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HomeSchooling
From: "clanSkeen" <sgian@3wave.com>
To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead@listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: Schooling - The Diatribe
Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 23:59:53 -0500A student will spend more that 16,000 hours in school from Kindergarten through 12th grade. That's a very large chunk of someone's life, especially for the young. During this time the children are confined, separated from other human beings except a narrow group their own age, and subject to strict regimentation. Why do we do this? Why do we take 16,000 hours out of childhood for our purposes?
The most common answer is that they have to learn to read and write and do math. Research shows (I am quoting here, want to include the *original* research but I don't have it at hand) that it takes about 100 hours to learn to read and write and do math when the person is ready to learn it. Experience makes me believe it. At any rate, out of the seven hours or so a day a child spends in class very little of it involves actual instruction from a teacher. When I was doing graduate work, I participated in a study where we sat in classrooms all day with sheets of paper ruled to account for every minute of the day, We put a check mark by the minutes when the teacher was engaged in actual teaching. Out of seven hours in a day, what do you suppose was the average time spent in actual teaching -- it was thirty-seven minutes. Another study done in the same department but with a stricter definition of 'teaching' put the count at fifteen minutes a day.
And even at that, the number of children who warm the seats for that eternity of 16,000 hours and yet don't even learn to read and write is astounding. So if it only takes a hundred hours or so to learn reading, writing, and math; what is going on in the rest of that time? The answer is 'Schooling'.Our educational system and its compulsory attendance is modeled after that of Prussia which Horace Mann and several of his colleagues visited in the mid 1800's (some say Mann did not actually personally travel to Prussia, but that's beside the point). The idea was to get young children out of the home and get them accustomed to regimentation and following instructions. It is no accident that compulsory public schooling for the very young began in the early 1800's in England, France, and Germany - all countries rich in coal to run machinery - and schooling was imported from there to the US and promoted by those involved coal powered industrial mills.
Horace Mann and other early proponents of compulsory schooling did not hide the fact that the purpose of school was not for the good of the individual, but for the good of society as a whole - their view of society in which great armies of workers ran mills and factories without complaint.
So since it is not the academics that are being taught in school, what is? What takes 16,000 hours to accomplish? Here's what schooling is all about:
1). Children's natural tendency to view things as an interconnected and interrelated whole, a gestalt, is replaced by fragmentation and confusion. The world is divided into 'subjects'. Already the child is out of the real world where the lines between math and science and language and art are blurred if they hardly exist at all. Then in the sterile and cloistered environment of the classroom, endeavors are divided into subjects and examined as if they were distinct and unrelated to each other.
Those not indoctrinated in schooling have long recognized the phenomenon that a keen and passionate interest in anything will result in an education in everything. A child that is intensely interested in, say, sailing ships and is free to pursue that interest will perforce use history, math, physics, sociology, language, art, music, biology, botany, (etc) in the course of this pursuit and absorb them effortlessly. Schooling takes the opposite approach and attempts to equip the student with a bag of isolated, amputated, lifeless "skills" in the mistaken impression that those skills can be used later when it is determined what the student must later pursue as an interest.
The result is that children's passions are belittled and given secondary importance if any at all. Children are told to 'not waste too much time' on any particular interest and by all means don't let it interfere with your "school work." How easily this falls off the lips of an educator is illustrated in the movie (but true story) "Searching for Bobby Fischer". When the boy is pursuing his unique talent at and passion for chess, his teacher calls his father in for a conference and tells him that this "chess business" needs to be put in perspective, it is interfering with his school work. The father lectures the teacher (good for him) and tells her, "He is better at this than you or I will ever be at anything in our lives."What good are passionate people to industry and consumerism? The first way that schooling harms children is that it substitutes its snipped and fragmented and sterile bag of tools for the encompassing gestalt passion of the child. It teaches people to doubt their dreams and set them aside.
2) Next schooling removes the child's natural and productive tendency to think things through to the end and replaces it with a conditioned response to turn on and turn off their attention like a light switch. Today at 11:15 we do math. How you feel about it doesn't matter. What wonderful line of thought you are pursuing in your head is unimportant. We are doing math now. But in 45 minutes, you are to turn that completely off at my command and do something else. The math (or whatever) is unimportant, and whether they learn it or not is unimportant. What is important is that we can command them to abandon whatever ideas are in their head at the moment and attend to what we substitute for those ideas. After 16,000 hours of this conditioning, the student begins to become almost thrall-like. They are very sensitive now to advertising and propaganda. There will always be a void in their heads waiting for someone to tell them what they are to attend to next. A new idea that would otherwise be thought through on no particular time table instead triggers the conditioned response and the nervous, fearful outcry is "Your are telling me what to do!"
Schooling harms children by conditioning out of them the natural tendency to ponder things through to the end and substitutes a conditioned response so their attention can be directed at someone else's whim.
This ability to command a child's attention to where we want it is so essential to schooling that those all too rare individuals who have the strength of character to resist it are called abnormal. The current label for them is ADD and ADHD. The failure to direct a child's attention at will so upsets schoolers that they are willing to give the children powerful drugs to achieve that end if ordinary means fail.
3). Children are born with self-esteem. Perhaps self-balance or self-poise would be a better term, but self-esteem will do. This is reasonable because self-esteem enhances the individual's prospect for survival. Schooling wears away a child's natural self-esteem and replaces it with a pathological addiction to rewards. Just as the human body is predisposed to a danger of addiction to such substances as tobacco, so the human psyche is predisposed to a danger of addiction to praise.Self-esteem is preserved by not interfering with it. It is enhanced by how those in the child's world acquiesce and accept his accomplishments and not by what they have to say about them. The schooling paradigm would have us believe that praising a child's endeavors makes him feel good in such a way that later he will later feel that same way about his accomplishments even if the teacher isn't there to praise them. But rather the praise replaces the natural self-esteem which comes from seeing ones efforts being accommodated and fitting in real world. Praise gives the child an emotional 'hit'.
Schooling accomplishes this by talking to the child in sappy, patronizing 'school speak' rather than talking to the children as one would to adults. Then each time the child behaves in the approved manner, there is an outpouring of cooing, contrived expressions, verbal praise, stars, smiley faces, red checks. When the emotional addiction is well established, these rewards can be replaced by grades, scores, and awards. By this time any real self-esteem is well in check and suppressed and like any addict the student longs after emotional hit that comes with the reward.
Here is an interesting aspect of the use of rewards in schooling: once the child's attention and longing are focused on the praise and tokens, they can get the same 'hit' by accomplishing little or nothing as long as the praise is there. What they actually do becomes immaterial. And when the rewards cease, or when there is not an ever increasing supply of them, the child experiences withdrawal. We say that the child has low self-esteem. Small wonder, we have spent a great deal of our 16,000 hours grinding it away and replacing it with an addiction to praise.What I have seen in the eyes of those in the schooling industry belies a chilling to the very marrow when these people are around the unschooled, or those rare individuals already alluded to who seem to be immune to schooling (ADD), because those who are not addicted to rewards will not perform on demand like a circus pony. Why should they? They neither want or need your rewards and praise. The schooler (teacher) has no control over such children and shows all the frustration of one trying to herd cats.
Schooling harms children by putting them out of touch with their natural self-esteem and self-poise and instead creating in their psyche an insatiable hole wanting to be filled with meaningless praise and rewards.
4). Children are born with a strong sense of attachment to what is real. Children parody the real world in their play and their self-esteem is advanced every time they manage to successfully step from their play world and accomplish some task in the real world. When a child peels a potato, hands over a nail, reads a road sign, is consulted on decisions; and their contribution is acknowledged in exactly the same way it would be acknowledged had it come from an adult, the child knows that it was esteemed. Gushing and praising steals the accomplishment from the child. They know then that it wasn't real.
Schooling takes away a child's attachment to the real and replaces it with tokens. First school removes the child physically from the real everyday world and only allows them exposure to a small group of individuals about their own age. Rather than witnessing and participating in real life where math and science and language are only tools to accomplish tasks, the language and math "exercises" become the work. The emptiness of such work is undeniable so children are conditioned to concentrate on entirely abstract tokens as the object of their endeavors, that is, grades. Shifting the focus from the real to the token has a great advantage for those whose desire is to control large populations. Tokens are cheap.
Schooling harms children by obliterating their natural attachment to the real world and conditioning them to value tokens instead, Schooling buys our children's' Manhattan Island for $24 worth of glass beads.5) Children are normally and naturally self-directing. It is the great endeavor and joy of being human and especially of being a child to pursue one's own direction, one's own purpose, one's own meaning. Schooling harms children by conditioning them to suppress their natural self-direction and wait for instructions from some source outside themselves.
This directing from the ousted includes everything from assuming for the child that the ultimate goal and ultimate good is to go to college down to when they will eat lunch and go to the bathroom. In between the child is told what he will study and when he will study it and in what order and in what manner. Out of the vast myriad of possible ideas and courses of thought a very tiny handful is deemed worthy of consideration. Someone else will decide for him where he will be, with whom he will associate [what class he is in], and what he may academically attempt. Someone else will evaluate the relative importance of his interests and allot time and resources accordingly.The result of 16.000 hours of this conditioning is intellectual dependency. All important decisions in life must be deferred to "experts." Our entire economy is built on the depends on this principle. It depends on the schools cranking out a steady supply of dependent psyches waiting eagerly to be told what to do and what to think and what to buy.
6) A child will naturally develop self-validation. So rare is this in a schooled society that there is hardly a point of reference to use as illustration. Schooling harms children by preventing the development of self-validation and self-evaluation and replaces it with a dependency on external validation. Schooling conditions a child to believe that he cannot in any wise decide for himself that he is worthy and worthwhile, only someone else can decide that for him.
Self-validation develops when children try themselves and their skills against tasks in the real world. Schooled children have little contact with the real world and so they can only try themselves against artificial and contrived measures. The results are abstract and depend on an evaluation and interpretation by someone else. Schooling projects the child's silhouette against the contrived background of grades, promotions, endorsements, class placement, permanent record, standardized test, and overall approval by the system. Schooling emphasizes that the child must always have his focus on this shadow of himself but he must never contemplate his own self that is casting the shadow in the first place. Self-evaluation is to be discouraged if not forbidden outright.
7) Children need privacy. I don't mean having their own room. This may or may not contribute to privacy. I mean the opportunity to get to know themselves by being with their own thoughts. What they need for this is not room but time: time to reflect and mentally wander, time to synthesize and integrate all that they have experienced, time to come to their own conclusions. It takes quite a bit of time to do this. In very pre-industrial societies where there is no plutocracy to exploit the time of common man, anthropologists have found that after spending the two or three hours a day required for the necessities of life, people spend several hours a day engaged in a sort of creative loafing. This is especially important for children.
Schooling harms children by putting them under nearly constant surveillance, giving them a sense that they are always watched, and preventing them from having any real mental privacy. Not only is there the seven hours a day in which they might be called on at any moment to give an accounting of how they are using their time, but there is the preparation and debriefing time for the school day and the ever watchful eye of schooling following the child home in the form of homework. Add to that scouts, soccer, lessons for this and that, church, television, etc. and there is not room left in a child's life for time to just be a child.Children for whom this need for privacy of thought has not been sufficiently suppressed will often make the opportunity for themselves even if it is in the middle of the school day. They are viewed as "distractible" and all too often this distractibility is deemed a pathology. Schooling demands that children must not be allowed this mental space to themselves even if it means giving them drugs to prevent it.
Epilogue
I have postulated seven points concerning how schooling harms children. This is by no means complete or exhaustive. The seven points I have brought up are:
1 - Schooling destroys cohesion and replaces it with confusion and fragmentation
2 - Schooling conditions children to stop thinking things through and controls their attention
3 - Schooling destroys self esteem and replaces it with an addiction to rewards
4 - Schooling takes away the real and replaces it with the token
5 - Schooling takes away self-direction and replaces it with outside instructions
6 - Schooling takes away self-validation and replaces it with external validation
7 - Schooling takes away privacy and replaces it with surveillance.
Is all this true? One way of arriving at truth is to see how well our theories explain what has hitherto been inexplicable. And there is plenty that is inexplicable about schools and society in general. If you will compare my above list of harms to much that you see and experience, you will see that it is valid and explains quite a bit.First let me point out that the harm schooling causes as I have described has nothing whatever to do with teachers' character. Teachers are hardly mentioned at all and even then the teacher could be good, bad, indifferent, or a cardboard cut-out. It is schooling itself that is harmful and where it is done or by whom is immaterial.
Notice also that my points have nothing at all to do with learning the academics, speaks nothing as to methods or materials, and nothing at all as to whether the schools are academically successful or not, how well they are funded, how they are administered. All that is entirely beside the point as well.
So why the gut reaction by some that all this is 'teacher trashing'? The answer lies in what schooling essentially is. It is indoctrination. We imagine that schooling has something to do with reading and writing and math. But it doesn't. People learn those things with or without schools and the evidence is in favor of the latter. What schools do is they 'school' people. Schools condition people to behave and react and think in certain ways to the benefit of 'society' or more accurately 'societal engineers' to the detriment of the individual. Recall in a previous discussion on school funding on this list it was pointed out that as school spending has increased, the level of academic achievement has fallen. The fervent reply was that the situation defied all logic so it must be to 'outside factors.' This phenomenon makes no sense and indeed it does defy logic until you understand that success in the academics is not hat schools are all about. They are about conditioning children, the academics are incidental. The more funding there is for schools, the better the conditioning.
The indoctrination of schooling is nothing that is taught directly. It began at an early age and was done slowly and in the background for those 16,000 hours spent in school. It is operant conditioning. It operates as background noise and you have long ago ceased to be consciously aware of it. It manifests not as something you recall or remember but rather as a feeling.
People will feel bad for no particular reason and cheer themselves up by giving themselves a reward like going out to buy something they do not need and cannot afford [3] (numbers in brackets refer to the above points). They will spend inordinate amounts of time and money on certifications and endorsements that do not materially improve what they do or what they produce in any way [6]. They will scramble up corporate ladders and buy bigger and bigger houses and cars and yet feel no satisfaction in it [5]. They will endlessly mull over "balancing" family and career and self and marriage as if they were all independent and unrelated parts of their lives [1]. People buy things because of the logo or endorser [4] and yet never examine how that decision makes them better off [6]. All the time the lessons of schooling play in their heads unnoticed but control their lives.
Schooling prohibits people from examining things too deeply because if we examine most anything too deeply, it could lead to self-examination and that is strictly prohibited. We have been operantly conditioned to react negatively to any thing might get too close to the type of didactic dialog that might break through this indoctrination. Like the effects of all conditioning the reaction is visceral. If a dialog gets too deep, the schooled squirm and feel uncomfortable and call it 'arguing' and 'fighting.' This is my explanation of the phenomenon that has happened more than once on this list where someone (me, for example) will be told that we have 'trashed' or 'bashed' or 'belittled' some one or some thing. When asked for the exact 'trashing' the reply is 'Well, you didn't just come out and say it, but I *felt* as if you were trashing someone and it *seemed* to me you were being negative.' I see that as a visceral reaction to a dialog that gets too close to provoking the schooled into self-examination and the result is a "Clockwork Orange" type of emotional reaction that we just can't quite put our finger on. I don't like it but I just can't tell you why. To me that also explains the oft heard cry of "You are trying to say yours is the only way, you are trying to tell everyone what to do." Only the deeply schooled are so conditioned to being told what to do that dealing with information in any other way would have them heaving and retching like (wasn't Alec his name) every time he heard Beethoven played.
Notice that I have not said that schooling has failed or is any worse now than it has ever been. It isn't. It's working fine .... so long as what you want are indoctrinated, operantly conditioned children. And that's exactly what a great many people want. But schools aren't failing. Their goal is to condition children to become good industrial workers and consumers and to give them only just enough academic skills to accomplish those ends. At this they are doing a good job. We often look at decades past and say that the level of achievement in, say, math and reading were much higher than they are today. Well, they had to be better at reading and math back then, the work place demanded it. In today's bar code, calculator, point-and-click world computational skills are optional. This is my thesis: the academic standards at any time are exactly those necessary to keep the workers in the factory and office and to enable and predispose them to use whatever industry produces. No more and no less.
This is my case (the superficial and easily explained part at any rate) for schooling being harmful. Is it true? Probably. Anyway, it explains a great deal, and that's just about as close as we ever come.
James
Special Mentions
Education resources for teachers, students and parents
Imagine a place where students can get timely, smart help with their schoolwork, parents can get real-time information on their children's progress, and teachers can ensure that their students perform well on important state exams.What is Home Schooling?
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School at home is when you purchase the textbooks for all subjects & follow much the same ideology put in practice in traditional school.
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Education Network of Christian Home-schoolers of New Jersey http://www.enochnj.org
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A warm welcome to the Christian Homeschool Forum Web Site! Our goal is to provide practical, inspiring help for homeschooling families and those considering homeschooling. http://www.gocin.com/homeschool/
Welcome to Hilltop Homeschool, the online home of the Lovelace Family. It is our wish that you find something here that is truly useful and encouraging. Have fun and come back soon! http://www.alaska.net/~cccandc/index.htm
Eclectic Homeschool Online, The Magazine for Creative Homeschoolers http://www.eho.org/
Windy Creek Home School http://www.windycreek.com/
Welcome to Home School Solutions, the home of award-winning software created for families by a veteran homeschooling mom, and by a father who has more than twenty years of professional computer programming experience. http://www.homeschoolsolutions.com/
This site is intended to address the concerns of homeschoolers who wish to use the Internet as an educational tool and resource.
http://homeschool.knotwork.com/Homeschool Fun Magazine is a monthly e-zine and message board providing the latest homeschool articles, ideas, lesson plans, educational resources, and tips for successful homeschooling. http://www.homeschoolfun.com/
Homeschool or Home School? . . . No matter how you spell it, homeschooling is cool! http://www.homes-cool.com/
Homeschoolers of Maine is a Christian Ministry dedicated to promoting home education in the state of Maine. We believe that every family has a God-given and constitutional right and responsibility to oversee the education of their children, regardless of their philosophy of education or religious affiliation. HOME is not a church and is not meant to replace the ministry of the local church to the home schooling family. http://www.homeschool-maine.org/
