Educational toys

Maybe it's just me, but lately, toys seem to fall into one of two categories: either they're educational, or they teach restrictive gender roles. The fact that we now have "girl Legos," called Clickits (because the second X chromosome prevents Lego use? or what?), is a topic for another post.

Parents buy educational toys not because they fear that without them their child will never read or never learn to add and subtract, but because they want to give their child a competitive edge in school. No one believes that an alphabet puzzle, an alphabet book, and sundry battery-powered alphabet toys are necessary to learning reading, but perhaps if you buy more than the next parent, your child will be in a higher reading group than theirs.

This is an industry which depends on formal schooling systems (and in this case, private schools probably contribute more than public schools do, as testing is sometimes required for admission). Knowing that our kids are tracked (college, vocational, warehousing), what yuppie parent would buy a toy that wasn't educational? Thus, a simple box of colored wooden blocks is now printed with sentences like "Teaches colors and shapes, while developing fine motor skills!"

The language now used to sell toys sounds a lot like the language used to describe the educational environment at my daughter's preschool. The preschool handbook (26 pages) mentioned the sand table, the water table, the painting easels, etc as developing "an intuitive understanding of the physical world" and "fine motor skills". (You could just take your kid to a sandbox or play in the bathtub, but I guess that doesn't seem as educational.)

The reason I feel this connection between the toy industry, higher-priced day care, preschools and so forth is important is that it conspires to make parents believe that props, research, and professionally designed materials are necessary for a child to learn. This benefits both Fisher Price and the local school system. It is a crucial myth, on which millions of dollars in profits and the third largest government spending program in part depend.

If a parent taught their child to read using only regular books, newspapers, and adult materials, and their own ingenuity and enthusiasm, they might question whether it really requires certified professionals and specialized educational materials to continue to teach reading. If, on the other hand, they used ten different alphabet and phonics products and sent the child to a highly regarded preschool, they might merely feel they had bought their child a head start in school (and want to keep on buying-- products and housing in better school districts).

I do value the educational toys and materials we have: the software, the LeapPad, our letter blocks, the "Let's Read!" primer. But I consider most of them to be luxuries; they are not ultimately necessary for learning. But then, I do not have the stress of worrying about when A will learn something, and whether that will be ahead of the majority of her classmates.

Baby books are full of developmental timelines from infancy on. Websites are full of them too. And I find they are becoming increasingly optimistic, saying for instance that "most babies can sit up unassisted by 6 months" though I have books upstairs suggesting 6 months is merely the average. (I also happen to know that while babies in Japan do not, on average, learn to walk until well after 12 months, babies in parts of Africa and South America learn to walk at 9 months on the average, and no one is worried about Japanese babies.) Language acquisition milestones are the worst, as many of them are based on samples comprised not only of high socioeconomic status children, but actually the children of college professors. (These are the children living in the neighborhoods around universities, after all.) Thus the stress of keeping your child "up to speed" and "ahead of the game" begins as early as a few weeks old. Inevitably your child fails to do something which "most babies" can supposedly do at their age, and the anxiety plays into the baby gear industry. This anxiety is reinforced by the age-segregated, assembly-line system of most formal schools; parents do not question that it will hurt their child to fall behind others, because they can see the tracking system before their eyes.

All of this disempowers parents by creating baseless anxieties about developmental timelines, and by attempting (through the sheer accumulation of advertising and marketing) to define good parenting as making smart product purchases.

Satire

Dear parents,

It's that time of year! This month we will be learning to tie our shoes.

We are sending home lacing boards and shoelaces with your child. Please note that these have extra large eyelets and aglets, to facilitate tying for little fingers. If you lose a shoelace, please telephone the school or send a note with your child, so that we may replace it. Substituting shoelaces you may have in your home, with standard-sized aglets, may impede your child's progress.

This week we will be examining shoelaces made of different materials in class, and discussing the history of the aglet (originally, aigullette, from the French aiguille, or needle). We ask that you participate by supervising your child in performing the initial step in the shoe-tying process, usually known as the "granny knot," preferably at least fifteen times per evening. Further homework assignments will be sent home at the start of each week.

Please refrain from encouraging your child to attempt shoe-tying prior to the end of the unit, as early failure can damage your child's self-confidence and ultimately their self-esteem.

Note also that we will be using the one loop wrap method, rather than the "bunny ears" method. While we recognize that previous generations often employed the bunny ear technique, research has proven that in the long term, one loop wrap knots are more secure and less liable to come untied. We will not be learning double knotting until 1st grade, therefore, it is for your child's safety that we must insist on the one loop wrap method.

Next month students will take a standardized exam to verify our successes in teaching the shoe tying process. Students will be asked to tie 50 pairs of shoes in 20 minutes. To prepare for testing, we will be using a fun finger puppet routine designed to strengthen the muscles and improve manual dexterity. Please encourage your child to demonstrate these finger puppets at home.

Enjoy the month, and have fun lacing!

Unschooling moments

Yesterday my daughter got out her "Clifford Magnet Math" book, which comes with small magnets with bones on them. You use the magnets to fill in little squares in the book, which is designed to help kids learn to count to ten. Toward the end there are also some simple equations like 1 + 3 = 4, with the corresponding squares to be filled in.

"Where is the taking away page?" A. asked me.

"You mean subtraction?" I asked. "Like with minus signs?"

Yes, that's what she was looking for, but it turned out there weren't any such pages, which A. found quite annoying. She thought it was ridiculous to have a book with adding but not taking away. Anyhow, she resigned herself to filling in 8 magnets on one of the counting pages, and then saying to herself "Eight take away two--" and she'd remove two magnets-- "makes six." And then she'd count the six remaining magnets to verify. She did this with various combinations of numbers. Apparently she was determined to do both adding and taking away.

She's been counting everything lately. Earlier she was surprised to get 5 green goldfish crackers in a handful of 7 crackers. "There are only two that aren't green!" she pointed out. I resisted the urge to go into instructional mode and trot out the word "probability," because she tunes out when I interrupt what she's doing with that tutorial tone in my voice. (I can just hear her reply: "Okay, but can we talk about this later? I want to eat these crackers.") So I merely agreed that with so many colors, it was very strange to get 5 of 7 that were green.

Today, just as I was wondering about the suspicious silence, A. came downstairs with a sheet of paper on which she'd written "fiSH". "Wow," I said, "I didn't know you knew how to write fish."

She had gotten out an old Maisy book which includes a wheel you can turn, inside one of the pages. At the bottom an object will show up in a little window, and in another slot at the top, the name of the object appears. You turn the wheel, and another object and another word appear. She used this to write fish, crab, octopus, boot, bucket, and starfish, and she seemed to remember which was which. She also wrote boo since it was only one letter away from boot. "See, this Maisy book teaches you to read," she informed me.

And right now, she's sitting on the floor putting together three-piece puzzles, one letter per piece, which show a picture and spell things like cat, dog, bus, and van. I forgot we even had those, they must've been hidden in the game closet or something.

It isn't that I doubted the concept of child-led learning, but it's still reassuring to see A. trying to learn these things herself.

Hurrah for unschooling in action!

Schools as cultural warfare

These are Native American children at the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania, around the turn of the century. Some were kidnapped outright from their families; some were taken by coercion, while armed US soldiers stood in the road; some were taken through deception. The overt purpose of the Carlisle school and others like it was to assimilate Indian children into white society. Their hair was cut, their traditional clothing and other possessions were burned, their names were changed, and they often went years without seeing their families. As a Christian Science Monitor article explains:

Hundreds of Indian boarding schools dotted the United States from the 1880s through the 1960s. The program was spearheaded by a zealous Army officer named Richard H. Pratt, who embraced the idea after working with Apache prisoners in St. Augustine, Fla. Pratt believed that removing Indian children from their culture and subjecting them to strict discipline and hard work would force their assimilation into mainstream society.

Congress agreed, and in 1897 it gave Pratt roughly 18 students and the drafty barracks at a deserted Army college in Carlisle. Cynical politics – and simple math – played into Pratt's plan. The government hoped to save millions of dollars, "because it cost anywhere from six to ten thousand [dollars] for the Army to kill an Indian," Bates says. "But if Indian children were put in schools and forced to change into 'Americans,' it would only cost a couple of hundred dollars per child."

Pratt's famous dictum was straightforward: "Kill the Indian and save the man." School officials prohibited children from speaking native languages, and punished transgressors. "Every school had a disciplinary jail cell," Bates says. Some even offered bounties for returned children.

Naturally the Native Americans did not willingly let their children go, and quite a few children were successfully hidden from the government. In 1895, 19 Hopi men were sent to Alcatraz when their village refused to surrender its children.

Canada used "residential schools" for even longer than we did; some are still operating, though assimilation is no longer an explicit goal. In both the US and Canada it was traditionally assumed that only manual labor would be of any use to Native Americans, and thus half the day was spent in vocational training, often in farming. (This reminds me of how Woodrow Wilson said that we needed a small group of people with a liberal education, and a much larger group who would forego a liberal education and learn to perform specific manual tasks.) In fact, Native Americans acculturated in these schools were not accepted into white society, but neither could they easily return to their original societies, having often forgotten the native language and skills. One article describes how assimilation was forced on these children:

A typical daily schedule at a boarding school began with an early wake-up call followed by a series of tasks punctuated by the ringing of bells. Students were required to march from one activity to the next. Regular inspections and drills took place outdoors with platoons organized according to age and rank. Competitions were held to see which group could achieve the finest marching formation.

Everything happened by bells, 'triangles' they were called. A triangle would ring in the morning and we would all run, line up, march in, get our little quota of tooth powder, wash our teeth, brush our hair, wash our hands and faces, and then we all lined up and marched outside. Whether it was raining, snowing or blowing, we all went outside and did what was called ‘setting up exercises´ for twenty minutes. (Joyce Simmons Cheeka, Tulalip Indian School, memoirs collected by Finley)

Conformity to rules and regulations was strongly encouraged:

We went from the tallest to the littlest, all the way down in companies. We had A, B, C, D companies. E Company was the Lazy Company, those that just couldn't get up and make it. They had all kinds of demerits for those people. They thought they'd shame them a little bit if they made an extra company and called it the Lazy Company. (Helma Ward, Makah, Tulalip Indian School, from interview with Carolyn Marr) .

. . .

For some students, the desire for freedom and the pull of their family combined with strong discontent caused them to run away. At Chemawa, for example, there were 46 "desertions" recorded in 1921, followed by 70 in 1922. Punishment of runaways was usually harsh, as the offenders became examples held up before their fellow students:

Two of our girls ran away...but they got caught. They tied their legs up, tied their hands behind their backs, put them in the middle of the hallway so that if they fell, fell asleep or something, the matron would hear them and she'd get out there and whip them and make them stand up again. (Helma Ward, Makah, interview with Carolyn Marr)

A similar program, ostensibly put in place for the welfare of children, but in fact used as a method of cultural warfare, was used in Australia all the way up into the 1970's. You may have heard of Australia's "Stolen Generation," referring to the aboriginal children abducted from their homes and placed in chuch- or state-run boarding schools. From Wikipedia:

According to a government enquiry on the topic, at least 30,000 children were removed from their parents, and the figure may be substantially higher (the report notes that formal records of removals were very poorly kept). Percentage estimates were given that 10–30% of all Aboriginal children born during the seventy year period were removed.

Additionally, although it's too depressing for me to locate all the details, the nazis abducted possibly as many as 250,000 Aryan-looking children from Poland, Russia, and other nations. Younger children were sent to German families, while older children were often sent into state-run boarding schools (those who did not meet racial criteria were sent to concentration camps). In the boarding schools children were brainwashed to believe that the German people were superior and that they themselves were German, as evidenced by their blonde hair and blue eyes; they were "Germanized," to use the nazi term. I can't help but note that in the Carlisle and other Indian schools, students were brainwashed to believe that Native Americans were cruel savages who burned towns to the ground and scalped innocent people without provocation. They were told they could choose not to be Indian; they could be anglicized.

Schools, then, have been used in cultural warfare. Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide states:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

One could argue that schooling has been used within a policy of genocide by the United States, Germany, and Australia.

Though I am not making a comparison of our current public schools to the above egregious examples, I think they bear keeping in mind. In the three cases I have mentioned, the authorities claimed that it was being done for the welfare of the children. I ran across recent articles that described the Carlisle school as "drawing students" or "accepting students" as if it were a desirable privilege; a few Australian MPs persist in claiming that removal from their families actually benefitted aboriginal children.

Currently, I think most Americans have an unquestioning, automatic belief that school and institutional education are beneficial, particularly to the poor. But this argument was also made in the US and Australia because native peoples had no running water, or no electricity, or had lower incomes. It would be one thing if public schools did a better job of providing equal opportunity, but they do not (see Disadvantaged Children). When Native Americans were taken away to be assimilated into white culture, it was said (by those in power) to be their only way of surviving; and yet still they faced racism and discrimination, and they were not accepted as whites. Taking children from their homes 35 hours per week is hardly akin to removing all contact with their families; I don't suggest these are equal. (Gatto suggests that his students had roughly 9 hours per week not taken up by sleep, school, or television.) I only suggest that the examples in this post are a relevant part of the context.

Historically, schools have been put to fascist purposes, they have been used by the state as a means of control and assimilation, they have been sold to the public in a paternalistic and false way as a means of lifting up the disadvantaged. And yet many people, and certainly the vast majority of liberals and progressives, continue to treat institutional education as intrinsically helpful to the populace. Seeing schools so simplistically ignores history.

Drapetomania

In an article titled "ADD as a Social Invention," Thomas Armstrong introduced me to the term "drapetomania":

In 1851, a Louisiana physician and American Medical Association member, Samuel A. Cartwright, published a paper in the New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal wherein he described a new medical disorder he had recently identified. He called it drapetomania (from drapeto, meaning "to flee," and mania, an obsession), and used it to describe a condition he felt was prevalent in runaway slaves. Dr. Cartwright felt that with "proper medical advice, strictly followed, this troublesome practice that many negroes have of running away can be almost entirely prevented."

Just when you think you can't be surprised, along comes another bit of information sure to make your eyes pop out of your head. Author Vanessa Jackson provides some other examples of labeling reactions to oppression and poverty among African Americans as biological diseases.

Although, really, I don't know why I should be surprised. Throughout the Victorian era, medical science held that intellectual activity was disruptive to women's menstrual cycles and impaired fertility. Ever wonder why hysteria and hysterectomy have the same root? According to the obstetrician of the late 1800's, having a uterus could make you insane, unless you kept to strictly feminine behavior.

When women were forced to give up the respect, dignity, and jobs they had held during World War II and return to 900-sq-ft ranch homes to raise 4 children and make digusting desserts involving jello, some were diagnosed with frigidity and mental illness and doped up on Valium.

In this context, it's easier to believe that ADD or ADHD is a fabricated illness, used to blame the individual in order to avoid questioning the system. Says pediatrician Peter Breggin:

When I was asked by the National Institutes of Health to be a scientific discussant on the effects of these drugs at a conference they held, I reviewed the important literature, and I found that when animals are given them, they stop playing; they stop being curious; they stop socializing; they stop trying to escape. Ritalin makes good caged animals; we're making good caged kids.

I wish I thought that was hyperbole.

Spices

I think this is one of those subjects which is excellent for homeschooling, because spices relate to practically everything. At A's age you can just look at spices, smell them, possibly taste them (although A. generally won't). You can discuss how they're harvested, dried, and sometimes ground, and how curry and chili powder are actually mixtures. It's cool to see vanilla beans growing on the vine-- it's far removed from that bottle of extract in the cupboard. I hope to experiment soon with putting cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc. into different cookies, and then have a taste test.

In our case we can get into the concepts of weight, volume, and density, since we just ordered a slew of spices -- by weight -- from Penzey's. A bag of cumin seeds and a bag of basil which are of equal weight are of vastly different sizes. (In our last order, my husband ordered 8 oz of mint. It became apparent when it arrived that 8 oz of mint would last us for approximately the next decade.)

The American Spice Trade Association website has a short introduction to the history of the spice trade, which could be used to learn about geography, the advent of colonialism, shipping and piracy, exploration and trade routes, etc. It even makes an interesting lesson in economics, in the concept of currency and the fact that the rarity of an item increases its price. From the ASTA site:

During the Middle Ages in Europe, a pound of ginger was worth the price of a sheep; a pound of mace would buy three sheep or half cow; cloves cost the equivalent of about $20 a pound. Pepper, always the greatest prize, was counted out peppercorn by peppercorn. The guards on London docks even down to Elizabethan times, had to have their pockets sewn up to make sure they didn't steal any spices. In the 11th Century, many towns kept their accounts in pepper; taxes and rents were assessed and paid in this spice, and a sack of pepper was worth a man's life.

The Economist also had a brief article on the spice trade.

One spice that particularly interests me is the ancient silphium or silphion, which once grew near Carthage and was highly prized. It was difficult to cultivate and could not be successfully grown elsewhere. When the Romans sacked Carthage, they sowed the earth with salt, and shortly thereafter silphium apparently went extinct. Possibly it's a stretch to call it a spice, however, as its main use appears to have been as an oral contraceptive.

Another food-related website called The Epicentre has a spice encyclopedia and some pages on the spice trade. UCLA has a great website on spices, including a detailed page on medicinal properties.

For someone like me, who has the opposite of a green thumb, a few little pots containing herbs will let A. learn about seeds, fertilizer, flowering, annuals vs. perennials, etc, without requiring much time or effort. Plus we get to eat the results.

Hope that inspires someone out there. And hey, if you think of anything else we can tie into spices, drop me a comment-- I hope to use spices as a "theme" for a long time to come.

The problem with praise

My mom recently directed me to an article at the Natural Child Project website, suggesting that using rewards and praise in education is not all it's cracked up to be. The author points out that rewards, like punishments, are based in part on behavioralist theories, and the benefits of using rewards to control or to teach have been demonstrated in pigeons, dogs, and rats. But of course, to quote the article, "We are not concerned with rodents’ developing self-esteem, their sense of autonomy or independence, nor do we give a hoot whether the rat will get interested in trying bigger and better mazes of it’s own accord, long after we stop rewarding it with little food pellets."

Rewards and praise may have unintended consequences, since they tend to promote doing the minimum work required to attain the reward.

Contrary to popular myth, there are many studies showing that when children expect or anticipate rewards, they perform more poorly. One study found that students’ performance was undermined when offered money for better marks. A number of American and Israeli studies show that reward systems suppress students’ creativity, and generally impoverish the quality of their work. Rewards can kill creativity, because they discourage risk-taking. When children are hooked on getting a reward, they tend to avoid challenges, to "play it safe". They prefer to do the minimum required to get that prize.

Here is a good illustration of why we made the mistake of believing in rewards, based on benefits that appear on the surface. When an American fast-food company offered food prizes to children for every book they read, reading rates soared. This certainly looked encouraging - at first glance. On closer inspection, however, it was demonstrated that the children were selecting shorter books, and that their comprehension test-scores plummeted. They were reading for junk-food, rather than for the intrinsic enjoyment of reading. Meanwhile, reading outside school (the unrewarded situation) dropped off.

I can attest to these effects from personal experience. My high school days were spent in recalculating percentages and averages so that I could determine the minimal work necessary to attain an A. If I could blow off a homework assignment, I did so. I don't think I missed much by blowing off high school work, but it was a bad strategy to take into college.

Another author points out the harm done by indiscriminate praise, in this article in Mothering magazine. She points out that too much praise in the classroom renders praise worthless, and that praising all children equally prevents them from understanding their personal strengths. Further, their attention is directed away from the real rewards and consequences of their efforts, to an artificial reward bestowed by someone else. As she puts it,

We grow tomatoes in our garden. If I water the seedlings, I am rewarded positively by the growth of healthy plants.... All summer, I will harvest a crop of delicious homegrown tomatoes, not "Good work in GARDENING" certificates.

Another good article cites a book titled Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn; here is a bit from Kohn's book:

Praise, at least as commonly practiced, is a way of using and perpetuating children’s dependence on us. It sustains a dependence on our evaluations, our decisions about what is good and bad, rather than helping them begin to form their own judgments. It leads them to measure their worth in terms of what will lead us to smile and offer the positive words they crave.

I've been thinking about the following: imagine if every time you went to say "Good job!" or "Well done!" you substituted the words "I approve"? I think that illustrates the condescension hidden in praise.

Of course, I do praise my daughter. I don't tend to praise her personally, but I make positive comments about drawings or tasks she's accomplished. Probably what I say most often is "Wow!" She solicits my praise (as in "Mom! I found 15 states that time!"), for one thing, and after all she is not yet 5. But for an older child, I am beginning to see how peppering them with praise can be a bit demeaning, unless the child asks for your opinion.

Fostering a dependency on adult approval does have consequences, as the last article points out:

One study Kohn cites found that students whose teachers praise them heavily demonstrated less task persistence (i.e., diminished intrinsic motivation) and also were more tentative in their responses, more apt to answer in a questioning tone of voice, and were less likely to take the initiative to share their ideas with other students. Praise was also a factor contributing to a tendency to back off from an idea they had put forward as soon as an adult disagreed with them.

A child who receives praise, rewards, and constant evaluation through testing and grading will tend to remain dependent on an authority to bestow a positive judgment. The academically successful child could grow up with the opposite of self-esteem-- we could call it other-esteem. Nor can I see how the current school system fosters intrinsic joy in learning or accomplishing tasks. And forget about independence, autonomy, and critical thinking. Too much "positive reinforcement" does not truly reinforce the individual; it engenders dependence.

To keep this in the context of the purpose of mass schooling, I'll end with a bit of historical context by John Gatto.

In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under the control of a group referred to in the press of that day as "the Education Trust." The first meeting of this trust included representatives of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist, in 1918, was to "impose on the young the ideal of subordination."

Self-actualization

I recently wandered across Maslow's idea of self-actualization on the web. Self-actualization seems a better ultimate purpose for education than cultural competency or earnings capability. Maslow (you may remember Maslow's pyramid of needs) studied people he considered to be models of self-actualization, and noted 15 common characteristics. This page lists the characteristics, and here is a longer summary. I'll quote from the latter summary:

The self-actualizers also had a different way of relating to others. First, they enjoyed solitude, and were comfortable being alone. And they enjoyed deeper personal relations with a few close friends and family members, rather than more shallow relationships with many people.

Does public school encourage deeper personal relations? Gatto has said the following, much more succinctly than I could, though it squares with my experience of high school:

The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. My guess is... they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behaviour borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy, so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

As for solitude, Gatto estimates that many of the children he teaches get only 9 hours of private time per week. When the kids in my neighborhood aren't at school, they're at some sort of class or playgroup. They're used to being directed, and might not know what to do with themselves when left alone. To continue with some of Maslow's self-actualized models:

They enjoyed autonomy.... And they resisted enculturation, that is, they were not susceptible to social pressure to be "well adjusted" or to "fit in" -- they were, in fact, nonconformists in the best sense.

When you are in school you have no autonomy. You can't go to the bathroom or eat without permission. As for resisting enculturation, high school was the very process of enculturation itself. To go on:

They had an unhostile sense of humor -- preferring to joke at their own expense, or at the human condition, and never directing their humor at others. They had a quality he called acceptance of self and others, by which he meant that these people would be more likely to take you as you are than try to change you into what they thought you should be. This same acceptance applied to their attitudes towards themselves: If some quality of theirs wasn’t harmful, they let it be, even enjoying it as a personal quirk... Along with this comes spontaneity and simplicity: They preferred being themselves rather than being pretentious or artificial.

Hostility is a daily part of school, in my experience, but it's hard to know where to start with the examples. I'll bring Gatto in again:

The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.

Gatto discusses how this cruelty comes about. Twenty-some children competing for the attention of a single adult in elementary school does not breed warm feelings among them, for instance. Personally, I think kids know they are being tracked, and are jockeying for position on the social ladder. Whatever the cause, I witnessed cruelty every year I was in school. Acceptance, spontaneity, and simplicity? Half the time it felt like Lord of the Flies come to life.

Further, they had a sense of humility and respect towards others -- something Maslow also called democratic values -- meaning that they were open to ethnic and individual variety, even treasuring it. They had a quality Maslow called human kinship or Gemeinschaftsgefühl -- social interest, compassion, humanity.

Not existent in my school. Maybe others have had better luck.

And these people had a certain freshness of appreciation, an ability to see things, even ordinary things, with wonder. Along with this comes their ability to be creative, inventive, and original.

I recently heard the phrase "drill and kill" for the first time. This refers to an attempt by a school to improve standardized test scores by heaping on mounds of worksheets and repetition. When I was in school, in the early grades, we still got those funny-smelling purple-inked mimeograph worksheets. We had worksheets, workbooks, copying things off the board, and reading out loud in what always seemed like slow motion, all of which was drudgery (although I didn't have homework, at least). Even Einstein reported that upon leaving school he had no taste for scientific inquiry for a full year. Socially, there is also pressure to adopt the popular bored and cynical demeanor; enthusiasm in most settings is socially unacceptable. None of this is very compatible with freshness of appreciation or creativity.

Altogether I have to conclude that public schooling is a hindrance to self-actualization.

Socializing parents

I was amazed, when my daughter started preschool (through our public school district) at how many demands were made of me. Orientation, parent coordination meetings, picture day, book order day, stone soup day, the Scrip program, guest readers (moms, that is), field trips. I started to think "Man, I am not PTA material," and to wonder why I didn't feel as dedicated to preschool as the other mothers. The mom who was most involved and gung-ho about the preschool once said, in response to someone's comment that she felt tired, "I always feel tired."

At the start of the year I had to put together a page of pictures with captions for the class photo album, which put pressure on me to make us look like a wholesome, vacation-taking, birthday-party-having family with loads of interesting snapshots. Other families had gone to Disneyworld; we had photos taken in our backyard.

I sent A. to picture day wearing a nice ivory-colored shirt and corduroy pants, only to discover that every other girl had shown up in a frilly dress, the tops of their heads a virtual sea of barrettes and baubles. I lied, saying that A. had refused to dress up, and I didn't think it was a battle worth waging. It was only half a lie, since the chances were close to 100% that she would have refused, had I attempted to stuff her into a dress, tights (on a 40-degree day), and hard-soled shoes. She hadn't worn a dress since she'd slipped and hit her head at Christmas at age 18 months, due to her nylon tights. That had been the end of that.

"Oh, it's your weekend to take home Nut Brown Hare," a teacher said to me one afternoon, her tone suggesting that I should be thrilled. Nut Brown Hare turned out to be a small stuffed rabbit. "There's a little book that goes with him that you can read, and at the end of the weekend, you'll ask A. to summarize what you did with Nut Brown Hare, and you write it in this little notebook."

Nut Brown Hare and its accompanying book and notebook sat in the unopened bag next to our door most of that weekend, until I got the thing out and cajoled A. into playing with it, which she did in a very dispassionate way for about 15 minutes. I then half-fabricated, half-exaggerated a page worth of experiences for Nut Brown Hare, and A. got her first lesson in cheating.

These little Nut Brown Hare vignettes gave all the parents a window into other people's lives, since a teacher would read them aloud at the very start of class, when moms were still hovering around. Other families had weekends filled with playdates, gymnastics, shopping, church, and a hundred other activities, and their dinners were normal American fare, green beans and chicken breasts and Hamburger Helper. Our typical weekend at that period was probably this: A. occupied herself much of the weekend while my husband and I sat around pondering a move to Canada, ranting about politics, watching Upstairs Downstairs, and deciding between Indian or Thai take-out while popping another Whole Foods cheese pizza into the oven for A. It wasn't quite normal enough to write in the little notebook.

Nor did I ever join in with the discussion of bedtimes, time-outs, star charts (this turned out to mean not astronomical charts but charts to keep track of chores and tasks, for which little star stickers were awarded). A. doesn't really have a set bedtime-- yes, we say it's 8pm, but that's not when she falls asleep. Nor do we do bathtime or book-reading before bed. We just don't follow The Schedule that every other family ostensibly followed: dinner, bath, books, lights out.

Though I hate to admit it because I would rather believe that I've outgrown caring what other people think of me, it all started to get to me after a while. I found myself saying things like "Every other kid in your preschool class is already asleep! You have got to go to bed!" I started buying slightly girlier clothes and trying to talk her into occasionally wearing her hair in a pony tail. I felt compelled to do something on the weekend, as if hanging out with your family, reading, cooking, and watching a Netflix movie is not "enough" somehow.

As soon as we decided to homeschool, I felt this great weight lift off of me. I felt so much less pressure to conform. John Gatto says that homework is an extension of the school's control and surveillance, an intrusion of the school into the sanctuary of the home. Even at the preschool level I felt this invasion. In our district, the kindergarten and first-grade homework consists largely of activities to be done with the parents, for instance, a different reading game-- requiring two players-- each night, Monday through Thursday. Under the guise of "parent involvement" they are trying to make us jump through their hoops right along with our children.

I recently downloaded the 33-page Parent's Handbook for the kindergarten my daughter would have attended. In addition to all the reasons why she will be better off learning at home, I myself have felt an enormous rush of relief that I will never have to put up with this crap again. I'll end with an example of the "you'll do what we say" tone of the Parent's Handbook-- keep in mind this pertains to kindergarten.

Feel the schadenfreude.

Regular attendance is essential for success in school. Students are expected to attend school every day of the school year. The parents are responsible for regular attendance at school. If a child cannot attend, it is the parent’s responsibility to call the school by 9:30 a.m.

Excessive tardiness affects the progress of the individual child and disturbs the learning environment for the rest of the class. It is the parent’s responsibility to see that the child gets to school on time. If your child is tardy, the child must report to the office when arriving at school and pick up a “Late Arrival” slip from a secretary.


Make-up Work Policy

1. Absence due to vacation

Make-up work will not be given out in advance. We would rather the student keep a daily journal or log describing the vacation. When the student returns to school the missed assignments will be given to the student. The make-up work should normally be completed within one week.


2. Absence due to illness

A. One or two days - The make-up work will be given to the student on his or her return to school. The missed assignments should be completed within three days.

B. Three days or more - The make-up work can be picked up at school on the third day and on every two days thereafter. These assignments should be completed two days after they are picked up. If parents phone the school office by 10:00 a.m. of their intentions to pick up their child’s work, the teacher will have it ready to pick up in the office by dismissal time that same day.

TeenScreen

My two or three readers are probably not yet done wading through yesterday's post (brevity was never my strong suit), so today I'll just drop a link about TeenScreen. This is a mental illness screening program created (with some funding from drug companies, surprise surprise) by Columbia University, and intended for universal use in high schools. It is being implemented locally in different ways, with varying levels of parental consent and confidentiality. This site has the skinny.

Give 'em amphetamines: Part Two

I wanted to add some statistics to yesterday's post about giving kids stimulants to help them through their long days.

A steady rise in prescribed stimulants and ADHD diagnoses in school-age children has been underway for well over a decade. For instance:

PULLMAN, Wash. [1999]--A new study by Washington State University researchers reveals physician office visits for the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more than doubled between 1990 and 1995. The study also shows that stimulant prescriptions for drugs that treat the disorder, such as Ritalin, nearly tripled among children 5-18 years old.

A 2001 PBS Frontline program found that:

[T]he vast majority of prescriptions for amphetamine and methylphenidate are for children diagnosed with ADHD. Methylphenidate [Ritalin] prescriptions rose dramatically in the early 1990s and have since leveled off at approximately 11 million per year. In comparison, amphetamine prescriptions, primarily Adderall, have increased dramatically recently, from 1.3 million in 1996 to nearly 6 million in 1999.

The Frontline program suggested that a typical US classroom includes 2 to 3 kids taking behavior-modifying drugs, usually a stimulant for ADHD.

These drugs are often taken for a number of years. Ritalin may not be dangerous in the short term, but in the long term, it may damage heart muscle, as apparently occurred in one 14-year-old boy who died of heart failure as a result of long-term use. (That's the pathologist's opinion, not mine.)

Adderall, the new fashionable choice in ADHD medications, is another story:

(February 10, 2005) -- US drug regulators will continue to allow the sale of Adderall to treat hyperactive children and attention deficit disorder, although Canada has halted sales amid concerns about its safety. Health Canada ordered the once-a-day treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder off the market after learning the drug has been linked to 20 sudden deaths and 12 strokes, including among children....

And it's amazing what we do not know about how these stimulants may affect brain development. We're still experimenting with rats to answer that question. One study found that rats given Ritalin as juveniles were more likely to exhibit "learned helplessness," analogous to depression, as adults. Another study found that rats given Ritalin as juveniles were less responsive to rewarding stimuli and more sensitive to stress.

I alluded to abuse of stimulants in yesterday's post. Here is some specific information on Ritalin abuse in middle and high school:

Among the findings from a soon-to-be-published Massachusetts Department of Public Health survey: 13 percent of 6,000 high-school students and 4 percent of middle-school students admitted to an "illicit, unprescribed use" of Ritalin in anonymous, written surveys....

Three years ago, high-school students in a focus group told Clark that the stimulant was "great for studying." Teens who crush and snort it liken the drug, intended for the treatment of ADHD, to cocaine. Also known as methylphenidate, Ritalin ranks on the Drug Enforcement Administration's Top 10 list of most-often stolen prescription drugs.

"In our research, prescription drugs were number two after marijuana in terms of drugs kids said they used most readily," adds Clark. "Girls especially felt prescription drugs were cleaner and safer because they'd been manufactured in controlled conditions."

And a bit about prescribed stimulant abuse in college:

[S]ome students are succumbing to the combined pressures of a heavy workload and active social life, turning to prescription stimulants to help them juggle responsibilities.

A Loyola College junior, who wished to remain anonymous, has had four midterms and two 10-page papers due in the past two weeks. With these demands and trying to maintain a social life, this student often turns to Adderall to keep up with work and to reduce the desire for sleep.

"I'm not sure just how prevalent Adderall is on this campus compared to others but it definitely exists, and the pressures of college are the reason," this student said....

The amphetamines Ritalin and Adderall are used illegally to enhance studying by as many as 20 percent of college students nationwide, according to a study published in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter in November 2002.

Why not misuse these drugs to enhance academic performance? They're prescribed in part to enhance academic performance. The US Dept of Education produced a document titled "Identifying and Treating ADHD, A Resource for School and Home," and under the section on Educational Evaluation, they say:

An educational evaluation also includes an assessment of the child’s productivity in completing classwork and other academic assignments. It is important to collect information about both the percentage of work completed as well as the accuracy of the work.

It's not just whether they're learning, the question is are they doing their work? Thinking back to the push for machine-like efficiency and productivity in the early 20th century (see The management culture), the phrase "child's productivity" sends a bit of a chill down my spine. Nothing like amphetamines for improving productivity! If only Henry Ford had had access to today's modern stimulants!

There is other evidence that ADHD diagnoses are originating in the schools:

Part of the reason that attention deficit is usually diagnosed in school age children (e.g., first to third grade) is attributable to the demands placed on the child when beginning school (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2000). The structure at school differs from that in the home or preschool environment.

And apparently the fault lies with the individual, not the structure at school, even if the individual has no difficulties outside of school.

The American School Counselor Association has one of the highest incidence estimates for ADHD that I've seen, and places the blame squarely on the student:

ADHD is one of the most prevalent childhood and adolescence disorders, affecting from 5 percent to 10 percent of all school-age children, who may be genetically predisposed to the disorder.

Genetically predisposed, eh? Gosh, where were all these twitchy, inattentive kids in previous decades?

The boy I mentioned earlier who died from long-term Ritalin use was placed on medication after a school counselor threatened his parents, saying they would be charged with neglect if they did not medicate their son.

Doctors seem to give considerable weight to the school's opinion as well, as in this "expert advice" Q & A column:

Since teachers work with children for many hours in a day, they have a perspective about a child's behavior that is very important. Teachers are trained to observe, record, and analyze a child's behavior....

Teachers have the opportunity and the professional obligation to note behaviors that may signal underlying learning, attentional, or behavioral difficulties, including ADHD. This information is a critical part of any decision about what kinds of interventions are best for a child....

Pediatricians, psychopharmacologists, and neurologists (those professionals who are responsible for formally diagnosing ADHD and for prescribing and monitoring medications), must rely on the objective observations of teachers and others in the school to help them make their decisions about the diagnosis, and about starting, continuing, and modifying medication.

Observe, record, and analyze a child's behavior? Do they not even realize how Orwellian that sounds?

In the future, the influence of teachers and school counselors in medicating children will be formalized:

Nov 15, 2004 - Funding for a controversial Bush administration plan to submit the nation's school children to mental health testing and drug treatment may end up reaching the Senate floor this week, as GOP congressional leaders look to clear the legislative slate in order to set the table for George W. Bush's second term.

The plan, called the New Freedom Initiative (NFI), is the keystone of a package of initiatives by the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, a group of doctors and mental health care professionals established by the Bush Administration in 2002.

As previously reported by The NewStandard, the Initiative’s critics, ranging from grassroots mental health advocacy organizations to government whistleblowers, have said the NFI's proposals do little else but establish state-mandated markets for the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry.

In 2003, the Commission published a report recommending states encourage more mental health testing and treatment for Americans and suggested public schools were an ideal place to access students and begin to root out undiagnosed and "severely disruptive" mental health issues.

The NFI plan, said [Allen] Jones, [a former investigator for the Office of the Inspector General], does not "have the Orwellian goal of drugging the populace for a political purpose." Instead, "it's the Orwellian goal of drugging the populace for an economic purpose."

I think Mr. Jones meant the economic purpose of selling more drugs. But when I consider the workload of the kids in my neighborhood-- on the bus at 8am, off at 4pm, and hours of homework in the higher grades-- I have to assume that a good part of the economic purpose of medicating children is increased productivity.

Give 'em amphetamines

Recently the kids and I visited my parents, while my husband was away on a rare business trip. A. and T. are lucky enough to have grandparents with quite a bit of land, a tractor, two veggie gardens, etc. We hunted for frogs, and A. and her grandpa flew a kite and took a long trek along the trail by the lake.

After two days, my daughter was exhausted. Any non-routine surroundings or experiences tend to be tiring to an intense and focused kid like A. When she was 3 months old she'd get obsessed with her bumblebee rattle to the point where it was distressing her, and I'd have to take it away. We took her to the zoo at age 2, and after an hour or so she broke down crying, just from sheer overstimulation.

Interestingly, as many parents will be familiar with, her behavior gets more physical and wilder when she's tired, not more lethargic. When she was a toddler we referred to this as arm-y and leg-y, which was apt, if not particularly poetic. Now we just call it hyper.

Because A. is calmer when rested, and hyper when tired, it makes sense to me that they give children Ritalin, a stimulant, to address hyperactivity. When you haven't been around an exhausted child who is bouncing off the walls, that might seem counterintuitive.

According to the Physician's Desk Reference entry on Ritalin:

This drug should not be prescribed for anyone experiencing anxiety, tension, and agitation, since the drug may aggravate these symptoms.

...

This drug is not intended for use in children whose symptoms may be caused by stress....

This medication should not be used for the prevention or treatment of normal fatigue....

If we were forced to have two incomes and the school district only offered all-day kindergarten, my daughter would experience stress, anxiety, inability to focus, rambunctious behavior, and fatigue, and somewhere along the line we would be advised to consider Ritalin, even though ostensibly this stimulant is not to be used for this purpose.

I was reading comments on a teacher's forum today and came across a teacher who was getting complaints from a student's parents. The student, he explained, "is untreated ADHD," and the mother had refused to medicate her son. Where does that guy get off making medical diagnoses?! According to the teacher, the student was never going to live up to his academic potential without medication.

Apparently in today's government-run schools, the generous use of amphetamines is required to be successful.

It's common now for college students to borrow a few doses of Ritalin from a friend, crush them up, and snort the powder. The drug is released more quickly that way, and has a greater effect. The students say it helps them study and pull all-nighters, and that it improves their academic performance.

I consider that a natural continuation of the way Ritalin is used K through 12.

The management culture

Our particular style of public schooling, adopted from the Prussian example, was heavily influenced by the "robber barons" at the turn of the 20th century, and the continuing push toward industrialization.

In 1911, Frederick Taylor published a paper titled The Principles of Scientific Management. By "management" he meant specifically the management of people, not of expenditures or equipment. Taylor proposed that workers should no longer be allowed to work unsupervised, but that their jobs should be reduced to following detailed instructions, written by a manager who had analyzed the job scientifically. Essentially, Taylor proposed turning tradesman into obedient, unthinking drones. He wrote:

Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work. And the work planned in advance in this way constitutes a task which is to be solved, as explained above, not by the workman alone, but in almost all cases by the joint effort of the workman and the management. This task specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it. And whenever the workman succeeds in doing his task right, and within the time limit specified, he receives an addition of from 30 per cent to 100 per cent to his ordinary wages.

To a large extent Taylor's ideas were adopted. This was the era of efficiency experts and the advent of the assembly line. The wealthy industrialists were concerned with making people as productive and consistent as machines-- with making them like machines. But that's not easy to do. How do you take a tradesman and strip him of any pride he might have taken in being knowledgeable about his work, by giving him exhaustive instructions and no freedom in his methods; subject him to a manager breathing down his neck every minute; and impose the tedium of total uniformity and consistency?

Well, I'm not sure you can do it. But you can raise a child to accept it, if you put them through the right kind of schooling. Here is an excerpt from a talk by John Gatto (you will find the same information in his book, The Underground History of American Education):

Between 1906 and 1920, a handful of world famous industrialists and financiers, together with their private foundations, hand picked University administrators and house politicians, and spent more attention and more money toward forced schooling than the national government did. Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller alone spent more money than the government did between 1900 and 1920. In this fashion, the system of modern schooling was constructed outside the public eye and outside the public's representatives.

And what did Carnegie and Rockefeller have in mind? Here is how Rockefeller put it:

In our dreams... people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple... we will organize children... and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

By "in a perfect way," he meant, of course, as a scientifically managed person would do it. As a machine would do it. They wanted to design public schools to churn out workers amenable to scientific management, amenable to repetitive assembly line work, accepting of close supervision, no privacy, and unquestioning obedience.

To what extent did the robber barons succeed in reforming our public schools? I don't know, but I'll end with John Gatto's answer:

Schools were designed by Horace Mann and Barnard Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulae, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled.

To a very great extent schools succeed in doing this.

You may be a homeschooler

There seems to be this perception that I'm in for a huge amount of work because we've decided to homeschool our kids. Yet, consider what a child is expected to be able to do (ideally) before they start kindergarten. I've collected this list from our own school district and other similar websites:

• read and write their name
• know the capital letters and preferably the lowercase as well
• count to 20 and recognize written numbers up to 20
• give their full name, address, and phone number
• tie their shoes
• sing a few songs and recite a few nursery rhymes
• recognize colors and shapes
• understand the concepts of equal, less, and more
• use crayons, markers, paint, scissors, and paste
• get dressed, undressed, and go to the bathroom unaided
• identify rhyming words
• know the general times of day (morning, afternoon, night)
• bounce a ball

If you teach your kids all that, you're a homeschooler, but you probably don't call yourself one. Some kids come to school already reading, or already adding and subtracting, or possessing a veritable library of information about dinosaurs, and nobody calls it homeschooling. I don't feel daunted by the task ahead because it's the same task that's been going on for nearly 5 years-- I already am and have been a homeschooler. Why would I suddenly decide that I am no longer a worthy teacher? (Especially when statistics show that teacher certification of parents has no effect on academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, of homeschooled kids.)

I haven't considered it hard work to help A learn about the world so far. Most of the time my contribution consists of reading books and trying not to say "no" when she wants to get paint and playdoh all over the kitchen for the 5th day in a row. Lately, I've been hollering out "It's next to Mississippi" or "That's the capitol of Maine" while she plays her LeapPad US States game. (I didn't know that Charleston is the capitol of West Virginia-- I kept saying "It's in South Carolina!"-- and I still screw up Pierre and Bismarck, so in another week she'll probably know her capitols better than I do.) We certainly discuss the natural world and how words are spelled and so on, but if I get that "instructional" tone she changes the subject. I tried to volunteer something about the moon going around the earth a while back, and she said (rather peevishly) "I know Mom, I saw that on 'Blue's Clues' a long time ago."

At an on-line teacher's forum recently, a woman wrote in asking for suggestions to help teach 2- and 3-year-olds their colors. (Never mind that the 3-year-olds and most of the 2-year-olds probably already knew their colors.) People wrote in with suggestions like "I give them nametags of different colors, and then we read "Brown Bear Brown Bear" and when we get to the page with their color they stand up." Or, "I sing a little song where I call out a color and then sing 'If you're wearing the color I've found, stand up, turn around, and sit back down.'"

This is a bit silly. You teach a kid their colors by waiting until they're interested and then saying "This is the red one. And this one here? That's blue." What the above games really do is keep a group of small children occupied and under some semblance of control while tangentially relating it to colors, so the preschool can claim they're teaching something. (It's not clear to me that these games would be very effective in teaching colors in the first place, however.)

Yes, if I had to teach preschool or kindergarten and maintain control and gain the kids' attention, I'd be in over my head. No question. But teaching your own child is something every parent does, and it's not a Herculean effort, unless you impose an artificial schedule or try to force them to learn a topic they're not ready for. Unschooling avoids that kind of formality and externally imposed structure. Unschooling is simply a continuation of what my husband and I have done for years.

Edison and Einstein

We're visiting grandparents this week, so posting will be a bit light. I'm just going to throw up some quotes today.

Thomas Edison, inventor of moving pictures, the phonograph, the stock ticker, microphones, and incandescent lightbulbs, was homeschooled. As one author explains:

In 1854, Reverend G. B. Engle belittled one of his students, seven-year-old Thomas Alva Edison, as "addled." This out-raged the youngster, and he stormed out of the Port Huron, Michigan school, the first formal school he had ever attended. His mother, Nancy Edison, brought him back the next day to discuss the situation with Reverend Engle, but she became angry at his rigid ways. Everything was forced on the kids. She withdrew her son from the school where he had been for only three months and resolved to educate him at home.

I hadn't realized that Edison was also a prolific reader, and for instance, got so enthused over Les Miserables that friends took to calling him "Victor Hugo Edison". You can read more about Edison's "unschooling" education at the above link.

Edison's aide and co-worker, Martin Andre Rosanoff, said at Edison's funeral:

Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.

As for Einstein, I'll just include some of his words below and leave it at that.

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Disadvantaged children

I used to feel, as do most liberals and progressives, that it's poor (disproportionately minority) students who particularly need the public schools, moreso than middle class (often white) students. If we have public schools to promote egalitarianism and social mobility, then an assault on public schooling is primarily an assault on the economically disadvantaged. But-- perhaps due to funding inequalities, I really don't know-- the public schools are not particularly good at giving equal opportunities.

Among public school students in Virginia, white students test on average in the 60th percentile in math, compared to the 50th percentile for minority students. This math skills disparity is cut in half among homeschooled students, where whites average at the 82nd percentile and minorities in the 77th percentile. In reading, the disparity in public schools is similar, with whites testing at the 61st percentile and minorities at the 49th percentile; among homeschooled children there is no difference. Whites and minorities both average in the 87th percentile. Check out the details (and some nice charts) here.

As for socioeconomic status, it has a large effect on writing and math skills among public school students. While students whose parents have a college degree average in the 61st percentile in writing and the 63rd percentile in math, students whose parents never graduated from high school test only in the 34th percentile in writing and the 28th in math. Doesn't look to me like the public schools are doing a very good job of educating students equally. Among homeschooled students, children score in the 80's regardless of parents' level of education.

We don't have explicit "tracking" in US schools, as they do in Japan and Europe. But we have tracking all the same.

In an open letter of resignation, detailing the reasons why he could no longer teach public school in good conscience, John Gatto wrote:

David learns to read at age four; Rachel, at age nine: In normal development, when both are 13, you can't tell which one learned first -- the five-year spread means nothing at all. But in school I will label Rachel "learning disabled" and slow David down a bit, too.

For a paycheck, I adjust David to depend on me to tell him when to go and stop. He won't outgrow that dependency. I identify Rachel as discount merchandise, "special education." After a few months she'll be locked into her place forever.

In an interview, he describes discovering that a girl in the remedial reading class which he was substitute teaching could, in fact, read quite competently:

There was a reader on the teacher's desk, and she grabbed the reader and said, "Ask me to read anything." I cracked it open to a story called "The Devil and Daniel Webster," which is an extremely difficult piece of American Victorian prose. And she read it without batting an eyelash. I said to her, "You know, sometimes, Milagros, mistakes are made. I'll speak to the principal." I walked into the principal's office and the woman began shrieking at me, saying, "I'm not in the habit of taking instruction from a substitute teacher." I said, "I'm not telling you what to do. It's just that this little girl can read." And she said something to me that, at my dying moment, I'll still remember. She said, "Mr. Gatto, you have no idea how clever these low-achieving children are. They will memorize a story so that it looks as if they know how to read it." Talk about an Alice in Wonderland world! If that little girl had memorized "The Devil and Daniel Webster," then we want her in national politics! The principal said, "I will come in and show you." After school, she came in and put Milagros through her paces. The little girl did well. Then she told Milagros, "We will transfer you." And when Milagros left, the principal said to me, "You will never be hired at this school again."

(The interview is fascinating-- check it out!)

I do feel that the government has a responsibility to assist in the education of our children, for those ideals I mentioned at the start: to foster equality and social mobility, and of course, to have an educated populace. Where possible, it seems homeschooling is superior to formal schooling (and costs on average 1/10th what public schooling costs), but that should leave more funding and space for families who want assistance. I despair of trying to reform the current system. Gatto said, in his acceptance speech for the New York City Teacher of the Year award:

The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aids and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard the institution is psychopathic, it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell....

It isn't designed toward progressive ends; it's the Prussian model. Our children have less knowledge than schoolchildren in countries like Sweden, where school lasts only 9 years, not 13. Yet the answer is always more funding, longer days, more testing, earlier schooling, a longer school year. I don't think more of the same is the answer, anymore.

...and look where it got the Germans

According to John Taylor Gatto, a long-time public school teacher (in fact, Teacher of the Year for both New York City and New York State), we got our school system from the Prussians, back in the 19th century.

Gatto writes:

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

1. Obedient soldiers to the army;
2. Obedient workers to the mines;
3. Well subordinated civil servants to government;
4. Well subordinated clerks to industry
5. Citizens who thought alike about major issues.

Schools should create an artificial national consensus on matters that had been worked out in advance by leading German families and the head of institutions. Schools should create unity among all the German states, eventually unifying them into Greater Prussia.

Wealthy children did not attend Prussia's public schools, of course. But the 93% of the population who did attend them learned, for instance, to raise their hand and ask permission before asking a question. Studying was interrupted constantly by horns, at which point students switched to another subject-- a process deliberately designed to keep students from getting ahead, reading on their own, or studying independently. They were all taught the same history and the same concept of the Prussian nation to foster social cohesion. Gatto again:

There were many more techniques of training, but all were built around the premise that isolation from first-hand information, and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers, would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders. "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought.

Prussian industry boomed. I've always had the sense that the German people were peculiarly industrious, but I thought maybe they'd gotten a larger dose of the Protestant work ethic, or who knows, maybe it's in the Teutonic genes? I had no idea it resulted from the early (apparently, the first) use of state-controlled compulsory schooling.

Given the economic benefits of rigid, compulsory schooling, I guess it's no surprise it caught the attention of wealthy Americans. Gatto explains how scholars educated in Prussia, or businessmen who visited the country, began arguing for a similar school system in the US.

I have a lot more to say in a future post about the boon to corporations which public schools have historically represented. Rockefeller and his ilk donated heavily to the public schools and wielded their influence, emphasizing the scientific management (and careful avoidance of "over-education") of those little cogs in the machine which you and I know as our children. But to focus on a more serious drawback of Prussian-style schooling, as Gatto points out:

One of the ... by-products of Prussian schooling turned out to be the two most devastating wars of modern history. Erich Maria Ramarque, in his classic "All Quiet on the Wester Front" tells us that the First World War was caused by the tricks of schoolmasters, and the famous Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the Second World War was the inevitable product of good schooling.

It's important to underline that Bonhoeffer meant that literally, not metaphorically--schooling after the Prussian fashion removes the ability of the mind to think for itself. It teaches people to wait for a teacher to tell them what to do and if what they have done is good or bad. Prussian teaching paralyses the moral will as well as the intellect.

Someone told me recently that there are only two countries in the world who begin their (government-run) school day with a pledge of allegiance to the State, and they are the United States and North Korea. I haven't verified this-- it seems unlikely to me that there is not some such pledge in Chinese schools-- but you can see the kind of company we keep. I mean really, the Pledge is a bit... er, Prussian, is it not?

As for promoting social homogeneity, consider the emphasis on student appearance. Students have been suspended from school for the following:

• wearing a shirt that read "Barbie is a lesbian" (link)
• wearing a Pepsi shirt on "Coke Day" (link)
• having a nose stud (link)
• wearing a Korn t-shirt (link)
• wearing a White Zombie t-shirt (link)
  
• wearing an "Anarchy" t-shirt (link)
• wearing hijab (link)
• wearing an anti-gay t-shirt (link)
• wearing a pro-gay t-shirt (link)
• wearing a shirt reading "redneck sports fan" (link)
• wearing a trenchcoat (link)
• wearing a shirt bearing a photo of an M-16 (link)
• draping the Columbian flag over a backpack (link)
• wearing a vegan sweatshirt (link)
• wearing a Wiccan pentagram (link)
• wearing jeans with holes in them (link)
• wearing the Sikh turban (link)
• having copper-colored hair (link)
• having pink hair (link)
• having blue hair (link)

Some of these suspensions were overturned after the schools were contacted by the ACLU or after lawsuits found in favor of first amendment rights. But the vast majority of suspensions for non-conforming appearance never make it into the news, so the above list is the tiny tip of the iceburg.

Once I knew about the creepy origins of our style of public schooling, things like the Pledge, the dress code, and everyone responding in unison to the sound of a bell started to seem a bit frightening.

On the last day my daughter attended preschool, I was there for the last 15 minutes, during which the boy who was "leader" that day got to show something he'd brought in. He held up a toy helicopter, said something about it, and then drew little laminated nametags out of a can. If your name got drawn, you asked a question about the helicopter-- whether you wanted to or not. Three names were drawn, and if yours wasn't one of them, you never got to ask your question at all. The more I think about this the more bizarre I find it to be. They are teaching children that asking a question is a privilege bestowed not merely by an authority but actually at random. Meanwhile the best questions most often go unasked. What is the point of the names in the can? I can't think of any, except to teach them: Don't ask questions unless you're told to ask a question.

Other things that occurred were: they danced in unison to prescribed steps, they were gently admonished to stay silent, and they lined up at the door in the order in which the teacher tapped them. Gives me a chill down my spine, and makes me have serious doubts about that awful word, "socialization." It's like when you hear someone talking about "school readiness" and what they mean is a kid who knows how to sit down, shut up, and ask permission before peeing.

Remember the Gatto quote above: "Lesser" men would be unable to interfere with policy makers because, while they could still complain, they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought.

It seems to have been fairly effective. 35% of publicly schooled adults say that politics and government are too complicated to understand. Among homeschool graduates, only 4% agree. While 76% of homeschoolers aged 18 to 24 have voted in the past 5 years, only 29% of the general 18-to-24 population have voted. (See here for details.)

All this makes for a dangerous situation. Sometimes I feel like one more 9.11 and it's all over, it's martial law and sealed borders and anti-sedition laws all over again. And I have to wonder what role the public schools have played in making us a population of "sheeple," as they say.

Founding Fathers on public schooling

I wanted to write about the history of public schooling for a few posts, because I've recently discovered that the original design and intent of public schools was not at all what I had thought.

What I had thought was this: We have public education because we want to build an egalitarian, democratic, socially mobile society, and to have an educated populace.

But some of the evidence of those supposed ideals is a little... off, somehow:

By... [selecting] the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor, we hope to avail the State of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich, but which perish without use if not sought for and cultivated.

--Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

Yes, he says genius is found equally among the poor and the rich, which sounds noble and egalitarian. But it turns out he only intended to provide secondary education to 20 boys per year from among the poor, and fully educate 10-- and even that was in order "to avail the State of those talents." As Jefferson put it:

By this means twenty of the best geniusses will be raked from the rubbish annually.

Hmmm.

He also said:

Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree.

I think it is relevant to remember that the Founding Fathers to a large extent feared the unwashed masses and the possibility of mob rule. The people cannot safeguard their own liberty "unless enlightened to a certain degree," and thus Jefferson proposed insuring literacy with three years of formal education guaranteed to any boy whose parents chose to send him to public school. But this education was only guaranteed "to a certain degree," since Jefferson also believed:

The mass of our citizens may be divided into two classes -- the laboring and the learned. The laboring will need the first grade of education to qualify them for their pursuits and duties; the learned will need it as a foundation for further acquirements.

I think Jefferson was more concerned here with maintaining the fledgling Republic (and the fledgling Republic's economy, perhaps) than with educating the people for their own sake.

I do think Jefferson had noble ideals, though he was a bit more aristocratic than they tell you about in high school. But some of the Founding Fathers were-- there's no other way to put this-- positively fascist about public education. Consider Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence, later a Congressman, and America's most prominent physician at that time. In 1786, he wrote Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, which included these suggestions:

The principle of patriotism stands in need of the reinforcement of prejudice, and it is well known that our strongest prejudices in favor of our country are formed in the first one and twenty years of our lives.
...
Our schools of learning, by producing one general and uniform system of education, will render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.
...
Next to the duty which young men owe to their Creator, I wish to see a SUPREME REGARD TO THEIR COUNTRY [caps in original] inculcated upon them.... Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.
...
In the education of youth, let the authority of our masters be as absolute as possible.... By this mode of education, we prepare our youth for the subordination of laws and thereby qualify them for becoming good citizens of the republic. I am satisfied that the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age....

Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe inculcating students with patriotism, civic duty and obedience isn't so bad. Time magazine, in their feature story on homeschooling, summarized it thusly: "Thomas Jefferson and the other early American crusaders for public education believed the schools would help sustain democracy by bringing everyone together to share values and learn a common history."

To share values. (Which values?)

To learn a common history. (Which interpretation of history?)

If you feel there is nothing at all wrong with these goals, I include the quotes below as food for thought.

It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them a consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.

--Benito Mussolini; from "The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism," 1932.


Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.

--Bernhard Rust, Nazi Minister of Education; from "Racial Instruction and the National Community," 1935.

Why?

I hope to write many posts about why we've chosen to homeschool our two kids (A, our 4-year-old daughter, and T, our 9-month-old son). There are studies showing homeschooled kids do better academically, there are problems with the historical foundation of public schooling, and there's evidence that "socialization" is superior for homeschooled kids. I've got data to cite, I've got essays to link to, I've got arguments to make.

But today I just want to mention some personal experiences that make me glad we're homeschooling (unschooling, in fact). These add up after a while:

• On numerous occasions from 3rd to 7th grade I got in trouble for reading ahead.
• I repeatedly got in trouble for doing math problems "the wrong way," regardless of what method I had used or the fact that my answer was correct.
  
• In 3rd grade, my brother was told to re-do a writing assignment and remove the slang and the dialogue, because they had not yet been taught quote marks or apostrophes (which he had used correctly), and those were therefore not allowed.
• I was told "you can't have" 2 minus 3, which I found confusing since I knew that made negative 1.
• I failed to understand divisibility because I knew about fractions and thought, for instance, that 6 was divisible by 4 because the answer was six fourths. I was merely told that I wasn't supposed to know about fractions yet, which was hardly helpful.
  
• In 2nd grade my brother was told to re-do a spelling assignment and write one sentence per word, after he had painstakingly crafted a legitimate sentence which incorporated all ten spelling words.
• In 5th grade my teacher told us it took 1,000 years for the sun's light to reach Earth (it actually takes 8 minutes).
  
• My 5th grade teacher also said the great pyramids had been built 1,000 years ago. She was off by three millenia, give or take a few centuries.
• I learned the exact same material in math in the 5th, 6th, and 7th grades. The exact same material.
• A friend was told by her 5th grade teacher that she could not become a fire fighter when she grew up because she was a girl.
  
• I was made to write a letter to my parents, along with all my 5th-grade classmates, apologizing for having cried as a baby.
• In 8th grade, on the first day of algebra class, I volunteered three answers in a row. This made me such a social pariah that not only did I not volunteer answers in math class again until college, but when called on I deliberately gave the wrong answer.
• I lied to classmates who asked my grade on math exams, downgrading my A's to B's or C's, to avoid getting nasty looks. I sometimes asked teachers not to write my grade on the front of my test.
• I could not study poetry in school as I was too uncomfortable there, poetry was too personal, and I cared about it far too much. When assigned to choose a favorite poem and read it aloud to the class, I told my teacher not to call on me as I was taking a zero for that assignment.
• My class read Great Expectations when I was 13. I thought it was boring, depressing, and took forever to read (not that I finished it), and I developed an unfair dislike of Dickens. To this day I have never read an entire Dickens novel.
  
• I was also assigned The Odyssey and The Iliad at age 13. Ask me what I think of Homer.
• In high school, my brother got in trouble for reading while he was supposed to be watching commercials on TV. Seriously. It was part of the Channel One program, in which schools sell their students' attention to advertisers, in return for AV equipment and money.
  

And so I learned that I should be careful not to get ahead of the lesson plan (I got that message from both teachers and students). That reading is almost never appropriate, and when it is, someone should read aloud, so others can follow along in unison, typically at a mind-numbing snail's pace. That being too enthusiastic is socially disastrous and unlikely to please the instructor in any case. That I hated certain authors-- not that I would hate them now, but somehow, isn't it odd, I never happen to pick up their works.

This is to say nothing of the cognitive dissonance which occurs when you traipse home to tell your parents about (say) Christopher Columbus, only to discover that your parents possess an utterly contradictory set of facts. I've checked out Columbus for myself. Turns out nothing they taught us in school was correct except the names of the ships and the year.

The social lessons were probably the worst: that girls shouldn't be too smart, shouldn't bring up odd conversation topics, should be skinny and quiet and smile all the time, shouldn't ever be angry, should know how to protect the fragile egos of adolescent boys. In short, that the female ideal is to be less. Less of everything.

It's not just what my children will learn at home that I'm looking forward to. It's what they won't learn.