People, especially educators, who hear me talk about
homeschooling, raise certain objections so often that it is
worth answering them here.
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?
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?
3. How are we going to
prevent parents with narrow and bigoted ideas from passing
these on to their children?
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?
6. If children are taught
at home, won't they miss the valuable social life of the
school?
7. How are we going to
prevent children being taught by "unqualified"
teachers?
8. How am I going to teach
my child six hours a day?
9. How are children going
to learn what they need to know?
10. My greatest concern is
that I don't want to slant my children's view of life all
through "mother-colored " glasses. . .
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.
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?
13. What if the children
want to go to school?
14. I'm concerned that
someone might be eager to take us to court and take away our
children.
15. I don't want to feel
I'm sheltering my children or running away from adversity.
16. I value their learning
how to handle challenges or problems. . .
17. 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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