side issue - Nobel prize winner Richard Feynmann has interesting things to say on some of that: http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm). You may have suspected this when you were taught fact lists rather than the gripping stories of history's people. Or if you wondered why some were "gifted and talented" or even just tracked top or bottom. Or hungered to linger longer than 45 minutes in your English essay before you had to switch to algebra. Or had to ask permission to attend to your basic needs. I know you and your brothers were raised to be Thinkers, Questioners - to wonder how many blocks make up a set of stairs - and take the cinders apart one-by-one to verify the answer... Your father, a man who should hold title to many more degrees than he actually has, is antithetical to the plan. School teaches that the good students don't ask questions that are outside the curriculum and the good students don't and can't and won't teach themselves what's important.
I guess I wouldn't consider parents who integrate the full responsibility of child-raising to include educating - as dis-engaged. Really the very definition of home-schooling must include the word committed. For decades, we've tried - without success - to fix our schools universally, but maybe the only way to make real change is from the ground-up. To talk about community, we'd have to agree on a definition. I wonder at a "community" consisting of segregating its members by age, the very idea which renders our children peer-dependent (a good book on that one: "Hold on to Your Kids"). I wonder at a "community" that prevents its members from fully participating by removing its children from its day-to-day workings. I wonder at a "community" comprised of members mostly either paid or forced to attend. I wonder at a "community" that pulls hard at the fabric of its individual families in absconded time and values. I have to disagree with you: an educated society is dependent on a public that prioritizes Family as a communal goal.
Does that seem like too much? There is proof that the things we take 12 years to teach, can be learned in about 100 hours. There are enough home schoolers around making interesting accomplishments - that don't cost tax-payers a cent - to render the whole cabal worth questioning. We hear repeatedly that the system is "in crisis," and if you believe standardized testing results, you have to wonder, what's being done with those other 16,292 hours? And why are we so sure they need to be sucked away in the manner they are? Couple school with television and extra activities, the average child has 9 free hours a week to participate in his family and figure out who he is. Maybe that's the crisis.
"School" worked once when it was the one-on-one tutorship allowed the elite. It worked early on in this country when there was enough real family and community around to balance out the time absorbed by study. And it still works when people are allowed to have a passion and the time to follow it - people like Audubon and the Wright Brothers, Roosevelt and Mark Twain, C. S. Lewis and George Washington. Those people and those periods believed that self-knowledge is the only true knowledge.
Maybe that's the only working suggestion I have to offer on how schools can be improved (though I did just start Gatto's "A Different Kind of Teacher" which promises ideas): time to figure out who you are and the resources to attend to your societal contribution. Clearly I haven't given much thought to the improving of public schools, largely because I remain convinced there's too much to fix. All I know is that our own little 13-years experiment has given us enough first-hand proof that much of what we accept as normal in our society, just down-right ain't. You don't have to force kids to learn - they're made to be curious and interested. Siblings who share the majority of their day-to-day with each other aren't naturally rivalrous. Kids who get to see and hear and learn the things their parents love (and dislike and have to sort out and remember and...) don't find those parents un-cool and unworthy. Maybe we're caught in a vicious cycle. 100 years ago the average working man had only slightly less spending power than our current working duo. In our modern set-up of working parents, our children are not our own, and as such we lack the relationships that makes them a pleasure to raise. Fellow mothers gasp at my lifestyle, shuddering at the thought of spending this much time with their kids. But to be fully human is to be fully part of the business of living - the cycle from birth to death and all the learning in between.
So what is Education? Maybe that's more to the point. This, from Gatto, is my working definition:
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important: how to live and how to die.”
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