Homeschooling

This article, in favor of homeschooling, gives me an excuse to do some article analysis. I like it, because I agree with the author on some things, but think a number of his points are completely absurd and/or banal. Let's begin.

I accept this award on behalf of all the fine teachers I've known over the years who've struggled to make their transactions with children honorable ones, men and women who are never complacent, always questioning, always wrestling to define and redefine endlessly what the word "education" should mean. A Teacher of the Year is not the best teacher around, those people are too quiet to be easily uncovered, but he is a standard-bearer, symbolic of these private people who spend their lives gladly in the service of children. This is their award as well as mine.

All the best teachers I've ever known were loud, offensive, rambunctious  and always on the verge of getting fired or transferred.

We live in a time of great school crisis.

Yup. In fact, you don't really need the word "school" in there at all.

Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.

What if you only count the white and Asian children, I suddenly crimethought?

The world's narcotic economy is based upon our own consumption of the commodity, if we didn't buy so many powdered dreams the business would collapse - and schools are an important sales outlet. Our teenage suicide rate is the highest in the world and suicidal kids are rich kids for the most part, not the poor. In Manhattan fifty per cent of all new marriages last less than five years. So something is wrong for sure.

 A bit of a non-sequitur, but I'm willing to humor him. I wonder if he laments the use of drugs, or the underlying problems they imply? I honestly wonder how the drug use chart would break down according to race and age. I wonder what the correlation is between drug use and career 'floppage', college dropout rates, and early death.

We seem to have lost our identity.

APPLAUSE 

Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.

The sudden jump from applause lights to this is jarring, but I always have a pleasant reaction to good sense and truth.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Some of the more obvious bits of this paragraph are true, but two falsehoods stick out at me. Firstly, while it is true that a great many (white and Asian) people are stuck in jobs they hate that are completely unfulfilling, the sentiment that "schools don't teach anything except how to obey orders", besides being an applause light begs the question "why aren't former public school students better at obeying orders?"

I also mislike his implied sentiment that students should only be forced to do work that they want to do. In school, all I wanted to do was screw around. Does this mean I should be allowed to fuck your girlfriend? Of course most people should be schooled for one focused talent, but this doesn't imply it should be a talent of their choosing. Further, for the greatest, brightest, most driven who are destined to be the next governors, cardinals, and kings, a diverse, formidable education is not just best, but necessary.

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent 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.

Massachusetts, like the Nazis, is a perennial enemy who crops up to threaten righteousness wherever it flourishes.

 I don't think we'll get rid of schools anytime soon, certainly not in my lifetime, but if we're going to change what is rapidly becoming a disaster of ignorance, we need to realize that the school institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate" - that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent, it's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing.

I think he just coined the name of my future metal band.

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

Aaah! Dystopia! But never a dystopia of freedom.

But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic - because the community life which protects the dependent and the weak is dead.

I'm not sure whether he's saying something I agree with, or whether this is just libertarian drivel.

The products of schooling are, as I've said, irrelevant. Well-schooled people are irrelevant. They can sell film and razor blades, push paper and talk on the telephones, or sit mindlessly before a flickering computer terminal but as human beings they are useless. Useless to others and useless to themselves.

He thinks the blame lies solely on our schools - a great deal of it does - but what he fails to realize is that by withdrawing his children from public school he is withdrawing them from a major organ of the Cathedral. He may yet only realize this when his first daughter comes back from college with a navel ring, a few tattooes, and a bun in the oven.

The daily misery around us is, I think, in large measure caused by the fact that - as Paul Goodman put it thirty years ago - we force children to grow up absurd. Any reform in schooling has to deal with its absurdities.It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety, indeed it cuts you off from your own part and future, scaling you to a continuous present much the same way television does.It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework"."How will they learn to read?" you say and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

For all its faults, I rather like this sub-tract. Especially since I am anti-homework.

But keep in mind that in the United States almost nobody who reads, writes or does arithmetic gets much respect. We are a land of talkers, we pay talkers the most and admire talkers the most, and so our children talk constantly, following the public models of television and schoolteachers. It is very difficult to teach the "basics" anymore because they really aren't basic to the society we've made.

An astute observation, indeed!

Two institutions at present control our children's lives - television and schooling, in that order.

Also known as Azathoth's right and left arms.

Both of these reduce the real world of wisdom, fortitude, temperance, and justice to a never-ending, non-stopping abstraction. In centuries past the time of a child and adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to become a whole man or woman.

Those who hear the instigator's call are quick to give all that up for a slim chance at glory.

But here is the calculus of time the children I teach must deal with:Out of the 168 hours in each week, my children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a self.My children watch 55 hours of television a week according to recent reports. That leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.My children attend school 30 hours a week, use about 6 hours getting ready, going and coming home, and spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During that time, they are under constant surveillance, have no private time or private space, and are disciplined if they try to assert individuality in the use of time or space. That leaves 12 hours a week out of which to create a unique consciousness. Of course, my kids eat, and that takes some time - not much, because they've lost the tradition of family dining, but if we allot 3 hours a week to evening meals, we arrive at a net amount of private time for each child of 9 hours.It's not enough. It's not enough, is it? The richer the kid, or course, the less television he watches but the rich kid's time is just as narrowly proscribed by a somewhat broader catalog of commercial entertainments and his inevitable assignment to a series of private lessons in areas seldom of his actual choice.

I see he adheres to "the goal of life is to end up with the best stories" theory of existence. Coincidentally, so do I.

And these things are oddly enough just a more cosmetic way to create dependent human beings, unable to fill their own hours, unable to initiate lines of meaning to give substance and pleasure to their existence. It's a national disease, this dependency and aimlessness, and I think schooling and television and lessons - the entire Chautauqua idea - has a lot to do with it.

I see where he's going with this. Someone get Dan Brown on the phone.

Think of the things that are killing us as a nation - narcotic drugs, brainless competition, recreational sex, the pornography of violence, gambling, alcohol, and the worst pornography of all - lives devoted to buying things, accumulation as a philosophy - all of them are addictions of dependent personalities, and that is what our brand of schooling must inevitably produce.

OK, grandpa. I'll take all the dead Jesuses off my crucifixes.

I want to tell you what the effect is on children of taking all their time from them - time they need to grow up - and forcing them to spend it on abstractions. You need to hear this, because no reform that doesn't attack these specific pathologies will be anything more than a facade.

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.

1. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?

1. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.

1. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.

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

1. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.

1. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.

1. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

Once again, we are ripped out of his libertarian-puritan dreamworld into the reality he so valiantly faces daily. This list is a grabbing diagnosis of the disease that ails the Azathothjugend.

 Time for a return to democracy, individuality, and family. I've said my piece.

I've skipped to the end here. Essentially, this wraps up the last 15 paragraphs of the article. A steady stream of meaningless platitudes punctuated by some mildly interesting anecdotes. Yawn.