Undoctrination.org

Upon hearing that we are ‘home-schooling’ parents, many people ask my wife and I “Why?”. The long and the short of it is very simple. We as parents have found the system largely responsible for the education of American children to be sorely lacking. We and our older children have been ‘beneficiaries’ of the system and having experienced it both as participants and as parents. We decided that with our youngest kids – we are done with it. With the benefit of hindsight – we would argue that the successes we’ve enjoyed were not resultant from our education but had occurred largely in spite of it.

In other words, schooling and education can indeed be exclusive of each other.

In the United States, literacy rates have dropped steadily over the past hundred years; taking their sharpest turns for the worse over the past few decades. It now seems that schooling has become more about seeing to a child’s self-esteem than it is about their education. There is little given incentive for success. One of our older children (who was adopted from Russia in 1998 at the age of 7) was shuffled through the public education system from grade to grade, barely passing a number of subjects, and now he struggles to complete job applications accurately. (This was despite our extra help and tutoring. He is a rather confident fellow though – but has little to back that up in terms of reading and math skills.) We (and he) had trusted the system to give him the best possible education.

It did not.

As parents, we have decided to pursue other avenues than this one-size-fits-all approach to education. But before we began, we needed to do some homework. This led us to some important reading. I highly recommend The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto as a primer on what the original (and continuing ) purpose of compulsory public education was (and is) in America. The book is a well-researched and annotated eye-opener about the role of education, which is essentially “non-education.” (You can read the book for free online by following this link: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm )  Another interesting take on the current system of public education is from a fellow named Ken Robinson which is briefly explained through a video done by an organization called the RSA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkPvSCq5ZXk&feature=related .

 ”But what about socialization?” 

If any of you are familiar with the book Lord of the Flies, I think you’ll understand our answer to that question. There is NO other place in society where people are segregated solely according to age like children are in the system of public education. (Think about it for a bit.) Prior to the advent of public education in America, where did kids get the opportunity to socialize and with whom did they socialize? Our peers are those whom we CHOOSE as our peers and not those whom we’re TOLD are our peers. Our youngest children have friends their own age, but they also have friends who are in their 60′s through their 80′s! Is it better to learn manners and acceptable behavior from someone older or from a kid your age who knows about the same as you do? We would rather subject our children to the ‘peer pressure’ of role models who have ‘been there, done that’ than tossing them into an artificial social fray of like-aged people struggling to find their own way and making up their own rules as they go.

Context is everything.

I highly recommend the book Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate. It offers an explanation of a phenomenon coined by the authors as ‘peer orientation’ wherein children form stronger emotional attachments to their peers than their parents, which leads to many of the social issues we see among the youth of today. The book is not free online like the Gatto book referenced above, but perhaps your local library has a copy. (Here is a link to the book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0375760288/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=704690682&ref=pd_sl_1j8blgcdem_e  . And here is a link to part of the forward by its author: http://www.transformativeparenting.com/book-excerpt )

My wife and I don’t consider ourselves ‘home-schoolers.’ We consider ourselves home educators, as we have found there is a vast difference between schooling and educating. We do it because we love our kids, because we want to adapt their learning experiences to them, to their strengths, to their interests and to give them the very best of learning experiences. Learning is fun, it is not rote, it is not done for the purposes of testing – and in the end it is not done merely for the purposes of credentialing. Learning is a lifelong process of gathering / sorting / sifting our experiences for the purpose of making sense of the world we live in – and not just a means of ‘making’ a living.

Learning IS living.