People, especially educators, who hear me talk about
homeschooling, raise certain objections so often that it is worth
answering them here.
- Since our countries are
so large and our people are from so many different kinds of
backgrounds (this was said most recently to me by a
Canadian) don't we need some kind of social glue to make us
stick together, to give us a sense of unity in spite of all
our differences, and aren't compulsory public schools the
easiest and best places to make this glue?
- Children in public
schools are able to meet, and get to know, many children
very different from themselves. If they didn't go to public
school, how would this happen?
- How are we going to
prevent parents with narrow and bigoted ideas from passing
these on to their children?
- If you don't send your
children to school, how are they going to learn to fit into
a mass society?
- If you don't send
children to school, how are they going to be exposed to any
values other than the commercial values of a mass society?
- If children are taught
at home, won't they miss the valuable social life of the
school?
- How are we going to
prevent children being taught by "unqualified"
teachers?
- How am I going to teach
my child six hours a day?
- How are children going
to learn what they need to know?
- My greatest concern is
that I don't want to slant my children's view of life all
through "mother-colored " glasses. . .
- I also wonder if I can
have the thoroughness, the follow-through demanded, the
patience, and the continuing enthusiasm for the diversity of
interests they will undoubtedly have.
- Most unschoolers seem
to live on farms growing their own vegetables (which I'd
like) or have unique life-styles in urban areas, and heavy
father participation in children's education. What about
suburbanites with modern-convenienced homes and fathers who
work for a company 10 to 12 hours a day away from home? What
differences will this make? Will unschooling work as well?
- What if the children
want to go to school?
- I'm concerned that
someone might be eager to take us to court and take away our
children.
- I don't want to feel
I'm sheltering my children or running away from adversity.
- I value their learning
how to handle challenges or problems. . .
- Will they have the
opportunity to overcome or do things that they think they
don't want to do?
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1. Since our countries are so large and
our people are from so many different kinds of backgrounds (this
was said most recently to me by a Canadian) don't we need some
kind of social glue to make us stick together, to give us a sense
of unity in spite of all our differences, and aren't compulsory
public schools the easiest and best places to make this glue?
About needing the glue, he's absolutely
right. We do need such a glue, certainly in big diverse countries
like the U.S. and Canada, but also in much smaller and more
tightly-knit countries, many of whom are also breaking apart under
the stresses of modern life.
Right now, the main social glue we seem to
have here in the U.S. is hatred of "enemy" countries.
Except when briefly united in such hatred, far too many of us see
our fellow-citizens, even those of our own color, religion, etc.,
only as our natural enemies and rightful prey, to do in if we can.
Indeed, we insist that this way of looking at other people is
actually a virtue, which we name "competition." This
outlook may have worked fairly well when our country was young,
nearly empty, and rich in natural resources, but not anymore. For
our very survival, let alone health and happiness, we need a much
stronger and better social glue than this.
Some kinds of community gathering places and
activities might help us form this social glue. But not schools -
not as long as they also have the job of sorting out the young
into winners and losers, and preparing the losers for a lifetime
of losing. These two jobs can't be done in the same place at the
same time.
People are best able, and perhaps only able,
to cross the many barriers of race, class, custom, and belief that
divide them when they are able to share experiences that make
them feel good. Only from these do they get a stronger sense
of their own, and therefore other people's, uniqueness, dignity,
and worth. But as long as schools have their present social tasks,
they will not be able to give such experiences to most children.
In fact, most of what happens in school makes children feel the
exact opposite - stupid, incompetent, ashamed. Distrusting and
despising themselves, they then try to make themselves feel a
little better by finding others whom they can look down on even
more - poorer children, children from other races,
children who do less well in school.
Even if children do learn in school to
despise, fear, and even hate children from other social groups,
might they not hate them even more if they did not meet them in
school? At least in school they see these other groups as real
people. Without school, they would know them only as abstractions,
bogeymen. This might sometimes be true, but only of those few
children for whom the world outside of school was as dull,
painful, humiliating, and threatening as school. Most children who
learn without school, or who go only when they want to, grow up
with a much stronger sense of their own dignity and worth, and
therefore, with much less need to despise and hate others.
The important question, how can people learn
to feel a stronger sense of kinship or common humanity with others
who are different, is for me best answered by a story about John
L. Sullivan, once the heavyweight prize fighting champion of the
world. Late one afternoon he and a friend were riding standing up
in a crowded New York City streetcar. At one stop, a burly young
man got on who had had too much to drink. He swaggered down the
center of the car, pushing people out of his way, and as he passed
John L., gave him a heavy shove with his shoulder. John L.
clutched a strap to keep from falling, but said nothing. As the
young man went to the back of the car, John L.'s friend said to
him, "Are you going to let him get away with that?."
John L. shrugged and said, "Oh, I don't see why not."
His friend became very indignant. "You're the heavyweight
champion of the world," he said furiously. "You don't
have to be so damned polite." To which John L. replied,
"The heavyweight champion of the world can afford to
be polite."
What we need to pull our countries more
together are more people who can afford to be polite, and much
more - kind, patient, generous, forgiving, and tolerant, able and
willing, not just to stand people different from themselves, but
to make an effort to understand them, to see the world through
their eyes. These social virtues are not the kind that can be
talked or preached or discussed or bribed or threatened into
people. They are a kind of surplus, an overflowing, in people who
have enough love and respect for themselves and therefore have
some left over for others.
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2. Children in public schools are able to
meet, and get to know, many children very different from
themselves. If they didn't go to public school, how would this
happen?
The first part of the answer to this
question has to be that it very rarely happens in public schools.
Except in very small schools, of which there are few, and which
tend to be one-class schools anyway, children in public schools,
other than a few top athletes, have very little contact with
others different from themselves, and less and less as they rise
through the grades. In most large schools the children are
tracked, i.e., the college track, the business track, the
vocational track. Even within each major track there may be
subgroupings. Large schools may often have a half-dozen or more
tracks. Students in one track go to one group of classes, students
in another track go to others. Very rarely will students from
different tracks find themselves in the same class. But - and here
is the main point - study after study has shown that these tracks
correlate perfectly with family income and social status: the
richest or most socially prominent kids in the top track, the next
richest in the next, and so on down to the poorest kids in the
bottom track.
In theory, children are assigned to these
tracks according to their school abilities. In practice, children
are put in tracks almost as soon as they enter school, long before
they have had time to show what abilities they may have. Once put
in a track, few children ever escape from it. A Chicago second
grade teacher once told me that in her bottom-track class of poor
non-white children were two or three who were exceptionally good
at schoolwork. Since they learned, quickly and well, everything
she was supposed to be teaching them, she gave them A's. Soon
after she had submitted her first grades, the principal called her
in, and asked why she had given A's to some of her students. She
explained that these children were very bright and had done all
the work. He ordered her to lower their grades, saying that if
they had been capable of getting A's they wouldn't have been put
in the lowest track. But, as she found upon checking, they had
been put into this lowest track almost as soon as they had entered
school.
Even where the schools do not track children
by classes, the teachers are almost certain to track them within
their classes. In Freedom and Beyond I gave this example:
An even more horrifying example of the way
this discrimination works can be found in the article
"Student Social Class and Teacher Expectation: The
Self-fulfilling Prophecy in Ghetto Education," by Ray Rist,
in the August 1970 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. The
kindergarten teacher described, after only eight days of school,
and entirely on the basis of appearance, dress, manners, in
short, "middle classness", divided her class into
three tracks by seating them at three separate tables, which
remained fixed for the rest of the year. One of these tables got
virtually all of her teaching, attention, and support; the other
two were increasingly ignored except when the teacher told them
to do something or commented unfavorably on what they did. Worse
yet, the children at the favored table were allowed and
encouraged to make fun of the children at the other two tables,
and to boss them around.
Rist followed these children through three
years of school, and reported, first, that these children's first
and second grade teachers also tracked by tables within their
classes, and secondly, that only one of the children assigned in
kindergarten to one of the two bottom tables ever made it later to
a favored table. And the odds are very good that most elementary
school classes have a kind of caste system in action. Even in
small and selective private schools, I found that many of my
fellow teachers were quick to label some children "good"
and others "bad", often on the basis of appearance, and
that children once labeled "bad" found it almost
impossible to get that label changed.
Enough has been written about class and
racial conflict in schools, above all in high schools, so that I
don't want to add much to it here. Where different races are
integrated in schools, even after many years, this usually begins
to break down around third grade, if not even sooner. From fifth
grade on, in their social lives, children are almost completely
separated into racial groups, which become more and more hostile
as the children grow older. Even in one-race schools, white or
nonwhite, there is class separation, class contempt, and class
conflict. Few friendships are made across such lines, and the
increasing violence in our high schools arises almost entirely
from conflicts between such groups.
So the idea that schools mix together in
happy groups children from widely differing backgrounds is for the
most part simply not true. The question remains, how would
children meet other children from different backgrounds if they
did not go to school? I don't know. While the numbers of
such children remain small, this will be difficult. But as the
numbers of such children grow, there will be more places for them
to go and more things for them to do that are not based in school.
We can certainly hope, and may to some extent be able to arrange,
that in these places children from different backgrounds may be
more mixed together. Also, people who teach their children at home
already tend to think of themselves as something of an extended
family, and using the Directory in Growing without Schooling, write
each other letters, visit each other when they can, have local
meetings, and so on. I hope this will remain true as more
working-class and non-white families begin to unschool their
children, and it well may; people who feel this kind of affection
and trust in their own children tend to feel a strong bond with
others who feel the same.
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3. How are we going to prevent parents
with narrow and bigoted ideas from passing these on to their
children?
The first question we have to answer is, do
we have a right to try to prevent it? And even if we think we do,
can we?
One of the main differences between a free
country and a police state, I always thought, was that in a free
country, as long as you obeyed the law, you could believe whatever
you liked. Your beliefs were none of the government's business.
Far less was it any of the government's business to say that one
set of ideas was good and another set bad, or that schools should
promote the good and stamp out the bad. Have we given up these
principles? And if we haven't, do we really want to? Suppose we
decided to give the government the power, through compulsory
schools, to promote good ideas and put down bad. To whom would we
then give the power to decide which ideas were good and
which bad? To legislatures? To state boards of education? To local
school boards?
Anyone who thinks seriously about these
questions will surely agree that no one in government should have
such power. From this it must follow that people have the right
not only to believe what they want, but to try to pass their
beliefs along to their children. We can't say that some people
have this right while others do not. Some will say, but what about
people who are prejudiced, bigoted, superstitious? We're surely
not going to let people try to make their children believe that
some races are superior or that the earth is flat? To which I say,
what is the alternative? If we say, as many would like to, that
people can tell their children anything they want, as long as
it is true, we come back to our first question - who decides
what is true? If we agree - as I think and hope we do - that there
is no one in government or anywhere else whom we would trust to
decide that, then it follows that we can't give schools the right
to tell all children that some ideas are true and others are not.
Since any school, whether by what it says or what it does, must
promote some ideas, it follows that while people who
approve of the ideas being taught or promoted in government
schools may be glad to send their children there, people who don't
approve of those ideas should have some other choice. This is
essentially what the U.S. Supreme Court said in Pierce v.
Society of Sisters (See Chapter 13).
One of the reasons why growing numbers of
people are so passionately opposed to the public schools is that
these schools are in fact acting as if someone had explicitly
and legally given them the power to promote one set of ideas and
to put down others. A fairly small group of people, educational
bureaucrats at the state and federal level, who largely control
what schools say and do, are more and more using the schools to
promote whatever ideas they happen to think will be good for the
children, or the country. But we have never formally decided,
through any political process, to give the schools such power, far
less agreed on what ideas we would like the schools to promote. On
the contrary, there is every reason to believe that large
majorities of the people strongly dislike many or most of the
ideas that most schools promote today.
Even if we all agreed that the schools
should try to stamp out narrow and bigoted ideas, we would still
have to ask ourselves, does this work? Clearly it doesn't. After
all, except for a few rich kids, almost all children in the
country have been going to public schools now for several
generations. If the schools were as good as they claim at stamping
out prejudice, there ought not to be any left. A quick glance at
any day's news will show that there is plenty left. In fact, there
may well be less support today than ever before for the tolerance
and open-mindedness that the schools supposedly promote.
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4. If you don't send your children to
school, how are they going to learn to fit into a mass society?
5. If you don't send children to school,
how are they going to be exposed to any values other than the
commercial values of a mass society?
Educators often ask me these two questions
in the same meeting, often within a few minutes of each other.
Obviously, they cancel each other out. The schools may in fact be
able to prepare children to fit into the mass society, which
means, among other things, believing what most people believe and
liking what most people like. Or they may be able to help children
find a set of values with which they could resist and reject at
least many of the values of the mass society. But they certainly
can't do both.
It seems to be one of the articles of faith
of educators that they, and they alone, hold out to the young a
vision of higher things. At meetings, they often talk as if they
spent much of their time and energy defending children from the
corrupt values of the mass media and the television set. Where,
but from us, they say, are children going to hear about good
books, Shakespeare, culture? We are the only ones who are thinking
about what is good for them; everyone else is just trying to
exploit them. The fact is, however, that most schools are far more
concerned to have children accept the values of mass society than
to help them resist them. When school people hear about people
teaching their children at home, they almost always say, "But
aren't you afraid that your children are going to grow up to be
different, outsiders, misfits, unable to adjust to society?"
They take it for granted that in order to live reasonably happily,
usefully, and successfully in the world you have to be mostly like
most other people.
In any case, the schools' efforts to sell
children the higher culture seldom work, since they obviously
value it so little themselves. In my introduction to Roland
Betts's Acting Out (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), a
frightening account of life in New York City's public schools, I
wrote:
Our big city schools are largely
populated, and will be increasingly populated, by the children
of the non-white poor, the youngest members and victims of a
sick subculture of a sick society, obsessed by violence and the
media-inspired worship of dominance, luxury, and power. This
culture, or more accurately, anticulture, has done more harm to
its members and victims, has fragmented, degraded, and corrupted
them more than centuries of slavery and the most brutal
repression were able to do. Every day this anticulture, in the
person of the children, invades the schools. If the schools had
a true and humane culture of their own, which they really
understood, believed in, cared about, and lived by, as did the
First Street School some years ago, they might put up a stiff
resistance, might even win some of the children over. But since
the culture of the school is only a pale and somewhat more timid
and genteel version of the culture of the street outside...
nothing changes. Far from being able to woo the children away
from greed, envy, and violence, the schools cannot even protect
them against each other.
A friend of mine, in his early thirties, is
a journalist, generally liberal, and sympathetic to the young. Not
long ago, he visited a number of high schools in the affluent
suburbs of Los Angeles where he grew up, talking to the students,
trying to find out what they seemed most interested in and cared
most about. I asked eagerly what he had found. After a silence, he
said, "They seem to be mostly interested in money, sex, and
drugs." He was clearly as unhappy to say it as I was to hear
it. We would both like to have found out that these favored young
people wanted to do something to make a better world, as many did
fifteen years ago. But we should not be surprised that young
people should be most interested in the things that most interest
their elders.
Nor is it fair to blame the schools, as many
people do, for the interest of the young in these things. Attacked
from all sides, the schools say plaintively, "But we didn't
invent these values." Quite right; they didn't. What we can
and must say is that to whatever extent the schools have tried to
combat these values, they have almost totally failed. In any case,
to return once more to my first point, they can hardly claim that
they are at one and the same time teaching children to accept and
also to resist these dominant values of our commercial culture.
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6. If children are taught at home, won't
they miss the valuable social life of the school?
If there were no other reason for wanting to
keep kids out of school, the social life would be reason enough.
In all but a very few of the schools I have taught in, visited, or
know anything about, the social life of the children is
mean-spirited, competitive, exclusive, status-seeking, snobbish,
full of talk about who went to whose birthday party and who
got-what Christmas presents and who got how many Valentine cards
and who is talking to so-and-so and who is not. Even in the first
grade, classes soon divide into leaders (energetic and - often
deservedly - popular kids), their bands of followers, and other
outsiders who are pointedly excluded from these groups.
I remember my sister saying of one of her
children, then five, that she never knew her to do anything really
mean or silly until she went away to school - a nice school, by
the way, in a nice small town.
Jud Jerome, writer, poet, former professor
at Antioch, wrote about his son, Topher, meeting this so-called
"social life" in a free school run by a commune:
... Though we were glad he was happy and
enjoying himself (in school), we were also sad as we watched him
deteriorate from a person into a kid under peer influence in
school. It was much like what we saw happening when he was in
kindergarten. There are certain kinds of childishness which it
seems most people accept as being natural, something children
have to go through, something which it is, indeed, a shame to
deny them. Silliness, self-indulgence, random rebelliousness,
secretiveness, cruelty to other children, clubbishness,
addiction to toys, possessions, junk, spending money, purchased
entertainment, exploitation of adults to pay attention, take
them places, amuse them, do things with them - all these things
seem to me quite unnecessary, not "normal" at all
(note: except in the sense of being common), and just as
disgusting in children as they are in adults. And while they
develop as a result of peer influence, I believe this is only,
and specifically, because children are thrown together in school
and develop these means, as prisoners develop the means of
passing dull time and tormenting authorities to cope with an
oppressive situation. The richer the families the children come
from, the worse these traits seem to be. Two years of school and
Topher would probably have regressed two years in emotional
development. I am not sure of that, of course, and it was not
because of that fear that we pulled him out, but we saw enough
of what happened to him in a school situation not to regret
pulling him out...
One of our readers gave us a vivid
description of what must be a very typical school experience:
My mother tells me that after the first
day in kindergarten I told her that I didn't need to go to
school anymore because I knew everything already. Great
arrogance? Not really. I knew how to be quiet, how to listen to
children's stories, and how to sing. I wanted to learn about the
adult world, but was restricted to a world which adults believed
children wanted. My great pre-school enthusiasm died an early
death....
Shame was one of the first lessons that I
learned. In the first grade I was told to color a picture of a
mother and daughter working in a kitchen. It struck me that if I
were to color the entire picture yellow, then it would be
different from all the other pictures. When I handed it in to
the teacher I expected her to be pleased, if not genuinely
excited. She, instead, glared at me for what seemed to be a long
time and caused me to feel the deepest shame and self-contempt.
. . I was six years old.
Since spontaneity was dangerous - it
conflicted with the teacher's view of how children should act -
lying was a valuable survival technique. . . In first grade, the
class was sent to the kindergarten room to do some work without
supervision. I used this opportunity to take a plastic doll and
stick the head into a plastic toilet in one of the furnished
doll houses in the room. No one was sure who did it, but
everyone thought it was amusing - except the teacher. She was
red with anger (she was a nun, and working-class Catholic
schools in the early 1960s were not the most humane
institutions) and I feared a severe beating. Suspicion was
eventually focused on me and I lied with complete success, at
least for me; another boy was blamed for the incident. I wish
that I had said, "Yes, I did it, so what." But I was
afraid. . .
Other incidents occurred to other people
and were much more serious. I saw a boy of thirteen, seventh
grade, try to explain why he did not have an assignment. His
crime was that he spoke with indignation. Before he said three
words, the teacher stopped him and with a
"who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are" tone of voice
called him to the desk and slapped him across the face with a
rubber strap, which was about 6 to 8 inches long and 1/4 inch
thick. He cried; they always did when it was in the face. He
never did get the chance to explain why he did not have the
assignment. I'm not so sure that he didn't have it. It may have
been that he could not find it quickly enough... This teacher,
the principal, was a "textbook" authoritarian. Every
violation of her largely unwritten rules would lead her to
deliver the same angry statement: "Don't challenge
me." She saw challenges in virtually everything - even
though we would never have challenged her. I'll just give two of
her biggest challenges.
Challenge number one involved misbehavior
which the teacher present did not see, but the principal looking
into the room did. The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades
(it was a small school) were in this room to practice singing.
She was furious, talked about challenges, and scolded the
student vehemently. Then she proceeded to slap him halfway
across the room. She gave him about eight or ten real haymaker
slaps. I was standing only a few feet away at the time... One
fact about this event showed how much in awe of authority we
were: the victim of this violence did not raise his hands to
protect his face. When it was over, all I could hear was the boy
crying and my own heart beating.
Challenge number two involved the same
boy. This time he urinated, or defecated, or both, in his pants.
Perhaps he was ill or maybe he had a mental problem. [Author's
note: Or perhaps he had merely been denied permission to go to
the bathroom, which happens quite often in school.] He didn't do
this regularly. He was about twelve years old. Naturally this
called for punishment. He was forced to stand in front of each
class in the school while the teacher explained to the class his
crime. When he came to our classroom the principal named him the
school's stinker and told us why. But what I remember most
clearly is the pained smile on his face.
There were many incidents of fear and
humiliation. Even though there were not many savage beatings,
the point is that we lived in an environment where this could
happen anytime. And we knew that. I had no clear idea that there
was anything wrong with the school; I only had a vague feeling
that things didn't have to be the way they were. I wasn't a
noble child resisting tyrannical teachers. No, I loved the game
of fear and humiliation and played like the masters.
"We can hardly wait to make someone
pay for our humiliation, yield to us as we were once made to
yield." (Freedom and Beyond, p. 114)
I'm not sure when it started, but in the
eighth grade a number of us would terrorize one of the timid
boys in the school. We would push the victim around, ridicule
him, pull his shirt out, spin him around, dust the chalk erasers
on his clothes, mess up his hair, and chase him on the
playground. It was easy to be friends with these boys when I was
alone with them. But when there was a group of us, the teasing
would begin. Since we were always in groups [author's
emphasis], the teasing of these boys, two in particular, was
nearly unending. On the playground they had to avoid being seen.
One of the boys would go home for lunch and not return until the
last minute of recess. We did it without thought and it seemed
to be only boyish pranks. It was sadism and I found it to be
almost irresistible.
We then started to turn on the group
members and practice our arts on the selected victim. I remember
coming home with sore sides from laughing so hard at another's
humiliation, but I felt empty and actually unhappy. The next day
I would do it again. This only stopped when I became the victim.
It was pure hell. Everyone you knew devoted all his time to your
being humiliated. Any one act was insignificant: slapping an
unaware student in the back of the head was popular. But it
happened all day long in a multitude of ways. Christmas vacation
came and one of my prime torturers transferred to another
school. Things cooled off for me, but not for the timid boys or
the younger children in the school. We almost had serious
violence with the male students several years younger than us.
I don't remember the beginning or the end
of this sadistic behavior. I know that I didn't act this way
before my last two years in grade school or since then.
This reader's experience is surely not
unusual. When I was nine, I was in a public elementary school, in
a class in which almost all the boys were bigger and older than I
was, most of them from working-class Italian or Polish families.
One by one, the toughest ones first, then the others, more or less
in order of toughness, beat me up at recess, punched me until they
knocked me down and/or made me cry. Once a boy had beaten me up,
he rarely bothered to do it again. There didn't seem to me to be
much malice in it; it was as if this had to be done in order to
find my proper place in the class. Finally everyone had beaten me
except a boy named Henry. One day the bigger boys hemmed us in and
told us that we had to fight to find who was the biggest sissy in
the sixth grade. Henry and I said we didn't want to fight. They
said if we didn't, they would beat up both of us. So for a while
Henry and I circled around, swinging wildly at each other, the
bigger boys laughing and urging us on. Nothing happened for
some time, until one of my wild swings hit Henry's nose. It began
to bleed, Henry began to cry, and so did I. But the bigger boys
were satisfied; they declared that Henry was now the official
biggest sissy in the class.
A teacher writes:
On Friday I was reading GWS and
intrigued with it as usual. I'm especially interested in the
"social life" aspect of schools and the damage it
causes. This morning I asked my third graders, "Do you feel
that in our school kids are nice, kind to each other?"
Out of 22 kids, only two felt that they
saw kindness, and the rest felt most kids are mean, call names,
hurt feelings, etc. Frankly I was amazed. I have always felt our
school is a uniquely friendly place....
When I point out to people that the social
life of most schools and classrooms is mean-spirited,
status-oriented, competitive, and snobbish, I am always astonished
by their response. Not one person of the hundreds with whom
I've discussed this has yet said to me that the social life at
school is kindly, generous, supporting, democratic, friendly,
loving, or good for children. No, without exception, when I
condemn the social life of school, people say, "But that's
what the children are going to meet in Real Life."
The "peer groups" into which we
force children have many other powerful and harmful effects. Every
now and then, in the subway or some public place, I see young
people, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, sometimes even as
young as ten, smoking cigarettes. It is a comic and pitiful sight.
It is also an ordeal. The smoke tastes awful. Children have
sensitive taste buds, and that smoke must taste even worse to them
than to most nonsmoking adults, which is saying a lot. They have
to struggle not to choke, not to cough, maybe even not to get
sick. Why do they do it? Because "all the other kids"
are doing it, or soon will be, and they have to stay ahead of
them, or at least not fall behind. In short, wanting to smoke, or
feeling one has to smoke whether one wants to or not, is one of
the many fringe benefits of that great "social life" at
school that people talk about.
I feel sorry for all the children who think
they have to smoke, and even sorrier for any nonsmoking parents
who may desperately wish they could persuade them not to. If the
children have lived in the peer group long enough to become
enslaved to it, addicted to it - we might call them "peer
group junkies" - then they are going to smoke, and do
anything and everything else the peer group does. If Mom and Pop
make a fuss, then they will lie about it and do it behind their
backs. The evidence on this is clear. In some age groups, fewer
people are smoking. But more children are smoking every year,
especially girls, and they start earlier.
The same is true of drinking. We hear more
and more about drinking, drunkenness, and alcoholism among the
young. Some states have tried in recent years to deal with the
problem by raising the minimum drinking age. It doesn't seem to
have helped; if anything, the problem only gets worse. One news
story sticks in my mind. One night last summer, in a town near
Boston, four high school girls, all about sixteen or seventeen,
were killed and another seriously injured in an auto accident.
Earlier in the evening, they had loaded up their small car with
beer and several kinds of liquor and had gone out for an evening
of driving and drinking. By the time of the accident, all were
drunk. The one survivor was later quoted by the papers as saying,
from her bed in the hospital, "I didn't think there was
anything wrong with what we were doing; all the kids around here
do it."
Of course, children who spend almost all
their time in groups of other people their own age, shut out of
society's serious work and concerns, with almost no contact with
any adults except child-watchers, are going to feel that what
"all the other kids" are doing is the right, the best,
the only thing to do.
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7. How are we going to prevent children
being taught by "unqualified" teachers?
First of all, to know what is meant by
"qualified", we have to know what is meant by quality.
We could hardly agree on who was or was not a good painter if we
did not to a large extent agree on what was or was not a good
painting. The question asked above assumes that since educators
agree on and understand correctly what is meant by good teaching,
they are able to make sound judgments about who is or is not a
good teacher. But the fact is that educators do not understand or
agree about what makes good teaching. The dismal record of the
schools is proof enough of this. Still further proof is that, when
charged in court with negligence (see the section "A Doubtful
Claim" in Chapter 14), educators defend themselves by saying
(with the approval of the courts) that they cannot be judged
guilty of not having done what should have been done, because no
one knows what should have been done. This may be so. But it
clearly follows that people who don't know what should be done can
hardly judge who is or is not competent to do it.
In practice, educators who worry about
"unqualified" people teaching their own children almost
always define "qualified" to mean teachers trained in
schools of education and holding teaching certificates. They
assume that to teach children involves a host of mysterious skills
that can be learned only in schools of education, and that are in
fact taught there; that people who have this training teach much
better than those who do not; and indeed that people who have not
had this training are not competent to teach at all.
None of these assumptions are true.
Human beings have been sharing information
and skills, and passing along to their children whatever they
knew, for about a million years now. Along the way they have built
some very complicated and highly skilled societies. During all
those years there were very few teachers in the sense of people
whose only work was teaching others what they knew. And until very
recently there were no people at all who were trained in teaching,
as such. People always understood, sensibly enough, that before
you could teach something you had to know it yourself. But only
very recently did human beings get the extraordinary notion that
in order to be able to teach what you knew you had to spend years
being taught how to teach.
To the extent that teaching involves and
requires some real skills, these have long been well understood.
They are no mystery.
Teaching skills are among the many
commonsense things about dealing with other people that - unless
we are mistaught - we learn just by living. In any community
people have always known that if you wanted to find out how to get
somewhere or do something, some people were much better to ask
than others. For a long, long time, people who were good at
sharing what they knew have realized certain things: (1) to help
people learn something, you must first understand what they
already know; (2) showing people how to do something is better
than telling them, and letting them do it themselves is best of
all; (3) you mustn't tell or show too much at once, since people
digest new ideas slowly and must feel secure with new skills or
knowledge before they are ready for more; (4) you must give people
as much time as they want and need to absorb what you have shown
or told them; (5) instead of testing their understanding with
questions you must let them show how much or how little they
understand by the questions they ask you; (6) you must not get
impatient or angry when people don't understand; (7) scaring
people only blocks learning, and so on. These are clearly not
things that one has to spend three years talking about.
And in fact these are not what schools of
education talk about. They give very little thought to the act of
teaching itself-helping another person find something out, or
answering that person's questions. What they spend most of their
time doing is preparing their students to work in the strange
world of schools - which, in all fairness, is what the students
want to find out: how to get a teaching job and keep it. This
means learning how to speak the school's language (teeny little
ideas blown up into great big words), how to do all the things
schools want teachers to do, how to fill out its endless forms and
papers, and how to make the endless judgments it likes to make
about students. Above all else, education students are taught to
think that what they know is extremely important and that they are
the only ones who know it.
As for the idea that certified teachers
teach better than uncertified, or that uncertified teachers cannot
teach at all, there is not a shred of evidence to support it, and
a great deal of evidence against it. One indication is that our
most selective, demanding, and successful private schools have
among their teachers hardly any, if indeed any at all, who went to
teacher training schools and got their degrees in education. Few
such schools would even consider hiring a teacher who had only
such training and such a degree. How does it happen that the
richest and most powerful people in the country, the ones most
able to choose what they want for their children, so regularly
choose not to have them taught by trained and certified teachers?
One might almost count it among the major benefits of being rich
that you are able to avoid having your children taught by such
teachers.
In this connection, the following story from
the Philadelphia Inquirer, November 18, 1979, may be of interest:
Between 1978 and 1979, public school
enrollment in New Jersey fell 3% from 1.38 million to 1.33
million. But enrollment in private non-parochial schools from
1978 to 1979 rose 8.5%, from 14,000 to 15,200. And, while
attendance data for parochial schools is not yet available,
indications are that it experienced a similar jump.
... Rev. Peder Bloom, Assistant Headmaster
of Doane Academy at St. Mary's Hall, an independent Episcopalian
school founded in 1837, sees not only a larger, but a more
varied clientele applying.
"Any number" of parents are both
working to pay tuition bills, he says, and presently the
biggest single occupational parent group is public school
administrators [Author's emphasis], according to private
school administrators. It used to be doctors; now they are
second...
As we will see in Chapter 13, when a
district court in Kentucky challenged the state board of education
to show evidence that certified teachers were better than
uncertified, the board was unable to produce (in the judge's
words) "a scintilla of evidence" to that effect. The
same thing happened more recently in a Michigan court. It is very
unlikely that any other state boards would be able to do so.
In the state of Alaska, hundreds or perhaps
thousands of homesteading families live many miles from the
nearest town, or even road. The only way they can get in and out
of their homes is by plane. Since the state cannot provide schools
for these families, or transport their children to and from
existing schools, it very sensibly has a correspondence school of
its own which mails school materials to these families, who then
teach their children at home. Nobody seems to worry very much
about whether these families are "qualified", and no one
has yet brought forth any evidence that home-taught children in
Alaska do less well in their studies than school-taught children,
there or in other states. For that matter, many states in the
Lower 48 have laws saying that if children live more than so many
miles from the nearest school, or bus route to a school, they
don't have to go to school. It would be interesting to find out
how many such children there are, and what provisions these states
make for their education, and how well these children do in their
schoolwork.
Perhaps the leading correspondence school
for school-aged children is the Calvert Institute of Baltimore,
Maryland. It has been in business for a long time, and for all
that time most school districts - I know of no exceptions - have
been willing to accept a year of study under Calvert as equal to a
year of study in school. Indeed, this assurance that
Calvert-taught children would not fall behind has been part of
what Calvert offered and sold its customers and clients. These
have been, for the most part, American families living overseas -
missionaries, military or diplomatic people, people working in
foreign offices of American firms, etc. A recent Calvert ad said
they have had over three hundred thousand customers. Clearly a
very large number of parents have taught and are teaching their
children at home, without these children falling behind. But very
few of these parents can have been certified teachers.
The same must be true of the Home Study
Institute, of Washington, DC, which has served mostly, but not
exclusively, members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. I don't
know how many families use or have used their materials, but the
quality of the materials I have seen, and the range of courses
they offer, suggest that this organization, too, serves a large
number of people, few of whom can have been or be certified
teachers. Yet again, there is no evidence that the students who
learn at home from these materials are failures either in school
or later in life.
Years ago I read that one or more inner-city
schools had tried the experiment of letting fifth graders teach
first graders to read.
They found, first, that the first-graders
learned faster than similar first-graders taught by trained
teachers, and secondly, that the fifth-graders who were teaching
them - many or most of whom had not been good readers themselves -
also improved a great deal in their reading. These schools
apparently did these experiments in desperation. It is easy to see
why they have not been widely repeated. Even in those schools that
are willing to allow "paraprofessional" adults, that is,
people without teachers' certificates, in their classrooms, the
regular teachers almost always insist that these paraprofessionals
not be allowed to do any teaching. But poor countries have found
in mass literacy programs that almost anyone who can read can
teach anyone else who wants to learn.
I found in my own classes, as in others I
have since observed where children are allowed to talk to each
other and to help each other with schoolwork, that many children
were very good at teaching each other. There were many reasons for
this. Even though I did my best to convince them that ignorance
was no shame, they felt much freer to confess ignorance and
confusion to each other than to me, since they knew that they knew
little and wrongly thought that I knew almost everything. Also,
they did not have to fear that their friends might give them a bad
grade. I had told them that I did not believe in grades, and I
think they believed me. But they understood, as I did, that this
had little to do with reality; both the school and their parents
demanded grades, and I had to give them. Some of them, who really
liked me, may have feared that after struggling to teach them
something I would be disappointed if they didn't learn it. Indeed
this was true, and though I tried not to be disappointed or at
least not to show that I was, I never really succeeded. They
wanted to please me, and knew when they hadn't.
Learning from each other, they didn't have
to worry about this. A child teaching another is not disappointed
if the other does not understand or learn, since teaching is not
his main work and he is not worried about whether he is or is not
a good teacher. He may be exasperated, may even say, "Come
on, dummy, pay attention, what's the matter with you?" Since
children tend to be direct and blunt with each other anyway, this
probably won't bother the learner. If it does, he can say so.
Either the other will be more tactful, since he rightly values
their friendship more than the effectiveness of his teaching, or
the learner will find another helper. And this is another and
important reason why children are good at teaching each other.
Both child-teacher and child-learner know that this
teacher-learner relationship is temporary, much less important
than their friendship, in which they meet as equals. This
temporary relationship will go on only as long as they are both
satisfied with it. The child-teacher doesn't have to teach
the other, and the child-learner doesn't have to learn from
the other. Since they both come to the relationship freely and by
their own choice, they are truly equal partners in it. I want to
stress very strongly that the fact that their continuing
relationship as friends is more important than their temporary
relationship as learner and teacher is above all else what
makes this temporary relationship work.
There is an old rule in medicine (not always
obeyed): "First, do no harm." In other words, in
treating patients, make sure you do not injure them. The rule is
just as true for teaching. Above all else, be sure that in your
eagerness to make them learn, you do not frighten, offend, insult,
or humiliate those you are teaching. Teachers of animals, whether
dogs, dolphins, circus animals, or whatever, understand that very
well-it is the first rule in their book. It is only among teachers
of human beings that many do not understand and even hotly deny
this rule.
It is because they understand this rule, if
not in words at least in their hearts, that the kind of parents
who teach their own children are likely to do it better than
anyone else. Such people do not knowingly hurt their children.
When they see that something they are doing is hurting their
child, they stop, no matter how good may have been their
reasons for doing it. They take seriously any signals of pain and
distress that their children give them. Of course, the distress
signals that children make when we try too hard to teach them
something are quite different from the signals they make when
something hurts them. Instead of saying "Ow!" they say,
"I don't get it," or "This is crazy." It took
me years, teaching in classrooms, to learn what those signals
were, and still longer to understand how I was causing the
distress. But parents teaching at home are in a much better
position to learn these distress signals than a classroom teacher.
They are not distracted by the problems of managing a class, they
know the children better, and their spoken and unspoken languages,
and they care about them more. Also, as I have said elsewhere,
they can try things out to see what works, and drop whatever does
not. Since they control their experience, they can learn more from
it.
This is not to say that all families who try
to teach their own children will learn to do it well. Some may
not. But such families are likely to find homeschooling so
unpleasant that they will be glad to give it up, the children most
of all. A home-schooling mother wrote me that when, simply out of
fear of the schools, she began to give her children a lot of
conventional schoolwork, they said, "Look, Mom, if we're
going to have to spend all our time doing this school junk, we'd
rather do it in school." Quite right. If you are going to
have to spend your days doing busywork to relieve adult anxieties,
better do it in school, where you only have one-thirtieth of the
teacher's anxieties, rather than at home, where you have all of
your parent's. So far, only one family I know of has given up
home-schooling as a failure, largely because the parents couldn't
control their anxieties. In time, there may well be others. I
doubt that there will be many.
We can sum up very quickly what people need
to teach their own children. First of all, they have to like
them, enjoy their company, their physical presence, their energy,
foolishness, and passion. They have to enjoy all their talk and
questions, and enjoy equally trying to answer those questions.
They have to think of their children as friends, indeed very close
friends, have to feel happier when they are near and miss them
when they are away. They have to trust them as people, respect
their fragile dignity, treat them with courtesy, take them
seriously. They have to feel in their own hearts some of their
children's wonder, curiosity, and excitement about the world. And
they have to have enough confidence in themselves, skepticism
about experts, and willingness to be different from most people,
to take on themselves the responsibility for their children's
learning. But that is about all that parents need. Perhaps only a
minority of parents have these qualities. Certainly some have more
than others. Many will gain more as they know their children
better; most of the people who have been teaching their children
at home say that it has made them like them more, not less. In any
case, these are not qualities that can be taught or learned in a
school, or measured with a test, or certified with a piece of
paper.
Are there then no requirements of
schooling or learning? Isn't there some minimum that people ought
to know? Could people teach their children who had never been to
school themselves? Even if they didn't know how to read and write?
I think even then they probably could. A woman told me not long
ago, after a meeting, that though she had a degree from Radcliffe
and a Ph.D. from Harvard, the most helpful, influential, and
important of all the teachers she had ever had was her mother, who
had come to this country as an immigrant and who was illiterate
not only here but in the country of her birth. And while working
as a consultant to a program to teach adult illiterates to read, I
heard about one of the students, a middle-aged woman who had for
years concealed her illiteracy from her college graduate husband
and her children, whom she used to regularly help with their
schoolwork. For many years I told her story to show how cleverly
people can bluff and fake. Only recently did I realize that this
woman's children would not have come to her year after year for
help on their schoolwork unless her help had been helpful.
She was in short not just a clever bluffer, but a very good
teacher.
I don't expect many illiterate parents to
ask me how they can take their children out of school and teach
them at home. But if any do, I will say, "I don't think that
just because you have not yet learned to read and write means that
you can't do a better job of helping your children learn about the
world than the schools. But one of the things you are going to
have to do in order to help them is learn to read and
write. It is easy, if you really want to do it, and once you get
out of your head the idea that you can't do it. If any of
your children can read and write, they can help you learn. If none
of them can read and write, you can learn together. But it is
important that you learn. In the first place, if you don't, and
the schools find out, there is no way in the world that they or
the courts are going to allow you to teach your children at home.
In the second place, if you don't know how to read and write, your
children are likely to feel that reading and writing are not
useful and interesting, or else that they are very difficult,
neither of which is true. So learning to read and write will have
to be one of your first tasks."
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8. How am I going to teach my child six
hours a day?
Who's teaching him six hours a day right
now?
As a child, I went to the "best"
schools, some public, most private. I was a good student, the kind
that teachers like to talk to. And it was a rare day indeed in my
schooling when I got fifteen minutes of teaching, that is, of
concerned and thoughtful adult talk about something that I found
interesting, puzzling, or important. Over the whole of my
schooling, the average was probably closer to fifteen minutes a
week. For most children in most schools, it is much less than
that. Many poor, nonwhite, or unusual kids never get any real
teaching at all in their entire schooling. When teachers speak to
them, it is only to command, correct, warn, threaten, or blame.
Anyway, children don't need, don't want, and
couldn't stand six hours of teaching a day, even if parents
wanted to do that much. To help them find out about the world
doesn't take that much adult input. Most of what they need,
parents have been giving them since they were born. As I have
said, they need access. They need a chance, sometimes, for honest,
serious, unhurried talk; or sometimes, for joking, play, and
foolishness; or sometimes, for tenderness, sympathy, and comfort.
They need, much of the time, to share your life, or at least, not
to feel shut out of it; in short, to go some of the places you go,
to see and do some of the things that interest you, to get to know
some of your friends, to find out what you did when you were
little and before they were born. They need to have their
questions answered, or at least heard and attended to (if you
don't know, say "I don't know.") They need to know more
and more adults whose main work in life is not taking care
of kids. They need some friends their own age, but not
dozens of them; two or three, at most half a dozen, is as many
real friends as any child can have at one time. Perhaps above all,
they need a lot of privacy, solitude, calm times when there's
nothing to do.
Schools rarely provide any of these, and
even if radically changed, never could provide most of them. But
the average parent, family, circle of friends, neighborhood, and
community can and do provide all of these things, perhaps not as
well as they once did or might again, but well enough. People do
not need a Ph.D. or some kind of certificate to help their
children find their way into the world.
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9. How are children going to learn what
they need to know?
About this, a parent wrote:
... During his early years, my wife and I
and a couple of friends taught him all he wanted to know, and if
we didn't know it, which usually was the case, it was even
better, for we all learned together. Example: at 7, he saw the
periodic table of elements, wanted to learn atoms and chemistry
and physics. I had forgotten how to balance an equation, but I
went out and bought a college textbook on the subject, a history
of discovery of the elements, and some model atoms, and in the
next month we went off into a tangent of learning in which
somehow we both learned college-level science. He has never
returned to the subject, but to this day retains every bit of
it because it came at a moment in development and fantasy that
was meaningful to him. [author's emphasis]
Of course, a child may not know what he may
need to know in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much
better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right
now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or
just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build
on it. If we try to make him learn something else that we think is
more important, the chances are that he won't learn it, or will
learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he
learned, and - what is worst of all - will before long lose most
of his appetite for learning anything.
Other parents have asked me similar
questions, and to one I wrote:
... With respect to your question, about how
a parent could teach something like chemistry, there seem to be a
number of possibilities, all of which people have actually done in
one place or another. (1) The parent finds a textbook(s),
materials, etc., and parent and child learn the stuff together.
(2) The parent gets the above for the child, and the child learns
it alone. (3) The parent or the child finds someone else who knows
this material, perhaps a friend or neighbor, perhaps a teacher in
some school or even college, and learns from them.
As for equipment, you say that your high
school had a very extensive chem lab, but I'll bet that very few
of the students ever used more than a small part of the materials
in the lab. I have known kids who were interested in chemistry and
did it in their own basements, who were able to do a great deal of
work with, at today's prices, less than $200 or maybe $100 worth
of equipment. The catalog of the Edmund Scientific Corp. (and many
other companies) is full of such equipment. The same thing is true
of physics. As for biology, except perhaps in the heart of the
city, it is not difficult to find plants and animals for
observation and classification, if that is what children want to
do.
I won't say these are not problems, but
people who want to solve them can solve them.
You ask "Would you expect a parent to
purchase test tubes, chemicals, instruments, etc., that would
perhaps only be used for one or two years, only to have the child
become an artist or musician?" Well, why not? People purchase
bicycles, sports equipment, musical instruments, without knowing
that their children will ever become professional athletes,
musicians, etc. None of this equipment (unless broken) loses any
of its value - it could probably be sold later for at least a
significant part of the purchase price. And, as time goes on, and
more people are teaching their children at home, it will be easier
to get these materials from other parents who have used them, or
to arrange for swaps, etc.
I see no real need for
"institutional" education at any age. There is in
Michigan a man named Ovshinsky who stood solid-state physics on
its ear by inventing a theory by which non-crystalline substances
could be used to do things which, according to orthodox theory,
only crystalline materials could do. For a number of years
orthodox physicists dismissed Ovshinsky's ideas. But he was able
to demonstrate them so clearly in laboratory experiments that they
were finally obliged to admit that he was right. Ovshinsky
never finished high school. There are probably more cases like
this than we know, and there would be a great many more except for
compulsory schooling laws. It is a kind of Catch-22 situation to
say, first, that all children have to spend all that time in
schools, and then to say that all kinds of things can only be
learned in schools. How do we know? Where have we given people a
chance to learn them somewhere else?
A very important function of institutions of
so-called higher learning is not so much to teach people things as
to limit access to certain kinds of learning and work. The
function of law schools is much less to train lawyers than to keep
down the supply of lawyers. Practically everything that is now
only done by people with Ph.D.s was, not so very long ago, done by
people with no graduate training or in some cases, even
undergraduate training.
I hope you will not doubt your competence to
help your children learn anything they want to learn, or indeed
their competence to learn many things without your help.
One mother wrote me some particularly
challenging questions [10-17], to which I gave these answers:
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10. My greatest concern is that I don't
want to slant my children's view of life all through
"mother-colored " glasses. . .
If you mean, determine your
children's view of life, you couldn't do it even if you wanted to.
You are an influence on your children, and an important one, but
by no means the only one, or even the only important one. How they
later see the world is going to be determined by a great many
things, many of them probably not to your liking, and most of them
out of your control. On the other hand, it would be impossible,
even if you wanted to, not to have some influence on your
children's view of life.
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11. I also wonder if I can have the
thoroughness, the follow-through demanded, the patience, and the
continuing enthusiasm for the diversity of interests they will
undoubtedly have.
Well, who in any school would have more, or
even as much? I was a good student in the "best"
schools, and very few adults there were even slightly concerned
with my interests. Beyond that, you may expect too much of
yourself. Your children's learning is not all going to come from
you, but from them, and their interaction with the world
around them, which of course includes you. You do not have to know
everything they want to know, or be interested in everything they
are interested in. As for patience, maybe you won't have enough at
first; like many home-teaching parents, you may start by trying to
do too much, know too much, control too much. But like the rest,
you will learn, from experience mostly, to trust your children.
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12. Most unschoolers seem to live on
farms growing their own vegetables (which I'd like) or have unique
life-styles in urban areas, and heavy father participation in
children's education. What about suburbanites with
modern-convenienced homes and fathers who work for a company 10 to
12 hours a day away from home? What differences will this make?
Will unschooling work as well?
Well enough. You and your children will have
to find out as you go along what differences they make, and deal
with them as best you can. Once, people said that the suburbs were
the best of all possible worlds in which to bring up children; now
it is the fashion to say they are the worst. Both views are
exaggerated. In city, country, or suburb, there is more than
enough to give young people an interesting world to grow up in,
plenty of food for thought and action. You don't have to have
every resource for your children, and if you did, they wouldn't
have enough time to make use of all of them. As for the father's
involvement, it can certainly be helpful, but it is not crucial.
Some of the most successful unschoolers we know of are single
mothers.
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13. What if the children want to go to
school?
This is a hard question. There is more than
one good answer to it, and these often conflict. Parents could
argue, and some do, that since they believe that school can and
probably will do their children deep and lasting harm, they have
as much right to keep them out, even if they want to go, as they
would to tell them they could not play on a pile of radioactive
waste. This argument seems more weighty in the case of younger
children, who could not be expected to understand how school might
hurt them. If somewhat older children said determinedly and often,
and for good reasons, that they really wanted to go to school, I
would tend to say, let them go. How much older? What are good
reasons? I don't know. A bad reason might be, "The other kids
tell me that at school lunch you can have chocolate milk."
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14. I'm concerned that someone might be
eager to take us to court and take away our children.
The schools have in a number of cases tried
- shamefully - to take children away from unschooling parents. I
think there are legal counters to this, strategies that would make
it highly unlikely that a court would take such action. And if
worse came to worst, and a court said, "Put your children
back in school or we'll take them away," you can always put
them back in while you plan what to do next - which might simply
be to move to another state or even school or judicial district.
[Note: homeschooling is now legal in all US states and Canadian
provinces, and in many other countries, due in no small part to
John Holt's work and writing, and to the support and work of the
organization he founded, John Holt Associates.]
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15. I don't want to feel I'm sheltering
my children or running away from adversity.
Why not? It is your right, and your proper
business, as parents, to shelter your children and protect them
from adversity, at least as much as you can. Many of the world's
children are starved or malnourished, but you would not starve
your children so that they would know what this was like. You
would not let your children play in the middle of a street full of
high-speed traffic. Your business is, as far as you can, to help
them realize their human potential, and to that end you put as
much as you can of good into their lives, and keep out as much as
you can of bad. If you think - as you do - that school is bad,
then it is clear what you should do.
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16. I value their learning how to handle
challenges or problems. . .
There will be plenty of these. Growing up
was probably never easy, and it is particularly hard in a world as
anxious, confused, and fear-ridden as ours. To learn to know
oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is
problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the
fake and unworthy challenges of school - pleasing the teacher,
staying out of trouble, fitting in with the gang, being popular,
doing what everyone else does.
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17. Will they have the opportunity to
overcome or do things that they think they don't want to do?
I'm not sure what this question means. If it
means, will unschooled children know what it is to have to do
difficult and demanding things in order to reach goals they have
set for themselves, I would say, yes, life is full of such
requirements. But this is not at all the same thing as doing
something, and in the case of school usually something stupid and
boring, simply because someone else tells you you'll be punished
if you don't. Whether children resist such demands or yield to
them, it is bad for them. Struggling with the inherent
difficulties of a chosen or inescapable task builds character;
merely submitting to superior force destroys it.
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