A Short History of Compulsory Schooling

Jul 13 2009

A Short History of Compulsory Schooling

Published by ElementalMom at 12:19 pm under Uncategorized

This just slays me. But then again, we all need a revolution we can dance to, yeah?

Tags: homeschooling, Tirades, Unschooling

9 responses so far

9 Responses to “A Short History of Compulsory Schooling”

# Teresaon 13 Jul 2009 at 2:28 pm

As former teacher, I couldn’t agree more. I would love to hear some solutions for working families who cannot homeschool, and alternately, cannot afford private school. A friend of mine is all for a voucher system since it would at least imitate a free market economy in education.
# Monicaon 13 Jul 2009 at 5:29 pm

Brought to you by the folks at the Cato Institute, among others. Wow. What nasty propaganda. Yes, it *is* true that one of the main motivations to instituting universal education in the US was to prepare a workforce… but it was mostly about having them be literate and numerate, not just responding to bells and authority.

Let’s just ignore the part where, without public schools, an awful lot of kids would get NO education at all. Vouchers are a way to dismantle the most system that has the greatest potential power to balance the equation. So is the massive push towards homeschooling. (And yes, I can also discourse on Marxist Correspondence theory. I know schools don’t currently do much to level the playing field. But it’s like saying “The bus broke down, so you five get in this car, and the rest can walk the last 100 miles.” We can’t get everyone there without fixing the damn bus.)

Me, I’m against homeschooling. I’m not against any individual’s right to do it, or disdainful of the individual choice, but for our family, it’s not something I would consider. My kids will always learn a ton at home, just like I did… but their classmates will also benefit from having families like ours invested in the public school system, as mine did. If it’s not good enough for my kids, it’s not good enough for my neighbor’s kids either, because they are people I need to share a community with. So the answer is to MAKE it good enough. Fortunately, I have several neighbors on the same page, and we’ve got a great start on parent involvement.
# ElementalMomon 13 Jul 2009 at 6:14 pm

Teresa, it’s a tough question to answer… for our parts, we have led a pretty spartan life in order to be a one-income family, and are heading to someplace with a much lower COL in order to keep it that way. California has gotten quite frankly insane; JMO, YMMV. If our system was healthy, it might be different, but it’s broken on so many fronts…

Monica, while I totally get your point about the communities kids have to grow up in, I still think the entire system is so fundamentally broken that throwing my children in on top of the children whose parents are completely not involved isn’t going to make a whit of difference, other than to make my children miserable.

I’ve blogged a lot about Rowan having different intelligence. I still believe that for non-language based, spatial learners, public education (especially here where I am) would be a great exercise in making my kid think he’s stupid, and isn’t going to change the orientation of the entire system to suddenly accommodate kids who learn like he does.

Parental involvement can cure some ills, for sure. But I know I spent far more of my life miserable from dealing with the strictures implicit in public education than was necessary. I won’t impose that on them.

Monica, I wonder how much stronger the community would be if families were supported as integral units instead of ripped apart at every turn? If raising young minds was considered by the state to be a priority above wage earning?

And just to bring it all down to potty humor… one of my chief joys in my unassisted pregnancies was the knowledge that I was never going to have to discuss my urine with another person. Similarly, my children will never have to raise their hands to use the restroom. And I’m good with that.
# Teresaon 14 Jul 2009 at 8:39 am

Monica – one of the required texts for a CA teaching credential is Emile, or On Education by Rousseau, which lays out the purpose of public education. In a nutshell, it is simply the socialization of individuals. That text is the cornerstone of all public school systems with which I’m familiar – the classroom, a single teacher, the “transmission” of knowledge, timed and/or separate subject areas, etc. The primary purpose is to bring individuals into alignment with the social mores and agenda of the larger society, to make good citizens. If you read the American constitutional amendments creating a public school system, and the CA state standards, all state the primary need for a school system is the socialization of the young to make them into good citizens.

And hey, they fail at that too. How many schools do you know of that permit the daily Pledge of Allegiance to our flag? What literature and history is taught in high school English, suggesting that the role of a good citizen is challenging our government and curtailing its size? How many students exit high school prepared to be working members of society?

Admittedly, there are astounding teachers and programs out there, and I hope my child gets access to them (i’m in a good area) because he needs the acquired social skills that come from learning to follow direction and work with others. I know that much about my kid. Plus, getting along with people very different from ourselves is a key feature of making it in our ever-changing world. But, I refuse to allow him to be categorized or turned into a drone. Trust me, Laureen, I’m hyper-sensitive to that sort of thing. I’m prepared to live off welfare if necessary to keep him home and teach him myself to give him the type of education that actually suits him.

Still, I’m with Monica on the concept of making the system work. Unfortunately, I don’t think that what currently exists is fully fixable. The whole concept of education needs an overhaul, up to and including summers off. Toss it out and start over, sort of like tearing down a rotten house and building a new, more clever one in its place. Maybe parents and educators can do this from the inside, maybe we all can do it tearing and supporting at the same time. I’m not sharp or educated enough to see what can be done (on the big picture side), but definitely aware enough to see that SOMEthing can and should be done. Central education is a good idea, but the system we have is failing our children and our country.
# ElementalMomon 14 Jul 2009 at 9:55 am

Right on, T. I have no idea what “the” answer might be… I’m guessing it’s more a ton of little answers that will get us closer to where we need to go.

Monica and I have this thing about coming to the same place from opposite sides. Our kids have food allergies, so she got supergood at reading the packages, and I abolished packages from our house because I kept messing up. Same principle, (you must address allergies) but totally different implementation.

I don’t think there’s anyone out there that isn’t a paid member of the educational management team (I know teachers in the trenches don’t think so) who thinks the system is just great the way it is. At the very least, it’s underfunded and under cared for. At the best, it can’t possibly hope to meet the needs of each individual kid.

But when all’s said and done, until the people of this nation rise up and declare our children to be a national priority instead of an annoyance to be dealt with minimally, we’re going to keep seeing problems in all kinds of child-related ventures.
# Jessicaon 16 Jul 2009 at 5:54 pm

I started college when my oldest daughter was about a year old. I was a music education major, I wanted to be a choir director at the high school level. So I started with my basic classes and my music classes. LOVED every minute of it. I finally got to take my first education class. I dropped the class halfway through. Took it again the next semester. Had to drop it again.

I still have the text books from that class. I wanted to post some quotes from the text book that decided for me that I wanted NOTHING to do with that system. But I can’t because I’d have to post the entire first chapter. The book was The Way Schools Work: A Sociological Analysis of Education by Kathleen Bennett deMarrais and Margaret D. LeCompte. On one of the first days of the class the professor was introducing herself and talking about the class. She said “If you are here because you think you are going to change the system, you might as well quite now. It’s not going to change.” Needless to say, I changed my major.

Fast forward to my oldest daughter turning 5 and starting public school. We were living in Columbus, Ohio, the state capital and one of the worst school systems in our state. My daughter’s teacher was fresh out of college, her mother had also been a school teacher. I was a very involved parent. My daughter often received a red card for talking when she wasn’t supposed to. She received these cards so often that I couldn’t figure out when she WAS supposed to talk to her friends. She fell off the monkey bars on the playground. She didn’t tell me, I saw the bruise on her back when I was helping her get ready for bed. I asked her why they didn’t tell me that she’d had gotten hurt. She said she didn’t tell anyone. She said that they weren’t allowed to talk to the grown-ups on the playground because they were talking to the other grown-ups and the kids would get in trouble for interrupting. I started assisting the teacher on Friday afternoons, helping kids with reading or whatever. I witnessed the teacher yelling at 5yos for not being able to tie their shoes, for having to go to the bathroom so often, or for not being able to sit still while the teacher was yelling at another child.

The kicker was the day that my daughter walked into the school with her friends and then walked back out because her friend forgot something at our house. NO ONE NOTICED THAT SHE LEFT! They never noticed that she had left the building. The principal completely blew off all of this and acted like it was no big deal.

I removed my daughter from that school the next week. We home schooled for several years. Just before she turned 8 she was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I was in a situation that I had to put her back in public school. She went to public school for 2 years. That experience was no better than the first. They sent her to the office to check her sugar alone (she should have ALWAYS been with a buddy in case if she got confused because her sugar was too high or too low). Her teacher the second year was hypoglycemic and constantly shared her snacks with the students. My daughter’s blood sugar was never under 400 while she attended school. Needless to say, she hasn’t been back to school since then.

I completely agree with the video. The public education system in this country is completely broken and needs to be dismantled. There is no “fixing” it, there is only starting over from scratch. I agree that education should not be in the hands of the government, it should be left to private individuals, organizations, groups.

Since I removed my daughter from public education the first time, I have never encouraged anyone to send their child to a public school. I will never encourage anyone to send their child to a public school. Public schools only encourage the breakdown of the family.

Socialization my butt.
Jessica
# Jessicaon 16 Jul 2009 at 5:59 pm

I forgot to mention that this video made me cry.

It breaks my heart to think about all the children who get pushed aside because they have a different intelligence that the teacher doesn’t have time to deal with, the children who are ignored because they blend in so well, the children who are looked over because they are shy or submissive and terribly abused at home.

It breaks my heart to think about all the children who are never able to live up to their full potential because the school system moves to slow.

It breaks my heart to think of all the children trapped in the prison of the public school system.

Jessica
# Anneon 21 Jul 2009 at 3:28 pm

http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm

Laureen, you’ve probably already done do, but for anyone who’s interested you can read the book in its entirety online, for free, at the above site.

I’m reading this on the advice of my pediatrician. I’ve completed the prologue and chapter 1 only (there are 18 chapters) and it’s riveting reading.

~Anne
# Shayeon 21 Jul 2009 at 8:55 pm

I taught just about 5 years and it was enough to know I didn’t want my children to be there. I was in the best district possible, too. I mean seriously the BEST district. It’s the American education system–the way we teachers were taught to indoctrinate these children–that bothered my soul. And still, it does.

Besides my indoctrination issues…for the most part, we’re just dog paddling in the classroom. We’re outnumbered. Even teachers like me who are nominated as teacher of the year repeatedly–we struggle to meet all of the needs and most weeks we end up the glorified daycare attendant. We decided that it could be so much easier, so much more enjoyable, and so much more productive at home or in our friend’s homes or moving about the town or ANYWHERE we want to be.

It’s not that I don’t think there are excellent teachers or that I think my kids are BETTER than the other kids. I don’t disagree that it’s not fair for the kids left behind. However, MY primary responsibility is to MY child. And if I can’t magically tear the system down and rebuild it in the next decade, then I owe it to my children to take drastic measures to meet their educational needs TODAY. We’ve downsized, moved to an inexpensive community, sold vehicles, got rid of cell phones, bought only used clothing, canceled our TV service, and bought a cheap house–all so that I could be home to educate our children. Huge sacrifices here.

If I hear one more person tell me that “at least YOU’RE qualified to home school because of your years of teaching and two master’s degrees,” I think I’m going to THROW UP. I’m teaching my own children in spite of what I was taught to value in higher education. Total mind flip, people. And if there’s anything I can do to help public education be radically different than what it is today, sign me up. But seeing the system from the inside, I feel confident that overhaul won’t happen during the years my children are under my roof. So they come first. At home.

Great points here!