Not School

End of this blog

2006-09-13T20:26:00.000-04:00

I have started a new blog, which will include posts about schooling and homeschooling, but will have a broader focus. Some posts will be like the ones here, some will be about my other interests: alternative health / medicine, macroeconomics, a few bits of history, some stuff about our food supply and cooking, and politics.

To me this all ties together because schooling teaches us not to think for ourselves, not to think critically, to trust the experts absolutely, to purchase services from specialists rather than attempt the work ourselves... in short, it erodes our personal competence. My new blog will be about trying to think for myself and get that personal competence back.

The first post could've gone here, though-- it's on John Holt's How Children Fail.

A born skeptic

2006-08-15T20:33:00.000-04:00

When my dad was a little kid, as our family tells the story, he never believed in Santa Claus. When he was 3 or 4, and relatives tried to talk him into believing, he couldn't be convinced. Apparently the whole thing seemed absurd, and he refused to play along. I think some of his "skeptic" genes have filtered down into my daughter.

She did formerly believe-- or at least, it appeared she did-- in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the bunny who brings pastel-foiled Hershey's kisses. But she always had many questions, and it was getting harder and harder to answer those questions. She'd reason: "The Easter Bunny can't be huge because there's no such thing as giants, but if he's little how can he carry the baskets?" Or, out of the blue: "So how does Santa really get in the house? Because no way could he fit down our chimney, and anyway, lots of people don't even have chimneys." Or: "What does the Tooth Fairy want with my teeth?"

[As an aside, the radio show This American Life, which I dearly love, once asked kids what they thought the tooth fairy did with all those teeth. One kid said she built houses out of them. The interviewer asked, "Why doesn't she just use bricks?" And the kid replied, "Because people don't grow brick teeth!"]

So, my husband and I have been having these increasingly uncomfortable conversations about various imaginary characters who come bearing gifts in the middle of the night. I've developed the theory that this was a way for parents to give gifts on special occasions without having to deal with any requests or pleading afterward. Santa only comes on the night of December 24th, so if he brings you candy canes and you eat them all in 2 days, well, that's your loss. He's not coming again until next year and it's no use nagging Mom. Quite a tidy solution, really. But I was starting to feel like I was really lying to my kid, and not in a fun way. It was starting to seem like pointless deception which she found frustrating and which required mental gymnastics on my part. I was wondering how long I was expected to keep this up. And I was remembering how, when I was a kid, I pretended to believe in Santa for at least two Christmases after I had caught on, because I was afraid my parents would be disappointed if I revealed that I was in on the joke.

Anyway, a few weeks back, under intense grilling about the Tooth Fairy, my husband finally cracked. He reluctantly admitted that no, there wasn't any Tooth Fairy. Within about 2 minutes Anya had reckoned that there wasn't any Easter Bunny or Santa Claus either. You might think she would have been disappointed or even peeved that we'd hoodwinked her all along. Instead she seemed relieved, and laughed and gave us a sly look, as in "Good joke and all, but give me a break-- a bunny who hides eggs?" Our claims about Santa and bunnies and fairies actually distressed her, I think. They were inconsistent and bizarre, not to mention that if Santa were real, then why not ghosts, dragons, and mummies?

And then, a couple of days ago, we had this conversation:

Anya: I saw this woman that had one of those necklaces on with that cross thing that means, "Believe in a god." [Scoffing noise and eye roll]
Me: So, you don't believe there's any god?
Anya: No. I mean, have any astronauts ever seen a god? No! There's nothing up there but the moon, and there's no air on the moon.

Anya thinks of "gods" in the plural, because her first exposure to the concept of deities came from learning about ancient Egypt. To her the cross means you believe in a god, any god. And so far it looks like gods fall into the same category as poltergeists, elves, and goblins.

Why schools don't teach economics

2006-08-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

"The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the Revolutionary War." - Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography

You may have heard it said that all wars are fought over economics. Certainly it is not possible to understand the history of the world without knowing something about economics, and I don't mean the simple concept of supply and demand influencing prices. Macroeconomics makes the world go 'round.

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling the money and its issuance." - President James Madison

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - banker Mayer Amschel Rothschild [then one of the most powerful men in Europe], 1790

Yet they don't so much as say the word macroeconomics in most high schools, nor teach any of its principles, not even in history class when it is of critical importance. They tell you what GDP is, perhaps, but it's more of a vocab term than anything. Most people are never introduced to global economics in college, either.

Here's one of the open secrets that are carefully not taught in the public schools: where our money comes from. I don't mean physical paper and coins. Of all the US dollars in existence-- in people's savings and checking accounts, in cash registers, in money market accounts and CD's, and sitting in foreign bank accounts-- of that enormous total, only around 6 or 7% actually exists as paper and coins. Most money is just a line in a spreadsheet somewhere. And even if you're holding a piece of paper, it doesn't represent anything concrete. It's not tied to gold or silver. Money these days is just zeroes and ones.

The total Amount of Dollars increases over time. For one thing, the US population increases, and much of the time people are also growing wealthier. That means the Amount of Dollars (known as the money supply) has to increase, too. More obviously, there's inflation: that $2 loaf of bread used to cost 10 cents; so there must be more money floating around now. Presumably the American government "prints" new money to accomodate the growing economy, right?

The Constitution would give a hearty "Yes!" to that question, but alas, the Constitution has been routinely ignored on this point since shortly after the Revolution. The US government does not make new money. The private banks make new money-- and they make it out of thin air.

There are two ways this magical money creation occurs. Both of them are difficult to believe.

Here's the first way [note: I edited this example in response to emtel's corrections in the comments; please see comments for further info]. Let's say I deposit $10,000 in a savings account. The bank can loan out 90% of what was actually deposited in its vaults. Thus, by repeated loans between various accounts and banks, they can multiply that original deposit by a factor of 10. I don't know how they decided on the 10 to 1 rule, but it's been that way since the 18th century. So, I put in my $10,000, and the bank can turn around tomorrow and loan $9,000 to my neighbor Joe. Joe then takes his loan and buys a car, and the car dealer deposits $9,000 in his account.

I've got $10,000 and a deposit slip to prove it. The car dealer has $9,000 and a deposit slip to prove it. $9,000 just got conjured into existence because some loan officer entered the numbers 9 0 0 0 into the system. Bam! 9 big ones, out of nowhere. And, on down the line after a series of such loans, and the banks could be holding deposits of close to $100,000, all originating in my 10K deposit.

And now Joe's paying the bank interest on that loan. You know... because the bank did all that hard work coming up with his $9,000. I sure wish I could conjure money and then loan it to people with interest-- whoo boy, I'd be rich fast!

If the banks do this too much, of course, they flood the country with too many dollars and each individual dollar starts to be worth less. This is called inflation. People also use that money to buy tons of goods made in foreign lands-- buying way more, in fact, then we sell to them, because we Americans are so cash-happy. This is called a trade deficit. Both inflation and the trade deficit are now getting out of hand, which in this case is due to credit card and mortgage lending which definitely got out of hand. The banks have been grossly irresponsible, and it isn't going to end well. We may likely see the collapse of the dollar. The rich won't mind, of course, because their money isn't in dollars.

The second way money comes into existence is when the government needs money. Let's say the government wants to spend more money than it's taking in. Let's say they're short by a billion dollars. The Constitution says they can simply create a billion dollars at will because they control the money presses. But J P Morgan says otherwise. The 1913 Federal Reserve Act which created the privately owned "Federal Reserve" says otherwise (the federal part is meant to be funny-- ha ha ha!).

What the government actually does is they print Treasury bonds, which are government IOU's. They print Treasury bonds-- just pieces of paper, really-- and they take them over to the Federal Reserve Bank on bended knee and beg the Fed to please buy the T-bonds so they can have their billion dollars.

The Federal Reserve is, let me say again, not a government entity, but rather a cartel of private banks. JP Morgan Chase owns the largest share of stocks (not that you can buy any stocks in the Fed, because it isn't publicly traded, naturally). JP Morgan Chase and Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs and the Rockefellers and some foreign banks all own the Fed. Yes, the government appoints chairmen and governors, but the appointees are bankers themselves, and in the end it's the banks that have to 'abra cadabra' the money into existence. As I said, that whole "Federal" bit in the title is just for laughs.

These private banks take the government's IOU's (T-bonds) and give the government money, charging them interest. You will see, if you pull out a paper dollar, that it reads "Federal Reserve Note" at the top. John F. Kennedy attempted to introduce an actual government currency tied to silver, under sole control of the US government, known as United States Notes. He did this by Executive Order. They started printing this true US currency, but Kennedy was assassinated some weeks later, and LBJ reversed the executive order and destroyed all United States Notes. President Lincoln also tried to introduce a true US currency, the Greenback, but I guess we know how that ended.

Not only do the banks control the issuance of new money, but the government owes interest to the private banks, because they've had to give them interest-paying Treasury bonds just to get their hands on some cash. It's exactly like my neighbor Joe owing interest on his $9K car loan, even though all the bank had to do was wave a wand. This interest the government pays on new money is a major reason we have a national debt. Have you ever heard someone say we owe that debt "to ourselves"? That's BS. The taxpayers owe that money to JP Morgan Chase and their ilk, because the private banks are the only ones who can issue money, and then they charge us for it! They charge us for doing what the Constitution says only the government can do.

The banks are stealing from us, individually and as a nation. They are flat out robbing us.

"The few who understand the system, will either be so interested in its profits, or so dependent on its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending [these] tremendous advantages...will bear its burden without complaint, and perhaps without suspecting that the system is inimical to their best interests." - Rothschild Brothers of London communiqué to associates in New York June 25, 1863

"It is well enough that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning." - Henry Ford

You might ask what happens when the people come to the banks and request money, but the banks refuse. What happens if they won't make any more money?

From 1929 to 1933 the money supply, the Amount of Dollars, shrank by a third. Milton Friedman blamed the Great Depression on this lack of money; he blamed the Federal Reserve. If there isn't enough money entering the system, people can't buy things, and the economy can't recover. Some people will tell you the rich bankers did this intentionally. First they threw money around like it was water throughout the 1920's, and then when their cash-happy bubble burst and money was desperately needed, they clammed up and gave America the cold shoulder. This allowed them to buy up other people's assets at pennies on the dollar. It allowed them to steal land gotten through foreclosure, foreclosure caused in part by their own misuse of the money supply.

"Capital must protect itself in every possible manner.... Debts must be collected; bonds and mortgages must be foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through a process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed... by a central power of wealth under control of leading financiers." - USA Banker's Magazine, August 25 1924

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations... will deprive the people of their property, until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson

What a singular success for the wealthy elites that knowledge of macroeconomics is not considered a necessary part of being "educated". The robber baron fathers of the public schools have made sure almost none of us know that we're being robbed blind.

Why we don't use a curriculum

2006-07-28T12:01:00.000-04:00

[This post started off as a comment I left on Hawksbill & Barbnocity's blog....]

Most of the unschooling families we know use some kind of curriculum, albeit on their own schedule, and with modifications. I asssume that non-unschoolers are even more likely to use curricula. But I've been very resistant to the idea.

For one thing, I don't believe in an academic canon that every educated person should know. The world is a gigantic place, and any canon is necessarily limiting. The idea of "universal knowledge" has historically been used for elitist and exclusionary purposes, particularly by the 19th century aristocracy in their attempt to cling to privilege in the face of the "new money" merchant class. I also think that defining the "important" knowledge is inevitably ethnocentric when it comes to history, geography, politics, or the arts.

I've also accepted that my kids are going to specialize in certain fields long before they ever get to college, which means a curriculum could only ever be supplementary. When we first decided to homeschool, I read every homeschooling blog I could get my hands on, and for a couple of weeks I was freaked out. I would read about a 9-year-old obsessed with astronomy, a 13-year-old Shakespeare afficionado, the 8-year-old who loved algebra, etc, and I would conglomerate all these talents into one imaginary Genius Homeschooler. Eventually I realized that homeschooled kids have freedom to pursue their interests, and they retain more of their natural desire to learn, therefore there is no way they're all going to learn the same set of facts and skills. I had to let go of my old schooly idea of "education" as one particular set of knowledge, everything else being merely a hobby. I began to realize that my kids would know more than other kids in a few areas, and less than other kids in many areas. Just like adults. Who decided specialization shouldn't occur until college, anyway?

I do encourage math and reading, but I see those as tools we are picking up along the way, not as the main topics of study. Anya can read words like "heart," "brain," and "caudal fin" because she's obsessed with her books about fish; other words and true reading will follow because they are useful to her. I've told her numerous times that scientists use a ton of math, and if she's going to be an icthyologist she'll need to keep learning math. These tools get picked up while she pursues her own particular interests, and it would be a lot harder to teach these things in any other context.

I believe that learning is the weaving of new data into a sort of mental narrative of the world, a narrative which is unique to each person. This web of accumulated knowledge is most efficient if it is allowed to develop organically, using whatever connections come naturally to that person. A curriculum organizes information on your behalf; it draws connections between topics on your behalf. And if today's Study Unit is ancient Egypt, that discourages you from going off reading about the domestication of cats or the Aztec pyramids, because that would mean interrupting today's lesson.

I am constantly noticing how everything relates to everything else. Recently Anya asked me about Canadian money; then we talked about why no women were on American coins; I explained that men have more power now but that was not true 30,000 years ago; then we Googled Queen Elizabeth II, which led to more Googling of famous crowns, scepters, and jewels; which took us to geology and mining, and touched on economics (rarity = higher value). Oh, and Persia came into it as well, as their crowns put European crowns to shame. I don't want to interfere with this intense linking of concepts (and neurons) which I witness on an hourly basis. Even the most Waldorf and informal curricula still imply that "Now is the time to discuss X, we'll get to Y later..." which is in some sense preventing connections from occurring.

I know that unschoolers use curricula mostly for suggestions, but it seems to me that if you follow a kid's stream of consciousness you wind up touching on most everything. I can barely keep up with Anya's curiosity-- I don't need suggestions!

Some Anya quotes

2006-07-19T19:26:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the kids were playing together, getting riled up and being silly and laughing hysterically. Then it sort of died down, and from the other room I overheard this:

Anya: You're a pretty nice baby, aren't you.
Tristan: Uh-huh!
Anya: Yeah, you're pretty nice.
Tristan: Uh-huh!
Anya: You're not a very smart baby, I'm sorry to say.

I had a good laugh at that one....

She uses this new tone now, best described as "let me break this to you gently." She used that tone a few weeks ago when we were getting ready for a family party at my parents' house. My dad had been outside doing some last-minute yard work and getting chairs out and so on, and he was still wearing his old grungy clothes. Anya came up to him and saw the holes in his jeans, and said: "Pop, those pants look really good on you, but I'm not sure they would be polite to wear to a get-together."

And a few days ago I was brushing my hair and she came into the bathroom and said "Mom, you look beau-- well, you look pretty good." Gee, thanks, kiddo! =)

Deschooling math

2006-07-06T21:04:00.000-04:00

This morning Anya and I sprawled on the floor with the Magnadoodle and I wrote out a math problem: 12 + 14, written vertically. We haven't done math in a month, but there was a brief time when she could do two-digit addition. In fact, she did a few pages worth. She'd draw a vertical line to separate the tens and ones, and add each column separately.

But this morning she couldn't remember how to add 12 and 14, and I knew why. I had known all along that she wasn't understanding the tens and ones places, and she didn't see that 12 + 14 is just 10 + 10 + 2 + 4, or 20 + 6, or 26. She certainly didn't see that our vertical addition algorithm is nothing more than a short-cut for this regrouping process. So of course she didn't remember it. It takes more than three or four worksheets to memorize an algorithm that makes no sense to you.

Interestingly, this morning she did attempt to break the numbers down into parts that were easier to add. She divided both 12 and 14 in half, and tried to add 6 + 7 + 6 + 7. Unfortunately, she was then stuck with 13 + 13, which got her nowhere-- but it was the right idea.

Then she told me she was going to write down the "close answer" (close as in near). She said "It won't be exactly right but it's the close answer." And she wrote 24 underneath, because she knows two dozen is 24 and since 14 is close to 12, the answer must be close to 24.

We did another problem, 35 + 43, and Anya tried to figure it out by determining how many fives there were in 43 and then trying to count up from 35 by that many fives. She did count that it took eight 5s to get to 40, but got frustrated by not knowing what to do with the 3, and somehow that idea fizzled out.

All of these attempts (and other variations she tried) required more thought and more advanced math, such as dividing 43 by 5, than if she had remembered the cookbook rules. If kids memorize those rules too early, and spend their remaining time on mere quality control (speed and accuracy), this prevents them from understanding math. But most classrooms aren't designed for allowing the natural logic of arithmetic to be discovered. Math manipulatives are often used in early grades, but when "the rules" must be memorized before many kids are developmentally ready to deduce those rules or truly understand them, the manipulatives thing becomes lip service. Kids will learn to get the right answer the same way that I make my car run without knowing a thing about the engine. Follow the rules and forget what's happening inside the black box-- just like working the assembly line, not coincidentally.

Going back to this morning-- at another point we were playing with marbles. I made a grid of 12 marbles, in 3 rows of 4, and showed it to Anya. If you look at it that way, it's obvious why 3 x 4 is the same as 4 x 3. One way it's 3 rows of 4 and the other way it's 4 columns of 3, but it's 12 marbles either way. (This also comes up with legos: is it a 2 x 4 piece, or a 4 x 2 piece? Either way it's got 8 dots.) I also showed Anya why 3 x 3 is called "3 squared," since you literally make a 3 by 3 square. Anya got some marbles and quickly figured out that she couldn't take ten marbles and make a multiplication problem using 4, because you can't make even rows of 4 with exactly 10 marbles. (I resisted using the term "divisible," since it won't sink in until she's run into this issue a number of times.) And a while back, she figured out (by playing with plastic circles cut into different fractions) that you can't make a fraction equal to one half unless you have an even number of pieces, which means the number on the bottom has to be even.

In contrast, I don't think I understood multiple-digit arithmetic until at least three years after I had, as far as the school was concerned, mastered these concepts. One day I was thinking about dimes and pennies and I suddenly realized what borrowing and carrying were all about, that it was simply a matter of changing in too many pennies or changing a dime for needed pennies. It would have been a lot easier to have had that revelation at the start. Another example: it was only in the last year that I realized why the area of a right triangle is 1/2 the base times the height, and that is the simplest thing imaginable. A right triangle is always half a rectangle, and what's the formula for the area of a rectangle? Duh. It's embarrassing, but see, I had no trouble memorizing the formula, and then I just never thought about it again. I'd see a right triangle and "1/2bh" would leap to mind, and that was the end of that thought process. So, at best the rules are unrelated to real understanding; at worst, they prevent real comprehension.

One of the more common questions voiced by those who don't homeschool is the whole "What about math?" thing. I suspect they believe memorization and repetition is the only way to learn math because, again, the rules don't make any sense and can't be arrived at organically. I suppose this is why most people hate story problems: because story problems make it harder to determine which set of memorized rules to apply. They try to make you think about the concepts involved, but many people never had a chance to grasp those concepts.

Death by a thousand conversations

2006-07-04T20:42:00.000-04:00

I'm someone who believes that in general, you shouldn't ask kids to do something unless you have a good reason. And that you should be willing to explain your reasons to them, for their sake but also for your own sake. I'm an Alfie Kohn devotee, and I believe from my own experience (and Kohn's books) that external motivations, i.e. threats and bribes, don't work well in the long term. So, I explain, and I explain, and I explain.

And because we're unschooling, whenever Anya has a question, I explain... and explain further. She's a chatterbug, and I'm sure that this is helpful long-term, because she learns a lot from our conversations.

But I get bone-weary from all this discussion. How do tornadoes happen? Why can't you make a cake out of only sugar and eggs and milk and no flour? What do spies do? What's a war? Oh, and could you make sure your answer is understandable to 6-year-olds, avoid anything scary, and condense your response to no more than 5 sentences?

After a while my brain goes numb.

Having given you that context, I had what you might call a 'parenting failure' today-- hardly a rare event, I admit. It happened like this:

Me: Anya, you've been out of the bath for a half hour, will you get dressed, please?

Anya: Why should I?

Me: Because we don't want your butt showing all day.

Anya: I think I have a cute butt.

Me: You do have a cute butt, but I don't want to look at it all day.

Anya: So don't look.

Me: Listen, will you just put on underwear, at least? As a favor to me?

Anya: Will you just do me a favor and stop asking me to put on underwear?

Me: Someone might come to the door, you need to at least have underwear on.

Anya: Okay, if someone comes to the door, I'll run upstairs and put underwear on.

Me: Look, it's not normal to go around naked all day, all right?

Anya: Well, it's normal for me!

Me: You need to wear some clothes. People wear clothes for a reason.

Anya: Like what reason?

Me, losing it: I AM YOUR MOTHER AND YOU WILL DO WHAT I SAY! GO AND PUT ON UNDERWEAR!

Oy vey.

A different sort of learning

2006-07-02T21:52:00.000-04:00

Even though I consider myself an unschooler, there are times when I get antsy because we aren't doing daily math and reading lessons, or because Anya used to know where all 50 states were and has now forgotten half of them. For instance, my husband's relatives from down south are coming up to visit, and I find myself wishing Anya were reading.

At times like that, I have to remind myself of all the stuff Anya's learning that doesn't "count" as learning in a school setting. Stuff she learns because she's with me all day, and can ask questions whenever they pop into her head. Stuff like:

What a "chain reaction" is
How to count using 4 vertical scratch marks + one diagonal mark, in groups of five
What an electrical outlet "adapter" is (e.g. one that converts 1 plug into 3 plugs)
That the water should be boiling before the noodles go in
What hit points, armor class, constitution, and charisma are (for you DnD fans)
How soccer is called football everywhere on earth except the US
What weddings and wedding rings are all about
What ear mites are (in cats)
Why hot and humid is worse than hot and dry
That heavier letters need more stamps
What a gift card is
What abstract art is
Words like violet, teal, chartreuse, army green
The Chinese symbol for "rain"
What "hold your horses," "fit as a fiddle," and "you're a goner" mean

There are probably 200 other figures of speech I could add to that last item, if I could recall them. Lately Anya is fascinated by idiomatic expressions, and will stop you and ask questions if you happen to use one. Also, her choice of words is getting more creative, and often sounds strange to adult ears. She was dialing a phone number the other day and said "Mom, I can't remember how it goes... could you direct me to the numbers?" Or, when she was painting: "I made the symbol, and then I put my style around it." I made toast one morning and she called to me: "Mommmm-- the toast ejected!" She has a decent vocabulary, which is no surprise since she talks to me All. Day. Long. But I don't get to call that "teaching," and if I measure against a traditional school curriculum, creative word choice doesn't count for anything.

Anya spends a lot of time watching her goldfish, captured bugs, bugs outside, birds in the yard, etc. She's absorbing a lot of information about animals, but not necessarily the kind of data you can form into multiple choice questions. I've learned a lot, too, including that science texts and our society in general tend to underestimate animals (including young humans, while I'm on this topic). Many insects, for instance, wash themselves in a manner that is not unlike a cat washing itself. They rub themselves all over with their front legs, including brushing off their antennae. Who knew? (Non-insect bugs don't do this, as they are dumb as a doornail in my experience.) And our goldfish are affectionate with each other. I am sure there is a scientific explanation for the fish remaining within an inch or two of one another, even though we have a 5-gallon tank; and for brushing each other with their extra-long tail fins. It's a schooling instinct, or perhaps it keeps the algae off their scales. I am sure there is also a scientific explanation for the fish zooming through the shower of air bubbles from the bubble wand at the back of their tank, then shooting through the rock tunnel and back into the bubbles again, one following the other. There's just more oxygen above the bubble wand, and they like the rock tunnel because they instinctively seek shelter. But Anya and I know that the fish enjoy each other's company, and that they play together. You'll never read that in an academic book, since academics have a positive terror of being accused of anthropomorphizing. (My father-in-law, a consummate academic, once accused me of anthropomorphizing when I was talking about a human being.) So, Anya's learning that you can't take a whole species and collapse it into three sentences in a biology text. Those texts are very useful, and we look stuff up in books and online all the time, but there is also the wonder of the natural world, which can't be scrunched into "Chapter 4: Aquatic Vertebrates." I count this as learning, too.

But I still wish Anya could read. I just can't help it.

Destroying summer vacation

2006-06-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

I ran across an opinion piece today, in the New York Times, which introduced me to the notion of "vacation homework" during summertime:

Last summer, for example, students at one charter school in the Bronx were assigned 10 book reports, a thick math packet, a report on China including a written essay and a handmade doll in authentic costume, and a daily log of their activities and the weather.

These were kids who'd just finished first grade.

And that daily log of activities-- yeah, so the school can snoop on your family all summer long. I don't think I could stand it. Possibly I'd keep a parody of a log myself, and have my kid turn that in:

June 23. Had a lovely breakfast with Father before he departed for work. Studied spelling words until 11am, tidied my room, made sandwiches for lunch. Took darling little brother out to the sandbox to give Mummy a bit of a rest. Jogged, did a few math problems, and set the table for dinner (delicious and healthy-- thanks Mum!). Read Dickens until 8:30 and then off to bed. Another blissful day!

I mean, what happened to privacy? Do the parents all get to read the teacher's daily log for the summer, too?

The NYT piece goes on:

And what about high schoolers — just a little light reading to ease teenage angst? One ninth grader we know was assigned a packet of materials on the Holocaust. Another must read a 656-page book on genocide, on top of three chapters of a science textbook followed by a 15-page take-home exam, prepare a 20-slide PowerPoint presentation and complete an English assignment involving three books and essays.

The authors point out that kids need vacation time to reduce stress, but even if we restrict ourselves to purely academic goals, kids still need down time for "consolidation." Consolidation is a psychologist's term for the period when recently acquired information gets woven in with what we already knew, linked up to our prior knowledge, and is therefore retained. If you never get a resting period where consolidation can occur, all you have is short-term memorization. In my opinion most of school relies on short-term memorization. Possibly this is why the "skills" students supposedly learn are so fragile and transient that they don't make it through the summer: because they keep you so ludicrously busy that there's no time to ever consolidate the new data. In any case, more homework isn't the solution.

Actually, homework is highly dubious even during the school year:

In fact, there's serious doubt about whether homework has any benefit at all. Most studies have found little or no correlation between homework and achievement (meaning grades and test scores) in elementary school or middle school. According to Harris Cooper of Duke University, the nation's leading researcher on the subject, there is a clear correlation among high school students, but he warns that "overloading them with homework is not associated with higher grades."

. . .

In fact, most experts believe reading is the most important educational activity. Yet a poll released last week by Scholastic and Yankelovich found that the amount of time youngsters spend reading for fun declines sharply after age 8. The No. 1 reason given by parents: too much homework.

Yes, it's hard to get an education when you're living with ever-present schooling.

It seems to me that parents should band together and refuse to have their kids do any of the summer homework. If even a quarter of the class did that, they'd have to make some radical changes, and those kids would get a real summer.

A good old-fashioned work stoppage is what's in order.

You call that reform?

2006-06-19T21:05:00.000-04:00

I wandered over to the National Education Association's website today, and found this:

NEA advocates for public school reforms that we know make a difference in boosting student achievement. Among them:

free, universal preschool

smaller class sizes

a qualified and caring teacher in every classroom

a challenging curriculum

ample resources for all public schools, including those that serve poor and minority students

involved parents

Wow. That is the most gutless, uninspiring piece of milquetoast I've seen in a while. The only new idea is universal preschool, and here the alleged benefits are not supported by research data. Children in poverty do benefit from pre-kindergarten education, but that's why we have Head Start. Some middle-class children may experience a slight academic benefit, but also tend to be hindered in their social development. And kids with highly educated parents do better, on the average, when they don't attend preschool at all.

The rest of the list are no-brainers. It's like a politician who says he supports More Jobs, Less Crime, and National Security. It's a pointless thing to say. It gets us nowhere in terms of real action. Sure, the NEA supports smaller class sizes. Who doesn't? The NEA supports ample resources-- what a novel goal!

How about these ideas:

Stop using standardized tests.
Fire a third of all school administrators.
Use mixed-grade, mixed-age classrooms and lots of peer tutoring.
Eliminate token economies, de-emphasize grades.
Buy some houses, set up tiny neighborhood schools, stop spending millions on busing.
Give students more autonomy over pacing and scheduling of subjects.
Allow 10% of school time for kids to pursue their own academic interests.
Build, say, four-week apprenticeships into the high school calendar.
Stop making kids listen to other people reading out loud!!
Let kids read the books they want to read. Set them loose in the library.
Give parents and students some actual say in the classroom (not mere lip service).
Respect students' first amendment rights.
Make classrooms more comfortable. Don't tolerate bullying, allow healthy food/drink, let people take a piss without asking permission (for crying out loud!).
Stop using history textbooks. Throw. Them. Out. Replace them with real history books.

At least that's an interesting list, even if some of the items would be hotly debated.

The NEA is apparently just like the Democratic party. Presumably benevolent, and the vessel for a progressive person's hopes and expectations-- but, for the most part, an enormous rhetoric-spewing disappointment. I don't think these people could drop the management-speak if you held a gun to their heads.

The amount of money spent on busing is absolutely ridiculous, and it's going to get a lot worse as we continue to run out of petrol. The problem is, you can't set up tiny little schoolhouses and maintain age segregation. And yet, eliminating age segregation is somehow too shocking a proposal to even be spoken aloud. People apparently believe that teenagers eat small children, if not closely supervised.

Furthermore, the number of school administrators per teacher has doubled since the 50s. This is a reversible problem.

Tens of millions are also spent in each state on constant standardized testing. So much is spent on the tests themselves and on the consequent additional administrators that I have to question whether it wouldn't be cheaper to forfeit federal funds, and just give the bird to NCLB.

* * *

A decade ago, I used to believe that there were simply an enormous number of morons out there. There were oodles of well-meaning idiots who would see the light if only we could sit them down and explain the truth to them. But now I think that when a system is failing, it is usually failing on purpose.

The reason we have almost 50 million uninsured Americans is that then, no matter how hideously bad and absurd your HMO becomes, you remain grateful to have any insurance at all.

The reason we don't have safe ports, safe nuclear facilities, safe subways, safe airports is that another 9/11 would benefit the glinty-eyed fascists within the current administration.

The reason they didn't save New Orleans is that they didn't want to save New Orleans. They wanted to destroy the Democratic and black metropolis within the red state of Louisiana, and they did so through intentional neglect. This was not a failure. This was a hidden agenda.

And the reason high school graduates are so ill-informed and unable to think critically is that K-12 education was designed by the robber barons to prevent true education and critical thinking. The schools aren't failing at all. They are succeeding in their historical mission-- in spite of the teachers who swim against that tide.

And the NEA surely isn't going to change that.

The Sickhouse

2006-06-06T17:33:00.000-04:00

Someone needs to educate Connecticut educators on the concepts of infection and contagion (link):

WATERBURY, Conn. --A doctor's note may not be good enough for city school children who are absent because of illness under a tougher attendance policy under consideration by the Board of Education.
Routine illness, even with note from a physician, would no longer be considered an excused absence under the policy proposed on Monday.
The policy would excuse health-related absences only if a student is hospitalized or presents proof of a "serious chronic illness," such as diabetes or asthma.
The proposed policy was drafted by a committee of teacher, administrators and others, headed by Michael Yamin, an assistant principal at Kennedy High School.
"We now are looking for school to be the priority," Yamin said.

Best of luck next flu season.

Thomas Jefferson on education: Part II

2006-06-04T09:46:00.000-04:00

I found a great short essay about Jefferson and public schooling, similar to my last post but considerably better. It begins:

One advantage of interpreting the words of those no longer with us is that it is frequently possible to imply they said what we would like them to say. In that regard, no Founding Father is cited more favorably by the public school establishment than Thomas Jefferson.

Probably the most often cited is his statement, "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." That is not a statement about schools, of course. One can be educated without being schooled. One also can be schooled without being educated.

In 1814, Jefferson made a clear distinction between the two as he said, "I hope our successors will turn their attention to the advantages of education. I mean education on the broad scale, and not that of the petty academies."

I've been writing about Jefferson because I sometimes see it implied that homeschooling is unpatriotic and antisocial. This isn't something I hear personally, but it shows up in mainstream media articles on homeschooling, as in the Time article. "Well, the Founding Fathers were in favor of sending kids to school, so you must be wrong," is sometimes written in between the lines. Homeschooling research generally indicates that homeschooled kids enjoy superior academic and social growth, on the average. Therefore, barred from more concrete criticisms, journalists sometimes fall back on giving a sniff of disapproval and dragging the Founding Fathers into it, as if they too would have tsk, tsked about homeschools. In fact, Jefferson wrote in 1780:

If it is believed that these elementary schools will be better managed by the governor and council or any other general authority of the government, than by the parents within each ward, it is a belief against all experience.

If I went around claiming that Jefferson fought for state-funded voluntary homeschool co-ops in every five-mile square, where every kid would get a total of 36 weeks to learn, with some tutoring, whatever they felt like pursuing within the language arts or mathematics, I would not be far off.

Furthermore, schooling is just one means of educating the public. A diverse and free press is also a very important mechanism (and one which we no longer have in this country). Jefferson wrote:

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. (In correspondence to to John Tyler, 1804.)

The most effectual path to the truth is the free press, Jefferson wrote. Not schools. He also wrote that "The only security of all is in a free press," and "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press." School might insure that all men could read, but it wasn't schooling that would protect American democracy. This is really quite obvious, since schools can't tell you about the latest referendum or political candidates. And nor do today's schools, with their "One Authority" approach to teaching, help graduates to decide what they believe when they encounter conflicting claims.

Our public school system did not originate with Thomas Jefferson any more than atomic bombs originated with gunpowder. Some weak chain of historical events could be drawn back through the centuries, but it wouldn't mean much. The fact is, this really wasn't what Jefferson had in mind. And even if he would have approved of our K-12 system, all the schooling in the world won't help democracy one whit, in the absence of decent newspapers.

Thomas Jefferson on education: Part I

2006-05-31T22:01:00.000-04:00

Way back in 2001, Time ran the cover story Is Homeschooling Good for America? It's a hideous piece, all in all. But there's one particular excerpt that I wanted to focus on, because it mentions Thomas Jefferson, and schooling proponents just love to cite Jefferson. Time made this claim:

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.

I've been reading some of what Jefferson actually said about public education, over at this compilation of Jefferson quotes, and I read him very differently. From what I've been reading, I'd call the above quote an outright lie.

For one thing, they're invoking Jefferson's authority as if he would have supported the current K-12 system we have now. In fact, his plan was to provide 12 weeks of school per year, for just 3 years-- less than 8% of the amount of schooling we require now. Secondly, based on what he thought students should be reading, it's clear that he didn't think schoolteachers would be teaching reading from scratch. You don't go from learning the alphabet to reading historical, legal, and philosophical texts in a mere 36 weeks. Clearly, Jefferson depended upon parents for at least introductory learning, and he had good reason to assume parents were up to the task. At the time of the American Revolution, roughly 90% of the population (excluding slaves) were literate. And very few of these people had ever attended a school.

Additionally, it might surprise those Time journalists to discover that Jefferson was explicitly against compulsory schooling:

It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father. (Note to Elementary School Act, 1817.)

He also defended individualized education:

The general objects are to provide an education adapted to the years, to the capacity, and the condition of every one, and directed to their freedom and happiness. (Notes on Virginia Q.XIV, 1782.)

Reading all this, one can only imagine his horror at our current system of forced mass education. Yet Time has no problem citing Jefferson in defense of the current public schools and in criticism of home schooling, which I find dishonest.

In stating that Jefferson wanted us to learn "shared values and a common history," Time is falsely attributing to him the motivations of later public educators. Certainly, more recent proponents of public schools had such goals in mind, such as the early 19th century Prussians, who used schooling to assimilate the populations of their newly conquered territories. Later in the 19th century, America also used schools to assimilate immigrants and Native Americans, often with such violence that it is no exaggeration to say that schools were a means of cultural warfare. The robber barons who created public schooling as we know it in the early 20th century also had the intention of creating a uniform, conforming, docile populace, one steeped in "The American Dream" and the American creation myths of Columbus, Plymouth Rock, the Mayflower, etc. Even more recently, Canada and Australia used schools as cultural warfare against their aboriginal populations, well into the 1970s. Both Canada and Australia now face the possibility of tens of millions of dollars in reparations to minority families whom they tore apart, taking their children away to be "educated" in the ways of the white man.

This history provides the context for the phrase "to share values and learn a common history." It's a potentially fascist goal, and one with little to no respect for local differences or a truly pluralistic republic. It was not Jefferson's goal, and to say it was is almost slanderous. Thankfully, we know his goals, in his own words:

The objects of... primary education [which] determine its character and limits [are]: To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business; to enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts and accounts in writing; to improve, by reading, his morals and faculties; to understand his duties to his neighbors and country, and to discharge with competence the functions confided to him by either; to know his rights; to exercise with order and justice those he retains, to choose with discretion the fiduciary of those he delegates; and to notice their conduct with diligence, with candor and judgment; and in general, to observe with intelligence and faithfulness all the social relations under which he shall be placed. (Report for University of Virginia, 1818.)

To characterize that as the pursuance of "shared values" and "a common history" is to make something up out of whole cloth. A more accurate summary of the goals would be: 1) to know the law, one's rights and obligations; 2) to elect "delegates" (politicians) wisely and to demand fair representation, and 3) to run one's business intelligently. (I am reminded that, at the suggestion of Benjamin Franklin, early American money was imprinted with the slogan "Mind Your Business". ) The requirements of the fledgling United States were that the common people, who had been entrusted with unprecedented rights and governmental participation, would know what they were doing; that the law would be respected; and that the economy should be strong. Pretty basic stuff, really.

Another quote characterized his goals thusly:

In the [elementary schools] will be taught reading, writing, common arithmetic, and general notions of geography. In the [district colleges], ancient and modern languages, geography fully, a higher degree of numerical arithmetic, mensuration, and the elementary principles of navigation. In the [university], all the useful sciences in their highest degree. (In correspondence to M. Correa de Serra, 1817.)

I'm not seeing history in here anywhere, except in that he did say once or twice that if students were going to improve their reading, they might as well read historical texts, as that taught them what might happen in the future. As a rule, if you couldn't prove a subject's practical utility, Jefferson would have said it should not be taught.

Jefferson's pragmatism shows up elsewhere. One of the reasons he championed publicly funded education was that, to put it simply, he wanted more trained scientific minds than any other nation, in order to close the gap of expertise which he felt existed between the United States and her more established competitors. He wrote:

The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries. (In correspondence to M. Correa de Serra, 1817.)

In other words, there were brilliant but destitute men who-- in England, Spain, or France-- would see their talents go to waste, but he intended to cultivate these talents and put them to use for the betterment of the country. Again, this was totally utilitarian, geared mostly (as I read it) toward the advancement of the hard sciences and technology. Jefferson had little tolerance for the teaching of the arts, conceding only that music was a respectable amusement for those who had an ear (but shouldn't be attempted by those who did not). He called fiction "a poison" and said it was dangerous to read most poetry. So as I say, I view him as a man of science, above all other intellectual pursuits.

In fact, Jefferson viewed the American experiment as the natural outcome of scientific and rational thought, and wrote that "Freedom is the first-born daughter of science" (correspondence to Francois d'Ivernois, 1795). He wrote that "Light and liberty go together," (correspondence to Tench Coxe, 1795), and by 'light' he was referencing the scientific and rational Enlightenment. The first American penny was illustrated with a sun with long rays, as well as a sundial-- another allusion.

I also mentioned technological advancement. It seems that Jefferson was against enforcing a well-rounded education, finding it preferable to allow students to pursue one particular vocation to the highest level of understanding possible:

I am not fully informed of the practices at Harvard, but there is one from which we shall certainly vary, although it has been copied, I believe, by nearly every college and academy in the United States. That is, the holding the students all to one prescribed course of reading, and disallowing exclusive application to those branches only which are to qualify them for the particular vocations to which they are destined. We shall, on the contrary, allow them uncontrolled choice in the lectures they shall choose to attend.... (In correspondence to George Ticknor, 1823.)

So, consider all this: Jefferson's dogged pragmatism, his emphasis on the practical sciences, his insistence on parental rights, his respect for individualized education, and his own stated goals for primary education. Does this sound like a man concerned with the soft (and softly fascist) goal of "shared values"? Where do these Time people get off, throwing around the ghost of Jefferson without comprehension or respect?

[Next post: Jefferson on the relative importance of schooling vs. a free press in insuring an educated populace.]

Burnout

2006-05-25T09:19:00.000-04:00

I hope to return to regular blogging soon, as I recover from what I'll call mom burnout. Not homeschooling mom burnout, because frankly we've not done that much that's educational recently-- I'm talking plain old mom burnout, where you feel like "Okay, if we can't do X or Y or Z without winding up with an exorcist-style tantrum and the older child simultaneously crying, then we're just going to STAY HOME and watch TV all day and forget it."

I know the stuff I'm dealing with is the same stuff all moms deal with, which is why I've so far resisted posting a whining burnout diary. It's just normal stuff: fish emergencies, eyeglasses missing a screw, tantrums, sandals that need exchanging for the correct size, stuff due at the library, constant requests for pizza, and pants that have mysteriously shrunk 6 inches in length (surely Anya couldn't have grown that fast!). That's the list so far today, as of 9:15am. (Oh-- and I've got to send that gift to my friend who had a baby a couple of weeks ago. Now we're up to three separate errands for the day and it's supposed to thunderstorm... sigh.)

Over the past 14 months since we decided to homeschool, I've been amassing all kinds of plans and ideas. Homeschooling blogs and The Unschooling Handbook and my own family all provide oodles of great educational ideas. And here I am with a toddler whom I cannot take across a parking lot without reserving 10 minutes for the resulting tantrum (because I didn't let him run around on his own, touching all the cars). The thoughtful folks at our local library put benches just outside the door, which have been useful as a place to hold my screaming 32-pound child until he can forgive me for carrying him across the blacktop, and settles down enough that we can enter the library. Afterward we have to wait again, this time in the car, until the tantrum subsides enough that I can get him strapped into the carseat. By this time, after trying to get books and videos while chasing Tristan around and after the two requisite tantrums, I am ready to go home and stick them both in front of the TV for a while.

I know, of course, that Tristan is 23 months old and that in another 6 months my life will be starting to get much easier. One of these days, he will accept the idea of walking across parking lots while holding my hand. One of these days, he will allow me to use the computer without having to play him the Pixar Cars movie trailer every five minutes. Anya and I will be able to play games without him wanting all the checkers, dice, dominoes or whatever. Art projects will be do-able because he won't be shrieking at his lack of access to Anya's paints. Negotiation will be possible, and I'll be able to get certain concepts across to him, like sharing and taking turns and the meaning of "Okay-- in just a minute".

Assuming we get through these 6 months with everyone's sanity intact, I've got big plans!

Stop me if you've heard this one before....

2006-04-30T21:46:00.000-04:00

I found this hilarious bit over at Our Unschooling Adventure, and since it's the kind of thing that travels rapidly all over the Internet, I hope it's okay to copy it here. Okay, so here it is:

Q:

How does a homeschooler change a lightbulb?

A:

First, Mom checks three books on electricity out of the library, then the kids make models of light bulbs, read a biography of Thomas Edison, and do a skit based on his life.

Next, everyone studies the history of lighting methods, wrapping up with dipping their own candles.

Next, everyone takes a trip to the store where they compare types of lightbulbs, as well as prices, and figure out how much change they'll get if they buy two bulbs for $1.99 and pay with a five-dollar bill.

On the way home, a discussion develops over the history of money and also Abraham Lincoln, as his picture is on the five-dollar bill.

Finally, after building a homemade ladder out of branches dragged from the woods, the lightbulb is installed.

Who's protecting our kids?

2006-04-28T09:03:00.000-04:00

At Joseph Mercola's health blog today, he posted about conflicts of interest in the FDA's drug oversight committees. If you've ever wondered why the ADHD drug Adderall was banned in Canada and not in the US, or why Paxil was banned from use in children in the UK but not in the US, here's your answer:

The study [published in the Journal of the American Medical Association] reviewed detailed financial disclosures by FDA advisory committee members and consultants who voted on new drugs... from 2001-04.

Almost 30 percent of voters acknowledged a financial conflict during the previous year with either a company that made the drug or one of its competitors. Among the conflicts: Consulting, stock holdings or investments and research grants ranging from $10,000-100,000.

Overall, at least one drug committee member or consultant had a conflict in 73 percent of the 221 hearings that took place during the course of the study. Here's the real problem: Only 1 percent of the drug advisory committee members were recused from attending some meetings.

On a related note, vaccine policy-makers often have conflicts of interest. Consider this excerpt from August, 2000 Congressional testimony (pdf) regarding the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices:

The CDC routinely grants waivers from conflict of interest rules to every member of its [vaccine] advisory committee.
CDC Advisory Committee members who are not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest are allowed to participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.
The Chairman of the CDC’s advisory committee until recently owned 600 shares of stock in Merck [worth roughly $50,000], a pharmaceutical company with an active vaccine division.
Members of the CDC’s advisory committee often fill out incomplete financial disclosure statements, and are not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.
Four out of eight CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.
3 out of 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.

The rotavirus vaccine they mention was pulled off the market a year later after it was found to be unsafe, causing intestinal intussusception (often requiring surgery) in 1 in 5,000 babies.

A certain subculture of people, including most academics and most doctors and a lot of leftist folks who tout their own empathy and compassion, have got a stranglehold on medicine. They claim that financial ties do not affect anyone in medicine or public health, although we all acknowledge that such ties affect politicians and other professionals. They claim that alternative health treatments are not scientifically justified, when in fact, as I am always discovering, there are all kinds of trials and studies published in perfectly mainstream peer-reviewed journals which support those treatments. They imply that it's dangerous to attempt to address your health problems on your own, even though some analyses find that improper mainstream medical care is the leading cause of the death in the United States. They'll advise the arthritic to take Vioxx, which has killed between 30,000 and 55,000 Americans in 4 years, according to the FDA itself. Never mind those natural arthritis treatments, like omega-3 fatty acids (great for your heart and brain also), turmeric extract (which helps to prevent certain cancers), and probiotics (which, as a bonus, improve nutrition and elimination of toxins and help to regulate the immune system, reducing allergies and asthma).

My advice (not that anyone asked for it) is to find a Whole Foods or a health store nearby, find out if there's someone knowledgeable there who is up on all the alternative literature. We have a local health guy, known to me only as "Dennis" from the nutraceuticals aisle, who has helped my family several times. And don't take your doctor at their word, but look into every fricking thing on your own before you agree to a course of treatment.

Creepy

2006-04-25T16:28:00.000-04:00

Today I got some junk mail addressed to "The M-Care Parents at...." M-Care is our insurance company, run by the University of Michigan medical complex.

The letter read, in part:

Dear Parents:

M-CARE, in partnership with the Ann Arbor Public Schools, is pleased to announce the following free educational presentation for parents and teachers about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD):

Understanding ADHD: At Home and in the Classroom

The goal of this presentation is to provide an opportunity for both parents and teachers to learn the facts about ADHD from experts in the field, and to learn effective ways to manage children with ADHD.

Translation:

The UM medical system, in partnership with the Ann Arbor schools, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Shire Plc, bring you this free advertising seminar! Learn how to manage, control, and manipulate your child through modern pharmaceuticals! (You can trust us, we're experts!)

Heck, why not just have door prizes? Can't you just imagine it?

All participants receive a free sample of your choice: Effexor, Focalin, or Lunesta! Get your child started on stimulants before another week goes by! Free introductory Ritalin to qualifying children!

Sickening.

Both M-Care and the Ann Arbor schools push vaccinations and health screenings with the sort of zeal and deceit that one normally associates with the mentally unwell. To see them teaming up is actually quite frightening.

Lock-downs

2006-04-18T22:01:00.000-04:00

[This did not post properly the first time, don't know why....]

In Southern California, students have been walking out of school by the tens of thousands on key days, to join protests against proposed immigration laws. These laws would (among other things) deport parents while leaving their children behind in the U.S., apparently in state custody. These students have met with scorn and sarcasm from the major media, who claim they just want a free day off from school. One student organizer I heard interviewed on the radio asked, "Why would we walk three miles to city hall in the rain if we just wanted to goof off?"

Schools have reacted to these walk-outs by instituting "lock-downs." I still can't get over it that they use the same term which is used in prisons, and without any chagrin or embarrassment. Anyway, one recent lock-down is being criticized:

[O]ne Inglewood elementary school imposed a lockdown so severe that some students were barred from using the restroom. Instead, they used buckets placed in classroom corners or behind teachers' desks.

Appalled by the school's action, Worthington Elementary School parents have complained to the school board and plan to attend another board meeting next week.

Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 when nearly 40,000 middle and high school students across Southern California staged walkouts.

Apparently these lock-downs are also used during locker searches, in which police enter the school using dogs to hunt down drugs. They are ordered at the drop of a hat because of student fights or reports of a student making threats. To give you an idea of the sorts of threats which throw administrators into a panic, consider this case:

In Ponchatoula, Louisiana, a 12-year-old who had been diagnosed with a hyperactive disorder warned the kids in the lunch line not to eat all the potatoes, or "I'm going to get you." The student, turned in by the lunch monitor, was expelled for two days. He was then referred to police by the principal, and the police charged the boy with making "terroristic threats." He was incarcerated for two weeks while awaiting trial.

There are other absurd examples at the above link. I presume that lock-downs would be similarly misused during frequent over-reactions by principals.

Naturally, they are touted as being for the students' protection:

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. Across the country, many schools hold lockdown drills because of terrorism fears and school shootings like the Columbine High bloodbath in Colorado in 1999 that left 15 people dead.
But Minnesota could apparently become the first state to require such exercises. A proposal before the Minnesota Legislature would mandate at least five lockdown drills a year while reducing the required number of fire drills.

Legislatures in Michigan, Kentucky, Ohio and South Dakota are among those weighing laws that would require schools to update safety plans periodically and practice them regularly.

The increased use of this prison tactic isn't really about safety, though, because schools are actually becoming safer. According to a Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice report (somewhat out of date, from 2000):

During the 1998-1999 school year, the year that included the Columbine shooting, the National School Safety Center reported that there were 26 school associated violent deaths-- a 40% decline from the previous year. Since there are 52 million students in America's schools, the odds of dying a violent death in a school in America last year was one in two million.
A joint study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics found that between 1993 and 1997, the number of school crimes declined 29%, the number of serious violent crimes declined 34%, the number of violent crimes (including fighting) declined 27%, and the number of thefts declined 29%.
A study by researchers from the Department of Special Education at the University of Maryland found that students at schools which employed "secure building" strategies to combat crime (including metal detectors and locker searches) were more likely to be afraid and be victimized than those attending schools which used less restrictive school safety measures.

It's not even about school board members trying to address community fears, albeit unfounded fears. The above report also found that 86% of teachers, 89% of students and 89% of law enforcement officers felt that their local schools were safe.

The lock-down policies are coming from places like Homeland Security and state legislatures, not from parents and teachers. This idea is being pushed by those in power, and I don't mean on the school boards. Practicing lock-downs is seen as a homeland security exercise, something which might protect us somehow from terrorism (completely ridiculous, of course). I guess politicians like to look like they're doing something, and this is easier than (say) assisting in the clean-up of nukes in the former USSR, or checking the cargo coming into our ports, or providing economic relief to certain countries with angry unemployed men who provide the reservoir of terrorists. Or, just to toss out an idea here, not bombing the bejeezus out of the Middle East.

But the larger benefit to those in power may be that the next generation of adults will be far less resistant to the use of temporary martial law, curfews, enforced quarantines, or whatever else the government has in mind. They'll feel just like they're back in first grade, peeing in a bucket.

In an increasingly deceptive world....

2006-04-18T10:32:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons that education requires more time, more drills, more testing and just seems to be more difficult than in the past is that schools have to teach students more material than before. At least, that's what they would have us believe. The phrase "increasingly complex world" is trotted out to justify new math and science requirements, or to make the claim that we now require longer school years or universal preschool. There's just more we have to learn, because our world has become so technological and complex.

When I look around I don't see that everyday life is any more complex than it used to be. You don't need trig to operate a cell phone. It's easier to microwave Lean Cuisine than to cook meals from scratch. It's easier to shop for clothes online than to buy patterns and hem and sew. Cars are not much more complicated (and the new technologies like OnStar might actually give you directions, so in that sense things are easier). Americans would benefit from much more understanding of personal finance and economics, but the schools don't teach that.

What I see changing in our everyday lives is that we are being manipulated and lied to with increasing intensity. Advertising is increasing, and it's increasingly hard to spot, as well. Many news stories were literally written by corporate PR departments and get passed off as journalism because it's cheaper than actual journalism. People get paid to spread "word of mouth" advertising in public places.

Another change is that information is more readily available, but one needs to be able to filter out the dubious info and to consolidate information from all over the Internet. People need to be familiar with conflicts of interest, with the fact that yes, even people who speak calmly and seem to be experts and wear suits and show up on TV will still look you right in the eye and lie to you. They do it all the time.

Instead of exposing kids to a range of sources of information, and helping them to think critically about what they are reading, schools actually do the opposite. There is one textbook per class, and there is one teacher who typically never contradicts the textbook.

Instead of teaching kids how advertising works and helping them to understand its pernicious effects, schools increase the advertising which students are exposed to, through ads on buses and in hallways or through Channel One "news" television. In many cases, as with vending machines selling pop and chips, the school's contract with the vendor involves a quota of minimum sales which must be met or the school gets no money at all. Thus the administrators and teachers become the allies of the corporations.

Government / civics class, when I took it anyway, was a dry memorization of governmental structures and Congressional procedure. We memorized some definition of "lobbyist" but gained no actual idea of corporate influence in politics. Nor did we study any political scandals or discuss campaign contributions, political ads, or vote suppression (which didn't die with the 60's). We learned nothing about the manipulation of politicians or politicians' conflicts of interest. We got the straight "You vote for them, they represent you" story.

It's quite fun to analyze ads. My mom used ad analysis as a writing exercise when she was teaching some years back, and it was very popular with the students (mostly college freshmen). My response to catalogs in the mail that look alluring (e.g. Pottery Barn) is to sit down and really look at the photos and imagine how they've manipulated everything. Pottery Barn is a fun one, because they photoshop the wall paint to perfectly match the color in, say, some sheets or a duvet cover. They photoshop the windows, giving the hazy, sunny outdoors either a bluish or yellowish hue depending on what's in the room. In most photos you can't see the outdoors, it's just a foggy sunny haze, which gives the rooms a dreamlike quality that real-life rooms are never going to attain. You also start to notice how, for instance, the candles and the apples in a bowl are the exact shade of green featured in those drapes on the wall. So, to attain Pottery Barn decor in your own home you'd have to spend hours scouring stores for candles and run to the grocery store every week in search of the ideal Granny Smiths. The Pottery Barn folks have it easier, they just photoshop said candles and apples and voila, perfect match. Pretty soon you start thinking, "Give me a freakin' break!" and throw the thing in the trash. This is the kind of skill that really is useful in real life. The typical kid sees 50,000 TV commercials per year, I read somewhere.

Needless to say, teaching kids how to think critically and protect themselves from advertising does not serve those in power... and that's why the schools don't teach this.

My daughter on evolution

2006-04-15T20:13:00.000-04:00

I want to preface this little anecdote by saying that evolution comes up fairly frequently here, due to Anya's obsession with animals. It makes me wonder how parents do this when they are Christian fundamentalists and don't teach evolution. We've been talking about freshwater vs. saltwater fish this week, including why saltwater fish would want to leave the ocean and go upriver to lay eggs, and how some of those fish, hundreds of millions of years ago, wound up staying in freshwater.

Tonight we've been watching one of the Blue Planet BBC ocean videos, which featured schools of sardines being eaten by sharks, dolphins, birds and a very big whale. We were talking about how predators tend to eat the slower or stupider fish, which helps the species because the babies are from the smarter, faster fish-- and thus the babies are usually smarter and faster.

Anya said that Goldie [our goldfish] would definitely survive in the wild long enough to mate, because she was definitely smart and fast. She added: "And Goldie's babies would be even smarter and faster and more mateful!"

More mateful... gotta love that one. I chuckled when she said this and she said indignantly, "Well the fish that aren't mateful don't have babies!" Probably true, and I'm proud of her level of understanding, I just have to laugh that when you practice child-led learning you wind up talking about such concepts as fish libido.

16 ways to tie your shoes

2006-04-13T13:06:00.000-04:00

Ian's Shoelace Site is a cool place to visit. You can learn the super-fast Ian knot, a more secure knot that looks cool when tied, and 14 other knots. Also, numerous ways to lace your shoes.
.

Medicalizing schools

2006-04-12T15:50:00.000-04:00

My mom sent me the article Medicine Goes to School: Teachers as Sickness Brokers for ADHD, which concluded:

The organised penetration of the pharmaceutical industry associated with ADHD into the education domain is a new phenomenon. While there has been extensive discussion about the ethics of fast-food marketing within schools, there has been little about the consequences of the pharmaceutical industry's infiltration of schools.

These consequences include the fact that about half of all ADHD diagnoses originate with the child's teacher, that teachers often administer medications, and that teachers "educate" parents and students about ADHD. On a supposedly "educational" web page aimed at teachers, Novartis (maker of Ritalin) advises teachers to handle parents' questions as follows:

Make it clear that it is important for them—and for their child—to understand and follow the doctor's medical advice about medication and other therapies for ADHD. ADHD is a serious condition that may require the child to be on medication and undergo counseling for a long duration.

Why is it the teacher's job to tell parents ADHD is a "serious condition"? What the hell is the teacher doing answering parents' medical questions in the first place? It is one thing to discuss classroom behavior or learning, but Novartis is clearly attempting to use teachers to increase "patient compliance."

Even if you agree with the historical collaboration between schools and doctors (it's a rich history), surely it is cause for concern if school staff are now being manipulated by big pharma propaganda campaigns. Doctors are influenced by such campaigns. Teachers will be no different. I wouldn't be at all surprised if in 10 more years, teachers were advising parents to seek medication for social phobia, separation anxiety, or oppositional defiant disorder on the basis of their "expert" observation.

[UPDATE: My mom posted on big pharma's "disease-mongering." Take a gander.]

Where I've been

2006-04-08T10:06:00.000-04:00

"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information and religions destroy spirituality."

--Michael Ellner

That's pretty much how I'm feeling right now.

My husband and I have been reading about vaccines, fluoride, antibiotics, food additives, and mercury dental fillings over the past few days (thus my absence from blogging). Once again I've been thinking of how schools train everyone to look to the authorities for the truth, and then those authorities turn around and lie to us. What a perfect system for those in power.

Only in a country with state schooling could you get people to believe:

antibiotics cure ear infections caused by viruses
injecting infants with mercury (>90 times safety limits) does them no harm
infants do not feel pain (medical dogma into the 1970's)
even though 100% of fats produced by your own liver are saturated, saturated fats are in fact bad for you
even though your liver makes 80% of all the cholesterol in your body, making more or less depending on how much you eat, cholesterol is some sort of poison
children have no natural desire to learn
humans don't know how to form social groups or communities without schooling
Christopher Columbus was a great guy
fluoride is good for you (would you like a side of arsenic?)
putting mercury in your teeth has no health effects

Amazing what they can get us to believe.

Real knowledge

2006-04-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

Anya is very interested in the natural sciences, whether it's insects or fish, planets or kitchen chemistry. I find that I'm learning quite a lot, myself. What's more intriguing is that the new knowledge is completely different than the old schooly, memorized knowledge.

I knew what larvae were, and about larvae forming coccoons and turning into winged insects. But I've still been staring at these white cottony patches at the corners of our back porch and thinking "Damn those spiders." A few days ago it finally dawned on me that they were coccoons, thus the problem was some sort of insect. It finally dawned on me, because I finally paid attention, I finally got a real grasp of insects vs. spiders vs. other bugs. Probably that's because Anya and I haven't used any textbooks, we've only looked things up online as the questions occurred to us, in our own order, on our own schedule, using our own mental map for understanding this new information.

I have been able to recite "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter...." for years. But I never realized that the planets consist of four small rocks near the sun, four enormous gas giants farther out, and one or two anomalous planetoid objects which may or may not, in fact, actually turn out to be planets. Or that the little rocks aren't likely to have many moons (a combined total of 3, in fact) because they don't have much gravity and they're so close to the sun that most small objects will "miss" the orbit window and fly right into the star. Gas giants, on the other hand, are farther away from the sun's pull and have more gravity due to their mass, so they, of course, have dozens of moons. This just makes sense to me now, it's not a matter of cramming the information into my brain to be regurgitated on a test.

Or, to take another example: Insects are a lot smarter than other bugs. You might read in a science book that insects are highly evolved, but when you've been examining ladybugs for weeks and you come across a pill-bug, that pill-bug strikes you as so dumb you can hardly believe it's living. The difference in intelligence between insects and creepy-crawlies strikes me as huge, probably analogous to the difference between mammals and fish. Furthermore, some ladybugs are a lot smarter than other ladybugs. And yes, I'm "anthropomorphizing" to some extent, but some ladybugs have a whole range of behaviors and others species sit like lumps on their chunk of orange and do little else. Unfortunately, the invasive species (7-spotted and Southern) are much smarter than native species, which does not bode well for the native ladybugs.

I've learned these things like I've learned cooking, or how to change a light fixture, or how to get stains out of clothes. If you have to strain your brain and use mnemonic devices and onerous repetition to remember something, maybe you're being asked to learn in an unnatural way. Is it more important to know whether Jupiter or Saturn is closer to the sun? How does that inform daily life? On the other hand, if you have a sense of four little rocks and four giant, moon-encircled balls of gas, well, at least that's an image. At least, when you're gazing at a night sky, it gives you some sense of the solar system.

The more time goes on, the less I feel like I truly learned in school.

Imagining the future

2006-03-31T10:13:00.000-05:00

If you stand back and consider current public education trends, and carry them through to their eventual goals, this is what future schooling will look like:

Kids will attend school 45 hours per week, year round, from age 3 to age 18.

There will be no recess.

There will be no talking at lunch.

There will be a uniform (including hairstyles, jewelry, etc).

Daytime curfew laws will help enforce school attendance.

Truant students' parents will face jail time.

Police in the schools will enforce the discipline code.

Police use of nightsticks, pepper spray and tasers will not be uncommon.

Bullying and sexual harassment will continue to be tolerated.

Students distressed by school because they are strongly attached to their parents will be diagnosed with Separation Anxiety Disorder and given drugs.

Students who are scared to attend school will be diagnosed with Social Phobia and given drugs.

Students reluctant to attend school for any other reason will be diagnosed with School Refusal Disorder and given drugs.

Students who resist constant control will be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder and given drugs.

Students who can't sit still or be silent will be diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and given drugs.

And for all that, you can bet that literacy rates will remain lower than they were before compulsory schooling, that general knowledge will decline, that voting rates will decline, and that our workforce will continue to lose high-tech jobs to developing nations. What, then, is the point of 15 years of coerced schooling?

The people fighting for more public schooling, the teachers who think 3 more months of class time will solve their problems, the school board members who think preschool will boost academic success, the parents who think more money is the panacea-- these folks think that school is a wonderful thing and more is certainly better. Not only do I personally feel they are mistaken, but more to the point, they aren't the ones in charge.

What I mean is, how does this serve those in power? If public schools made the people more difficult to govern by causing them to demand more from politicians, to stand up for their rights, to exercise critical thinking, then politicians would find ways to reduce schooling. Instead, what they have done is find ways to keep current schooling or increase it, but simultaneously to make it less effective in terms of actual education. The schooling itself, those 180 days, that is still serving those in power. And everyone, on the right or the left, seems to want more days, more years, more hours.

I believe school acts like the chain around the infant elephant's leg in that old parable. As an infant, the chain is an effective control; the elephant cannot break it. As an adult, the elephant is so well trained that a mere rope around the ankle will keep it from straying.

An American spends well over a decade in an environment in which they must obey, have no autonomy, and certainly have fewer rights than the Constitution provides to citizens outside of schools. Questioning the authorities is both futile and likely to be penalized. What is the societal effect of this early training?

We have a Congress that routinely acts contrary to the will of the American people, and does so without fear. We have presidents who did not win the popular vote. We have no enforcement to speak of when it comes to food safety laws, environmental protection laws, or price fixing laws (think gas prices and plane fares). To give a more dramatic example, 9/11 was not just preventable in some vague "if only we had known" sense, but in the sense that the government knew everything about the plot except perhaps the exact date, yet provided less security for New York's airspace than was provided in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympics. This was on record as the most colossal government fuck-up in the history of the United States until Katrina came along. But the average American, trained by 13 years of doing what the teacher says without question or protest, feels it's not his or her place to get involved.

The Democrats ask for more money, more days, more hours for the schools-- and the Republicans say "Well sure, but don't think we're going to let you teach anything," and laugh themselves silly. What the new robber barons like about school is the same thing the original robber barons enjoyed: the way that rope weighs heavily around our ankles.

Speechless

2006-03-30T23:29:00.000-05:00

From Knight Ridder:

Beat cops and detectives aren't the only members of the Wichita Police Department who are being issued Tasers.

School resource officers are, too.

By the end of the month, all 22 SROs in the Wichita schools -- seven in high schools and 15 in middle schools -- will carry the controversial device.

And a timeline from This Modern World:

February: Wichita Police introduce tasers into schools.

Early March: Students at Wichita West High School discover this and are understandably concerned. Organized by Hope Street, they gather 250 signatures on a letter to the school district asking about health effects and the district’s use policy.

March 16th: A 15 year-old student is tasered during a confrontation at another high school, Wichita North. However, no one except those involved know at the time because the school district covers it up.

The next week: The tasering becomes public thanks to an anonymous tip from a teacher. The Wichita Eagle criticizes the school district for trying to hide it.

Today, March 30th: The Wichita Eagle reveals two other attempts to taser students, including a 14 year-old girl.

Lastly, from Amnesty International via the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - The number of people who have died in the U.S. after being shocked by police stun guns is growing rapidly, Amnesty International says in a report that catalogs 156 [deaths] in the past five years.

Deaths after the use of Taser stun guns have risen from three in 2001 to 61 last year, the international human rights group said....
. . .
Tasers deliver a 50,000-volt jolt through two barbed darts that can penetrate clothing.

Consider this future situation:

It's illegal to leave school before age 18 unless you graduate, but new graduation requirements make that impossible in many districts due to teacher shortages. This is the pending situation here in Michigan.
No choice as to where your kids are warehoused-- er, attend school.
Daytime curfew laws as in San Diego, to enforce school attendance.
An increasingly controlled school environment with no respect for the 1st amendment even as an abstract principle, let alone in practice.
Typically, no constructive attempts to halt bullying, sexual harassment, or student violence.
Tasers being used on students.

Welcome to the Hitler Youth camp, here's your bar of soap.

Abandoning the public schools

2006-03-30T17:05:00.000-05:00

Many people believe that homeschooling means abandoning the public schools. If the involved and motivated parents leave the schools, doesn't this weaken public education? Shouldn't these involved parents stay and fight for better schools?

Involved parents can't actually do very much for public education except fundraise, act as chaperones, and pull up the test score averages. Do they influence curriculum? Do they increase creativity in the classroom, or improve lesson plans? Do they counter administrators by insisting on teacher autonomy? Do they fight against the incessant use of carrots and sticks, of extrinsic motivators? Do they successfully reduce "kill and drill" in favor of science and history? Do they increase art and music instruction? Do they influence policies on recess, "silent lunch," or busing?

No, an "involved" parent is basically a parent who kisses the school's butt. In contrast, a parent who has the temerity to demand change is simply a troublemaker. And for all their efforts, such a parent is extremely unlikely to successfully change the school. They may win concessions for their own child, but they rarely change the institution.

The reforms that do occur (led by educators and politicians) have not altered the basic structures of school which impede learning, such as age segregation, learning on a set schedule, and short class periods. They have not resulted in interesting textbooks, nor reduced bullying and sexual harassment. We're going backwards in terms of administrative overhead, with twice the number of administrators per teacher than we had 50 years ago. And NCLB is a giant leap backward. Graduation rates are at a historical low, literacy rates are still lower than before compulsory schooling--

In short, reforms have never been particularly successful. Not only are they not parent-led, but they consistently strip away students' and teachers' autonomy. They consistently add to the bureaucratic burden of schools, and they consistently shrink the breadth of information taught.

This is a situation where we do not need reform. We need revolution.

Revolution, though, requires some vision of what education could be. Of what it might be if we invested this much money and effort in a system not designed by Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, the robber barons and a bunch of fascist Prussians. How are we going to create that vision, when people have no faith in natural learning and abhor giving children autonomy? People mostly believe that education is inherently a difficult, fraught, unpleasant process. They don't believe children can learn reading and basic arithmetic in (as John Gatto claims) under 100 hours of instruction. They don't believe that handwriting, typing, spelling and most grammar can simply be absorbed by avid readers and writers. They're scared by the idea that different children might learn different things, that one might know about internal combustion engines and another about fossils. Such children cannot be compared and ranked, nor is it usually obvious which is the more "important" knowledge. For two centuries the elites have strictly defined the "important" knowledge; they aren't going to give up control easily.

The only way to convince people that an alternative path is possible is to live one. I don't think "school at home" fulfills this role, personally (though it's still better for the kids than school). But as an unschooler, I would hope that the example of my kids learning with extremely little coercion or adult direction would cause people to question our system of schooling.

My family is a living example that there are other ways. And I think that's the best thing I can do for education, though it's certainly inimical to public schooling as we know it.

Studying tools instead of using tools

2006-03-28T13:56:00.000-05:00

From a Columbus Dispatch article:

A new survey made public today found that 71 percent of public schools have cut back on at least one subject in favor of reading and math. One-third of the 299 districts surveyed in 50 states have cut back social studies time this school year, 29 percent have reduced science, and 22 percent have shrunk time for art and music. Most reported that students are getting better at reading and math.

The thing about reading and math (except for some very high-level math) is that they are tools. Reading allows you to learn things, identify things, follow instructions, and of course, be entertained. Math allows you to handle finances, understand science, and make plans for things like vegetable gardens or birdhouses. They're tools. Studying math and reading as ends in themselves is like having classes on hammers and measuring cups and charcoal pencils without actually building, cooking, or drawing anything.

Although most Americans read every day (even if it's food labels or the TV guide), we don't use math beyond simple arithmetic. We would have fuller lives and be better informed if we'd spent more time in school learning about other countries, about trees, about insects, about nutrition and cooking, about politics and lobbying, about mortgages and credit cards, about basic car repair, about CPR and first aid, about early child development. When we just teach math and reading, we aren't informing kids of anything.

So this is yet another way in which NCLB is resulting in a more ignorant populace.

On parenting toddlers

2006-03-26T11:16:00.000-05:00

Tristan, now 21 months, has been throwing tantrums lately. He actually threw his first tantrum at around 9 months, but these are Tantrums, Capital T. I don't say "No" to him often, but if he gets hold of something dangerous I obviously have to take it away. Much of the time, I'll simply ask him to give it to me, and (astoundingly) he will. Other times, we're in for ten minutes of enraged hollering, crying, and throwing things. Another trigger is when he figures out that we'll be going out soon, and it's taking too long to get into the car. Once the meltdown is underway, he refuses any comforting until he's cried the rage out (he'll hit me or throw additional objects if I try to hug him). I just sit close by and look sad (my attempt at empathizing) until he's ready for me to pick him up. If the tantrum is bad I sometimes get desperate and start offering juice popsicles or "car choo-choo" (the scene in Harry Potter II when the train almost hits the flying car). It's hard when he's miserable and I can't do anything about it but wait.

Our culture has one primary way of understanding tantrums: the kid is trying to manipulate you. This is utterly illogical, because kids don't have tantrums until all their ingenuity and self-control have been exhausted. If they were trying to manipulate you prior to the tantrum, they certainly aren't anymore. They aren't trying to do anything, they're at their wit's end and at the mercy of their emotions.

A few decades ago men used to believe that women cried for manipulative purposes (calling it "turning on the water works" or other such phrases). The implication was that a husband who was influenced by his wife breaking down in tears was just falling for an act. If that idea pisses you off, then it ought also to piss you off that we see children in this way. How convenient for the modern parent to dismiss unhappiness and anger in one's children as merely a "power struggle." How 1920's to suggest that parents should turn a deaf ear to their child's pain.

Once when Anya was 3, I decided to try the parenting book advice of not giving in to a tantrum, because supposedly it only teaches the child that a tantrum is required to get what they want. It turns out there is an enormous flaw in that logic, which is: it assumes that at some point the child will give in. Anya wanted to eat some M & M's before lunch, and I said no, healthy food first. This was at about noon. Fast forward to 4pm. We've had hours of argument and crying puntuated by TV shows or other distractions, but Anya hasn't touched her lunch. By this time I'm begging her to take one sip of orange juice, that if she just takes one sip I'll give her the M & M's, but no. All along I've been thinking that if I just make the "No" stick once, it'll be easier next time. But by 4pm I had to start dinner and she had to eat, so I gave in. She ate one M & M of each color and then promptly ate her whole lunch, and I felt like the world's biggest idiot. I still regret that I wasted a miserable afternoon "giving it a try" when my instincts told me better.

Incidentally, I never encountered a time when something major was at stake (i.e. safety) and Anya refused to listen or compromise. But the "healthy food before chocolate" rule had little logical basis that I could point to (we were only talking a few M & M's, it couldn't have ruined her appetite). Basically it came down to a battle of wills because nothing, in fact, was at stake except my desire vs. hers. She would never have put up that kind of fuss if I had been able to say "Look, if you don't do X you could get hurt." The futility and inanity of half the parenting battles are what provoke defiance and opposition in children, if you ask me. "Pick your battles" isn't simply about saving your strength, it's also about preventing resistance for resistance's sake.

As for toddlers "manipulating" parents... well, obviously I am my children's best tool. If Tristan wants juice, how's he supposed to get some without "manipulating" me? If he wants his car puzzle off a shelf he can't reach, he must necessarily "manipulate" some taller person to obtain it. What is the big horror about kids "manipulating" adults? Why have we defined this to include disrespecting adults?

Modern parenting advice rarely if ever acknowledges that the drive for autonomy, being a force innate to human beings, deserves respect. Toddlers' desire for independence is usually to be curbed (unless it saves the parent work, as in getting dressed or using the potty). Any independence that doesn't assist grown-ups has no purpose, it seems, in the eyes of most of society.

My son is a kid who gets so excited if I put on a Baby Einstein video that he stands up on his tip-toes and thunders, "Uh-huh!" with a huge grin. He squeaks with excitement when he plays chase with Anya, he cries like his heart is breaking if I accidentally startle him or hurt his feelings (e.g. because he's about to do something dangerous). In one of our books there's a cat that gets stuck on the roof, and he says sadly, "Oh no, dog" at that part. (All small 4-legged creatures are dogs except our two cats, who are cats). If Anya cries he will pat her shoulder with one chubby hand. He's an emotional kid, prone to getting overwhelmed-- he's not "testing limits".

[Insert pithy, witty, amusing concluding sentence here.]

And I repeat....

2006-03-25T14:07:00.000-05:00

From the Wiki entry on attachment parenting:

One criticism of attachment parenting is that it can be very strenuous and demanding on parents. Without a support network of helpful friends or family, the work of parenting can be difficult.

Another criticism is that there is really no conclusive or convincing body of research that shows this labor-intensive approach to be in any way superior to what attachment parents term "mainstream parenting" in the long run.

Criticism #1 is a valid consideration for parents. They may need to find ways of getting support if they're committed to attachment parenting. But from the kid's point of view this is not a criticism.

As for criticism #2, attachment parenting is, in my eyes, quite obviously more pleasant for the kid. Whether it's "superior in the long run" is moot. I'll say it again: childhood is not preparation for life, it is life.

Why is that so easily forgotten?

Back to basics

2006-03-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

School is remarkably invisible to most people. It involves something so fundamental: you are giving your child to someone else for hours out of the day. How can that happen with so little consideration? With so little concern over the adult who will be in charge of your child, who will be their caretaker? John Gatto says this was not initially accepted as normal, that violence against schoolteachers and riots in or around schools were commonplace in the early years of compulsory schooling. For instance:

Bruce Curtis’ book Building the Education State 1836-1871 documents the intense aversion to schooling which arose across North America.... Many schools were burned to the ground and teachers run out of town by angry mobs. When students were kept after school, parents often broke into school to free them.

At Saltfleet Township in 1859 a teacher was locked in the schoolhouse by students who "threw mud and mire into his face and over his clothes," according to school records—while parents egged them on....

Or-- again from Gatto:

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted — sometimes with guns — by an estimated 80% of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880’s when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

When you homeschool, people ask you why. Parents have raised their children to adulthood since before we were homo sapiens, but now we are asked to explain? Why shouldn't I ask other parents why they send their children away?

Not only does school now strike me as-- well, frankly, a rather bizarre arrangement (would you leave your child with a babysitter who also had 23 other children to look after?)-- but I find the tone of schoolteachers and principals to be extremely off-putting. Their tone is so often one of "We know what is best for your children, not you."

Consider this stern paragraph from a Michigan elementary school newsletter:

Our [Kindergarten] Round Up meeting will be held on Thursday, February 16, 2006 at 7:00 P.M. At this meeting you will receive pertinent information about the curriculum, kindergarten options, immunizations and complete the necessary forms. Childcare will be provided.

Translation: If you have a child who is about to turn 5, you must show up at this location, on this date, at this time, and we will take your children to another room while we make you fill out forms and pressure you about vaccinating. [This school district has printed lies on some of its websites regarding the supposedly mandatory nature of vaccines. I don't know about other states, but in Michigan vaccines are not mandatory.]

Our local school's newsletter states that "it is a district guideline that parents may not request a specific teacher for their child." You have no say over who babysits your kid, in other words.

The mental health community helps to justify the division of children and parents by inventing separation anxiety disorder, school refusal disorder, and social phobia to explain and stigmatize any resistance to separation. Regarding such diagnoses, I can only say: bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. These people never question the society, never question the schools, never take the point of view of the child. They define mental illness as "not thriving in mainstream society," as if mainstream society were natural and eternal instead of arbitrary and changing, as if our culture ought to be monolithic, as if we all should follow the same lifestyle and the same rules. I have a word for these psychiatrists, as well, and it is: Soviet.

I may start answering the "So why did you decide to homeschool?" question with "Because our species cares for its own offspring." I don't say it has to be the mom, or even the parents (we traditionally have lived in broader family clans, after all). And I am sympathetic to the economic impossibility of a parent staying home, for many families-- but then I have to ask why the "richest country on earth" (as we're always told) accepts a culture in which parents cannot afford to care for their own children?

Politicians and other leaders talk about "the children" and "family values," but let's face it. We've set up a culture which is hostile to children and then we've diagnosed the kids who can't adapt to such hostility. And then, if you try to opt out of some of this by homeschooling, people wonder why.

How about these basics: children need the care of relatives, children need joy, children need autonomy. Or, even shorter: childhood is not preparation for life, it is life.

On not comparing children

2006-03-23T09:11:00.000-05:00

her

have

Mom 1: Little Tommy spent last week studying Monet. We're going to take him to Chicago for that big impressionism exhibit.

Mom 2: Oh, really? Well, Susie has been so interested in amphibians and their sensitivity to environmental degradation... we're doing the frog survey this spring.

Mom 1: Oh, isn't that nice. And Tommy's been so interested in electricity and magnetism, I think we're going to spend Saturday at the science museum....

Mom 2: Of course, Susie's other love is geometry. We just can't get our hands on enough math manipulatives to keep her happy!

actual

Drugs for boredom

2006-03-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

Recently, there's been a flurry of news reports on the risks of ADHD drugs. This Bloomberg article is representative:

March 15 (Bloomberg) -- Drugs children take for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should carry stronger warnings about the risk of side effects like hallucinations and paranoia, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.

The agency since 2000 has received more than 500 reports of psychosis in children 10 and younger who took attention drugs including Shire Plc's Adderall, Eli Lilly & Co.'s Strattera, and Novartis AG's Ritalin and Focalin, a staff review found.
. . .

ADHD drugs have been previously criticized by other FDA advisory panels for potentially increasing the risk of heart attacks, strokes and suicides. Last month, a different advisory panel unexpectedly suggested putting the FDA's strictest warning, a black box warning, on ADHD drugs advising users of heart-attack and stroke risks.

These risks have actually been known for a while, but the US government has not chosen to publicize these risks nor do anything about them. Canada, for instance, banned Adderall some time ago after a series of sudden deaths (by stroke or heart attack) which were attributed to the drug. Yet still the FDA was silent. On a related topic, certain antidepressants have been banned for use in children in the UK (e.g. Paxil) due to an increased risk of suicide, and the FDA has done nothing concrete to protect children from those medications, either.

What really irks me about the ADHD drugs is that school is usually the problem, yet the child is somehow seen as defective. Take these excerpts from an overview of ADHD available at the Help for ADD site:

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a disorder characterized by a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity/impulsivity that occurs in academic, occupational, or social settings. Problems with attention include making careless mistakes, failing to complete tasks, problems staying organized and keeping track of things, becoming easily distracted, etc. Problems with hyperactivity can include excessive fidgetiness and squirminess, running or climbing when it is not appropriate, excessive talking, and being constantly on the go. Impulsivity can show up as impatience, difficulty awaiting one's turn, blurting out answers, and frequent interrupting.

Such a child is obviously bored out of their ever-loving skull, to the point where their skin is crawling. Possibly 6-year-old children should not be sitting at desks for 6 hours a day-- have they thought of that? Possibly they need one-on-one attention, autonomy, more physical activity? Perhaps they need to be actually learning instead of listening to some classmate struggle to read aloud, especially if they've already finished the reading book? (I remember reading somewhere that ADHD kids tend to test higher on IQ tests and may be more intelligent than average. That would partly explain the boredom.)

Another excerpt:

One perplexing aspect of ADHD is that a child's symptoms can vary considerably at different times and in different settings. For example, it is common for parents to wonder how their child can have ADHD when that child focuses intently when watching TV or playing Nintendo. Similarly, when engaged in free play activities, children with ADHD are often indistinguishable from their peers. In other settings, however, particularly those where activity must be restricted and attention sustained to tasks that seem uninteresting, the symptoms are quite evident. For children with ADHD, this variability in symptoms does not indicate laziness or defiance (although these can be issues that must also be dealt with). Instead, it demonstrates that ADHD symptoms are simply more likely to be evident in some settings rather than others. Unfortunately, the classroom is one setting where ADHD symptoms are very likely to be prominent, and sometimes this explains the very different views that parents and teachers have of the same child.

Right, the kid is defective but we just tend to notice it in the classroom. The parents don't notice any difficulty, but the teacher (a Trained Expert, don't you know) recognizes the symptoms. Give me a break.

I actually do think that there are environmental influences that can cause problems for kids, e.g.: mercury, dyes and preservatives, lead, arsenic, too much sugar, antibiotics (these can destroy the healthy intestinal bacteria we need for proper nutrition), trans-fats which prevent the body from utilizing omega-3 fatty acids (which in turn are critical to brain development, learning, and mood). Our kids have many strikes against them because of our food supply, our overuse of antibiotics, and pollution. But most ADHD cases are diagnosed only once the child begins school, and the symptoms are seen primarily in the classroom. In these cases, the problem isn't physical.

Our society is obviously willing to risk psychosis and stroke rather than question the modern classroom.

Pass me the vomit bag

2006-03-21T20:27:00.000-05:00

This is from an NEA "classroom management" publication:

Examples of reinforcing classroom expectations include:

"I see so many people ready to start meeting. I see hands in laps, legs crossed, eyes front."

"I noticed that many people remembered to look at the person they were greeting today...."

"Thank you for a very efficient clean-up today. I see caps back on markers, pencils with points down in cans, paper off the floor."

Now compare that with this excerpt from our local elementary school newsletter:

I want to take the time to thank [School Name] Parents. Each day I see parents working alongside staff as part of the educational team.... I see the positive impact of parents each day. I see well cared for children that are full of fun and eager to learn. I see you volunteering in the classrooms, in the workroom, on the playground, in the lunchroom and at special events....

And I see that someone needs to give this principal the bug-eyed, slack-jawed, furrowed-brow look of shock and horror that she deserves for treating parents like they're four years old.

Sociodiversity

2006-03-20T18:29:00.000-05:00

According to its Wiki entry, biodiversity has four main benefits:

It insures that all natural processes are carried out, making the ecosystem less vulnerable.
It provides a wealth of resources: a variety of foods, medicines, tourist climates, and industrial materials.
It insures that all species are allowed to exist (very basic ethics!).
Greater diversity means a wealth of data for scientific study, providing clues into evolution and current biology.

Now apply this idea to human beings... let's call it sociodiversity. Sociodiversity has the same benefits to society as biodiversity has for ecosystems:

It insures that all jobs and services are carried out, making the economy less vulnerable.
It provides a wealth of human resources: a variety of ideas and skills, more innovation and invention, different kinds of intelligence.
It insures that all kinds of human beings are allowed to express themselves.
It allows us a fuller understanding of our own species, our many ways of life, our disparate styles of thinking and expression.

And then consider this bit from an old 1996 American Psychological Association article (thanks to another homeschool blog -- only I can no longer locate which one! -- for the link):

[S]chool exposes children to many different teachers with varying attitudes and values, notes psychologist Carole Rayburn, PhD, a consultant to the Maryland public schools. Children who stay at home only hear their parents' philosophies and have little chance to form their own views, she says.

"What if parents are teaching a narrow view that goes against what society values?" Rayburn wonders. "The school is more apt to represent what society as a whole values."

I will reiterate that parents have the right to teach their children what they want. Some parents may teach their children to believe some really despicable things, but what's the alternative? Total fascism, that's what.

Secondly, this article is quite out of date and reflects the old misconception that homeschoolers keep their kids hermetically sealed in the home or refuse to allow them to speak to anyone with differing beliefs.

But lastly and most importantly, when parents teach their kids a particular set of values, particularly when they are non-mainstream or an eclectic mix of beliefs, they are increasing sociodiversity. When China begins to eat up the world's supply of crude oil, we're going to need innovation to maintain our economy. When global warming changes our climate and wreaks havoc on agricultural practice, we're going to need a bunch of different ideas. I think virtually everyone would appreciate a greater diversity of politicians. And then there's the fact that sociodiversity is just more fun.

[Regarding fun and the lighter side of diversity: Have you ever been wandering the internet and discovered that, for instance, there are square dancers willing to pay $300 and up for a gigantic poufy gold lame petticoat? And your mind boggles? Or maybe you've wandered onto a web page run by someone who attends Star Trek conferences in furry animal costume? Or maybe you were trying to replace the hinges on the entertainment center door, which broke after your daughter hung on the door one too many times, and you find yourself reading a woodworking site's flame war about Blum vs. Mepla European hinges? See, I love that stuff. I say, bring on the diversity.]

When people talk about "fringe beliefs" or mutter about children needing to grow up ready to accept mainstream society, I think that somewhere in there is a fear of differences, a fear of bullheaded people whose ideas might not mesh with yours, a fear that we might have to have debate, that our neighbors may one day not be like us.

In other words, there's a fear of the very diversity they claim to be enamored of.

Adults teaching kids games

2006-03-19T21:51:00.000-05:00

This story from Scotland caught my eye today:

CHILDREN are being taught skipping and traditional games in schools by specialist instructors, costing up to £160 a day, as part of a move to tackle inactivity and obesity among Scotland's young people.

One in five Scottish 12-year-olds is classified as obese and, as children spend more time playing sedentary video games than in active play, it is feared many playground games like skipping and hopscotch, which used to provide exercise, are in danger of being permanently forgotten.

. . .

The lessons, once written off by cynics who claimed children did not need to be taught how to play, have sparked a craze for skipping and other games unseen in playgrounds for years.

In one Glasgow primary school, hand-clapping games are back in vogue, with children learning complicated rhymes in English and French to impress their friends.

Kellie Currie, who teaches for Skipping Workshops, said: "You wouldn't believe the number of schools I go into where kids don't know how to play games....

I'm all for kids learning how to jump rope, play 4-square, hopscotch, or rhyming games. It's just kind of sad that adults have to teach them, instead of other kids.

What kids really need, in terms of the big S-word (socialization), is lots of free and largely unsupervised time with other kids. Soccer practice and the classroom are too highly structured for this purpose, in my opinion. One of the benefits of just "hanging out" with other kids is that you come to see each other as a resource for preventing boredom. I might suggest Chinese jump-rope, my friend might later suggest a game of "round the world" (basketball, of a sort), someone else might come along and want to ride our bikes down the Big Hill. That's the bond that spurs friendships and social groups... you need each other for entertainment (even if it's just Canasta and Connect Four).

One expert quoted in the above article blamed the lack of physical games on a "safety culture" that fears injury, particularly on the school playground. Parents don't want to let their kids roam the neighborhood either, they way parents used to, due to similar fears of accidents or worse. And then, there's the pressure to fill up a kid's time with "meaningful" activities that look good on paper or can be seen as "investing in the future." It's not all the fault of TV and Xbox.

The fact that these games are now being taught in school by adults not only indicates a problem with physical inactivity; it also points to problems with socialization. Next time you're gritting your teeth as someone mutters vaguely about "social issues," just remember that homeschoolers have enough free time, at least, to learn hopscotch.

Professional vs. parental teaching

2006-03-18T09:51:00.000-05:00

There's an old Doonesbury cartoon where Zonker is at the typewriter, writing:

Most problems, like answers, have finite resolutions. The basis for these resolutions contain many of the ambiguities which conditional man daily struggles with. Accordingly, most problematic solutions are fallible. Mercifully, all else fails; conversely, hope lies in a myriad of polemics.

Mike comes in and asks, "Which paper is this?"

Zonker says, "Dunno. I haven't decided yet."

I was strongly reminded of Zonker's b.s. when I came across this paragraph in the California Standards for the Teaching Profession:

Teaching is more than methodology. Philosophical and theoretical understandings of teaching and learning empower teachers to make thoughtful, informed decisions about instructional strategies and ways to support students' learning. A teacher's practice cannot be viewed or evaluated separately from her or his professional ideas and understandings; all aspects of teaching are interdependent. The Standards are broad and interdependent because the professional practice of teaching needs to be seen comprehensively as a complex, dynamic process in which practical and conceptual elements are woven together as a seamless fabric.

There are people who would read this hooey, and think of all those teacher's colleges, and all those libraries full of education journals and research papers, and conclude that homeschoolers are rejecting an entire field of social science. They might conclude, in fact, that homeschoolers reject science generally, and have an appalling lack of respect for expert knowledge. Because science has become part of the great political divide, with many progressives claiming science as 1) the only appropriate means of comprehending the world and 2) exclusively theirs, a minority of progressives just cannot abide a homeschooler who appears (in their eyes) to hate science.

There's no arguing with someone who writes you off as positively medieval because you avoid formal schooling. But, just to get my own thoughts clear, I would make these points:

What makes teaching difficult and complex and worthy of reams of scientific studies is the absurd adult-to-child ratio. The Big Questions like "Sight reading or phonics?" are a moot point when you're using individual instruction, because then you just use whichever one works best for that child.
Administrators complicate teaching in order to justify their own employment. (There are at least twice as many of them, per teacher, as there were in the 1950's.)
Because I am an expert in my own children, I have an enormous advantage over a stranger who only has minutes per day in which to get to know my child.
I have a major advantage in being able to "strike while the iron is hot" and explain concepts at precisely the moment when my child is curious.
Autonomy increases learning (e.g., see Alfie Kohn). Enough said.
Anxiety decreases learning; school is a hostile social environment.
Attempting to teach a concept too early results in lost time, lost effort, and much frustration for everyone involved. Not having a schedule is thus another advantage.
Assessment is basically pointless when you homeschool. I can't imagine how any parent could do it without having a pretty good idea of where their children were in math and reading skills, without understanding their depth of knowledge in the topics that interest them.

To give an example of these ordinary, everyday advantages enjoyed by homeschoolers, last night at about 10:15pm I introduced Anya to the topic of asexual vs. sexual reproduction. I admit, it was long past bedtime and I didn't want to get into it, but we homeschool, and thus we had the discussion. She was confused about how tribbles (from Star Trek's The Trouble with Tribbles) can have babies even if there's no boy around to mate with. I gave her the jargon, and then we talked about how it's mostly plants that use asexual reproduction, although not all plants-- and that no, I could not think of an animal that reproduces asexually. (There must be some, though. Earthworms? I'll have to use Wiki or Google....) She won't quite remember these terms, the first time around. I know that because I know her (see #3). "Asexual reproduction" is too many syllables to be absorbed on the first go at 10:15 at night. But over the next few days, I'll find a way to say them again (maybe once I find an animal that reproduces asexually), and in another week or two she'll have it down.

The "science is on my side" zealot says "You think you can emulate a scientifically trained professional? You think you're an expert educator?"

My reply is, "You think all the professional training in the world can make up for the teacher being a stranger, having only minutes a day to spend with my child, having 24 other children to look after, wasting my child's time constantly, making learning drudgery, holding them back, eliminating autonomy, enforcing an unreasonable schedule, destroying intrinsic motivation, and teaching in an environment of competition, hostility and anxiety?"

They think a teaching degree can do that?

Hostility

2006-03-16T18:24:00.000-05:00

Some time ago I had promised to post about the vicious hostility occasionally displayed toward homeschoolers, generally by folks on the political left. I'm a progressive myself, but I've run into other progressives who suggest unschoolers will grow up to be mass murderers (scroll down to the purple text). Or I've had them say things like "Spare me your homeschooling propaganda!" when I'm merely mentioning that my daughter enjoys doing math problems. Most progressives do not respond this way, but the minority who have this reaction are positively rabid in their hatred of homeschoolers.

Of course, homeschooling isn't the number one all-time hot button issue for progressives. That would be vaccination. I was on a blog two nights ago and said that I had not vaccinated my children, and someone replied, and I quote:

You are a complete fool. You don't vaccinate your children? They should be taken away from you because you are an irresponsible moron.

I don't know why I let this upset me. I've been told I should have my children taken away from me before-- in fact, it happens every single fucking time I mention vaccination on a liberal political blog (pardon my language). People pile on the "Recommended!" votes for any comments suggesting you are an unfit parent, if you dare to admit that you thumbed your nose at modern medicine.

Another of these hot buttons would be mercury. Anyone who believes the mercury in vaccines, the air, and dental fillings may (just may) be harmful is stupider than dirt, in the opinion of the fascist progressive. It's a litmus test. If you express any reservation about having mercury placed in your mouth, for instance, that's it, you're incapable of scientific thought. Never mind if the World Health Organization concluded:

Human studies and experiments in laboratory animals indicate that dental amalgam contributes significantly to mercury body burden in humans who have amalgam fillings (IPCS, 1991; US DHHS, 1993; Weiner & Nylander, 1995; Health Canada, 1997).

Doesn't matter. The point is, doctors and dentists and the CDC know what is best for you, and you are to click your heels and say jawohl and hand over your kids and shut up about it.

I think the hostility toward parents who eschew mainstream schooling or mainstream medicine is all based on the same core issue: a certain group of progressives sees such decisions as a rejection of science. To them, it does not matter if I am homeschooling as a Christian evangelical fundamentalist, or as an atheist. It does not matter if I choose not to vaccinate because I'm a Christian scientist, or because I have examined the evidence and concluded it is not in my children's best interests. Either way, I have rejected science, because they get to decide what's rational. The American left increasingly views itself as the One True Party of Science.

This is also at the root of the undying stereotype that homeschoolers are primarily motivated by religion. It's not that they don't hear us when we say "Look, at least half of us are secular." It's that they throw us into the same boat with fundamentalists on the basis of our rejection of public schooling itself. They go right on implying that homeschoolers, in general, keep their kids home to teach them intelligent design instead of evolution. But you know what? Even if that were true, parents have every right to do that! Otherwise we would have to legislate 1) what constitutes truth, and 2) legal repercussions for telling your children anything but The Truth. I happen to believe dietary cholesterol is unrelated to heart disease. Does that qualify my family for a visit from Social Services?

Similarly, these vaccine fascists ought to realize that any number of things are more dangerous than not vaccinating even if I stipulated that their facts were entirely correct. Even then, it would be more dangerous to:

not breastfeed
smoke in the house
let a 6-year-old sit in the front seat
feed a kid McDonald's on a daily basis

Are we going to take those kids away too?

The irony is, this subset of progressives who are fascists are exactly like religious fundamentalists. Any disagreement with them is a rejection of science, just as to a fundamentalist, any disagreement with them is a rejection of God.

You're either with us or you're against us.

Bullying... the video game

2006-03-15T16:03:00.000-05:00

It turns out there is a video game called Bully, in which you play a student at a reform school and fight your way to the top of the pecking order. It isn't out yet, but is scheduled for release in the next few months. The early advertising claims:

As a troublesome schoolboy, you'll laugh and cringe as you stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers, play pranks on malicious kids, win or lose the girl, and ultimately learn to navigate the obstacles of the fictitious reform school Bullworth Academy.

I really can't reconcile that with this screen shot:

From the Mirror (UK):

Horrified child welfare campaigners and teachers' groups are calling on the [UK] government to ban the Bully game.

Liz Carnell of campaign group Bullying Online says: "This game should be banned. I'm extremely worried that kids will play it and then act out what they've seen in the classroom.

"Bullying is not a game by any stretch of the imagination. We have around four suicidal children contacting us every day."

Two million children in the UK are bullied at school, with 40 per cent enduring abuse twice a week or more.

And the effects can last a lifetime. One in 12 youngsters is so traumatised that their education, relationships and even their job prospects are affected.

Between 10 and 15 children each year commit suicide after being picked on.

And in the United States:

MIAMI -- The Miami-Dade County School Board is taking what could be described as a pre-emptive strike against what some critics fear could be the latest in a line of video games they say promote violence.

South Florida attorney Jack Thompson, along with the support of the Miami-Dade County School Board, is leading an attempt to prevent a soon-to-be-released video game called "Bully" from making its way into the hands of children.

"The killers at Columbine were victims of bullying, and they became the ultimate bullies, killing people to settle scores with those who gave them a hard time, and that's the theme of this game," Thompson said.

The school board resolution requested parents not to buy the game, and requested that local retailers not stock it. The attorney mentioned above has also filed a lawsuit to ban the game from sale in Florida, claiming it constitutes a public nuisance.

If bullying weren't widespread to begin with, this game would never have been developed. Clearly the marketing idea is that victims can seek some sort of revenge, however artificial, within the game. And there are, of course, plenty of victims.

An anecdote about socialization

2006-03-13T22:15:00.000-05:00

We're part of an unschooling group in our area with around 30 or so families, and a little while ago we had a decent-sized gathering. About a dozen kids, anywhere from roughly 4 to 10 years old, were playing "ship" together. (The ship caught fire, sharks attacked, pirates attacked, people fell overboard and so on. The "ship" was a big, sturdy wooden table.)

In light of the fact that people often ask homeschoolers "What about socialization?" I have to say that my daughter is the only kid in our group, to my knowledge, who said:

"Oooooooh, you're in trouble!"
"He started it!"
"It's her fault!"
"I didn't get that out."
"Don't you know the rules?"

And my daughter is also (almost) the only child who has ever attended any school.

At times I find myself apologizing to other moms, often adding: "Well, she went to preschool for a year and a half... that's where she learned that." Not only do I say it, but other moms know exactly what I'm talking about! Generally the other kids just give Anya an uncertain look and more or less ignore such competitive statements. I really don't think Anya says this stuff with much hostility, I think it's just that large groups cause her to revert to preschool "Lord of the Flies" dialogue. I assume she will outgrow such statements, especially as they get her nowhere with the unschooled crowd.

The vast majority of the time, though, Anya enjoys herself tremendously-- it's just that when she says something negative my ear always catches it because of her tone of voice. The kids actually play remarkably well together and without any power hierarchy, in spite of the age range. But then, I've been noticing Anya's awareness of other kids' ages for a couple of years now. We'd be at a playground and she'd say to a toddler -- with gestures and slow, emphatic speech -- something like "Oh, don't come down that way, come over here, this way's safer." Or, "Make sure you hang on tight!" Sometimes she might misjudge a child's age, but she was quite accomodating to whatever age she perceived them to be. This is how it generally works at the homeschool group gatherings (although not necessarily between siblings, perhaps). There's one 8-year-old boy who is protective of the littler ones without being overbearing, saying stuff like "Hey man, get down from there, that's not safe!" He tried to play cops and robbers with Anya (she being the appointed criminal), and she was scared by it. He caught on to that, so he came up and said "I talked it over with the chief of police and he says we should drop all the charges, so I'll have to let you go...." Cracked me up.

I think adults who only know schooled kids or remember their own school days imagine that kids are naturally mean to one another, particularly to younger kids. In fact, in more natural settings, I think older kids imitate parental care when dealing with younger ones. I think back to when our school district was consolidating and the middle school was going to be moved into one of the two high school buildings. Many parents were freaking out, as if the high school students constituted an enormous danger, either from physical violence or due to drug use or sexual harassment. This is really sad. My experience is that older kids take care of the younger ones, and can probably teach things to younger kids even more efficiently than an adult can convey the same information. Mixed age groups ought to be seen as a wonderful thing.

Which brings me to an excellent comeback to the eternal "What about socialization?" question. I was over at the Joyful Living and Unschooling site and found this:

When they ask the socialization question you can ask how public school kids learn to relate to people who are not the same age as themselves.

Good point.

Stealth privatization

2006-03-09T18:49:00.000-05:00

Suppose that a company provided a school with textbooks, curriculum, guidance for teachers, grades, and the criteria used to award diplomas. Suppose that, nationwide, revenues from similar products and services were in the billions of dollars per year. Would we consider that school to be privatized?

If that sounds like privatization to you, then many American schools have indeed been privatized, right under our noses. The three biggest educational testing services, which account for close to 100% of all standardized tests administered in the US, are Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin (source).

I don't know about you, but I recognize those names. Harcourt? McGraw-Hill? Houghton-Mifflin? Those were the names written on the spines of my public school textbooks.

Textbook publishers don't merely provide passive information, to be used as the schools and teachers see fit. They provide discussion topics, summaries and highlights, selected vocabulary terms, and homework sets-- as well as (in the teacher's guide) quizzes, lecture suggestions and classroom activities. John Gatto has written about how "school editions" of literary works control classroom learning:

Soon after I began teaching Moby Dick I realized that the school edition wasn't a real book at all but a kind of disguised indoctrination. It provided all the questions... [and] if you read those questions, let alone answered them, there would be no chance ever again for a private exchange between you and Melville.

The editors of the school edition had provided a package of prefabricated questions and over a hundred chapter-by-chapter abstracts and interpretations of their own. If I didn't assign them the kids wanted to know why, and unless everyone duly parroted the party line set down by the book editor, those used to getting high marks became scared and angry.
There was no avoiding the conclusion that the school text of Moby Dick had been subtly denatured and was worse than useless -- it was dangerous. So I pitched it and bought a set of real Moby Dick's with my own money. The school edition of Moby Dick asked all the right questions, so I had to throw it away. Real books don't do that. Real books demand that people actively participate, ask their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren't just stupid, they hurt the mind under the pretext of helping it just exactly the way standardized tests do.

Now, in addition to this control of the classroom, teachers are often "teaching to the test." Three companies decide what goes on the test, and therefore what information is of importance, and furthermore, they dictate how we assess educational achievement. Some schools, in an effort to boost scores, purchase supplementary materials such as lesson plans, workbooks, and practice exams, provided (naturally) by the designers of these tests. These preparation materials then dictate, even more meticulously, what will be taught in the classroom.

With an increasing number of states now relying on high school exit exams which must be passed in order to obtain a diploma, these same three companies are also setting criteria for graduation. Some states place test scores on the students' high school transcripts (e.g. Washington). Such scores then provide a measure akin to an SAT or ACT score, likely making them more important than individual semester grades to many employers or college admissions boards.

This is assuming things work correctly. Gross mistakes have been made. For example:

School officials yesterday revised the number of students mistakenly assigned to summer school upward to more than 8,600, but Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Board of Education officials argued that parents of those children should be grateful for the mix-up because the faltering children were given a chance at more schooling.

"If I were a parent of one of the children, I would say, 'Thank you for having the child in summer school' because the child got more education," the Mayor said at a City Hall news conference....

The Mayor, who had strongly pushed the summer school program as a way of getting tough with failing students, spoke in response to questions about the revelations by Chancellor Rudy Crew that thousands of students in the third and sixth grades were erroneously required to attend summer school because of a scoring mistake by CTB/McGraw-Hill, the company based in Monterey, Calif., that designed the exam.

So, to recap:

Three companies write the books, heavily influence classroom learning, encourage teaching to the test, design said tests, decide who is promoted, decide who must attend summer school, decide who graduates, and label students with numbers that play a significant role in their future prospects.

How is that not privatization?

Applied math

2006-03-08T15:06:00.000-05:00

From a December 2004 article:

U.S. high school students match their peers in other nations when it comes to math skills. But ask them to apply those skills to real-world situations and things begin to look a bit bleak, a new study suggests.

The nation's 15-year-olds make a poor showing on a newly released international test of practical math applications, ranking 24th out of 29 industrialized nations, behind South Korea, Japan and most of Europe. U.S. students' scores were comparable to those in Poland, Hungary and Spain.

. . .

The test goes far beyond the multiple-choice questions many students see on standardized tests these days.

. . .

[Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy] adds, "Maybe American kids know more math than they did before, but they don't know how to apply it in practical situations."

Or, take this report from early this year:

More than half of students at four-year colleges and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.
The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills no matter their field of study.
. . .

They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, ...compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey....

. . .

Almost 20 percent of students pursuing four-year degrees had only basic quantitative skills. For example, the students could not estimate if their car had enough gas to get to the service station. About 30 percent of two-year students had only basic math skills.

I've been pondering why so many of us are unable to apply math in everyday life. Is the problem that we introduce concepts too early, before we can really "get" the techniques involved in solving a problem? (Take carrying and borrowing: if you really understand the ones, tens, and hundreds places, these are obvious tricks to use. If you don't have a gut-level grasp, these are just cookbook rules one must memorize.)

Is it that "kill and drill" ignores the conceptual and demands rote memorization in its place? Is it that "story problems" are those last few items in the homework assignment, almost like extra credit, rather than the meat and potatoes of math? Is it that we teach a superficial overview of too many concepts in math, instead of taking techniques one at a time, examining each one in depth in a dozen different contexts?

And furthermore, why is "math phobia" a widely recognized phenomena? I haven't heard anyone say they had "reading phobia" or "science phobia" or "history phobia." Yet a sizeable proportion of Americans experience an impenetrable brain fog when confronted with math.

I don't have a theory to put forth here, really, to explain why learning mathematics is so fraught. But I've been pondering it, and thought I'd post about it. Anyone have any ideas?

Today's questions

2006-02-22T15:51:00.000-05:00

Things Anya asked me today:

How do magicians do the rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick?
How many moons does Venus have?
How come Mercury and Venus don't have any moons?
Is our planet ever going to get sucked into the sun?
How big is our moon? (She guessed "Bigger than our house.")
What are asteroids?
What's a growth spurt?
Where do the blue ladybugs live?
How far is it to Hawaii?
How do you tell male ladybugs from female ladybugs?
Where can we find aphids?
Would our ladybugs (current count: 21, living in a pickle jar) mate if we gave them aphids?
Does "ladybug" have a silent 'e' in it? (the 'a' says its name, after all...)
Why are ladybugs diurnal?
What do Daddy Long-Legs eat?
What do pillbugs (roly-polys) eat?
What happens to a roly-poly if it dries out?
What's the recipe for Play-Doh?
How come some grass grows taller than other grass?
How tall does the tallest grass grow?
Do prairie dogs live on the prairie?
How come one of our guitars is louder than the other guitar?
How do you play a C note on the guitar?
How do you play Old McDonald on the guitar?
How does the thermostat work?
If light is the fastest thing ever than how come it takes a second for the kitchen light to turn on? (It's fluorescent....)
Are fairies real?
How many seconds is two minutes?
How many seconds is three minutes?
How slow does a turtle move?
How slow does a tree sloth move?
What's the fastest animal?
Can I (Anya) run faster than a chipmunk?
What does this sound mean (a telephone busy signal)?
How come some cheese is stinkier than other cheese?
How does popcorn pop?
How many people live on the whole Earth?
Why don't any people live at the South Pole?
How come my (electronic, LeapFrog) globe doesn't say "population 1" at the North Pole?

Mind you, this is just what I can remember, sitting here and trying to recall as of 4pm. There are also many observations that she wants me to reaffirm, as in: "That red spot on Jupiter is a storm bigger than our whole PLANET, right Mom?" I didn't count those, and there are just as many of those as actual questions. Nor did I count lengthy discussions such as how orbiting works, the phases of the moon, or the seasons. Nor the time spent finding ladybug images on Google. Nor the time spent practicing little song bits on her guitar. Nor did I count the things I volunteered, like that groups of insects have different names, like coleoptera are beetles, lepidoptera are moths and butterflies, and hymenoptera are social insects like bees, wasps, and ants. The Latin names are boring, but we were looking through a long index of bug pics listed by Latin names, and it was actually useful in that context.

And then there was Tristan: colors, shapes, vehicles, parts of the face, practicing going down the stairs, books, puzzles, dancing, crayon drawing, Baby Einstein videos, and the endless requests for snacks. He was eating grapes today while Anya had the lid off the ladybug jar, and he held up a grape and said "bug." I was pretty thrilled with that, and of course cut the grape in half and stuck it in there, then helped him see that the bugs were indeed eating it within minutes.

I just don't think we have time for a curriculum-- I'm too busy helping my kids learn stuff as it is.

And this was a day I supposedly devoted to housework! Criminy, no wonder I'm so often exhausted....

The Pledge

2006-02-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

This is a photograph of American students saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Up until 1942, this was the salute given during the Pledge. Pretty startling, no?

The Pledge (and its original salute) were created in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, whose political beliefs lay somewhere between socialism and communism. (His cousin Edward Bellamy wrote a best-selling futuristic novel describing a communist utopia. The novel was called Looking Backward, and I can see why it outsold almost every other book of its time: it involved strict management of the entire population by the State, which was a very popular idea around the turn of the century.) Francis Bellamy may have been a progressive socialist concerned with equality and other noble pursuits, but he also believed this could be attained through a more powerful, controlling government. I guess the author's motivations don't matter much, since the Pledge is merely one long sentence, but I think it gives some cultural context.

The Pledge was enthusiastically adopted by the National Education Association and local school boards in the years that followed, often along with a flag-raising ceremony. For a time in the 1940s, the Pledge was legally compulsory. In 1940 the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that even Jehovah's Witnesses, whose religion forbids them from swearing allegiance to any lesser power than God, would be forced to recite the Pledge in school. However, the court promptly reversed itself in 1943, ruling that no school could compel students to recite the Pledge due to free speech protections.

The "under God" portion of the Pledge was added in 1954 in order to distinguish our Pledge from the communist Soviet Pledge, which is pretty ridiculous if you think about it. What exactly is the message? "Sure, we have our own daily loyalty oath just like them, but at least we're not godless fascists"? Why not just drop the whole silly thing?

The main concrete effect of the Pledge is to socialize children that patriotism is normal; lack of patriotism is aberrant. Furthermore, patriotism is to be expressed through communist-like spoken loyalty oaths and militaristic salutes, not through expression of freedom of speech (talk about ironic). It may not seem like a big deal, when it's just a short 30-second ritual and kids don't even consider the meaning of the words most of the time, but I consider it both an anachronism and another example of school's hostility toward autonomy.

UPDATE: There's some more information about the history of the Pledge here, at my mom's blog.

The more things change....

2006-02-17T17:03:00.000-05:00

From John Taylor Gatto's The Underground History of American Education, chapter five:

One of Munsterberg’s favorite disciples, Lillian Wald, became a powerful advocate of medical incursions into public schools. The famous progressive social reformer wrote in 1905: "It is difficult to place a limit upon the service which medical inspection should perform," continuing, "Is it not logical to conclude that physical development...should so far as possible be demanded?" One year later, immigrant public schools in Manhattan began performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without notifying parents. The New York Times (June 29, 1906) reported that "Frantic Italians" —- many armed with stilettos -— "stormed" three schools, attacking teachers and dragging children from [their] clutches....

From the legal advocacy group The Rutherford Institute, July 30, 2000:

Strangers entered two different elementary schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma on two separate occasions. They forcibly removed the clothes from numerous children between the ages of three and five—over their cries of fear and desperate attempts to resist—and proceeded to probe the genitals of the now-nude children.

. . .

The nurses conducted their exams over the protests of the children, with some crying for their mothers. Still others, intimidated and filled with fear, even attempted to resist physically. Their parents did not know that the exams were scheduled and had not given their consent. So there was no way they could have known the terror their children were enduring during their school day.

The nurses stretched the children out on a floor mat, on top of a school desk, and forcibly removed their clothes. Although the nurses were not even wearing hygienic gloves, they pressed and probed the children’s genitals and took blood samples. The exams were conducted en masse—the children endured these humiliations in front of one other, amidst the panic, crying and fear.

When confronted about the situation, the Head Start director responsible for the exams said that he didn’t think there was anything strange or unusual about the physicals....

. . .

Thirteen families have now filed a lawsuit against Head Start, the nurses involved, the county health department and the school district. The parents allege violations of their privacy, emotional and mental distress of their children and other constitutional claims.

And in Pennsylvania, several years back:

The Washington Times (Genital Exams at School Irk Parents, A1 4/27/96) reports that 50 [actually 59] sixth-grade girls at a public school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania were forced to undergo "genital examinations" in violation of the expressed will of the girls and without the notification of parents.

Katie Tucker, the mother of one of the girl's who was violated, tells the story: "[After being marched into the nurses office] they were told they needed to take off their clothes and just leave their underwear on. They were standing in line, perfectly embarrassed, and then they found out the doctor was doing genital exams.

"The girls were scared. They were crying and trying to run out of the door, but one of the nurses was blocking the door so they couldn't leave.

"My daughter told the other nurse that 'My mother wouldn't like this. I want to call her.' And they said 'No.' And my daughter said, 'I don't want this test done.' And the nurse said 'Too bad.'

"[The physician] put the girls in a room and had them lie down on a table, spread-eagled, with nothing covering them...." The inspection was supposedly for genital warts and lesions. Mrs. Tucker continues, "The girls had no idea what they were doing. The doctor didn't talk to them. She just did the genital exam and didn't say one word. All my daughter could do was stare up at the ceiling. And it hurt. It still hurts."

School officials in the Pennsylvania case refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing and were supported by other educators:

The Pennsylvania branch of the National Education Association (NEA) supports the actions of Dr. Vahanvaty, the supervising school nurses, and the requirement of an in-school genital exam. Teachers wore blue ribbons to demonstrate their support of the exam. The district and state police agreed with Dr. Vahanvaty's statement that she acted within professional and state guidelines.

The East Stroudsburg School Board approved of the examination. A motion to give children the right to refuse examinations below the waist was defeated 8 to 1.

These educators were, however, clearly in the wrong:

SCRANTON, PA -- U.S. District Judge A. Richard Caputo ruled on July 27 that the East Stroudsburg School District violated the Fourth Amendment rights of 59 6th grade girls who were given genital exams without parental consent in 1996. The exams occurred at the J.T. Lambert Middle School. The judge ruled that the exams constituted "unreasonable searches," and said he "could not identify a compelling government reason to examine the genitals."

Two days later, the jury returned a verdict against the district, awarding a total of $60,000 in damages, or $7,500 for each of the eight student plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The jury did not award damages to the parents. The physician who performed the exams reached an out-of-court settlement [reportedly for $25,000 per student] with the girls families.

In addition to this we have, in essence, the state-mandated drugging of 1 or 2 children in a typical classroom.

They started off using schools to enact public health measures against the will of parents, and they are still trying to pull it off today. The more things change....

Handwriting

2006-02-15T19:00:00.000-05:00

Okay, I've found it: the most pointless educational advice ever, regarding handwriting:

Begin with lines and shapes, encouraging children to draw all vertical lines from the top to the bottom. All circular shapes should begin at the 2 o'clock position, moving up, left, and around-like the letter c. (Kids tend to start at the top and make egg shapes.) Shapes using straight lines -- triangles, rectangles, and squares -- should always use individual lines that meet, not a single stroke with an attempt to make "pointy" corners. Every line should be drawn left to right or top to bottom. Vertical lines are drawn first, left side, then right side, and then the connecting horizontal lines. The horizontal lines on top are first, and all horizontal lines should begin at the left. Kids have their own short cuts, so these basics do need to be taught.

Gosh. I make my v's using a single, pointy-cornered stroke, instead of two strokes-- and yet, I have the gall to consider myself educated.

As for "these basics do need to be taught," I don't think so. When I was in about the 6th or 7th grade, most of the girls decided to make their handwriting stylish and pretty. Sure, we'd had a good 5 or 6 years of handwriting drills by then, but after all that effort, we weren't too enthralled with standard, uniform writing. We developed individual styles, some round and balloonish, some slanty and narrow, whatever we thought looked "cool". I experimented with I's dotted with open circles, elongated lacy writing, fat horizontally stretched cursive, and so forth. My dearest friend writes to this day in a wild, loopy, vertically stretched font which not infrequently causes her letters to go amiss with the post office, eventually arriving with the address written in some postal employee's handwriting on the front of the letter for clarification. My own writing is a combination of print and cursive (although I much, much prefer typing). Nor is the handwriting of many of the men I know either a) completely legible nor b) uniform. Somehow we all survive, handwriting notwithstanding.

While I'm at it, I'll also say that it is not necessary to teach typing. I began typing as a kid, when my brother and I played text-based adventure games. My abilities went from hunt-and-peck to my own organic system, using primarily three fingers on each hand (although I hit the shift key with my right pinky). I can type faster than most people I know, I don't have to look at the keyboard, and I'll never get carpal tunnel because I am not holding my hands in one stiff, unnatural position over the keyboard-- rather, my hands move around as I'm typing and the positions they take on are the ones that came naturally.

So, personally, I'd put "handwriting" and "typing" into the sheer busywork category.

Homeschooling on the rise

2006-02-14T19:37:00.000-05:00

A US Department of Education report on homeschooling has just been released (based on a nationwide 2003 survey, so it's already out of date!). According to this random and representative sample, homeschooling has increased from 1.7% of K-12 students in 1999 to 2.2% in 2003. There were, in 2003, an estimated 1.1 million homeschooled children, a 29% increase over the 1999 number.

Parents were then asked which one of the applicable reasons they considered to be their most important reason for homeschooling—31 percent of homeschooled children had parents who cited concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure, as the most important reason for homeschooling and 30 percent had parents who said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction. While these were the two most common responses, another 16 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools was their most important reason for homeschooling.

On an unrelated note, I've been over at the NEA and AFT websites trying to find out what they have to say about homeschooling, and what they have to say is: nada. The NEA site has one "leave teaching to the experts" column, written by a head custodian rather than a teacher, but that's it. Essentially, home education is totally ignored.

The case for unschooling

2006-02-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

I have to thank reader samuel for leaving a comment, which led me to his unschooling blog, which led me to this excellent post on unschooling. I hope you'll read the whole thing, but I just wanted to excerpt one good point:

There is at least one more thing wrong with the conventional model. Judging sources of information on internal evidence is a very important intellectual skill. In the classroom, that skill is anti-taught. The pupil is told things by two authorities–the teacher and the textbook–and his job is to believe what they say. Here again, a sufficiently good teacher may be able to overcome the logic of the setting and teach some degree of critical thinking–but here again, sufficiently good teachers are rare.

One of the great advantages of the Internet, considered as an educational tool, is that it is so obviously an unfiltered medium, leaving it up to each reader to figure out for himself how much to trust his sources of information. It isn't perfect, but at least it is teaching the right lesson instead of the wrong one.

Being able to decide what you think the truth is, based on logic, evidence, your own prior knowledge, and so on, is not just critical to a given individual's education, it is critical to democracy. People will hear conflicting claims and predictions in every imaginable political debate, but what Americans too often do is throw up their hands, give up trying to decipher it all, and vote on the basis of personality. They'll say they just trusted candidate A or B a bit more, and voted accordingly. That's a hideous basis on which to cast a vote!

I also think that one reason we have such short memories for political and historical events is that we're not cataloguing our observations with the idea that they might be useful in interpreting future events. We aren't in the habit of puzzling things out for ourselves, and we don't plan on using our prior experience to decide what we believe about events yet to come.

The specific point about the Internet is certainly true for me. I honestly enjoy diving into a sea of contradictory theories via Google, tossing some out and finding others intriguing. Was Flight 93 over Pennsylvania shot down by the US Air Force? What was Sibel Edmonds on to when she was silenced? Who killed John Kokal? Is my daughter magnesium deficient? Is the caffeine in all this tea I drink doing me harm? I like investigating this stuff, the same way I like reading whodunit murder mysteries and loved those Two-Minute Mystery books as a kid. Contradiction is just interesting, not vexing. I'm very glad my kids' enjoyment of puzzling through things will remain intact!

Hilarious

2006-02-13T21:26:00.000-05:00

I am probably violating some sort of copyright here, but I had to post this. It's too good.

Relevant information

2006-02-12T13:49:00.000-05:00

I once had a history class in which we studied world geography-- sort of. We had to be able to write in the names of all 190-odd countries on a map, and we had to know the names of all their capitals. We worked up to this point over the course of a semester.

Today I've been reading about Iran, which got me thinking about how we didn't learn, in that long-ago class, about the Strait of Hormuz. My teacher made no decision about which places were important to know about; every country and capital was treated as equally important, and no natural features (deserts, mountains, straits) were covered at all. It's a perfect example of teaching the shallow overview which turns out to be largely useless, instead of picking and choosing the critical elements and studying them in depth.

I submit that it is far more important for Americans to know about the Strait of Hormuz than to know where Myanmar is. Consider (here's the reference I used):

The Strait of Hormuz leads from the Persian Gulf out into the ocean.
90% of Persian Gulf oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz on tankers.
22% of US oil imports, 30% of Western European oil imports, and 76% of Japanese oil imports come from the Persian Gulf.
This oil must go through one of two shipping lanes, each only 1 mile wide.
The Strait of Hormuz is right off the coast of Iran.
Iran has said on several occasions that it will shut down the Strait if threatened.

The majority of Americans support military action against Iran. I have to wonder if they would still support this if they understood that the world's largest economies will lose anywhere from a quarter to three quarters of their oil, engendering a global economic depression? Sure, Americans support bombing Iran... we may know that the capital of Ecuador is Quito, but most of us have never heard the term "oil chokepoint".

More homeschooling hatred

2006-02-12T13:25:00.000-05:00

Reader emtel asked if I had any sense of what drives intense hostility toward homeschooling, and I think that's a good question. I'm going to try to post on this soon, although really, I'm not sure I understand it. In the meantime, I found another example of this hostility here in my own state. From the Muskegon Chronicle (scroll down for original article):

Terrorists will strike a busload of students in the Whitehall area on Tuesday, killing more than a half-dozen and sending dozens more to hospitals.

. . .

The disaster won't be real, but it will look real, and the participants -- including students, emergency room personnel and firefighters -- will act as if it's real.

The exercise, one that is becoming familiar in the post 9/11 era, is part of attempts by emergency responders and Muskegon County school districts to prepare for the worst.

The exercise, which will involve the aftermath of a supposed explosion on a school bus... is being funded by homeland security grants awarded to several area school districts and Muskegon County.
. . .
About 60 middle and high school students... will be part of the exercise.... Local law enforcement agencies, fire departments, human service agencies, transportation services and medical services will participate.

Students from Muskegon Community College and Reeths-Puffer will assist in applying makeup to add to the reality of the gruesome scene. Between 200 and 300 people will observe the exercise, including school bus drivers, school administrators, emergency personnel and evaluators from agencies across the state who will provide feedback.

The exercise will simulate an attack by a fictitious radical group called Wackos Against Schools and Education who believe everyone should be homeschooled.

Unbelievable.

Fear of autonomy

2006-02-09T18:06:00.000-05:00

There's a blogger on the political left named Steve Gilliard, whose blog I no longer read as a result of his continual demonstration of his near-hatred of children. But he recently blogged about a CNN article on unschooling, and... well, I guess it's like picking a scab, but I went and looked at Steve's post after my mom mentioned it.

Sigh.

His co-blogger wrote:

One day, ONE of these kids will win some big academic post/scholarship/whatever.

Many more will open fire in assorted public places.

That's right, you read it here first: unschooling leads to mass murder. Because, as we all know, the only thing preventing humans from tearing each other to pieces with our bare hands is Structure and Discipline. (Never mind that most schoolchildren who open fire on their classmates do so as the result of bullying and torment which is widespread in schools. Just disregard this minor quibble.)

Steve himself wrote:

There are two problems here: one, the child has no sense of expectations. When you can do what you want, when you want, dealing with the demands of other people is difficult. You assume the world centers around you and your concerns.

People repeat this stuff, the old "Discipline is vital! Permissiveness will ruin your child's life!" but without much real thought behind it. Steve is a big believer in how all bad behavior or lack of interest in school or basically anything he doesn't find desirable in children is the result of bad (meaning inadequately structured) parenting. But then, Steve has no children.

Which child has a more accurate sense of their place in the world: the child who is out and about and actually in the world? Or the child locked up in an artificial environment in which being the teacher's pet, having the highest grades, being a top athlete or belonging to the 'in' crowd are all capable of instilling an exaggerated sense of importance? Further, given the frequent use of rewards and consequences in schools and the pointlessness of such external controls in an unschooling family, which child would be more often guided to consider what accrues to them? Which child is more likely to feel that what happens to them is the only relevant consideration? The kid with autonomy, who has a chance to develop intrinsic motivations for learning and civility and charity; or the kid who is incessantly bribed, whose greed and ego is constantly appealed to?

Steve then says unschooled kids will avoid difficult tasks. Yeah. Like, you know, that layabout Thomas Edison who never followed through with an idea in his life. Or that lazy, comfort-loving Margaret Mead-- when did she ever put herself out in pursuit of a higher goal?

He ends with this unintentionally funny sentence:

Sometimes you need to sit in a room and be lectured, so you can concentrate.

Ohhhhhh.... is that what I was supposed to be doing, instead of daydreaming and passing notes and doing my homework from other classes?

Numerous comments following the post defended homeschooling and unschooling, but there were also numerous comments which I can easily summarize as "Well, the world is a cruel and terrible place, and the earlier one learns to deal with hatred and oppression, the better." Some leftists want children to learn to obey and to accept and to toil in silence, yet simultaneously believe that dissent is more vitally important to our country's future than perhaps at any other time, because those in power are so evil and fascistic. I don't find this to be intellectually consistent.

Getting paid to go to school

2006-02-05T16:24:00.000-05:00

[Thanks to my mom for pointing this out to me!]

Up until I read this article on school attendance, I wasn't aware that No Child Left Behind factors attendance rates into its yearly school evaluations. A higher attendance rate can mean substantially more money for the school district. And so, predictably, schools have begun to rely on rewards systems in an attempt to boost attendance.

CHELSEA, Mass. — Attendance at Chelsea High School had hovered at a disappointing 90 percent for years, and school officials were determined to turn things around. So, last fall they decided to give students in this poverty-stung city just north of Boston a little extra motivation: students would get $25 for every quarter they had perfect attendance and another $25 if they managed perfect attendance all year.

"I was at first taken a little aback by the idea: we're going to pay kids to come to school?" said the principal, Morton Orlov II. "But then I thought perfect attendance is not such a bad behavior to reward. We are sort of putting our money where our mouth is." [emphasis added]

Wow. It's those last two sentences that get me. If you want people to behave in a certain way, you'd better be paying them for it. Otherwise you're not "putting your money where your mouth is." This doesn't merely reflect the uncritical embrace of behaviorist methods that Alfie Kohn talks about, but also the "uber-capitalist" mindset in which all human behavior takes place according to economics and economics only. Asking kids to show up for school without a rewards scheme is, apparently, naive and unrealistic.

Back to the article:

In Hartford last year, 9-year-old Fernando Vazquez won a raffle for students with perfect attendance and was given the choice of a new Saturn Ion or $10,000. (His parents chose the money.) At Oldham County High School in Buckner, Ky., Krystal Brooks, 19, won a canary yellow Ford Mustang. In Temecula, Calif., the school district prizes can include iPods, DVD players and a trip to Disneyland.

. . .

In the Chicago public schools, students with perfect attendance for the first three months of the year are eligible to win $500 worth of groceries or up to $1,000 toward a rent or mortgage payment. Joi Mecks, a spokeswoman for the district, said that for every 1 percent increase in its attendance rate, the district received $18 million more in state money.

. . .

Last year, Fort Worth began holding an event for every student with perfect attendance for at least one six-week period. The students have chances to win cars, computers, shopping sprees at Pier One Kids, and a suite at a Texas Rangers game. More weeks of perfect attendance mean more chances of winning.

Is anyone else struck by the similarity to game shows and lotteries? Have any of the school administrators considered the potential negative morale that results from having rewards bestowed at random, rather than on merit? And for god's sake, has anyone thought about the public health implications of having clearly ill children coming to school? Or the fact that children are being punished for getting sick in the first place?

But for the schools, pedagogical or public health or ethics considerations cannot compete with that most primary goal: better funding.

Many schools have been galvanized by the federal No Child Left Behind law, which factors attendance into its evaluations. And schools, especially in poor districts, are motivated by money from state governments, which is often based on average daily attendance.

. . .

Schools in Fort Worth had a budget shortfall of $15 million last year, said Beatriz Mince, assistant coordinator for the district's Office of Parent and Public Engagement. "The only way to get extra money is average daily attendance," Ms. Mince said, adding that if average attendance increased by one student, the district would receive an extra $4,700.

It reminds me of basing grades on homework completion. The question is not "Are the kids learning?" but rather "Are the kids doing their work?" Or in this case, are they merely showing up? Are we keeping them adequately warehoused?

The article has one quote from an expert who opposes these incentives plans:

"It's against our grain to suggest that you have to cajole, seduce or trick students in order to get them to learn," said Dr. Jeff Bostic, director of school psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. "And where does it end? Are we going to need to give out a Porsche Boxster? Rather than say we're going to pay you if you show up, we've got to work harder at showing how school really does have relevance to these kids' lives."

It's a well-known fact that in order for an incentives plan to continue working over a long period, rewards must continue to be increased. But his first point is the key one, in my opinion: do we want to suggest that no student would willingly learn without carrots and sticks? That we are totally unable to point out the relevance of school in these children's lives (because maybe there isn't much relevance)? Or that it's simply so unpleasant to attend school that we have to pay students to do it?

Well, yes, actually, apparently that is what we're saying:

But other experts say incentives make sense because they parallel the working world, where employees are given financial incentives to work harder or better.

Okay, fine. School is really hard work, and we should pay kids to go to school because it's appropriate for school to mirror the working world. If that's the case, at what point do we start using the term "child labor"?

The article goes on to question the utility of rewards schemes, discussing school districts where incentives for attendance worked, had no effect, or actually resulted in decreased attendance. One expert said that it was a matter of getting an incentive of appropriate value, and that it needed to be delivered immediately following the desired behavior. These are the sorts of arguments which tend to dominate discussions of carrot and stick programs, according to Alfie Kohn; but what about questioning the whole idea?

Back in Massachusetts, the headmaster at the high school in Lowell, William J. Samaras, said a program to give laptops to graduating seniors who missed no more than seven days of school drew criticism that "we're giving them a prize in a sense to do what they're supposed to do anyway."

Of course, schools do that all the time. Kids get reward tokens for acts as basic as learning and being polite to other students.

Interestingly, in one district where the incentives program resulted in worse attendance, some students and teachers felt the situation was preferable.

Some students, however, said the incentive-only policy had had unexpected benefits because those who attended school were more likely to want to be there.

"Usually in a classroom that has kids that don't want to come to school, you don't get a lot of participation," said Sonya Garcia, 16, a junior. "It lowers my motivation for working. If I'm working with people who are focused, it creates competition and that gets me motivated."

Mr. Resnek agreed. "It's almost created a better school," he said. "It's selfish, but it's better for us who are here."

Kind of calls into question the compulsory nature of schools, doesn't it? And the new Michigan graduation requirements, which insist that every student be on the college prep track or be denied a diploma? What do we sacrifice when we use coercive carrots and sticks and utterly disregard the benefits of autonomy?

Crippling graduation requirements

2006-01-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to get my head around this topic for a few days. Here in Michigan, where our Democratic governor is at war with our Republican legislature, they've found one idea with bipartisan support: strengthening Michigan's high school graduation requirements.

Currently, Michiganders can't get a diploma unless they pass one semester of government class (aka civics). This new plan would expand the state-mandated requirements hugely, to include:

four years of English
four years of math
three years of science
three years of social science
two years of foreign language
one year of health / physical education
one year of visual / performing arts
as before, one semester of civics

First of all, any of our state politicians should be able to see that this plan cannot be implemented because there are not enough math, science, and foreign language teachers. Predictably, just days after the governor's State of the State speech in which she touted this plan, articles started showing up in local papers saying it isn't feasible:

Macomb County educators want the state to delay implementation of new graduation requirements for at least two years, in part because there aren't enough certified instructors to teach the new courses.

. . .

A major concern is the availability of qualified teachers to teach courses such as chemistry and physics.

[Gayle Green, chief academic officer for the Macomb Intermediate School District] said there simply aren't enough to go around. "They're just not coming out of the colleges," said Green. "We need more flexibility."

In order to meet the new standards, Michigan's colleges and universities must begin to produce more teachers certified to teach in those historically more stringent disciplines, Green said.

Green also said a requirement that all students take a second algebra course means present teachers must be re-trained to be able to reach students who don't normally enroll in that higher level math course. Algebra 2 is an elective course in most Michigan schools and typically attracts college-bound students.

Macomb County is where I grew up. It's quite well-off compared to the county to its south, which contains Detroit. How is Detroit going to get enough physics teachers to come to its deteriorating schools, get paid practically no money, teach giant-sized classes, and teach to kids who didn't elect to take physics?

Maybe the good governor thought of providing extra money for teacher re-training and economic incentives to attract math and science majors to teaching? Well, no:

School board President Susan Amato-Henderson said as she understands the language of the bill, it amounts to an unfunded mandate.

"There's not a dollar increase (for schools) tied to this," she said.

[Superintendent John] Vaara said if the bill becomes law, it will place an extra financial burden on schools because of the need to buy more text books and to hire more teachers for the required courses.

"You can't just put in any teacher to teach any subject," he said.

So, basically, in the poor districts we just aren't going to have any more diplomas. It just won't be possible anymore. Governor Granholm should have known, when she received the enthusiastic support of state Republicans, that there was something she was missing. That in some way she'd been had. This will be worse for the state's public schools than NCLB was, and it's being pushed by a Democrat... it's just maddening.

Putting aside the infeasibility of the plan, it also removes yet more student autonomy. Consider a creative and artistic student who wants to take 4 years of band, 4 years of art and 4 years of drama. Under this plan that is impossible, if they also plan to receive a diploma. Or consider a vocational tech student who wants to take computer science, auto CAD, drafting, and some shop classes. They have 6.5 available class slots, assuming there are no scheduling conflicts; is that enough? Is it reasonable to say "Sorry, you won't be able to take that drafting class since it conflicts with Spanish," when the kid has no intention of going to college and no personal use for a second language?

There are some who get offended when you suggest there are kids who we know are not going to college, as if acknowledging this fact means we're selling those kids short. But in Michigan, only 41% of kids go to college directly after high school, and only 18% eventually get bachelor's degrees. It is not right to deny a kid a diploma because they failed their second year of Spanish or their fourth year of math, when they have no intention of going on to college. This plan will certainly reduce the proportion of students who attain a diploma. And it will certainly increase drop-out rates (if you fail math two years running, what are your chances of graduating anyway? so why bother?).

What is the purpose of this plan for the majority of students who are not going straight on to college? Are the politicians going to argue "universal knowledge" and say these classes will enhance the lives of all students? My rebuttal to this argument is that if school courses were really about enhancing people's lives, the required curriculum would include things like:

home finance (credit cards, mortgages, 401ks, etc)
cooking
nutrition
early child development
human physiology
probability, percentages, and statistics
local government

Trigonometry enhances no one's life. And I say this as a math major. Much more useful to know how to take some chicken and some pasta and some vegetables and make a meal. "Universal knowledge" was a concept invented by the aristocracy, to distinguish themselves from upstart nouveau riche merchants in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. It's a concept that needs to be retired, in favor of more individual autonomy.

These graduation requirements are taking us in the wrong direction on so many levels.

Early education materials

2006-01-28T16:43:00.000-05:00

I've been going through Anya's books, trying to find something that is easy enough for her to attempt to read, but without being as boring as Hop on Pop or Go Dog Go!. There are some better Seuss books that we are missing, which might work. The dozens of cheap Scholastic books which we purchased while she was in preschool (and I felt pressured to hand in book orders nearly every month) are for the most part useless here. Some of them (the "Froggy Does X" series, for instance) I don't particularly want her reading, as the behavior and scenarios involved are questionable. Some books are infantilizing, e.g. a Scholastic book about sleep that begins "A horse's eyelids go down when they go to sleep. A chicken's eyelids go up. Which way do your eyelids go?" Other books use a combination of boring, simplified language and difficult vocabulary which leaves me mystified: what reading level is it aimed at, exactly?

Thankfully, though, I've hit upon The Boxcar Children (and its 18 sequels, though I haven't read those yet). I liked this book as a kid, and was a little surprised to learn that it was written using only the most common 500 words in the English language. The vocabulary repeats fairly often, as in the first scene where the words "bread" and "bakery" and "boy" and "girl" are each used a few times, which gives kids practice. The text uses basic words which come up frequently: day, night, table, chair, walk, carry, happy, hungry, smile, said, and so on. Compound words are used liberally, as in "Greenfield Road" or "blueberries," which seem like long words to a kid and yet they're easy to sound out. In short, the author put considerable thought into the educational aspects, but the story (4 siblings surviving all on their own) is still interesting to most young kids.

(As an aside: I'm always afraid that Anya will be seriously upset by the idea of orphans, and yet, from Harry Potter to Pippi Longstocking to The Boxcar Children, kids are intrigued by life without (much) adult supervision, and Anya is no exception.)

Still, this book is considerably above Anya's reading level at the moment. I've made up a pile of miniature flashcards with words I've gleaned from Chapter One. I figure that if she can learn to sight read these words (around 60 or 70 of them, I'd guesstimate) then she can make quick progress in the book.

As you may have noticed, my "unschooling" mentality has kind of gone out the window here. I'm encouraging her, though not pushing her, to look at the flashcards with me, and I never thought I'd use flashcards at all. But Anya has been saying things like "When will I be able to read?" or "When will I be able to read Harry Potter?" about ten times a day, and there is no other way to get there except to get a certain basic vocabulary under her belt so she can read a bit faster and thus avoid frustration.

Having mentioned the variable quality of early reader books, I'll also say that many math workbooks are not well designed. We have the Miquon Math workbooks, and on every page the arithmetic problems occur in a certain pattern which is designed to lead a kid toward some insight. For instance, they might have a series of problems such as: 2+4, 2+5, 2+6, 2+7, etc. This is designed with the hope that kids will have an epiphany: if you can't remember 2 + 6, maybe you can remember 2 + 5 and just add one more. Similarly, they introduced multiplication by writing 2 + 2 + 2 and on the next line, 3 x 2, so that kids would see this equivalence over and over again. Every page has some such purpose, and is not merely yet more drilling. In contrast, the workbooks we buy at the grocery store or Target contain problems written down at random, it seems. They are good for drilling, but only for drilling. There's no "a-ha!" moment induced by these generic books.

Education is an area where I am not convinced there has been any progress over the past few decades, in terms of the actual science of teaching. The Boxcar Children was first printed in 1942, and the Miquon Math stuff is from 1964. The little workbooks with the pointless pictures and decoration, circa 2004, are mostly crap. I had no idea I'd have to be such a discerning consumer of educational materials, but I guess I do. And a pre-1970 copyright date, in my limited experience, is a good sign!

Throw this book away

2006-01-24T09:22:00.000-05:00

[Anxiety in parenting part IV]

I doubt there's any book more capable of inducing stress in a parent than What to Expect When You're Expecting--and before you're even officially a parent, no less. I went hunting for excerpts from this foul book on the web, and it was worse than I remembered. I once owned it myself, and a few other pregnancy books in the "encyclopedia of disasters" prenatal genre. I eventually decided these were psychologically detrimental, and purged them from my home. I gave most of them away, but I thought What to Expect... was too hideous to inflict on any other mother-to-be, and I threw it in the trash. There are far better sources of similar information, minus the guilt and fear.

I mean, consider this advice:

If you're a first-time expectant mother, enjoy what will probably be your last chance for a long while to focus on taking care of yourself without feeling guilty.

Yeah. 'Cause after the baby's born, you're only allowed to live vicariously through your children. You have a few more months, and then no more funny novels or blogging or Project Runway for you!

I mean yes, parenting is hard, but when the baby's asleep, why should I feel guilty for reading Janet Evanovich or watching TV or reading blogs?

Or how about:

Napping when you're mothering may also be difficult, but if you can time your rest with the children's nap-time (if they still nap), you may be able to get away with it -- assuming you can tolerate the unwashed dishes and the dust balls under the bed.

Translation: "If you're the kind of slob who doesn't care about her children's living conditions, if you have no concerns over hygiene or cleanliness, well then, go ahead and sleep during the day. But don't come whining to us about the dust balls afterward."

This book is also notorious for the utterly impossible to achieve "Best Odds Diet." First of all, what's with the "Best Odds" business? You eat their 15 servings of vegetables and 10 servings of raw wheat berries or whatever it is per day (which, I once calculated, adds up to more than the absurdly small number of daily calories they advise), and you just might, with a little luck, avoid... what, birth defects? Incurable disease? A 39-hour labor? "Best Odds" of what, exactly? Do they have to remind of us the awful unspoken possibilities at every turn, such that we're too scared to indulge in a chocolate bar?

I know I'm not alone on this one. Friends have expressed similar sentiments, and one Amazon.com reviewer wrote:

This was the first book on pregnancy I read when I was pregnant. The diet and nutrition section scared the Hell out of me! By the time I was done reading that section, I was terrified that eating peanut butter or having a cup of coffee would result in my giving birth to Quasimodo.....

After reading this book, I felt scared and depressed....

Another reviewer said, under the heading "To the expectant fathers":

Guys ... consider this a warning; this will be the worst book that your significant other can read and will make your life utterly miserable for the next nine months.

It may have been intended as a self-help guide but instead seems to act more as a bible for every worst-case-scenario imaginable. After spending a few hours perusing this book's contents, your significant other will become so overworked and paranoid that every little ache, pain, and irritation will become a sign of the baby being born with a forked tongue and three heads.

Or:

I am a physician and I can honestly say this has to be the WORST pregnancy book ever written. It is written by a paranoid for the paranoid. This book is full of useless, over-the-top advice (like avoiding all refined sugar and installing shower guard-rails) that will drive even the most relaxed first-time mother into insanity.

Much of this book involves discussing what happens at prenatal exams, including descriptions of tests for (insert improbable but terrifying diseases, disabilities, etc). It also promotes, directly or indirectly, what seems like every intervention or procedure known to obstetrics. It's no wonder people find it scary and depressing. And yet, if you check out the New York Times bestseller list, What to Expect... still makes the top five under "Paperback Advice." It's almost impossible to avoid owning this book once you become pregnant-- either you cave in and buy it yourself, or someone gives you theirs, or you get it as an early shower gift. And at some point you can't help but open it up and skim a bit... and thus begins the propaganda campaign to convince you that nature cannot be trusted. Your body cannot be trusted. You cannot be trusted. Only the experts can save your family.

Fear and stress make no one a better parent... so why do they bombard us with so much of these? We have a cultural focus on "family values" and yet the implication at every turn is that families are failures unless they bow to expert guidance. That children are "at risk" and it's a daily struggle on the part of dedicated doctors and teachers to keep them safe and prevent them from falling by the developmental wayside. Meanwhile, a lot of money is made off this mindset.

It's made me into a downright curmudgeon, it has. My attitude toward most popular and mainstream parenting advice is... well, probably not suitable for mixed company, let's put it that way.

Feel bad yet?

2006-01-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

I went to the website of Parents magazine, and clicked the "Look Inside" link to take a look at some of their recent issues. I took some of their front-cover article titles, and put in my own translations:

Be a Better Mommy in 2006! [Because as of now, you really suck as a mom.]

How Early Bedtimes Boost Your Child's Immunity [That cold your kid has right now? That's your fault for letting your kid stay up till 9pm.]

READ THIS! 5 Lifesaving Moves Moms Should Know [What kind of an irresponsible mother are you, that you don't know these Five Moves?]

Plan a Perfect Playdate [What, you don't normally send rice-paper invitations? Are you or are you not a devoted mom?]

WARNING: Signs Your Child Is Sicker Than You Think [Scared yet?]

10 Important Foods Your Child Needs [...and we bet he/she won't eat a one of them, which is, as usual, all your fault.]

Stop Yelling! The Brand-New Way to Discipline [Yelling is so... uncouth. What's the matter with you anyway?]

Stop a Tantrum in 10 Seconds [Okay, no, we've never heard of our method actually working in practice... but nonetheless, if your kid's tantrums take longer than 10 seconds, you must be doing something wrong.]

Raise the Nicest Kid on the Block [Not just nice, but THE NICEST. Anything but "best" is failure.]

Teach Little Kids to Stay Safe in the Pool [Gee, we didn't mean to conjure up any fears... honest.]

What's really sick is that this stress-inducing theme (under the guise of "we're here to help you!") isn't accidental, and it's not just meant to guilt-trip you into buying the magazine, either. It is, in fact, designed to make you better fodder for the real business of the magazine: the advertising. Advertisers want anxious readers. They actually pay more for anxious readers. Magazines like Parents or Vogue or Ladies' Home Journal actually "sell" their readership to the advertisers, as in "Hey Diet Coke, want to reach 10 million women who want to lose weight?" A "motivated" audience member is code for an audience member with an inferiority complex, and "motivated" viewers or readers attract more advertising revenue. (My all-time favorite example of a media outlet "selling" their audience was from an old MTV ad, hawking its viewers. The ad featured a typical MTV fan, a young trendy guy in grunge clothes with odd hair, and the print read "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends free." Which gives you some idea of how little media outlets respect their audience. We're just here to have our attention sold to Madison Avenue. We represent a commodity, nothing more and nothing less.)

Advertisers paying tens of thousands of dollars to place ads in Parents magazine want parents who feel like failures before they even peruse page one. Anxious readers are looking to prove they're trying, looking to assuage their guilt and their feelings of incompetence. Anxious readers buy products. Anxious parents are a cash cow.

These people are not here to help us.

Aren't you thrilled?

2006-01-20T18:46:00.000-05:00

Sticking with the "anxiety in parenting" theme:

Some of the blame for an average parent's insecurities must go to the smiley-faced cheery enthusiasm parents are supposed to feel toward school. A lot of the homeschoolers I know have not experienced this first-hand, so I thought I'd dedicate a post to this.

I actually wrote about this once before, months ago in a post titled Socializing parents, based on my experience when Anya was in preschool. There were all these things asked of me, and they were always asked with the assumption that I would be gung-ho and exuberant about participating. "It's your weekend to..." was a phrase I came to dread. One of the teachers would come up, smiling, her attitude one of bestowing gifts, and say "Oh, it's your weekend to...." Our weekend to borrow the class photo album (why exactly would I want to look at other people's family photos or have them look at mine?), our weekend to borrow a stuffed bunny and then haul it around with us everywhere so we could write a little story about our weekend (ugh), our weekend to borrow the Mystery Box with its Mystery Item and write down 5 of its characteristics, so the other children could guess what it was-- and I could go on. This was on top of the Scrip program, chaperoning field trips, bringing in the snack and a toy for show and tell once a month, remembering a vegetable for the Stone Soup, charity drives, buying books through their fundraising program, and on and on. And this was for fricking preschool. We did all this when Anya was only attending school 6 hours per week.

Basically this meant that every time I brought her in, I was faced with some chore which I had no desire to carry out, and then the consequent guilt and anxiety because I wasn't "into" my kid's education. Other moms actually seemed to enjoy this stuff. I'd hear: "We're so excited about the Rodeo party, my husband's taking off work...." and just try not to stare, bug-eyed, at the Donna Reed imitation going on in the hallway. But maybe that's just me?

As another example, consider the recent school newsletter I would have received if Anya were attending our local kindergarten. The newsletter begins with this "Note from the Principal":

WELCOME TO 2006! We want to express our gratitude to all the [school name] families for a tremendous 2005. We are very pleased with all that has been accomplished and look forward with great anticipation to many more successes in 2006! It is hard to believe that we have nearly completed the first half of the school year-- Wow, time does fly! Your children have demonstrated much progress and growth so far, and they will gain so much more knowledge and experience before the end of the school year. Take time to notice and celebrate your child's uniqueness and creativity. Many more exciting days are in store. I enjoy and look forward to being a part of your child's educational experience.

I don't know how that makes you feel, but the life is sucked right out of me. I'm exhausted just reading this stuff. This school, by the way, is for kindergarten and first grade only. 'A tremendous 2005'! Oh, the accomplishments! The progress! The growth! The experience! The excitement! (Did we mention we saved a small war-torn nation from famine?)

"Many more exciting days are in store!" For me too? Really? Getting the kid on the bus by 7:35am (the time we'd need to have Anya on the bus-- still half dark at this time of year)? Getting calls from the teacher to discuss some problematic behavior (while ceding authority and expertise to the teacher, since they're the "one in charge" during school)? Remembering the permission slips, the snacks, the show and tell items, the homework (in our district, kindergarteners have homework every day), the school events, the book sales, the Scrip program, the food and clothing donations on given days? Can I be excused from the breathless anticipation?

I went and looked at the kindergarten classroom on their website. It's fine, I guess. Institutional white covered over with colorful drawings, artificial bouquets, banners and number lines and maps. They cover up those white walls with a kind of desperation (look! paintings and crayon drawings and flowers! it's cheerful! it's child-friendly! it's not a prison!). Why do they make schools like this, with the white tile and white walls and fluorescent lights? The waiting area at our local DMV is so much cozier (seriously). I'm supposed to get geeked that my child goes (or would go) to this room every day, to be told what to do nonstop, learn rudeness from other kids, be removed from me, and learn essentially nothing? And I'm supposed to participate joyfully like June Cleaver, and feel bad if I don't?

Much of this participation benefits the school directly, but one's own child only indirectly, if at all. And yet, I always felt that any lack of enthusiasm would be taken as bad parenting.

I realize that I should, by this age, be able to go about my business without paying much heed to the opinions of near strangers. No doubt, I was over-reacting to perceived social pressures. But for most parents this involves the opinion of the person in charge of their children for hours out of the day, and everyone knows the "good" kids bound for college prep have the "good" parents. You forget those Scrip coupons or the required cardboard shoebox or the donated pencils one too many times, and maybe your kid won't seem quite so yuppie class. So it's very hard to ignore. They grin at you as if to say "Aren't you thrilled?" And you madly grin back as if to say "There are no words to express just how very thrilled I am!"

Luckily I can log on to blogger and vent my spleen through snark. I feel better already!

Anxiety in parenting

2006-01-20T08:25:00.000-05:00

[Well, we had the holidays. We had the post-holiday cleaning and "where are we going to put this?" phase. And then we got besieged for over a week by some sort of awful illness which I maintain must have been three different viruses we caught simultaneously. But I am hoping to now resume blogging on a regular basis... if there's anyone still checking in here after all this time!]

I've been enjoying our homeschooling group a lot lately. There is no discernible competition between the moms, and if you reveal some shortcoming they give sympathy and advice, not raised eyebrows. This is very different from my experience when Anya was in preschool. Hanging out with those moms, I never felt comfortable and always felt Anya and I were being judged.

There are a number of forces at work in making parents anxious, in inducing that background level of competition and comparison which can make parenting a lot less fun. It starts off with the pregnancy books, carries on with parenting books, is stoked by visits to the pediatrician (a friend was just told her son is "ahead on fine motor skills, but a little behind verbally"-- both being utterly pointless observations), fueled by sports (which now start before kindergarten) and of course fed and encouraged for 13 years by public schooling. All of it is based upon the idea, and further solidifies the idea, that there is a "standard" course of development, discovered by scientists, which we are all supposed to meet. And the excuse for imposing this psychologically harmful apparatus of "milestones" and "competencies" is that it's better for the child if we find out they're falling behind as soon as possible. Constant vigilance, is the motto of the experts-- constant testing, constant observation, and for the parents and kids, absolutely constant anxiety.

At our homeschooling group, mothers talk about when a child learned to read -- typically between ages 5 and 8 or thereabouts -- the same way they mention that he or she loves reptiles or has been obsessed with astronomy. There is no "standard" time to learn to read. Everyone learns to read anyway. You don't actually need the fear and testing (so... what is their real purpose?).

The standardization of human beings is not, of course, actually attainable. Everyone will have shortcomings, because everyone has their own individual collection of strengths and weaknesses. But using individual variability to create feelings of anxiety and inferiority makes us more likely to seek and accept the advice of experts. (It also destroys much of the natural solidarity we would feel with other parents.) It's not a conspiracy, but it's damned convenient for schoolteachers, doctors, coaches, authors, toy manufacturers, and the Gerber company if we're all feeling a bit uncertain about our parenting skills, a bit worried, a bit inclined to spend big bucks on an educational gizmo if it might help our kids outperform the neighbor's kids.

The public schools play a larger and larger role in this parental culture of fear, due to increased testing, increasing numbers of kids diagnosed with ADHD, increasing numbers of kids diagnosed with learning disorders, and so on. The assembly line and quality control models weren't quite so prominent when I was in school, I don't think. Nowadays normal human variability is used to tell virtually every parent that their child has an "area of concern." I mentioned my friend whose son is supposedly slightly behind verbally, at the age of 18 months, although he's ahead in other areas. Well, what kid isn't "slightly behind" in one area and slightly ahead in another? What is the point in even saying so? Doesn't this go without saying? The point of announcing that a kid is slightly behind some average is to make sure you bring them back in for the next well visit, out of fear that something might be wrong, or because you want to hear them say that the verbal skills are now normal.

So many "experts" on children ultimately depend on this same model: first we assume that "standard" is the goal, then we scare you (we can always find something that isn't standard in your kid), then you feel compelled to continue working with us to solve the imaginary problem. Which, incidentally, is exactly how advertising works: we define the goal, we suggest you're deficient, we induce anxiety, and we tell you our product is the solution.

There's no way to be within the system and to beat the system. Mainstream medicine and mainstream schooling-- I've checked out of both.

Boys at school

2005-12-16T12:32:00.000-05:00

When I was growing up, I heard a lot about girls not doing as well as boys in school. Girls were less likely to participate in class, I read somewhere-- maybe that explained why they showed less grasp of important concepts on standardized tests. Perhaps the problem was that teachers and parents had lower expectations of girls' math and science ability and didn't encourage girls as much. Or maybe it was gender stereotypes which made girls want to be ditzy rather than brainy, in order to be more attractive to boys. Something was going wrong for girls, anyway. Everyone agreed on that.

But when I went to college, most of my fellow math majors were women. I went to grad school in biostatistics, and again, it was mostly women. In fact, these days 57% of college students are women, and most bachelor's degrees being awarded nationwide go to women. That may now be true of master's degrees as well. If the trend continues, in just a few more years PhDs and professional degrees will also go disproportionately to women.

Younger boys and girls also show differences in academic performance, almost exclusively in one direction: girls do better. In 4th, 8th, and 12th grades girls test higher in writing and reading than do boys (see this page for a list of relevant charts/statistics), and are roughly equal with boys in math scores in those three grades. Girls used to be behind in math, so again, if the trend continues, they will eventually solidly outperform boys in math throughout the K-12 years.

One hypothesis I have for why boys don't do as well in school is that girls are socialized to be better behaved, quieter, more obedient, etc. than are boys. School places a heavy emphasis on obedience, conformity, and passivity (it's the only way one adult can direct and manage 25 kids-- it's just a structural necessity given the way we've arranged our classrooms). If girls do better, perhaps it's for behavioral reasons, since parents and society in general cultivate different behavior in boys and girls. Supporting this idea, I note that boys are more likely to be disciplined in school. And they are dramatically more likely to be diagnosed with learning disorders, or with behavioral disorders like ADHD or Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

A potential problem with this idea is that girls have always had their behavior tailored differently than boys. They've generally been taught to be quieter and more "ladylike" and more docile. What may have changed, though, is that children's lives are more scheduled and supervised than ever before, and schools are making increasing demands on children's self control. In this pressure cooker climate, girls' behavioral advantage over boys may have increased. (Well, I say "advantage" in the narrow context of traditional schooling, not because I consider it actually advantageous in life in general. Actually I think being ladylike is a hindrance. For example, 80% of Fortune 500 female executives say they were tomboys as children. I guess "demure" doesn't go over too well in the boardroom.)

Another idea is that girls and boys really do develop differently, gaining skills on different timelines (on the average). The theory here is that kids are learning certain skills earlier than they used to, for instance beginning reading in kindergarten or preschool instead of in first or second grade. Boys, due to biological differences in development, don't (again, on average) learn on that schedule. They tend to get labeled as behind, inadequate, or somehow disordered because their natural developmental timeline doesn't mesh with the new academic timeline schools want to impose. I'm not saying I buy this, I'm just saying it's a possibility.

When Anya was in preschool, I once heard a couple of moms talking about their kids' writing skills. One of them said: "Well, my daughter was writing her name at age 3, and he's 4 and he can't make his letters yet... but that's just how it is with boys." The other mom chimed in with "Yeah, boys are about a year behind." On another occasion I heard a mom explaining that she was going to keep her son out of kindergarten until he was 6. She stated angrily that she'd been reading about female and male development and that it was preposterous to think that boys had the manual dexterity to start writing at age 5, the ways girls do.

Once that becomes the common opinion, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Boys won't start writing until a year later than girls because boys' mothers aren't concerned about encouraging them to write. They won't learn to read until later because they enter school later. This idea can cement itself just as harmfully as the old "Girls are bad at math" idea.

On a slightly different topic, I found survey results for the question "How do you feel about school?" (Figure A in the list of charts I linked to above.) This question was asked in the senior year of high school, so keep in mind that it excludes students who hated school so much that they dropped out. In 1980, 42% of boys and 50% of girls said they liked school "very much" or "quite a lot". Only 14% of boys and 13% of girls said they didn't like school very much or didn't like school at all. Interestingly, girls' enjoyment of school has fallen faster since 1980 than boys' enjoyment. In 2001, 29% of girls said they enjoyed school very much or quite a lot (a 21% drop), while 30% of boys enjoyed school (only a 12% drop). The percentage who say they don't like school much, or don't like it at all, increased for both sexes (up to 24% of boys and 21% of girls by 2001). In other words, boys aren't falling behind academically because they dislike school more than girls. Actually, girls' satisfaction with school has fallen much more precipitously in the past two decades. Yet still they have overtaken boys in academic achievement.

Boys' lower test scores and more problematic existence at school is still a bit of a mystery to me, but I don't think it's fair that the new "gender gap" is garnering so little attention. And I'm a bit shocked that some mothers would accept the idea that their sons are inferior to their daughters quite so easily. It seems to me that the women's movement and the men's movement could come together with one basic message for the schools: Stop trying to socialize, label, pigeonhole, test, and cramp our children. Problem is, you'd have to start completely over and redesign schools from scratch, if you want a new generation of public schools to follow that advice.

Busy time of year

2005-12-15T10:55:00.000-05:00

Sheesh, 10 days since my last post-- I guess blogging has taken a backseat to Christmas shopping, wrapping, decorating, cleaning... etc. I just wanted to put something up, even if it's miscellany:

Tristan has a new habit of putting his chubby little hands on his forehead and saying "Oh no!" when things fall or spill. It's very cute, though I say it myself. He also shakes his head wildly and says "No no no no no" pretty frequently, which is followed, if that doesn't work, by hollering at the top of his lungs while stomping his feet. His car obsession continues, with a high proportion of his spoken words being vehicular in nature: car, bus, truck ("tuh"), tire, wummm for any sort of construction equipment, and "tay" for train.

Another funny thing he does is babble this elaborate stream of nonsense when excited. I think I've got two chatterboxes on my hands. The night we decorated the tree, Tristan circled around it practically vibrating with glee over the Christmas lights, pointing to the ornaments and giving a nonsensical lecture in a high-pitched voice. Meanwhile, Anya talked right over him: "Do you want to hang this one Mom? I like the red ones but I want you to get some red ones to hang too, because I know you like red too, so I'll just hang this little drum and you take this one...."

I was feeling guilty the other day because I ordered these "base 10" blocks to help Anya with math, to help her learn the ones, tens, and hundreds columns. I wanted to teach her about adding two- and three-digit numbers by adding each column separately, but somehow, we hadn't gotten to it yet. But then she wandered over to me the other day, calculator in hand, and said "You know, if you add 333 and another 333 it makes 666. You can add the numbers by themselves. And 222 plus 222 makes 444." That boosted my faith in this whole process-- here I am feeling bad that I haven't taught her about adding the digits separately, and she goes and starts figuring it out on her own! I'm not a total unschooler, though, the way I had originally imagined I might be. My very next thought was "I've got to get those darned blocks out and strike while the iron is hot!" Still, we practice child-led learning, which is a foreign concept to many people.

Anya has been interested in learning European time, which has been complicated. How to explain that this isn't the time in Europe at this moment, it's the time right now, as Europeans would measure it? I think she is getting it... sometimes I am frustrated at myself for not knowing a better way to explain something, and I have to be really careful not to show it because she might think I was frustrated with her.

We've also been doing a bit of social science, because she is suddenly describing things as "girlish" or "boyish." I've explained that girls and boys are basically the same, and "the people with the factories" want to make us think they're different so families with both daughters and sons have to buy twice as much stuff. And that these people make commercials trying to make you believe that girls and boys need different things, but it's actually a lie. [Incidentally, I dressed Anya completely gender neutral until she was 3 and still avoid clearly girlie clothing. Tristan is currently wearing her old clothes.] I've also been trying to cultivate a certain defiant stubbornness, saying for example: "You like the color blue. Are you going to let them try to say you don't like the color blue because blue is "boyish"? They can't tell you what you like or don't like!" We've spent probably hours going round and round about businesses, advertising, and girls vs. boys.

On a different note, we were at the public library in the nearby college town the other day, and I got a glimpse of what life is like when one is devoted to traditional academics. There was a mom there who was being so very didactic and educational with her young sons that I began to feel she was showing off or attempting to compete with me (we were the only ones in the small child storytime/play area). She interrupted her 4-year-old's playing with a truck to ask him what he saw on the rug, which had roads and a small town scene. She pointed out different buildings and asked "What clues do we have that this might be a firehouse?" Her son never answered her, just waited and then resumed playing with the truck (wouldn't you give up after a while, if the schoolmarm tone resulted in your kid patiently ignoring you?). She also, over the course of the time we were there, asked Anya if she knew how to spell her last name and whether she could read, among other questions. I half expected her to quiz Anya on the names of the planets or her times tables. She tried to get her 10-month-old to identify the correctly colored car ("No no, the GREEN car-- where is the GREEN car?"). And she brought up her son's "class" and "school" a remarkable number of times, though he was not yet kindergarten age. I don't tell this tale to be catty, I just wanted to describe it because I had truly forgotten there were moms who acted this way. At unschooling group playdates, the kids just do what they want with little adult concern, and I have never heard any mom getting "educational" unless she was specifically asked a question. The homeschooled kids I know certainly are not micro-managed to this extent. There has to be some sort of psychological backlash from scheduling and micromanaging kids to the point where they can't play with a truck without being pestered and directed by adults.

[I'm hoping to post in the next day or two on some new graduation requirements in my own state of Michigan.]

Critical thinking

2005-12-05T17:26:00.000-05:00

I was hanging out on Daily Kos today, and saw someone's comment that the powers that be in the US fear an educated populace, because an educated populace thinks critically and asks tough questions, and is generally harder to control. She/he added that in the late 1960's education was working quite well, and look at the counter-culture that spawned.

I used to think this too, but when I read James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me I found out that higher levels of education were associated with more support for the Vietnam war, not less. In spite of highly publicized and televised college protests, more education generally made people more supportive of the government. I left this reply (in part):

Historian James Loewen once said in an interview:

I once did an exercise where I asked people about what kind of adults, by education level, supported the war in Vietnam. By an overwhelming margin-almost 10 to 1-audiences responded that college-educated people were more likely to be for withdrawing the troops, were more "dovish". When they explained their reasoning, they usually wrote that educated people are more informed and critical and therefore better able to figure out that the war wasn't in our best interests. Well, the truth was very different. Educated people disproportionately supported the war in Vietnam, were more "hawkish."

I went upstairs and got Loewen's book Lies My Teacher Told Me and found the old poll statistics. In January 1971, 80% of those with grade school education supported withdrawing the troops from Vietnam. 75% of those with high school education supported withdrawing, while 60% of those with college education supported withdrawing. (Loewen points out that polling consistently shows that those most likely to be sent to war tend to support it most strongly, as they feel compelled to find meaning in it. This makes the statistics by education level even more surprising.)

I support teaching children how to think, but this is very different from the kind of education we have now. Consider:

Only 4.2% of the homeschool graduates surveyed consider politics and government too complicated to understand, compared to 35% of U.S. adults. This may account for why homeschool graduates work for candidates, contribute to campaigns, and vote in much higher percentages than the general population of the United States. For example, 76% of homeschool graduates surveyed between the ages of 18-24 voted within the last five years, compared to only 29% of the relevant U.S. population.

...The current system was not designed by the citizens who attend public school, it was designed (largely during the robber baron era) by those in power, to ensure that they stayed in power (and made even more money). However hard dedicated teachers work today, I feel this history matters and that our pedagogy therefore requires massive reform before it will reliably produce critical thinkers and informed citizens.

The other commenter, in their response, suggested that schools needed to teach critical thinking skills early on because the potential to learn critical thinking might be lost forever. (My whole point was that schools don't teach critical thinking, but people are so used to harnessing all desirable mental functioning to "education" (meaning schooling) that I guess my comments didn't make sense to this person.)

The more I thought about the notion of "teaching" critical thinking, the sillier it seemed, because humans have surely evolved to utilize all sorts of beneficial thinking, no schooling required. We have an amazing ability to spot patterns, discover associations, test theories, and yes, "think critically" and skeptically. I certainly feel that hard thinking can be encouraged or it can be quashed, but this idea that it's up to schools to protect us from the irreversible loss of our opportunity to think is absurd. We are thinking from the day we're born (well, before that). If we're no longer thinking and analyzing the world around us at age 18, the question is not "Who failed to teach you to think?" but rather "Who destroyed your desire to use your brain?"

The message of regimented schooling is that children cannot learn on their own, cannot puzzle things out or make discoveries on their own, and that an authority figure will tell them what to believe and how to solve problems cookbook-style. Memorization doesn't promote thinking of any kind, and rewards systems dampen the intrinsic pleasure of learning. The hostile social climate of school is often anti-intellectual in nature, suggesting that using one's brain too much indicates a deficiency of character. Biased standardized tests and other inequalities tell most students, in various subtle ways, that they are inferior. I have no doubt that many teachers try to get their students to participate, to debate, to think, but it seems to me they are swimming against a hell of a tide.

The prevalent belief that we need school to help us think is incredibly frustrating. It would be great to see a school district try something radically different, like having small mixed-age schools which promote student independence and self-learning, as in Montessori schools (just to take one example). Give them democracy, give them autonomy, stop regimenting them by age or grade, stop insisting that all students learn exactly the same material, and kids will not lose their initiative nor stop using their minds. The students who emerged from such a school would be farther on their way to adulthood, much better thinkers, more likely to participate in politics and civil affairs, and harder to trick, seduce, bully, or stonewall than the students emerging from our current schools.

That, of course, brings up another of the sinister purposes of NCLB. You can'ttry a radical new form of schooling, because you have to pass those tests on a particular schedule. Thus government is safe from any true reform of our schools, and the politicians are largely safe from people who will investigate and form their own conclusions.

If you'll permit me a slight tangent: The government can, when the people have lost their interest in puzzling things out for themselves, simply "lose" the testimony of over 100 witnesses who saw a missile strike TWA 800 at the moment it exploded over the Atlantic. They need have no fear of a public clamoring for further inquiry. The FBI can casually dismiss the illogical selling of United and American airlines stock on September 10, 2001 (on the Chicago exchange) without even bothering to find out who was selling it-- because who is going to bug them about that? (Hardly anyone-- only a few widows from New Jersey who can't get any air time on cable news.) It can claim that Flight 93 flew straight into the ground in Pennsylvania, and not worry about the small handful of local people who ask, "Then why is the debris field 8 miles wide?" and "What about those fighter jets?"

It's not about whether people are "educated" or "uneducated." The question for those in power is: How can we get rid of the desire to investigate and think and research and theorize? How can we make thinking undesirable? Well, in the words of the US Commissioner of Education in 1889:

"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent overeducation from happening. The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they’re not tempted to think about any other role."

--William T. Harris

Or just not tempted to think-- period.

More on that censorship story

2005-12-02T10:01:00.000-05:00

I had mentioned that 1,800 copies of a student newspaper were confiscated in a Tennessee high school in yesterday's post. Well, today I found more information. The paper was confiscated because "...Superintendent Tom Bailey said the contraception article needed more "editing" before it was acceptable for the entire school to read."

However, the contraception article was immediately followed by an editorial advocating abstinence:

The birth-control piece ran above another article, "Spenser advises students to wait until marriage for sex," by Spenser Walsh, in which the teen advises his peers that he is only trying to "talk you out of a decision that perhaps might change your life." Walsh goes on to warn of the dangers of STDs, unwanted pregnancies and the emotional toll taken by relationships that start with sex.

School administrators had no problem with this second article, though it touched on similar content. Perhaps the contraception article did contain graphic language, but in that case it could have been edited. In fact, it was replaced by an opinion piece on the school play.

The paper's student editor in chief, Brittany Thomas, said the school demanded the change. "I was told to fill it with another editorial," she told the Sentinel.

It occurs to me that these students were trying for balance by putting an abstinence only piece just below the contraception article. That seems quite fair and responsible-- moreso than the superintendent who axed an article he didn't agree with.

[A] statement from the Society of Professional Journalists released on Wednesday strongly condemned the action. "This is an example — a bad example — of school officials censoring news content simply because they disagree with it," SPJ President David Carlson said.

Mead Loop, SPJ's vice president for campus chapter affairs, said... "[H]ere we have an example where a principal teaches a lesson to students that censorship is preferred to an open reading of news."

Instead, Carlson said, "Educators should foster open discussion of ideas rather than attempt to limit the discussion. It appears the students tried to do good journalism, and the administration is holding them back."

The ACLU is said to be considering getting involved.

Freedom and democracy

2005-11-30T10:42:00.000-05:00

Some time ago I came across this quote by Royce Van Norman, who wrote about school administration in the 60's:

Is it not ironic that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape - in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school - we attempt to teach 'the democratic system'?

I am reminded of this quote pretty frequently. You can't teach a child how to be a citizen and a participant in a democracy without giving them democratic freedoms and a meaningful voice. I don't think it's much of a mystery that most Americans don't vote, and that the youngest adults are least likely to vote. This isn't because they're young and irresponsible, it's because they just got out of school. They have no sense of being able to control or influence anything, no sense of themselves as citizens; instead they have fatalism. Also, they're used to being told what to think by an authority figure, and become confused when opposing candidates tell them different things. And their attitude toward democracy is rather shaky-- for instance, students have little respect for the Bill of Rights:

When told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories....

Possibly students are internalizing the distaste for freedom of the press which they experience in school. For instance:

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Copies of a high school's student newspaper were seized by administrators because the edition contained stories about birth control and tattoos, stirring a First Amendment debate.

Administrators at Oak Ridge High School went into teachers' classrooms, desks and mailboxes to retrieve all 1,800 copies of the newspaper last week, said teacher Wanda Grooms, who advises the staff, and Brittany Thomas, the student editor.

The Oak Leaf's birth-control article listed success rates for different methods and said contraceptives were available from doctors and the local health department. Superintendent Tom Bailey said the article needed to be edited so it would be acceptable for the entire school.

In fact, however, this edition of the paper was re-printed and distributed without the birth control story in any form. It wasn't edited, it was deleted.

Only 83 percent of high school students agreed that people should be able to express unpopular views (see above Bill of Rights link). It's pretty shocking that almost 1 in 5 high school students thinks minority voices should be silenced, but then, they're used to being silenced themselves. They're used to speaking only with permission, and they're used to having their personal appearance edited whenever it fails to conform. In one of my earliest posts I compiled a list of stories in which schools took disciplinary action over a student's appearance, including suspending students for nose studs, copper-colored hair, and a "vegan sweatshirt," whatever that means. A related story popped up in today's headlines:

ATLANTA - A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled in favor of a Gwinnett County honors student who was disciplined for violating the school's "anti-gang clothing" policy.Judge Beverly Martin agreed that the policy is -- quote -- "fatally vague." She has enjoined the state's largest school district from enforcing parts of the dress code....

Marlyn Tillman approached the ACLU after school officials at Brookwood High School punished her son for so-called "gang-related activity" based on the color and/or style of his clothing. She says her son -- who has never been in a gang -- was disciplined several times for clothing items and accessories. She says the items included a pocket watch, a rolled-up pants leg and a shirt with the student's nickname on the back.

She says she and her son -- now a senior who remains in advanced-placement classes -- are happy with the judge's ruling.

In her words, "He feels as though finally, he can get back to education and not be as concerned with are the fashion police after him."

The heavy control of students in schools cannot produce strong, independent citizens who speak their minds and demand their rights. But then, it really isn't meant to.

Comments

2005-11-23T11:00:00.000-05:00

From now on, when anyone leaves a comment they will have to verify that they're a human being by typing in the word displayed at the bottom right of the screen. I couldn't take any more ads for wedding favors, test preparation classes or requests from "Hoe Bing" to visit his ADHD blog. Sorry for any inconvenience!

Wrong answers that aren't

2005-11-22T16:07:00.000-05:00

Anya has been doing a lot of arithmetic lately, and there have been several times when she's gotten answers that would be counted simply as "wrong" in school, but for which there were reasonable explanations.

Take the simple addition pages in her workbooks. Usually she is supposed to count the number of objects in each of two groups, write in those addends, and then write in their sum. I was looking over one of these pages, where every answer was either 9 or 10, and noticed she had written 4 + 4 = 8 on one line. In fact the equation should have been 2 + 7 = 9, which I know she knows (there were no other errors), but you see, Anya's favorite number is 8. She resents it when there's no sum of 8 on the page. So she just ignored the instructions on that line and wrote in her own equation. I did not consider this to be "wrong," because my purpose is not to train accurate office workers who obey instructions to the letter; it's for my kids to learn arithmetic. And even if my purpose were to raise dutiful accountants, we have years in which to learn the importance of accuracy. Anya's equation would be marked wrong in school because one teacher cannot divine the thought processes behind the wrong answers of over 20 children-- even supposing they shared my perspective (not likely, with all the emphasis on test-taking).

In another example, Anya told me she added up "one of every number" on her calculator and it added up to 66. Sure, if you add all the numbers from 1 to 11 it does add up to 66, though an adult would probably think of the single digits 1 through 9, which only sum to 45. It takes a little effort to figure out exactly what she's calculated sometimes-- and would a teacher have that time?

Telling a kid their answer is simply wrong is incredibly frustrating to them, and it ignores the opportunity to figure out what the misunderstanding is. Of course humans make typos on the calculator and sometimes we goof on rote memorization tasks, mixing up 6 times 9 and 7 times 9. But a great many "mistakes" in fact point to a conceptual error which it would be extremely useful to investigate. I don't personally remember this happening in school unless I sought the teacher's help myself-- and sometimes not even then.

While we are on the subject of math, there is a heck of a lot of value placed on right answers as opposed to conceptual understanding. Here is an observation I had from undergrad and grad school: people with math degrees are no better at arithmetic or figuring out the tip in a restaurant than non-math majors. In fact, I'm substantially worse at off-the-cuff arithmetic than a lot of other people I know. I have a BS in math and an MS in biostatistics (applied math), and on the SAT, ACT, and GRE, math was in every case my lowest test score. Why? Because the conceptual understanding required to write proofs, conceive of infinite series, and integrate functions in 3-D has pretty much no relationship to the "meticulous" trait that makes for an excellent accountant, schoolteacher, or test-taker.

It's true that even in college I lost points on complex math problems because I'd goofed and missed a minus sign or forgotten to square something. Yes, students of all stripes should try to avoid these little errors, but you know, I made a lot of them and I still got a math degree. I think they're stressed far too much in these early grades. I'm glad my kids won't be in an environment where goof-ups count so much against them, yet real misunderstandings are not identifed or delved into.

Education spending

2005-11-17T09:47:00.000-05:00

I'm going to do something that gives me the willies, and quote from an American Enterprise Institute (boo, hiss) publication. What can I say, they've got a good summary of difficult-to-find statistics:

American schools are actually well funded, by any reasonable standard. After inflation, education spending in the United States more than tripled between 1960 and 2000.

It may surprise some to learn that, in fact, we rank at the top of the international charts when it comes to education spending. In 2000 (the latest available data), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) calculated that the United States spent significantly more than any other industrial democracy, including those famous for generous social programs.

In primary education, on a per-pupil basis, the United States spent 66 percent more than Germany, 56 percent more than France, 27 percent more than Japan, 80 percent more than the United Kingdom, 62 percent more than Belgium, and 122 percent more than South Korea. High school figures were similar.

Despite this spending, the United States ranked fifteenth among the thirty-one countries that participated in the OECD’s 2000 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading exam. Ireland, Iceland, and New Zealand were among those that outperformed us while spending far less per pupil. The results in math are equally disquieting: on the 1999 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the United States ranked nineteenth of thirty-eight participating countries. Most troubling is that America’s standing actually deteriorates as students spend more time in school.

The article claims that many schools costs are, rather duplicitously, not included in per-pupil spending estimates. For instance, the interest paid on school bonds, renovation costs, land purchases, and new school construction costs are all not included. Thus, New York City's $12,000 per pupil expenditure is in fact over $14,000; Los Angeles actually spent about $13,000 per pupil yet reported less than $7,000 per pupil expenditures. They conclude:

A reasonable estimate is that widely reported per-pupil spending figures represent only 70-80 percent of what the United States spends on education. Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby has estimated that in 2000 we actually spent more than $9,200 per pupil, compared to the widely reported “official” figure of $7,392.

Just some back-of-the-envelope thoughts here: multiply $9,200 by 25, and you're spending close to a quarter million dollars per year per classroom ($230,000). Now, I don't know how much that space costs in terms of a mortgage, maintenance, and so on-- but let's say $2500 / month for the room (considerably more than my house payment, for instance). Let's additionally stipulate $60,000 for the teacher's salary, $500 / month for supplies (only during the school year), and throw in $25,000 for desks, books, maps, and a few computers. Still with me? We have $110,000 left. Say it takes $40,000 to operate a school bus, per year (roughly the cost in Wake County, North Carolina, which I picked at random)-- we still have $60,000 left. Where is this money going? According to the American Enterprise Institute, US public education spending grew by more than 50 percent from 1995 to 2003. What is going on? Well:

In 1949-50, schools employed one non-teacher for every 2.36 teachers. By 1998-99, there was one non-teacher for every 1.09 teachers. In Washington, D.C., the school system employs eleven thousand people (for sixty-five thousand students), less than half of whom are teachers.

Washington DC schools are not in good shape, physically or academically. They can't even afford to fix the plumbing in some schools. Yet they employ one adult for every 5.9 children-- less than half of them teachers. And what is the proposed solution for boosting academic success in the district? Mixed age classrooms? Peer tutoring? Training teachers to give students more choice and self-determination? Montessori-style learning? Firing some administrators and hiring some teachers (hello, isn't this obvious)?

No. In 2002 a DC councilman drafted legislation that would have required mandatory preschool starting at age 3. I guess reform in the classroom is too radical, whereas carseats on the schoolbus barely raises an eyebrow.

The more time goes on, the more I just think this system cannot be reformed.

Another blogger on bullying

2005-11-16T14:10:00.000-05:00

Another homeschooling blogger, BigNut, has a post on students bullying teachers. According to a study in Ontario, 38% of teachers reported having been bullied by students. Of these, more than 1 in 5 sought professional help to deal with the consequences of the bullying. BigNut rightly asks, if so many teachers can't avoid being bullied and find it difficult to cope with bullying, how are the kids faring?

In another post on bullying, BigNut cites research showing that the vast majority of bullying occurs in front of others, and that bullies, contrary to what most of us had thought, are well-liked and have high social status. This suggests that counseling individual bullies is not going to work, because they are not "acting out" due to personal problems. They bully other kids because bullying works for them. It seems the whole school culture would need to be changed such that bullying does not boost one's social position (but how likely is that?).

Check out these posts... and thanks, BigNut!

More on bullying

2005-11-13T12:12:00.000-05:00

From the NEA:

Six out of 10 American teenagers witness bullying in school once a day.

Bullying affects nearly one in three American schoolchildren in grades six through 10. Eighty-three percent of girls and 79 percent of boys report experiencing harassment.

Students who are targets of repeated bullying behavior experience extreme fear and stress:

Fear of going to school
Fear of using the bathroom
Fear of the bus ride to and from school
Physical symptoms of illness
Diminished ability to learn

What the NEA does not say is that the 83% of girls and 79% of boys experiencing "harassment" are experiencing sexual harassment specifically. At least, I assume that the NEA is citing a particular important survey on sexual harassment, which found:

83% of girls and 79% of boys report having ever experienced harassment.

The number of boys reporting experiences with harassment often or occasionally has increased since 1993 ([to] 56% [from] 49%), although girls are still somewhat more likely to experience it. For many students sexual harassment is an ongoing experience: over 1 in 4 students experience it "often." These numbers do not differ by whether the school is urban or suburban or rural.

76% of students have experienced non-physical harassment while 58% have experienced physical harassment. Non-physical harassment includes taunting, rumors, graffiti, jokes or gestures. One-third of all students report experiencing physical harassment "often or occasionally."

Actions hurt but so do words. When given 14 examples of non-physical and physical harassment, students say they would be very upset if someone did the following:

Spread sexual rumors about them (75%)

Pulled off or down their clothing in a sexual way (74%)

Said that they were gay or lesbian (73%)

Forced them to do something sexual other than kissing (72%)

Spied on them as they dressed or showered at school (69%)

The NEA and other groups tend to focus on school violence when addressing the subject of bullying, but I think that in fact non-physical bullying is more rampant and quite possibly more psychologically damaging. Consider that having sexual rumors spread about them was "very upsetting" to more students than were being forced to do something sexual or being spied on while dressing or showering.

A quarter of students experience sexual harassment "often," a third experience physical sexual harassment "often" or "occasionally." No wonder that:

A substantial number of students—both boys and girls—fear being hurt by someone in their school life. Eighteen percent (18%) are afraid some or most of the time, and less than half (46%) are "never" afraid in school.

And yet, the main objection to homeschooling continues to be "Aren't you worried about socialization?" (I'm going to memorize this response: "Yes, of course, that's the main reason we decided to homeschool!")

Your average person on the street does not know that homeschoolers do better academically than do public school students, so why is it that they latch onto "socialization" and almost never ask about academic concerns? (Or is that just my experience?) I am starting to think we are all aware, at some half-conscious level, that school is really about finding your slot in society and learning to conform within your category. And that people are willing to put up with the bullying, the harassment, and the misery experienced in schools because they just cannot fathom what happens to someone who does not find their pigeonhole, meld into their social clique, and get properly classified and defined. Better to endure the harsh experiences that teach you to accept your lot in life than to wind up a non-conformist, right? And better, many parents think, to help your kid through the cruelty, competition, misery and anxiety than to have them "not fit in" as adults.

I am beginning to suspect that the social life of school is most school parents' biggest concern, at least, in their heart of hearts. Nominally it may be grades, but what gets to them emotionally must be the teasing and harassment (if they're aware of it). They need to believe this is worth it. So when you say you aren't going to send your kids to school, what they want from you (not consciously, but arising out of some deeper emotional place) is to hear that yes, you're worried about your kid missing out on all that bullying. That yes, that's the one advantage their kid will have-- knowing what "the real world" is like (even though the adult world in fact contains far, far less of this kind of nastiness). That yes, the price your child will pay for still being happy at age 14 is they'll be the weirdo on the block.

I'm tired of being asked, in some never-articulated and indirect manner, to agree that schooled children will reap social advantages to make up for the everyday miseries they witness or endure. It feels like this is what I'm being asked to accept, when someone says "Well, there may be some socialization issues..." or similar. It does no good for schooled children if adults act as if the typical school social environment is inevitable, or worse, somehow helpful. There is no trade-off for the bullying. There is no excuse for adults allowing so much commonplace cruelty inside of schools, which we ourselves would never allow in our workplaces. I'm not going to go along with this by getting defensive when asked about socialization, citing our social opportunities and so on. These people don't really care if my kids grow up weird or not (some of the people asking me think I'm weird anyway). They are wanting me-- again, not consciously, but at some level-- to agree that a taste of cruelty is really the best thing. That it's not hurting their kids.

I just can't go along with that anymore. From now on I'm going to try and remember: "Yes, of course we're concerned about socialization, that's why we decided to homeschool!" To respond otherwise comes too close to endorsing the current venomous social atmosphere of most schools.

Techno bullying

2005-11-10T21:04:00.000-05:00

Via CNET news:

According to a survey conducted earlier this year by U.K. children's charity NCH, one in five kids has been bullied via digital phone or computer. Bullying by text message was the most common form of abuse reported, with 14 percent of children interviewed saying they had received upsetting messages on their mobile phones. The interactions run the gamut from disconcerting to downright terrifying.
The more extreme instances of techno-bullying involve so-called "happy slapping," where physical assaults are recorded on mobile phones and distributed to Web sites and other phones via video messaging.

Experts say that while most bullying occurs at school, or on the way to or from school, mobile phone bullying follows students into their homes. Kids often do not tell adults about harassment for fear that their phones will be taken away, nor do they want to turn their phones off, as they are a key device for their social lives. In the UK, 97% of children aged 12 to 16 own mobile phones.

The attitude that "all kids get bullied and learn to live with it," besides being factually inaccurate, also contains the admission that adults do not bully each other like this. Among adults, "happy slapping" would result in a criminal charges, as would many of the lesser forms of harassment. Kids aren't learning this at home, they're learning this in the Lord of the Flies, nowhere-near-enough-caring-adults environment of the school.

When I was in college I came to believe that high school was about socializing everyone so that they "knew their place" and wouldn't get uppity. The social strife was designed to further racism, sexism, and classism, to destroy confidence, to destroy solidarity, to sow self-doubt, to enhance conformity. But what I didn't get was that this wasn't coming just from "the culture," from parents and kids. It is enabled and enhanced by the environment of the school, in which children can so easily be victimized without adult advocates to come to their defense.

When we first decided to homeschool, someone close to me said he thought it was a good idea because (and I quote): "Elementary school was when I learned that adults don't really care about children and are not actually there to help you."

Borrowed satire

2005-11-08T16:31:00.000-05:00

I found this satirical news article on the web, and I hope the author (Angela Paul) won't mind me excerpting it here-- it imagines a future in which communal eating, like communal learning, has been mandated by the government:

Home Eating a Threat to Public Kitchens?

State Allows Growing Trend of Eating At Home

After much heated debate on the house floor, legislation was passed today to allow a growing number of families to cook meals for their families in their homes. The children must have annual physical examinations to assure proper growth and weight gain. Attempts to require weekly meal plans and monthly kitchen inspections were voted down.

A spokesperson from the National Association of Nutritionists (NAN) condemns this decision. "These children are being denied the rich socialization and diversity that is an essential part of the eating process. Without the proper nutritional background, it is impossible for the average person to feed their own children. We, as child advocates, see this as a step backwards and speak out for the sake of the children who cannot speak for themselves."

Homecooking parents say the benefits of eating at home include increased family unity and the ability to tailor a diet to a particular need. Elizabeth Crocker, a home cook, states, "We started cooking and eating at home when we realized that my son had a severe allergy to eggs. The public kitchens required him to take numerous medications that had serious side effects in order to counteract his allergy. We found that eliminating eggs was a simpler method and our son has thrived since we began doing so."

After this experience, the Crockers decided to home cook for all of their children, and converted their media room into a kitchen. Elizabeth says, "We have experienced so much closeness as we have explored recipes and spent time cooking together and eating together. We have a dining circle with other families where we sometimes share ideas and meals together."

The Crocker children have done well physically under their mother's care, weighing in at optimum weights for their ages and having health records far above average. It should be noted that Mrs. Crocker, while not a professional nutritionist, has a family history rich with nutritionists and home economists. "Surely the success of the Crocker children is due to the background of their mother," responded the spokesman from NAN. "The results they have achieved should not be viewed as normative." Mrs. Crocker counters that her background was actually a hindrance to the nutritional principles she follows. "Our paternal great-grandmother was a home economist, but she prepared most meals from pre-made mixes. In our homecooking we try not to duplicate public-kitchen meals, but to tailor our meals to the needs and preferences of our children."

Pretty darned funny, I thought.

Preschool

2005-11-06T09:57:00.000-05:00

I've argued before that educators are continually trying to expand the time kids spend in school, through longer school years, longer days, and of course, universal preschool. Preschools are also becoming less about play, and more about academics. An article from Michigan included this:

With state education curriculum requirements becoming more stringent for all grades, it's essential that children receive some kind of preschool experience, [preschool coordinator Jan] Brock said.

"Preschool is so important because kindergarten requirements have increased," she said.

"We have an opportunity to provide them with experience to help them prepare for kindergarten. We want them to have a quality preschool experience to help prepare them for success in school."

Or, from New York state:

Many children who complete preschool programs do not have readiness skills required by the New York State Department of Education. "We have experienced significant change during the past few years," said Rosmarie Bovino, deputy superintendent of schools. "What used to be taught in first grade is now being taught in pre-K. In the past, pre-K was viewed as a time for learning social skills, with playtime being the primary activity. That is no longer true."

The district has met with local preschool teachers to discuss state standards, particularly math and reading, and provided copies of the recently released New York State math and English language arts curriculum materials.

I guess they are abandoning the social skills development purpose of preschool in favor of just making it like normal school, with curriculum requirements and the whole nine yards. So I suppose the next thing will be "Enroll your infant in our preschool readiness program, before they fall behind in socialization!"

A recent study looked at over 14,000 kindergarteners from across the nation, measured their academic abilities and their social skills, and recorded whether or not they had attended preschool. It did find that those who had attended preschool tended to test higher on pre-reading and math skills:

The study... shows that preschooled children from the poorest families would score 8 and 9 percentile points higher on standardized pre-reading and math tests, respectively, than children who stayed at home. Children from middle-class families made 5 percent gains in language and math compared to their peers who did not attend preschool, and children from upper-income families made modest gains in language.

In other words, preschool has little academic benefit for children from higher-income families (whose parents usually have higher education levels). "Modest" is usually code for "not statistically significant" or "miniscule to the point of being irrelevant." Higher income families are more likely to send their kids to preschool, and their kids do better in school-- but according to this study, their kids don't do better because of preschool. It's just that preschool attendance and academic performance have a common cause: higher socioeconomic status.

True, kids from lower income families have improved test scores if they have attended preschool, although:

Margaret Bridges, co-author of the study and director of child development at the institute, acknowledged the study showed that disparities in early cognitive development between children from wealthy backgrounds and children from lower economic backgrounds would not necessarily decrease, and that the gap could be addressed by prioritizing resources for certain at-risk groups.

"With limited resources to invest in preschool programs, I think it's important to focus the resources on the kids that are having the most trouble with achievement," she said.

In other words, you might send the lowest income kids to preschool but not send the higher income kids, and then you might have a better shot at removing the disparities in academic achievement. Only I think we know that higher income families are not going to keep their kids out of preschool, so only universal compulsory public preschools will seem like a real solution to public educators.

The study also looked at social skills. I don't have to tell any other homeschoolers, positively fatigued by people bringing up socialization concerns, how pleasantly ironic the study's results are:

Black children who attended preschool lagged in social development compared to black children who did not attend preschool, while white and Hispanic children showed almost no decrease compared to children of the same ethnicity who did not attend preschool.

All economic groups showed less social development compared to stay-at-home children, except those from middle-income families, who were not socially affected by attending preschool.

So, to recap: at best, preschool didn't affect social development. But for most kids, it impeded their social development. I would love to carry some sort of study results abstract around with me to hand over to people who bring up social development as a knee-jerk first reaction to hearing that we're homeschoolers, but in my heart I know it wouldn't make any difference. The study article goes on:

But some educators believe preschool helps children's social growth.

"I totally don't believe the (results on social development)," said Jennifer Lage, a teacher at Sheffield Preschool in Berkeley. "I think socially, that's one of the main reasons to put your child in preschool, for them to gain some social skills early on."

"Socialization" through schooling is a matter of theology with some people; it is unassailable. Never mind what the data say.

Paranoid Parenting

2005-11-04T08:35:00.000-05:00

This morning I discovered the book Paranoid Parenting, written by British sociology professor Frank Furedi. The publisher's blurb says:

Hardly a day goes by without parents being warned of a new threat to their children's well-being. Everything is dangerous: the crib, the babysitter, the school, the supermarket, the park. High-profile campaigns convince parents that their children's health, safety, and development are constantly at risk. Parents are criticized by one child-care expert after another, but even the experts can't agree on matters as simple as whether or not it is wise to sleep next to a child. Parents don't know whom to trust; the only clear message is that they can't trust themselves....

I thought that sounded interesting. When you bring up homeschooling with most people, the response is essentially fear: fear that the child won't develop any social skills, usually, or fear that they won't get into college, or fear that they'll never learn algebra. When it comes to raising children, people are afraid of attempting it without the intervention of experts. (Moreover, they're sometimes threatened if you try it yourself.)

I stumbled across an interview with Furedi as well, on the radio show Counterpoint. It was one of those moments, like when I first discovered John Gatto, where my own half-formed thoughts were suddenly articulated. I'll end with a longish excerpt from the interview-- hope you like it as much as I did.

Michael Duffy: Why do you think we have started to worry so much?

Frank Furedi: I think there are several reasons. One reason is that we’ve tended to regard human relationships as, by definition, very difficult and complicated, and we tell ourselves that, particularly parents, are not competent enough to deal with children, that apparently they are very difficult, that you almost need a PhD in developmental psychology to know how to manage your children. I think the more we treat parenting as a skill rather than a fairly naturally developed relationship, the more parents lose confidence in themselves. And when you lose confidence in your ability to mother or to father it becomes very easy to opt for, ‘You can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that, you shouldn’t go outdoors, you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t talk to strangers.’ That’s the easy way we can compensate for our insecurities, and I think that’s been pretty much institutionalised within the Anglo-American environment.

Michael Duffy: You mean we—the parents are feeling insecure about themselves, and they’re sort of pushing this off onto the children?

Frank Furedi: Yes, I think sometimes we create a poisonous atmosphere for parents; it’s not the parents' fault. But quite often…for example, at the moment there are big campaigns being organised in Britain to teach parents how to touch their children. So you can get massage classes, and there are classes that are designed to tell parents how to cuddle their children. Now, call me silly, but I used to think that touching your child and cuddling your child is something that you could work out for yourself; it often comes very naturally. But the very minute that we turn that into a skill that requires the support of professionals, we actually make it more difficult for parents to spontaneously touch their children, and to intuitively and instinctively cuddle their kids because it’s now seen as, somehow, a complicated task. The more we send out that kind of message, the more we, as parents, lose confidence in ourselves and stop believing in our intuition.

. . .

Frank Furedi: In many ways what we’re doing is we’re turning help-seeking into a primary virtue. We’re told that a responsible parent is somebody that seeks help. A responsible parent is not somebody that just gets on with life and does the business; it’s somebody that seeks support, calls up help lines. So the more we tell parents that they need to look for help and look for support, the more we incorporate the idea that actually they’re partners with some professionals in the joint task of bringing up their children.

Michael Duffy: Frank, I’d just like to continue with what you were just saying; there are people and companies, indeed entire industries, who benefit from this paranoia, aren’t there?

Frank Furedi: There are. In one sense, we all suffer from it because, if you are a parent, bringing kids up in this environment is not really good for anybody, but there are people who kind of benefit from this. I think governments, for example, who often are confused and disorientated about what kind of policy to pursue, find it easier to go for what I call the ‘politics of behaviour’, which involves regulating people’s lifestyles and basically preying on people’s fears and insecurities at established points of contact, and they provide support. You, in return, are meant to be the grateful public who responds positively to this.

So politicians use our insecurities as a point of departure for policy making. There’s a veritable parenting industry that has developed which insists that they’re in the business of bringing children up, and their ambition is continually expanding. For example, in the UK and in America, the parenting industry is now targeting very young children between the age of one and three, and they’re claiming that unless they get their hands on them and train them, they’re not going to be fit to go to school because they’re not going to learn certain social skills, they’re not going to have the ability to concentrate on their work, and therefore we need to have the kind of institutions established…schemes established where, already at that early age, they can be trained in a particular way. So in that sense there’s an industry that’s evolved around parenting which thrives on our own fears and insecurities, and which puts us in a perpetual state of dependency in relation to the things they tell us.

Michael Duffy: I’m fascinated by the advice industry. Obviously, if one sits down with a number of books, they often give wildly contradictory advice, and there’s also a magazine that I read from time to time for parents and it literally differs from each month; one month it will tell you to do one thing and the next month it will tell you to do another, and no one seems at all worried by this. The ultimate effect is to create this sort of state of permanent neurosis, which people seem to accept.

Frank Furedi: Well, they do, because what happens is that once you get on the treadmill of listening to advice, you then become almost like a junkie and you try out a particular strategy, it doesn’t quite work and then you read somebody else’s advice, and they tell you that when your child goes to sleep make sure that the lights are on. That doesn’t seem to work either, then you read somebody else’s advice and they insist that there mustn’t be any lights on, they must be very quiet and maybe you can put some music on…and you can go through all these books and all these self-help manuals, and after a while you don’t realise that you’ve tried five or six different techniques and you don’t realise the most important lesson of all—that, in the end, you are the only person that actually knows your child well enough to know what’s the most appropriate way of going forward, and without listening to your intuition and cultivating your intuition, you’re kind of perpetually listening to people who are giving very boring, routine, formulaic advice that’s actually often quite inappropriate to your circumstances.

Autonomy in learning and literature

2005-11-03T08:46:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a bit more of Punished by Rewards, and I paid particular attention to how a degree of freedom in the classroom improves learning. Everyone learns better when they are interested in the subject, but even when a certain subject has to be learned, it still helps to provide choices and some self-determination along the way. Maybe that seems obvious, but Kohn provides an interesting sampling of actual research in this area (quoting from pp. 222-23):

When second graders in Pittsburgh were given some choice about their learning, including the chance to decide which tasks they would work on at any given time, they tended to "complete more learning tasks in less time."
When high school seniors in Minneapolis worked on chemistry problems without clear-cut directions -- that is, with the opportunity to decide for themselves how to find solutions -- they "consistently produced better write-ups of experiments" and remembered the material better than those who had been told exactly what to do. They put in more time than they had to, spending "extra laboratory periods checking results that could have been accepted without extra work." Some of the students initially resisted having to make decisions about how to proceed, but these grumblers later "took great pride in being able to carry through an experiment on their own."
When preschool-age children in Massachusetts were allowed to select the materials they used for making a collage, their work was judged more creative than the work of children who used exactly the same materials but did not get to choose them.
When college students in New York had the chance to decide which of several puzzles they wanted to work on, and how to allot their time to each of them, they were a lot more interested in working on such puzzles later than were students who were told what to do.
When teachers of inner-city black children were trained in a program designed to promote a sense of self-determination, the children in these classes missed less school and scored better on a national test of basic skills than those in conventional classrooms.
Fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade students who felt they were given personal responsibility for their studies had "significantly higher self-esteem and perceived academic competence" than children who felt controlled in their classrooms.
When second graders spent the year in a constructivist math classroom, one where textbooks and rewards were discarded in favor of an emphasis on "intellectual autonomy" -- that is, where children, working in groups, took an active role in figuring out their own solutions to problems and were free to move around the classroom on their own initiative to get the materials they needed -- they developed more sophisticated higher-level reasoning skills without falling behind on basic conceptual tasks.

One of the fascinating findings in the above list was that giving college students a choice of puzzles resulted in them enjoying the puzzles more even at a later date. Maybe being forced to do math in a certain way at a certain time results in kids disliking math even weeks or months later (or forever). As Kohn points out, perceiving oneself to be in control (or feeling helpless) is an enormous psychological factor as well as a predictor of academic learning. According to research Kohn cites, even infants exhibit enjoyment of noisy toys that they control, but fear similar toys which make noise at random. Based on research, giving kids no control would tend to reduce their self-esteem, make them more vulnerable to depression, and just plain make them angry. To have all this associated with academic learning cannot be a good thing.

I had to read Great Expectations at age 13 and I hated it. It was the most dark, grim, depressing, frightening, awful book in existence as far as I was concerned. I remember thinking that only a creepy half-insane man could come up with Miss Havisham and her cobweb-strewn wedding cake. (I didn't read much beyond that, in fact.) To this day, in spite of enjoying other 19th century literature (even Wuthering Heights, which is also nightmarish), I have never completed a Dickens novel. Along similar lines, I read Hamlet in 12th grade and again in college and thought it was okay, then read it one weekend all on my own and loved it. This isn't to say I never enjoyed an assigned work-- I loved Madame Bovary and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, but for various reasons I hated the lectures and discussions on these books and still wished I had been able to read them in peace, on my own, rather than for a class. In short, I don't think I would want my children to be assigned to read literary novels, at least until college. If my kids don't (for example) see me reading an Austen novel and get interested, or in some other way pick up one of the literary novels around the house, I plan to say "Here are some shelves full of literature, pick a book to read."

Last spring a friend of mine was asking for literary book recommendations. He was helping to identify some easier-to-read classics for his niece to read over the summer, as his family is quite focused on education and academic success, and his niece would soon be starting high school. My recommendation was not one of the classics, it was anything by P. G. Wodehouse, but particularly the Jeeves/Wooster novels. These make tough reading at first, due to the strange slang, the massive vocabulary, and the more complicated sentence structures. But the key is, they are hysterically funny once you are used to the style of writing. Once you "get" the humor, you're more than willing to slog through the unfamiliar language. For any of you who have kids of high school age (maybe younger, I don't know), you can boost their vocabulary easily if you can get them hooked on Bertie Wooster (a bumbling rich bachelor) and Jeeves (his valet). I'll just end with an excerpt from one of the best of these books, The Code of the Woosters:

I suppose that when two men of iron will live in close association with each other, there are bound to be occasional clashes, and one of these had recently popped up in the Wooster home. Jeeves was trying to get me to go on a Round-The-World cruise, and I would have none of it. But in spite of my firm statements to this effect, scarcely a day passed without him bringing me a sheaf or nosegay of those illustrated folders which the Ho-for-the-open-spaces birds send out in the hope of drumming up custom. His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.

More on the contrast effect

2005-10-25T15:55:00.000-04:00

I found a definition of "behavioral contrast" which I wanted to try and make sense of, because it seems critical to understanding the repercussions of rewards systems:

Behavioral contrast has been defined as an inverse relationship between rates of responding in one setting and the conditions of reinforcement in another setting (McSweeney & Weatherly, 1998). Many varieties of contrast have been reported in the empirical literature. Contrast can be classified into two primary categories; positive and negative contrast. Positive contrast is an increase in the rate of responding in one setting as a result of a decrease in reinforcement... in another setting. Negative contrast is a decrease in the rate of responding in one setting as a result of an increase in reinforcement in another setting.

As I understand it, the "rate of responding" means how often a target behavior occurs. If you're using positive reinforcement, i.e. rewards of some sort, you're trying to increase a desirable behavior. In this case, a higher response rate means your rewards system is succeeding.

Negative contrast basically means that while a rewards scheme may be successful in one setting, there are unfortunate side effects in other settings. Specifically, the good behavior you've been trying to encourage becomes less common if rewards are increased in other settings. It's all relative, I guess: if payment for good behavior goes up in one environment, it makes other rewards systems that much less attractive or motivating.

Positive contrast means that your "response rate" goes up, or in other words you start having more success at encouraging good behavior, if the rewards start to dry up in other settings. Again, it's all relative: if other rewards are reduced, your own rewards look that much better.

Consider what happens if you send your well-behaved child to a classroom where the teacher happens to use elaborate rewards: tokens to be turned in for small toys, stickers, special honors, lavish praise, and all manner of privileges to be bestowed or revoked. This child is offered a bribe in most instances where a request is made. Time for a math test: the highest scorer gets to wear the Math Genius pin for a day. Remember to raise your hand before speaking: each time you don't you lose one of the magnets off your desk (magnets that can be turned in at the end of the week for little plastic baubles). Keep your desks clean: Cleanest desk gets to line up first for recess. Do your homework: each week without any late assignments earns you an hour's free time on Friday afternoon.

After a few weeks of this, suppose you ask your child to set the table. Can (s)he be blamed for thinking "And what do I get if I do?" It's not simply a matter of greed or laziness or selfishness. They are learning at school that behavior occurs not within a social contract but rather within an economic contract. If they are paid for the least little thing while in the classroom, are they not then entitled to some compensation when Mom or Dad asks them to contribute work?

Conversely, consider a teacher who begins a new school year determined not to resort to rewards and punishments. Suppose that in that part of town, disobedience from kids is not tolerated, and parents typically keep their kids in check with strict rules, spankings, behavior charts, candy used as bribes, and a hundred and one other methods of manipulation. (I do think there are parts of the country and demographic groups where parents are more apt to use behaviorism.)

The kids in that classroom will be expecting an authority figure who cements their position of power by setting the rules, distributing incentives, and doling out consequences. They won't be used to having an adult appeal to their reason or point out shared goals, of having requests explained and having infractions dealt with as "teachable moments". Parents who are fond of time outs and gold stars will not respect the teacher either and will feel that their child is suffering from a lack of discipline and the resulting disorder in the classroom. I still feel such a teacher could succeed, but the first part of the year might be a trial. At every request, a sizeable segment of the class would be thinking "And what do I get if I do?" or "What happens if I don't?" It is particularly ironic that parents might blame the teacher, when their own Skinnerian methods made their kids so difficult to work with.

To sum up: even if a parent doesn't use behaviorism, they can suffer its ill "contrast" effects if it's used liberally in school. Likewise, schoolteachers facing poorly behaved students may be suffering the contrast effects of the authoritarian parenting which is currently making a cultural resurgence.

The epidemic of disrespect

2005-10-17T21:22:00.000-04:00

One of the major themes of the NEA website is discipline, or "classroom management." Apparently, simply maintaining order is becoming increasingly difficult for teachers:

There's the feeling among educators that things are worse now than they've ever been, and they aren't wrong, says Jim Garbarino, a Cornell University professor and author of "Raising Children in a Socially Toxic Environment."

Garbarino points, in part, to an "erosion of adult authority" in today's society that makes it more and more difficult for teachers and other educators to do their job. Although research on the declining behavior of students is scarce, Garbarino says one survey found 82 percent of adults agree kids are less respectful.

There's a possibility that there is no actual trend where kids are getting less respectful. Sometimes our society holds a consensus opinion which is, in fact, a myth. Remember the crime wave of the 1980's, the one that made every politician from dog-catcher to president declare how "tough on crime" they were? The one that led to mandatory minimum sentencing and the Willie Horton campaign commercial? Yeah, well, it never happened. Utter media fabrication, that was. Violent crime declined over the course of the 1980's. Property crime went down fairly dramatically. Yet I'm sure 82 percent of adults would have agreed that crime was on the rise, had they been similarly surveyed.

But let's assume kids really are getting less obedient ("respectful" is usually just code for "obedient," as I'm sure it is for the NEA).

When most of the parenting books focus on discipline, taking control, and asserting your position as household dictator, how on earth can we have an erosion of adult authority? Nowadays, there is a positive terror of "permissive" parenting, with adults (especially those without children) speaking scathingly of badly behaved "brats" they seem to run into everywhere they go. I can't tell you how tired I am of reading the old saw "parenting is not a democracy." The culture is positively obsessed with adult authority. This is the era of the TV show Supernanny:

Hailed by the New York Times as "fascinating" and "required viewing;" praised by Oprah Winfrey, David Letterman and Kelly Ripa; acclaimed by such publications as Newsweek, Hollywood Reporter and The New Yorker; and lauded by parents and nannies across America, Supernanny is a hit.... Supernanny is now an international phenomenon; it airs in 47 countries.... Her book, Supernanny: How to Get the Best from Your Children, spent 17 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, hitting No. 1 for much of that time.

Supernanny's top ten list of parenting rules:

1. Praise and Rewards
2. Consistency
3. Routine
4. Boundaries
5. Discipline
6. Warnings
7. Explanations
8. Restraint
9. Responsibility
10. Relaxation

This is our culture: parenting is about attaining obedience from one's children. There is nothing in the above list that suggests any concern about empathy, social responsibility, creativity, imagination, enjoyment, or learning. Any "erosion of adult authority" is entirely mystifying when the primary concern of many adults, when dealing with children, is to insure their position of authority.

Back to the NEA article:

"Teachers probably have to do more to establish their individual authority because they don't have a cultural foundation to build upon," Garbarino says.

Some blame parents—in fact, 82 percent of teachers in the Public Agenda poll say parents simply don't teach their kids discipline. Many kids come to school with little regard for rules. "They're used to getting their own way," says Sheila Cornelison, an algebra teacher in northern Alabama, who trains colleagues in Alabama Education Association-sponsored I Can Do It! Workshops—seminars offered by some state Associations to help teachers with classroom management.

I very much doubt that your typical American parent lets their kid rule the roost. Something is going wrong in our relationships with children, but that eternal straw man, the "spoiled child" that results from permissive parenting, is not the problem. If you've been reading earlier posts, you probably know what I think it is: behaviorism (Supernanny's #1 parenting technique). Far from having a new, permissive culture which grants children too much autonomy, we have kids who are scheduled 24/7, are rarely if ever given unsupervised time, and are, in many cases, incessantly manipulated with time outs, star charts, cookies, spankings, and all manner of carrots and sticks. This leads to poor behavior and lack of respect for adults for several reasons:

Bribing and threatening kids does not show them any respect. It means treating the child as if they cannot be reasoned with or appealed to, as if they cannot understand the world around them, as if they are animals. Ergo, they don't respect us either.
Behaviorism stresses the power structure between parent and child, which gets in the way of mutual affection and can inspire resistance for resistance's sake (everyone wants a measure of freedom). De-emphasizing the power structure through discussion and negotiation will actually make for a more "manageable" child.
Children whose parents regularly explain the purpose behind their requests, which is what you have to do if you aren't using rewards and punishments, learn to trust that adults have good reasons for their demands. Even when a reason is not provided, the child is more likely to assume a reason exists, and to do what they're asked. In short, trust has been established.
The "contrast effect" creates a backlash of even worse behavior once the Skinnerian system is no longer in effect, meaning that a child who is highly controlled in the home will exhibit worse behavior at school. Teachers may use certificates, tokens, and endless tchotchke to purchase decent behavior, but can they really compete with the personalized system of manipulation used by some parents? Not likely. For the child whose behavior is economically driven, there is little reason to be well behaved for a teacher.
Paying a child for positive behavior indicates you have low expectations or even a low opinion of them. Children will internalize these low expectations over time, and therefore act less responsibly.

It is frustrating to say the least that teachers want parents to take kids more in hand, which, in our society, usually means setting up more rules and enforcing them with an even stronger economy of rewards and consequences. And yet that system is in fact the root of the problem (along with, in my opinion, overscheduling and lack of unsupervised time).

One last point is that teachers cannot possibly detect all infractions or always be accurate in determining which child caused a given problem. They only have 2 eyes and they may have 30 kids in their room. This means that rewards and punishments cannot possibly be given out fairly in all cases. The same NEA article includes this:

Unfortunately, [Cornelison] and others say, gone are the "good old days," when teachers could rely on parents to catch their backs. Now, one out of two teachers report having been accused by parents themselves of unfair discipline.

Well, naturally. This is the inevitable consequence of having one person attempting to administer a complicated economic system of detentions, certificates, extra homework, tokens, and so on, for 20 to 30 kids. Kids get paper money that they didn't earn, and other kids get held in at recess (incarcerated, so to speak) for crimes they didn't commit. And what does that do to morale?

Unfortunately, rewards and punishments are, to most Americans, what the water is to the fish. Such methods are thought to be natural and right and go unquestioned. The worse the behavior gets, the more Skinnerisms we pile on. I don't know where this will end, but we're not on a good path.

Recent homeschooling

2005-10-13T18:55:00.000-04:00

Anya has become interested in "playing school" lately (her term). She wants to get out the letter blocks and make up sentences together. She wants to play a game where we spread out some word cards and I say "Where is 'fox'?" and she finds the word, until all the cards are gone. This one is a good game because she doesn't have to sound it out entirely, she can use process of elimination based on the first or last letter only, and yet she still learns the words by sight. I'm going to pick a short early reader book, identify all the words in it, write them on cards, and play the "Where?" game until she knows them by sight. This way, she should hopefully get excited about reading the book, as opposed to having it drive her nuts because sounding it out goes so slowly.

On impulse, while at the grocery store, I bought a little math workbook. I was almost sheepish about it, since first of all I think of myself as an unschooler, secondly many of the homeschoolers in my area follow Waldorf curricula and don't feel academics need to be emphasized at age 5, and lastly, aren't worksheets dull as dust and repetitive?

Well, Anya loves the workbook. She brings me pages and asks me to read the instructions. I bought three more at Target today, along with a package of sparkly pencils and some neon colored cap erasers. I am already eyeing a silly pencil sharpener that looks like a nose (guess where you stick the pencil) as a stocking item. I was surprised how geeked I got about the pencils. I guess one never outgrows the excitement of new school supplies-- even if they are nominally unschooling supplies.

I've also been reading her Little House in the Big Woods. A couple days into it, I went over to a corner of the room where she'd built a fort, and had been playing mother dog to four little stuffed puppies. Alongside the puppies was a pile of food: applesauce cups, Goldfish, juice boxes, Cheerios, etc. Apparently, since it's autumn, it was necessary to lay in a store of food for the puppies. I also keep hearing her telling the puppies things like "Hurry up! There are panthers in the forest!" During times when she is Anya, as opposed to "Woofy," her dog identity, she occasionally thinks of another item to ask me about, as in: "Did they have gum when Laura was living in that house in the woods?" Which of course is followed by "NO GUM?" and a look of horror.

Tristan, the World's Most Irate Toddler, is doing very well but has a tendency to yell "Bah! Bah!" while scowling and throwing objects to the ground. He also prefers that I never stand or walk without carrying him, which is a bit tough, but oh well, he'll outgrow it.

Hope my readers are all doing well!

Columbus Day

2005-10-10T10:13:00.000-04:00

Christopher Columbus is one of the major reasons we decided to homeschool our children. Seriously. I could not stand the thought that they would go to school and be taught that this man was a "brave explorer" and that he "discovered America" or was the first to think the world was round. He was a monster in search of slaves and gold, mediocre in every respect except his avarice, and in the pursuit of his greed he decimated entire populations. There were perhaps 3 million Arawaks living on Hispaniola when Columbus arrived (estimates range from 1 to 8 million). By 1508 there were only 60,000 left. Shortly thereafter there were none.

Ask anyone who discovered America, and they'll probably say Columbus. Never mind if others discovered it first, people from Siberia, Indonesia, Japan, the British Isles, West Africa. Never mind if at least 20 million people were living in North America in 1492, people with trade routes and treaties, crops and medicine, history, religion, culture, and art. Some people defend the absurdity of Columbus's "discovery" by saying "Well, we just mean that he was the first European to discover the Americas." Uh-huh. Because, you know, the Europeans are the ones who count, so it's okay if theirs is the only perspective we get.

Much of what is taught about Columbus in US history textbooks is literally pulled out of thin air, written in for dramatic flair, added to the story completely gratuitously. It is our national creation myth, and they've made it a right good tale. A one-month crossing in good weather with plenty of supplies turns into three months of violent seas, starvation and fear, near mutiny, and then a joyous cry of "Land! Land!" It's like Chapter One was crafted by someone who used to write Made-for-TV movies based loosely on actual events.

The truth is more like this, from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me (p.62-63):

In the words of Hans Koning, "There now began a reign of terror on Hispaniola." Spaniards hunted Indians for sport and murdered them for dog food. Columbus, upset because he could not locate the gold he was certain was on the island, set up a tribute system. Ferdinand Columbus described how it worked: "[The Indians] all promised to pay tribute to the Catholic Sovereigns every three months, as follows: In the Cibao, where the gold mines were, every person of 14 years of age or upward was to pay a large hawk's bell of gold dust; all others were each to pay 25 pounds of cotton. Whenever an Indian delivered his tribute, he was to receive a brass or copper token which he must wear about his neck as proof that he had made his payment. Any Indian found without such a token was to be punished." . . . Columbus's son neglected to mention how the Spaniards punished those whose tokens had expired: they cut off their hands.

. . .

On Haiti the colonists made the Indians mine gold for them, raise Spanish food, and even carry them everywhere they went. The Indians couldn't stand it. Pedro de Cordoba wrote in a letter to King Ferdinand in 1517, "As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth.... Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery."

Priest Bartolome de las Casas detailed other atrocities: Spaniards cutting into natives' flesh to test the sharpness of their knives or beheading natives for no apparent reason. Some of Las Casas's descriptions are thought to be exaggerated:

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers' breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, "Boil there, you offspring of the devil!" Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby.

This goes on, mind you, for another paragraph or so, and details burnings at the stake, amputations, rape, and so on. I would like to think it is exaggerated. But much of what Las Casas wrote is confirmed by other letter-writers or Columbus's own accounts. For instance, Columbus wrote complacently to friends about the sexual slave trade, noting that "...there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten are now in demand."

The precise degree of cruelty may be arguable, and I realize that many thousands died because of small pox and other diseases the Europeans brought. But the native Americans in what is now the United States also died from these diseases, yet they did not disappear in a matter of a few decades. It is undeniable that Columbus and his men, along with successors like his son or younger officers, committed genocide. Millions were living on Hispaniola, Haiti, Cuba, and smaller islands in 1492; by the mid 1500's, none were left. We might as well have Hitler Day as have Columbus Day.

Obviously there is a gigantic discrepancy between primary historical sources and the guff invented for school textbooks. (One textbook has Columbus dying unappreciated and penniless, not knowing he had discovered a new continent. Just for the hell of it, I guess-- sounds better that way. Never mind that it's contradicted by Columbus's own journals.) But this particular discrepancy, as hideous as it is, is pretty much par for the course. We learn about the brave and noble early colonists, but not that they gave small pox-laden blankets to the native Americans; nor that some early colonies were successfully overthrown by slaves, who then maintained peaceful and mutually beneficial relations with native Americans; nor that some of those captured by natives refused to go back when 'rescued' by fellow colonists.

I think that our creation myths are fictionalized and dramatized in proportion to the evils we committed, and the evils were considerable. A friend once said I seemed determined to demonize the Europeans, but this reaction simply points out the huge difference between historical data and what's in the textbooks. From her perspective, I'd gone off the deep end and was choosing an insupportable interpretation; from my perspective, the textbooks have jaw-dropping audacity in manufacturing a false and rosy history. I really have no desire to paint the Europeans as evil. I think stealing an entire continent through genocide more or less speaks for itself.

I could no more allow Anya and Tristan to be taught the Fantastic Fake History of Our Superior Nation than I could allow them to be taught that the Holocaust never happened. History is not a single, objectively "true" narrative, and yes, many viewpoints can be argued, but some interpretations are bunk. American History in most public schools is way over the line.

Pandemic Flu Awareness Week

2005-10-05T13:06:00.000-04:00

Bloggers from every part of the blogosphere are participating in a week-long effort to increase awareness of the coming influenza pandemic, and I thought I'd join them for one posting.

Pandemics occur when a new type of influenza, one which has never infected humans before, mutates and becomes contagious between humans. No one on earth has antibodies to this new type of influenza, which is why it's able to spread unchecked across the globe. Currently, the new H5N1 virus is widespread in wild and domestic birds in Asia, and has occurred in humans in several countries, but it has not been very contagious up to this point. It may now have achieved easy transmission between people in Indonesia, but it is difficult to get much information.

Whatever the current state of things, it is only a matter of time before the necessary mutations occur in some particular strain of H5N1 and a pandemic begins. The trouble is, we can't know which strain, which set of symptoms, which mortality rate will be involved in this looming plague. We had global flu pandemics in 1957 and 1968 which were relatively mild, and basically looked like a worse-than-usual flu season. On the other hand, the pandemic of 1918 was catastrophic, killing between 2 and 5 percent of all human beings alive, in a matter of a few months.

You may hear talk of a vaccine, but there is no vaccine. We don't know which strain will go pandemic, so we don't know how to make vaccine. Also, we have extremely limited manufacturing capability, requiring us to start making vaccine 6 months before we need it, even assuming we did know the genetic sequence of the future pandemic bug. Furthermore, it turns out vaccines even for normal flu are largely ineffective. I hate to be so negative, but there is nothing much people can do to stop this thing. We can only hope that the form of influenza that causes a pandemic is a mild form, with a low mortality rate. That is not how H5N1 looks right now, but it's not in its final form yet.

A lot of people don't really understand what flu is. It doesn't help to have medications labeled "Cold & Flu" as if influenza is just a bad cold. Actual flu can attack not just the respiratory system but also the digestive system and the nervous system. My family had a bad H3N2 flu, the Fuji strain, two winters ago. We had shooting pains in our joints, dizziness, ringing in our ears, spots in our vision, and a bizarre recurring twinge that my husband described as feeling "like your head was suddenly on sideways". Severe depression following recovery is a possible side effect of flu, and I certainly felt depressed while we had Fuji. After about 3 or 4 days, you can start to believe that you are never going to get any better. A few more days and you stop remembering what it is like not to be sick. Depression is a consideration when you think there's going to be a bad flu season. Lay in some P. G. Wodehouse or Janet Evanovich, maybe a copy of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (gotta be the funniest movie ever).

Two things you can take to boost your immune system are N-acetyl cysteine (an amino acid) and beta glucan (a "glycoprotein" or polysaccharide found in oats, barley, brewer's yeast and other things). Adults can take 600mg NAC twice daily and 100mg beta glucan twice daily. Children can take roughly half that (NAC can be stirred into juice, beta glucan sprinkled on cereal or oatmeal or bread). NAC in particular has been shown to prevent or reduce flu symptoms quite substantially as compared to placebo; beta glucan is more generally known to induce macrophage activity (one of the "front line defenders" of the immune system).

Sambucol, a liquid berry-flavored medication derived from black elderberries, has been shown in clinical trials to reduce the duration of flu by 4 days, as well as reducing symptoms, in double-blind randomized clinical trials. This makes it significantly more effective than Tamiflu, which is the only prescription antiviral that seems to be effective against H5N1. However, at least double the usual amount of Tamiflu is required, which is not how it will be dispensed; and the US has so little Tamiflu that it's essentially irrelevant. Mainstream medicine has got nothin', but you can buy Sambucol fairly inexpensively (try vitacost.com) and it's over the counter. You take 1 tablespoon 4 times per day for 5 days, or about half that for children. This costs less than $15 per adult or $10 per child if you go through vitacost (you need about one 8-oz (large size) bottle per adult). This is perhaps the single best thing you can do to prepare, along with having Tylenol and ibuprofen.

It is safe to take Tylenol and ibuprofen simultaneously, if necessary for controlling fever. Anya was taking children's ibuprofen when we had flu, and she became utterly lethargic and it turned out her fever was 105.1. We stripped off her clothes, put cold wet cloths all over her, and gave her Tylenol. I was taking Tylenol at maximum dosage and I could barely keep my fever below 103, which was very distressing as I was 2.5 months pregnant and had been told not to let my fever exceed 102. My husband's fever was 104. This went on for 4 full days.

You may want to have canned soups, frozen TV dinners, cereal, and bottled juice around if flu comes to your area. It's likely no one will be able to cook for a few days if your whole family comes down sick. Gatorade and Pedialyte are good to have on hand.

When someone starts to recover, they need to behave as if they are still sick for another couple of weeks afterward. They need to rest, push fluids, sleep more than usual, and limit exposure to public places and germs. Flu can recur, and the immune system will take weeks to regain its strength. I had a coworker who got flu, seemed to have recovered, and then went jogging. A few hours later his wife rushed him to the ER, where his blood pressure crashed and he went into a coma. It turned out he had pneumonia, and he then developed septicemia which did not initially respond to antibiotics. Thankfully he came out of the coma 10 days later, against the expectations of his doctors.

Bush has been tossing out the idea of quarantine on TV in the past few days. I don't think this will happen, but some flu community folks have stocked up on canned foods, dried beans, toilet paper, bottles of juice, rice, flour, and so forth. Some simply want to be able to avoid the grocery store if flu is circulating, but others expect quarantine measures and don't want to be caught short of supplies. N95 masks and gloves are also being purchased, for when outside trips are necessary.

Myself, I have one remaining question regarding flu preparations, and it is: How does one sterilize Netflix materials?

You can keep track of what's happening with flu at Recombinomics or read more about pandemic flu at the invaluable Flu Wiki. At the moment there is a mystery illness in Toronto which may or may not be flu (false negatives in flu testing are common, so it is hard to know for sure). It is probably not H5N1, but whatever it is, it's a vicious bug.

More and more school

2005-10-04T09:13:00.000-04:00

In California, where over half of this year's high school seniors can expect to be denied their diplomas (see preliminary exit exam scores here), the authorities are getting rather nasty about enforcing compulsory education:

ESCONDIDO, Calif. -- Parents could go to jail for up to six months under a daytime curfew ordinance for schoolchildren that goes into effect in Escondido Monday.

The ordinance, approved by the Escondido City Council in July, makes it unlawful for students ages 12 to 17 who are "subject to compulsory education" to "loiter, idle, wander" in public places on days when school is in session.

Students who violate the curfew could be fined up to $250 or have to do 20 hours of community service, while their parents could face six months in jail and a fine up to $1,000.

In Massachusetts, school districts are being offered increased funding if they go to an 8-hour school day:

Boston, Springfield, Cambridge, and at least 17 other Massachusetts school districts are moving forward with plans to extend the day in some of their schools, rejecting the traditional 180-day, 6-hour schedule because educators believe there is not enough time to teach students what they need to know.

The 20 districts met Friday's deadline to apply for grant money that the state Department of Education is offering to districts that want to explore adding about two hours to the day in some of their schools....

With its grants, Massachusetts becomes the first state to officially sanction a longer schedule, though some schools in Massachusetts and around the country already are experimenting with a longer school day or school year....

Mary Russo, principal of Boston's Murphy K-8 School, said the benefits of a longer school day are worth the complications. ''Right now, as we think about our school, we think about it as not having enough time within the confines of the 8:30 a.m.-to-2:30 p.m. day to teach everything that needs to be taught, everything we'd want kids to have," Russo said. ''The hours in the school day just aren't enough for us."

Keep in mind that many kids have a 45-minute bus ride, one way, to get to and from school. If the school day is increased to 8 hours, their day is increased to 9.5 hours, excluding all extracurricular activities. Assuming 8 hours of sleep and an hour or two of homework per night, an active child who is in sports and marching band and swim team will get no more than 2 or 3 hours per day with their families, while the school will get 4 times that much. Who is raising the child, exactly?

The idea that 6 hours per day is not enough relies on the unspoken assumption that the school is creating the child, that everything the child will know in life will be poured into their heads in school. Reading, writing, and arithmetic has become "Everything we'd want kids to have." Evidently children cannot be expected to learn anything of value outside of school.

Another unspoken belief comes into play here, that old saw about how we live in "an increasingly complex world," therefore it is much harder to teach kids enough to prepare them for adulthood. True, our technology is more complex, but it's not as if school teaches you to set your voicemail message, reduce spam in your inbox, or set the clock on your microwave. Nor does school teach you how your credit rating affects the interest rate on your mortgage, how to set up utilities when you move, how to take a flight or book a hotel room, how to choose the healthier items on the menu, how to do your taxes, or how to renew your driver's license.

Reading and writing the English language is much the same task that it always was. Multiplication works the same way. Science courses have been taught for many decades now, and while inert gases are now called noble gases, and we now know Newton wasn'tentirely correct, little has really changed at the high school level. We may live in an increasingly complex world, but it does not follow that school subjects have grown more complex. (Actually, I think the whole idea of the "increasingly complex world" is sheer malarkey, because most of us don't sew our own clothes, take care of livestock, plant and harvest, carve furniture, brew ale, assist women in childbirth, or can or pickle or smoke or dry or salt-preserve foods, and those were all complex tasks as well.)

Our neighbors' son started kindergarten this year, and they're already giving him daily homework. It's one thing to believe that high school classes may need to teach more material because of our high-tech world, but kindergarten? The real purpose of that homework is just to get the kid used to having to do homework every day. I don't understand why parents in Massachusetts would tolerate having an 8-hour day, 1.5 hours on the bus in some cases, probably 2 or more hours of homework in the higher grades-- I mean, when these kids grow up and get full time jobs, it's going to seem like a real relief!

John Gatto has said it takes only about 100 hours to transmit reading, writing, and arithmetic to children. Yet our kids attend over 14,000 hours of schooling before we reward them with a diploma. Obviously education is only part of the purpose.

How rewards demean

2005-09-30T12:31:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a short detour from my extended book report on Punished by Rewards to share the horror of a few rewards systems I've read about at NEA.org. Here's one that's sure to inspire morbid fascination:

From Sybil Rice (Sybsci@aol.com), an eighth grade science teacher at Texas Middle School in Texarkana, Texas:

"Our middle school developed a school wide reward program aimed at encouraging good behavior and taking the focus off of the negative. Students receive PRIDE points for good behavior in the classroom, on campus, and at school sponsored events. (PRIDE stands for Personal Responsibility In Daily Effort) Once each grading period, we hold grade level PRIDE assemblies where achievements are recognized and students can win prizes from drawings they entered by cashing in their PRIDE points. Once each semester, we hold a school wide assembly to honor good behavior and achievements. Last time, the grand prize drawing was for a motorized scooter! Our administration liked this idea so much they implemented a similar system for the staff! We can now earn PRIDE checks to be used for drawings toward things like manicures, massages, and a free day off!"

Wow, teachers earn "PRIDE checks" for good behavior, eh? And does the principal give them a pat on the head for getting to school on time? Seriously, how can this woman not feel demeaned by this? Suppose your spouse came home one night, starting praising you for keeping the kids clothed and fed all week, and handed you a gift certificate? And said that if you kept them fed and clothed next week there'd be another gift card in it for you?

As for the students, apparently the points are used to buy raffle tickets which give them merely a chance of being rewarded-- just to boost the level of unfairness, I suppose. I have serious doubts that these points are given out in a fair way in the first place, since they are apparently at the whim of teachers. Additionally, either some classrooms provide a better chance of winning prizes because the teacher gives out points more liberally, or there is a limit on points given within a classroom, in which case jealousy and strife can be expected to ensue between classmates. Meanwhile, kids are taught there is nothing in it for them if they behave responsibly, it's just behavior that someone pays you for, for their convenience. And by the way-- why be responsible outside of school, when there are no PRIDE points to be collected?

Worst of all, when a student acts responsibly, they appear to be doing it for PRIDE points, not of their own volition. The rewards system strips them of the actual pride of being responsible. It's like if your spouse paid you to be nice to the kids; would other people perceive you as being patient and understanding and kind, or as just wanting the money? Would you perceive yourself in exactly the same way, or would the ulterior motivation subtly erode your self-esteem? Would your kids still view your kindness as evidence of love and empathy? Would they model the same behavior although they were not being similarly paid, or would they feel entitled to an allowance? Why on earth would anyone ever introduce such a caustic system?

I'm picking the spouse example intentionally, because it demonstrates how an egalitarian relationship can be changed if someone begins to give out rewards. The principal at the school mentioned above must be quite a power-hungry bastard, to set himself up as the patriarchal bestower of gifts. Yet the teacher who wrote in was so thoughtless as to merely appreciate the manicures, so she obviously wouldn't see the harm this is doing to her students, either.

Another behaviorist scheme on the NEA suggestions board is more obviously demeaning and humiliating:

From Nancy Morrison, a third grade teacher at Elkhart Elementary School in Elkhart, Kansas:

"I adopted this system from my sister who is also a teacher and it works great! At the beginning of each 9 weeks, each child receives $25.00 in play money. Anytime they break a classroom or school rule, they are charged a fee. Breaking rules that COST them include such things as not returning homework, disrespect to the teacher or peers, abusing computer limits, etc.

"At the end of the 9 weeks, I have a celebration. I charge a fee such as $10.00 as a cover charge. Then I assign prices to the amenities like $2.00 for popcorn, $1.00 for pop, $4.00 to read a book to the class, $5.00 to be the teacher for 30 minutes and the kids just love this. They are not allowed to lend money to friends and I have truly seen a change in the behavior of my kids. Those that do not have enough money for the cover charge are the waiters and waitresses and believe me in the fact that they are so jealous of the others that they make sure they are NOT the servants at the next party."

Note that the punishments are subjectively determined: what constitutes "disrespect" toward peers? And how can the teacher possibly observe all interactions between students? This creates feelings of resentment and perceived (as well as actual) injustice. From Punished by Rewards (p. 56):

[A]ccording to a series of studies by psychologist Carole Ames, people tend to attribute the results of a contest, as contrasted with the results of noncompetitive striving, to factors beyond their control.... The result is a diminished sense of empowerment and less responsibility for their future performance.

Competition also breeds anxiety, which interferes with learning. Further, it decreases the likelihood that students can work together effectively. Kohn cites research that shows students learn better in small, well-structured groups than they do when working on their own. Collaboration improves learning, in spite of the way schools promote individualism. Of course, it's harder to dole out rewards and punishments when students can assist one another and work together, and it's harder to measure the performance of each student.

Working alone, working for rewards, working in competition with peers. If you believe Alfie Kohn, and personally I think it's hard to ignore his command of the literature, all of this is just totally wrong and antithetical to optimal learning.

Part III: Rewards don't really work

2005-09-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

I'm now through Chapter 3, on the effectiveness of rewards. The first part of the chapter shows that when an incentives program is used, and then that rewards program ends, people exhibit worse behavior than those in control groups who were never offered rewards. This was found to be true when behaviorist programs were used to promote weight loss, smoking cessation, use of seat belts, and use of math-related games in elementary school. At the very beginning, for a brief time, those getting rewards would do better than those offered nothing. But once the payments stopped coming in, these folks (as compared to controls) lost less weight, were more likely to smoke, were less likely to use seat belts, and were less likely to engage in games that used math.

No surprise, really. Can't you just hear the thought process? "Why should I bother... it's not like I'm getting paid for it anymore."

When you're given the extrinsic motivator, you don't have to find your own reasons, or talk yourself into making an effort. You're getting paid, that's why you're doing it; and when you stop getting paid, then why do it at all? If you're asked to attempt some behavior change and you're not paid, then you develop your own reasons ("It's for my health" or "I could use the extra help in math"). And when it's your own personal reason, it persists.

Apparently this happens so often in studies of incentives programs that (p. 40): "...behaviorists have had to invent a neutral-sounding name for it: it is technically known as the 'contrast effect'." In other words, there is a backlash when you take away a reward you had previously offered.

Even more fascinating is the detrimental effect rewards have on performance, even while the rewards are still being given. This one is harder to wrap one's mind around, considering the continuing popularity of rewards systems in schools. For instance, on one NEA page of 25 ideas to motivate young readers, 8 of the 25 involve explicit rewards, while several others involve less tangible incentives, such as having your drawing hung up on the wall.

The popularity of incentives notwithstanding, the 1970's and 80's were full of research indicating that performance in the presence of a rewards system is worse than performance when no incentive is offered. This might be hard for some people to believe, so I'm going to give a list of examples from Chapter 3. These are all treatment (rewards) vs. control group experiments.

Nine-year-old boys asked to determine the difference between pairs of similar faces made more errors if paid for their successes than if they were not paid. Payments of 1 cent or of 50 cents both produced inferior performance compared to the control group.
Undergraduate students were less able to construct a candle holder and attach it to a wall, when given various materials, when they were paid anywhere from $5 to $20. In fact, it took them 50% longer to devise a suitable holder, compared to unpaid controls.
Children did less well on a word memorization task when given an M&M after each success, as compared to children who merely saw a visual indication of their successes.
Undergraduates were asked to examine three patterns and identify the most dissimilar of the three. Those who were paid did significantly worse than those who received no incentive. The researcher, baffled, doubled the reward, but received the same result.
Students were being trained to write headlines for a student paper, following specific rules. Some of them began to receive payment for each headline produced, and the ongoing improvement in the quality of their headlines ceased. Students who had never been paid continued to improve.
Fourth graders performed more poorly on a task even when allowed to choose their preferred reward, a particular toy or type of candy.
High school students were given 5 different tasks, some creative and some testing their memory. Regardless of the type of task, performance was lower in the rewarded subjects than in the control group.
Preschoolers rewarded for each completed drawing produced more drawings than controls, but objective observers judged their drawings to be of lesser quality than those made by unrewarded children.
Sixth grade girls promised movie tickets for teaching a game to younger girls were less successful as tutors than comparable girls offered nothing. Those promised tickets became frustrated more easily, were less efficient at communicating ideas, and had pupils who understood the game less well than pupils taught by unrewarded girls.
Third graders promised a toy for working on some "games" (actually an IQ test) tested lower than those promised nothing.
Young writers instructed to spend five minutes merely thinking about the rewards their writing might bring them (money, fame, etc) wrote less creative poetry than others who had not been instructed to ponder rewards. The quality of the poetry in the treatment group was also judged to be lower than previous work done by the same students.

Two further conclusions, both quite surprising and with broad implications, have come out of recent research on rewards and performance (p. 45):

After conducting six separate studies, Morton Deutsch concluded that "there is no evidence to indicate that people work more productively when they are expecting to be rewarded in proportion to their performance than when they are expecting to be rewarded equally or on the basis of need."

In other words, merit-based bonuses, commissions, tips, and all those competitive payment structures which create so much stress and destroy camraderie generally do not work. (I guess it's more about destroying worker solidarity and cementing the power of management than it is about improving quality.)

Secondly (p. 45):

Ann Boggiano and Marty Barrett found that children who are extrinsically motivated -- that is, concerned about things like rewards and approval they can get as a result of what they do in school -- use less sophisticated learning strategies and score lower on standardized achievement tests than children who are interesting in learning for its own sake. The reward-driven children do more poorly even when they are compared with children whose scores the previous year were identical to their own.

So the more rewards (tangible or social) given by the school or parents for higher grades and test scores, the worse performance will be, and the more simplistic the learning strategies students will employ. Most people would find this hard to believe, but I guess I could direct them to the 41 research references footnoted in Chapter 3.

One researcher summed all this up in fairly damning language (p.48):

[Those offered rewards] choose easier tasks, are less efficient in using the information available to solve novel problems, and tend to be ... more illogical in their problem-solving strategies. They seem to work harder and produce more activity, but the activity is of lower quality, contains more errors, and is more stereotyped and less creative than the work of comparable nonrewarded subjects working on the same problems.

It seems clear that rewards should not be used in schools. To reward a child for reading a book, for instance, is to imply that reading is unpleasant drudgery. When the rewards end, we would expect the child to be less interested in reading than if they had never been paid. And they will tend to choose easier books and will read them with less attention and comprehension. It's a shame, then, that each year an estimated 22 million K-6 students are rewarded with pizza coupons for reading books.

It's a shame that the NEA website is positively peppered with enthusiastic emails from teachers about the latest rewards program they're using (candy, toys, paper money, tokens-- you'll find it at NEA.org). What are they teaching in teaching schools, if not that rewards programs produce only short-lived results and actually impair learning? Is this not an important pegagogical point?

Some homeschoolers feel there must not be enough discipline in schools, because just look how kids act these days. My answer to that is, when you see kids-- which is usually when they are not in school-- well, then they're not being paid for good behavior like they are when they're in the classroom. So why behave well? What's in it for them? Where's the paycheck?

It's not lack of discipline. It's misguided Skinnerian discipline that is eroding real maturation and the development of social behaviors and personal responsibility. Similarly, we don't need yet more time in school, yet more homework to be turned in for tokens; we need the eradication of rewards for learning.

Once again I'll return to something my mom, as a college writing instructor, once overheard a student saying: "Man, I can't wait till I graduate and I never have to learn another thing." That's a student who has been thoroughly taught over two decades that learning is drudgery, that you must be forced by law to do it, that you must be praised or threatened all the way through, bribed with the promise of a higher salary. Some kids probably feel they'll have more dignity and autonomy if they simply refuse to be taught at all, since learning occurs by coercion, however subtle much of this coercion may be.

(Suddenly it seems less surprising to me that 11 percent of young adult Americans in a 2002 survey could not find the United States on a world map.)