Growing up in an evangelical family, attending Sunday School in an evangelical church, I heard the parable of the two houses hundreds of times. The house built upon the sand is washed away in the storm or the flood. The house built upon the rock remains firmly in place and withstands the storm or the flood and the tests of time.
Growing up in an evangelical family, attending Sunday School in an evangelical church, I heard the parable of the two houses hundreds of times. The house built upon the sand is washed away in the storm or the flood. The house built upon the rock remains firmly in place and withstands the storm or the flood and the tests of time.
To weather the storms and survive attacks, our schools and our educational infrastructure should be built on a foundation that is rock solid and invulnerable to forces or to people whose aim is to undermine or destroy them for their malign purposes, which are not compatible with our purposes (which in this case allow for a democratic and progressive orientation to education).
I have quoted here before what the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote about education in his famous poem from his book, “The Prophet”, which bears repeating once again. He said:
“If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
No truer words were ever spoken. Our conceptions of schools and education are based on a false notion of teaching and learning, fatally undermining their very foundation. The learner or the student can never be at the center and the child is never led to the “threshold” of her own mind as long as we have a paradigm in which learning consistently follows teaching and the answers constantly precede the learner’s questions.
When we suffer from inherited illusions about our capability as arrogant adults, teachers, and administrators to always ascertain precisely what the child needs to know, and at what time, and our imagined right to arbitrarily compel the child to “learn” what we choose to teach from our perspective and determined by our measurements, we are on a foundation of sand. Who died and made us the omniscient teachers and guardians of true knowledge?
As parents and as adults we have not only the right, but the duty to take responsibility for education. Knowledge is built on the experience, discoveries, and insights of the past.
However, none of that came prepackaged from god or from ANY authority. Respect for the process and dignity for the learner are paramount. Any hint of coercion and any pretense of power or superiority over the student is inimical to the process. A curriculum which is not organic, not originating from the curiosity and spontaneous questions of the learners and derived from a real life and literature rather than an artifice of teaching or instruction for the sole purpose of instruction is an abstraction and a distraction.
How much time do we have left for this lesson to sink in? How much longer will we cling to the use of law, threats, intimidation, force, and punishment to attempt to impose education upon our highly capable and brilliant children? Repeat after me: “If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom.”
Gibran was writing a full century ago. Dewey tried to tell us soon after. Where does our arrogance come from and when will we learn humility from the intelligence of our children?
As a follower here (Moninna) stated in a message sent to me last week,
“Mass state education has often been referred to as simply a religious doctrinal teaching of secular beliefs.”
In other words, it cannot be called education at all, in my estimation. In a frame or context of transmitting pre-existing knowledge from a position of superior knowledge and doctrinal belief (including even the facts of “hard science”), one inhibits critical thinking and knowledge creation. Teaching in a milieu where the student is passive, submissive, and a recipient of an officially approved curriculum establishes a condition lacking adequate context, which makes information, data, language, or concepts less meaningful, real, and intelligible. The heavy hand of the state obliterates initiative and decimates the spirit.
When the innumerable and chronic failures of our schools are mentioned and the reality of 25% of our citizens remain illiterate (and probably another 30-35% are semi-literate, inept, and incapable of critical thinking) educators and other people who are supposedly trustworthy reflexively hit the “minimize” button. Why is that? Why are they not honest with themselves or with us? Why do they deny reality? Why do they need so badly to believe that traditional schools are not built on the sand of mythology and coercion, and that their crumbling is not the consequence of their defective authoritarian structure?
You tell me.
I repeat myself, again and again. It is not about funding, teacher salaries, or unions. It is not about good or bad programs, policies, curricula, techniques, or strategies, and it is most definitely not about test scores or IQ scores. The reactionaries and privatizers have it all wrong. But, so also do the traditionalists and the purveyors of retrenchment to some version of the good old days. Our schools are creating authoritarians and followers and they are anti-intellectual factories for conservativism. You need to get this right Thom. Nostalgia and anecdotes are not reliable guides. Look at the science - and weep.
Outstanding discourse Robert. It has been over half a century since I read Khalil Gilbran's the Prophet, although I dispute that he was Lebanese, as Lebanon was not then a country. More of a Persian, and by that I don't mean Iranian, that is also a later invention.
I consider myself an autodidcact, because even though I have a Masters degree, my knowledge base is not that taught in brainwashing factories, but from my own reading, and interests which are still eclectic.
I'm a HS drop out, who within 8 months passed both a HS GED and an AA GED (they had such a thing back in 1958). Graduated from university with a 3.74 GPA and a Masters with 3.47 GPA, and essentially discarded most of the swill that they tried to indoctrinate me with. But first you need to read and write, and that can be done with starting kids off with an Alphabet Book.
I have bought and am buying my bisnieto a library of bilingual books, including bi linqual books and he is not yet 2 (big birthday present coming for him).
Education is important but not the homogenious social reinforcement skill that are shoved down kids throats, at the same time kids need the social exposure that school provides, from that they learn h ow to survive, but these days of internet education (and I include Tik Tok, Instagram, Telegram, what not is not education it is mind rot. One must learn how to interact wiith other people from an early age, otherwise they grow up as tools and fools.
My sis was very religious, and wanted to protect her youngest from the vagaries and realities of life, so she home schooled her daughter and her social life was confined to church. She did a great job of imparting essential and socialy accepted knowledge, as she won a full scholarship, but coming into contact with the real world, and no longer protected,she was naive, and vulnerable to being exploited. She wound up with teaching credentials, took a position in W VA, teaching her own peers, and her life went downhill after that., into drug abuse, being in a relationship with a low life drug abusing red neck, ran over by a drug abusing redneck in a pick up truck, in a supermarket parking lot, and it only gets worse.
Question is how do you develop inquisitive, critical thinking skills, and teach kids not to believe everything you see and hear, to arrive at one's own opinions and not acquire them because some "authority" exposes you, or tells you that "they are the truth".
I started on my own path at age 8, when I read The Odyessey by Homer, intrigued I knew it was ancient Greek fiction, then at age 12 I read the Bible, and once again realized that I was reading fiction. Most of the swill be it history or economics, even sometimes science,has proven to be fiction.
Children need an education, but a real one, where they are taught and praised for critical thinking, not punished because they don't digest the swill.
Thom has done a great service in providing information that enables people to learn "Hidden History" You won't find his info, ideas or writings in curiculum or even libraries.
"The learner or the student can never be at the center...." Check out the IEP. The kid is at the center.
Whereas the method in public education is usually pedagogy, it probably could as well be andragogy. Pedagogy is the teaching dependent personalities. Andragogy is the facilitation learning for "self-directed" learners. E.G. Montessori Theory is an educational approach that emphasizes individualized instruction and self-paced learning. It is based on the belief that children are naturally curious and capable of learning independently.
There you go with the methodology, techniques, and theory! Re-inventing the educational wheel, yet again. Montessori, Dewey, Tolstoy, and Rousseau were writing a century or more ago. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is a reason we are stuck in reverse. There is a reason we cannot escape the pedagogical obsessions. We have allowed ourselves to be dependent upon our teachers and our schools for something we are mistakenly calling education.
My dad used to say often that children should be seen and not heard. I think teachers should be seen and heard from only when students ask for their input! I am the last person to diminish the importance of “good” teachers. However, when children are given a mindset from the time they can speak or before that they will only learn when they attend a school, “pay attention” to a teacher, and follow instructions for 12 years, we have completely defeated our purposes.
Institutionalizing learning or “education” and creating a category for teaching that takes the initiative away from the individual child is our first mistake. But then, we compounded and perpetuated the error by passing laws to require school attendance. There is one way and one way only to escape that trap.
IEP’s are splendid. But they cannot ever be implemented on any scale for any length of time. All such innovations run counter to the authoritarian bureaucracy which is endemic to compulsory attendance. Control, order, discipline, obsessive measurement, focusing on the group and the school’s mission and mandates, etc., etc., must always take priority, except for small scale and temporary “models” and “experiments”, Bill Gates, notwithstanding. How many times do I have to say it? Either you put your confidence in the individual or the state. Those are your choices. I choose the individual. The state should be providing the resources and oversight, not taking over the lives of children and engineering society.
" Individual or the state" is a bullshit false dichotomy that plays well in Trumpworld.
Public education supports socialization, which is more important than ego centered "individualism." The IEP helps the kid to perform.
I had something to do with the SSA Listings of Impairments for kids. I also heard disability cases, worked with juvenile crime, etc. Most behavioral impairments can be diagnosed, treated, so that kids don't turn out to be menaces to society.
My statement about the individual and the state was not a commentary on individualism versus the state or collectivism. It was added as an afterthought when I was fatigued and I was thinking only in terms of whether the state should be deciding the direction of the individual’s life on the basis of some imagined expertise relative to curricular content and values. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I agree with you and have stated here many times, I believe, that socialization is a primary function of schooling. It is, however, a function which has been performed extremely poorly for the reasons I have often outlined. When students have no autonomy, when they feel put upon, bullied, oppressed, or ignored, or when their peer interactions are superficial and distorted by competition and myriad restriction, socialization is perverted.
“Behavioral impairments”??? Are they “learning disabilities”, impairments, lack of social skills, and problems which students bring which require amelioration??? Or, are they problems created and exacerbated by the school? Are they disabilities because they inhibit authentic learning, or are they instead reactions to extreme frustrations, abuse, the physical restraint of bodies needing movement, exercise, and deep breathing and the denial of learning opportunities which are organic and logical? Control and behavioral training are for pigeons and lab rats. Some of us were taught all to well what the schools wanted us to learn.
There are quite a few important items that are not currently taught in schools, especially religious schools. Like, what is the purpose of government? What is an autocracy, what is a theocracy, what is an agnostic?, what is wisdom?, and how to teach it, what is a dictatorship?, What are The facts of Life?, What is the purpose of a man? What is the purpose of a woman? What is the cycle of life? What is the purpose of a child? What is the true root of all evil? What is an atheist? What is capitalism? What is socialism? What is the purpose of life? How to serve good or God? Without the children knowing all the answers to these questions just teaching them knowledge only helps them to become idiots.
I’m sorry. You are asking for miracles. You want the impossible. Schools cannot and will not ever be able to teach those things. If they are to be learned, it must be through meaningful living and experience, only a small part of which can be had in an institutional setting or from instruction, training, exercises, and lectures. Knowledge is not taught. BIG MISTAKE. Where do I begin? You probably meant to say academics. Academics do very little to advance knowledge. Did you read the entire comment. “If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind”. Please take another look.
Thank you for making my point for me. Public schools should be public service agencies and must stick to real world activities which are not about pretending to create academic wizards, geniuses, and intellectual masters. Their parents are dysfunctional in too many cases, at least in part, because of profound damage done to them in their schools during their own childhood where they were humiliated, badgered, hounded, guilt-tripped, shamed, and punished or demoralized. Not only did they not learn what they might have with respect to innumerable other things, but they failed to receive any meaningful education about navigating life, raising a family, maintaining healthy relationships, or managing money and other important things.
Your admonition not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” repeats a common error made by many people when they read into my statements something that is not there. I have not suggested relinquishing anything except coercion, threats, and intimidation and the arbitrary authority which must always accompany compulsory attendance laws. My response to that mistaken notion is that the baby was stillborn and that isn’t bathwater. Attendance laws never produced ANY positive benefits, contrary to popular opinion and what I insist must be thrown out is solely the ludicrous and paternalistic (and unconstitutional) pretention that forcing children to attend will somehow magically compensate for not understanding what children nee or how they develop and learn.
Compulsory attendance laws are the Straitjacket which proscribes positive change. Nothing good would be lost by eradicating them while literally overnight, children would have autonomy, teachers would have respect, and parents would no longer be blamed for the failures of the institution.
To whom or to what are you responding? You’ve got me mystified.
I have never to the best of my recollection ever once suggested that schools should not be available, funded by public money and monitored and regulated to protect students and to prohibit discrimination, or that teachers should not be provided and paid well and respected. Have you checked you eyesight lately?
For the record, once again, I fully support free public schooling. They are an essential public service and should be providing much more in the way of service than they ever have in the past.
For the record: Compulsory attendance in those schools for either boys or girls is an abomination. There is no such thing as “mass education” or “compulsory education” and those terms are oxymorons. I have stated repeatedly that the paternalistic, unconstitutional, and counterproductive laws must be eliminated so that schools will finally become hospitable, civil, and safe places for children. The first thing they should be doing is training children to be discerning and to not read into remarks things which are not there.
You've probably heard what they say about making assumptions. Old age and bad experiences may have something to do with my irritability about having my words misrepresented and about my intelligence being insulted, and I regret that I am not more tolerant in such instances. I am as much a feminist and a respecter of women as you are, believe it or not. However, you jumped to conclusions which have no basis in the statements I made and those conclusions are offensive to me. Ask William if I do not hold males to the same standard.
If you would be so kind as to go back and read what I actually wrote and take the time and trouble to process the logic and the message, you will see how far off base your comments were. You may not have seen my frequent posts here in the past where I have consistently reiterated my support for public schooling, teachers, teachers’ unions, and equality for all. But I did go to some trouble yesterday to spell out my thinking and to focus on the core issue.
Teachers have been given an outsize role and image which is impossible to live up to within an authoritarian paradigm. Every student should be seen as a “prodigy” of one sort or another and no student should be harmed. Maybe you believe that there are benefits which outweigh the harms. But I refuse to see victims as mere collateral damage and I am outraged at the indifference and blasé attitudes I see about what we allow these systems to do to children.
If you have doubts or questions about anything I have said, I will be more than happy to answer respectful questions.
Please do not let my negativity discourage you from expressing your thoughts and opinions. Your original statement appeared to be very defensive and intimated that I had said in effect that I was anti-school or against teachers or that I am one of the people who is trying to “destroy public education”. It was all the more upsetting because you did acknowledge the harm which is done and has always been done in traditional schools. It felt a little too much like a personal attack but I appreciate very much your understanding and desire to clear the air.
I see no way to address compulsory attendance as a separate issue. The proximate cause of the harm IS precisely the attendance law and everything that follows it. Forced attendance and the “attendant” or logically coherent conceptions of learning as drudgery, unpleasant “work”, and externally sourced are so ingrained in our psyches that no one can imagine that children would go and learn without coercion. The idea that it is okay for government to be the agent of force in this one exceptional case (involving innocent and impressionable naïve children, no less) doesn’t seem to disturb people in the least. Getting rid of the law is a taboo subject which even people with great awareness about other topics (such as Thom) are not able to think about objectively. This is very sad and has been a massive frustration for me for over five decades.
This is not rocket science. Long before anyone tried to privatize schooling or before the libertarians tried to eradicate the liberty from education the schools were failing in their own stated mission and doing Immeasurable harm, however well disguised and deflected. The cartesian perspective on knowledge and knowledge acquisition were and are still predominant. The connection between coercion and the whole institutional usurpation of the educational function got obscured. We will not have democracy much longer if we do not figure this out and get rid of the bad laws.
Here is that big mistake, again, better known as the “Error of the Third Kind”, identifying and fixing the wrong problems. You say that “Public schools need to re-invent themselves”. Public schools have tried six million times (probably not an exaggeration) to re-invent themselves. That is the whole point of my assertion. Power resides externally. There are impenetrable barriers to change, innovation, and “school or educational reform”. Those barriers emanate directly from the law and from the illegitimate authority and control that under the law must go to state officials, designated appointed or elected authorities, school board bigwigs, and school administrators. None of those people know squat about education! Who is kidding whom?
We have some wonderful examples of good schools. They do not educate in the way that people have imagined that schools should because that is a pathetic misconception. Schools are very limited in what they can do and education is a matter for personal growth and development which cannot be legislated or bought. However, free schools are great examples and experiments which provide autonomy and a free environment for learning, teaching, and organic development. Many public schools have tried to imitate the free schools and many advocates have tried to spread the free school philosophy. They invariably and almost immediately hit the brick wall. Compulsory attendance law is about control, management, authority, social engineering, and making sure the people remain passive and obedient. Freedom and democracy in schools, as Dewey and so many others have found out the hard way are directly at odds with what the laws require. Reforms are DOA. Changes are dead in the water. The school must always go back to business as usual. The status quo is baked into the cake. Tell your friends. The ironic thing is that getting rid of the laws would not cost anything or "interrupt the flow of money" except to remove the middlemen which Thom has noted are making a killing on textbooks, programs, workshops, etc., etc.
Growing up in an evangelical family, attending Sunday School in an evangelical church, I heard the parable of the two houses hundreds of times. The house built upon the sand is washed away in the storm or the flood. The house built upon the rock remains firmly in place and withstands the storm or the flood and the tests of time.
To weather the storms and survive attacks, our schools and our educational infrastructure should be built on a foundation that is rock solid and invulnerable to forces or to people whose aim is to undermine or destroy them for their malign purposes, which are not compatible with our purposes (which in this case allow for a democratic and progressive orientation to education).
I have quoted here before what the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran wrote about education in his famous poem from his book, “The Prophet”, which bears repeating once again. He said:
“If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”
No truer words were ever spoken. Our conceptions of schools and education are based on a false notion of teaching and learning, fatally undermining their very foundation. The learner or the student can never be at the center and the child is never led to the “threshold” of her own mind as long as we have a paradigm in which learning consistently follows teaching and the answers constantly precede the learner’s questions.
When we suffer from inherited illusions about our capability as arrogant adults, teachers, and administrators to always ascertain precisely what the child needs to know, and at what time, and our imagined right to arbitrarily compel the child to “learn” what we choose to teach from our perspective and determined by our measurements, we are on a foundation of sand. Who died and made us the omniscient teachers and guardians of true knowledge?
As parents and as adults we have not only the right, but the duty to take responsibility for education. Knowledge is built on the experience, discoveries, and insights of the past.
However, none of that came prepackaged from god or from ANY authority. Respect for the process and dignity for the learner are paramount. Any hint of coercion and any pretense of power or superiority over the student is inimical to the process. A curriculum which is not organic, not originating from the curiosity and spontaneous questions of the learners and derived from a real life and literature rather than an artifice of teaching or instruction for the sole purpose of instruction is an abstraction and a distraction.
How much time do we have left for this lesson to sink in? How much longer will we cling to the use of law, threats, intimidation, force, and punishment to attempt to impose education upon our highly capable and brilliant children? Repeat after me: “If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom.”
Gibran was writing a full century ago. Dewey tried to tell us soon after. Where does our arrogance come from and when will we learn humility from the intelligence of our children?
As a follower here (Moninna) stated in a message sent to me last week,
“Mass state education has often been referred to as simply a religious doctrinal teaching of secular beliefs.”
In other words, it cannot be called education at all, in my estimation. In a frame or context of transmitting pre-existing knowledge from a position of superior knowledge and doctrinal belief (including even the facts of “hard science”), one inhibits critical thinking and knowledge creation. Teaching in a milieu where the student is passive, submissive, and a recipient of an officially approved curriculum establishes a condition lacking adequate context, which makes information, data, language, or concepts less meaningful, real, and intelligible. The heavy hand of the state obliterates initiative and decimates the spirit.
When the innumerable and chronic failures of our schools are mentioned and the reality of 25% of our citizens remain illiterate (and probably another 30-35% are semi-literate, inept, and incapable of critical thinking) educators and other people who are supposedly trustworthy reflexively hit the “minimize” button. Why is that? Why are they not honest with themselves or with us? Why do they deny reality? Why do they need so badly to believe that traditional schools are not built on the sand of mythology and coercion, and that their crumbling is not the consequence of their defective authoritarian structure?
You tell me.
I repeat myself, again and again. It is not about funding, teacher salaries, or unions. It is not about good or bad programs, policies, curricula, techniques, or strategies, and it is most definitely not about test scores or IQ scores. The reactionaries and privatizers have it all wrong. But, so also do the traditionalists and the purveyors of retrenchment to some version of the good old days. Our schools are creating authoritarians and followers and they are anti-intellectual factories for conservativism. You need to get this right Thom. Nostalgia and anecdotes are not reliable guides. Look at the science - and weep.
Outstanding discourse Robert. It has been over half a century since I read Khalil Gilbran's the Prophet, although I dispute that he was Lebanese, as Lebanon was not then a country. More of a Persian, and by that I don't mean Iranian, that is also a later invention.
I consider myself an autodidcact, because even though I have a Masters degree, my knowledge base is not that taught in brainwashing factories, but from my own reading, and interests which are still eclectic.
I'm a HS drop out, who within 8 months passed both a HS GED and an AA GED (they had such a thing back in 1958). Graduated from university with a 3.74 GPA and a Masters with 3.47 GPA, and essentially discarded most of the swill that they tried to indoctrinate me with. But first you need to read and write, and that can be done with starting kids off with an Alphabet Book.
I have bought and am buying my bisnieto a library of bilingual books, including bi linqual books and he is not yet 2 (big birthday present coming for him).
Education is important but not the homogenious social reinforcement skill that are shoved down kids throats, at the same time kids need the social exposure that school provides, from that they learn h ow to survive, but these days of internet education (and I include Tik Tok, Instagram, Telegram, what not is not education it is mind rot. One must learn how to interact wiith other people from an early age, otherwise they grow up as tools and fools.
My sis was very religious, and wanted to protect her youngest from the vagaries and realities of life, so she home schooled her daughter and her social life was confined to church. She did a great job of imparting essential and socialy accepted knowledge, as she won a full scholarship, but coming into contact with the real world, and no longer protected,she was naive, and vulnerable to being exploited. She wound up with teaching credentials, took a position in W VA, teaching her own peers, and her life went downhill after that., into drug abuse, being in a relationship with a low life drug abusing red neck, ran over by a drug abusing redneck in a pick up truck, in a supermarket parking lot, and it only gets worse.
Question is how do you develop inquisitive, critical thinking skills, and teach kids not to believe everything you see and hear, to arrive at one's own opinions and not acquire them because some "authority" exposes you, or tells you that "they are the truth".
I started on my own path at age 8, when I read The Odyessey by Homer, intrigued I knew it was ancient Greek fiction, then at age 12 I read the Bible, and once again realized that I was reading fiction. Most of the swill be it history or economics, even sometimes science,has proven to be fiction.
Children need an education, but a real one, where they are taught and praised for critical thinking, not punished because they don't digest the swill.
Thom has done a great service in providing information that enables people to learn "Hidden History" You won't find his info, ideas or writings in curiculum or even libraries.
"The learner or the student can never be at the center...." Check out the IEP. The kid is at the center.
Whereas the method in public education is usually pedagogy, it probably could as well be andragogy. Pedagogy is the teaching dependent personalities. Andragogy is the facilitation learning for "self-directed" learners. E.G. Montessori Theory is an educational approach that emphasizes individualized instruction and self-paced learning. It is based on the belief that children are naturally curious and capable of learning independently.
Mr. Solomon,
There you go with the methodology, techniques, and theory! Re-inventing the educational wheel, yet again. Montessori, Dewey, Tolstoy, and Rousseau were writing a century or more ago. Tell us something we don’t know.
There is a reason we are stuck in reverse. There is a reason we cannot escape the pedagogical obsessions. We have allowed ourselves to be dependent upon our teachers and our schools for something we are mistakenly calling education.
My dad used to say often that children should be seen and not heard. I think teachers should be seen and heard from only when students ask for their input! I am the last person to diminish the importance of “good” teachers. However, when children are given a mindset from the time they can speak or before that they will only learn when they attend a school, “pay attention” to a teacher, and follow instructions for 12 years, we have completely defeated our purposes.
Institutionalizing learning or “education” and creating a category for teaching that takes the initiative away from the individual child is our first mistake. But then, we compounded and perpetuated the error by passing laws to require school attendance. There is one way and one way only to escape that trap.
IEP’s are splendid. But they cannot ever be implemented on any scale for any length of time. All such innovations run counter to the authoritarian bureaucracy which is endemic to compulsory attendance. Control, order, discipline, obsessive measurement, focusing on the group and the school’s mission and mandates, etc., etc., must always take priority, except for small scale and temporary “models” and “experiments”, Bill Gates, notwithstanding. How many times do I have to say it? Either you put your confidence in the individual or the state. Those are your choices. I choose the individual. The state should be providing the resources and oversight, not taking over the lives of children and engineering society.
" Individual or the state" is a bullshit false dichotomy that plays well in Trumpworld.
Public education supports socialization, which is more important than ego centered "individualism." The IEP helps the kid to perform.
I had something to do with the SSA Listings of Impairments for kids. I also heard disability cases, worked with juvenile crime, etc. Most behavioral impairments can be diagnosed, treated, so that kids don't turn out to be menaces to society.
Mr. Solomon,
My statement about the individual and the state was not a commentary on individualism versus the state or collectivism. It was added as an afterthought when I was fatigued and I was thinking only in terms of whether the state should be deciding the direction of the individual’s life on the basis of some imagined expertise relative to curricular content and values. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear.
I agree with you and have stated here many times, I believe, that socialization is a primary function of schooling. It is, however, a function which has been performed extremely poorly for the reasons I have often outlined. When students have no autonomy, when they feel put upon, bullied, oppressed, or ignored, or when their peer interactions are superficial and distorted by competition and myriad restriction, socialization is perverted.
“Behavioral impairments”??? Are they “learning disabilities”, impairments, lack of social skills, and problems which students bring which require amelioration??? Or, are they problems created and exacerbated by the school? Are they disabilities because they inhibit authentic learning, or are they instead reactions to extreme frustrations, abuse, the physical restraint of bodies needing movement, exercise, and deep breathing and the denial of learning opportunities which are organic and logical? Control and behavioral training are for pigeons and lab rats. Some of us were taught all to well what the schools wanted us to learn.
There are quite a few important items that are not currently taught in schools, especially religious schools. Like, what is the purpose of government? What is an autocracy, what is a theocracy, what is an agnostic?, what is wisdom?, and how to teach it, what is a dictatorship?, What are The facts of Life?, What is the purpose of a man? What is the purpose of a woman? What is the cycle of life? What is the purpose of a child? What is the true root of all evil? What is an atheist? What is capitalism? What is socialism? What is the purpose of life? How to serve good or God? Without the children knowing all the answers to these questions just teaching them knowledge only helps them to become idiots.
Mr. Johnson,
I’m sorry. You are asking for miracles. You want the impossible. Schools cannot and will not ever be able to teach those things. If they are to be learned, it must be through meaningful living and experience, only a small part of which can be had in an institutional setting or from instruction, training, exercises, and lectures. Knowledge is not taught. BIG MISTAKE. Where do I begin? You probably meant to say academics. Academics do very little to advance knowledge. Did you read the entire comment. “If he is indeed wise, he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind”. Please take another look.
Carolyn,
Thank you for making my point for me. Public schools should be public service agencies and must stick to real world activities which are not about pretending to create academic wizards, geniuses, and intellectual masters. Their parents are dysfunctional in too many cases, at least in part, because of profound damage done to them in their schools during their own childhood where they were humiliated, badgered, hounded, guilt-tripped, shamed, and punished or demoralized. Not only did they not learn what they might have with respect to innumerable other things, but they failed to receive any meaningful education about navigating life, raising a family, maintaining healthy relationships, or managing money and other important things.
Your admonition not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” repeats a common error made by many people when they read into my statements something that is not there. I have not suggested relinquishing anything except coercion, threats, and intimidation and the arbitrary authority which must always accompany compulsory attendance laws. My response to that mistaken notion is that the baby was stillborn and that isn’t bathwater. Attendance laws never produced ANY positive benefits, contrary to popular opinion and what I insist must be thrown out is solely the ludicrous and paternalistic (and unconstitutional) pretention that forcing children to attend will somehow magically compensate for not understanding what children nee or how they develop and learn.
Compulsory attendance laws are the Straitjacket which proscribes positive change. Nothing good would be lost by eradicating them while literally overnight, children would have autonomy, teachers would have respect, and parents would no longer be blamed for the failures of the institution.
Carolyn,
To whom or to what are you responding? You’ve got me mystified.
I have never to the best of my recollection ever once suggested that schools should not be available, funded by public money and monitored and regulated to protect students and to prohibit discrimination, or that teachers should not be provided and paid well and respected. Have you checked you eyesight lately?
For the record, once again, I fully support free public schooling. They are an essential public service and should be providing much more in the way of service than they ever have in the past.
For the record: Compulsory attendance in those schools for either boys or girls is an abomination. There is no such thing as “mass education” or “compulsory education” and those terms are oxymorons. I have stated repeatedly that the paternalistic, unconstitutional, and counterproductive laws must be eliminated so that schools will finally become hospitable, civil, and safe places for children. The first thing they should be doing is training children to be discerning and to not read into remarks things which are not there.
Carolyn,
You've probably heard what they say about making assumptions. Old age and bad experiences may have something to do with my irritability about having my words misrepresented and about my intelligence being insulted, and I regret that I am not more tolerant in such instances. I am as much a feminist and a respecter of women as you are, believe it or not. However, you jumped to conclusions which have no basis in the statements I made and those conclusions are offensive to me. Ask William if I do not hold males to the same standard.
If you would be so kind as to go back and read what I actually wrote and take the time and trouble to process the logic and the message, you will see how far off base your comments were. You may not have seen my frequent posts here in the past where I have consistently reiterated my support for public schooling, teachers, teachers’ unions, and equality for all. But I did go to some trouble yesterday to spell out my thinking and to focus on the core issue.
Teachers have been given an outsize role and image which is impossible to live up to within an authoritarian paradigm. Every student should be seen as a “prodigy” of one sort or another and no student should be harmed. Maybe you believe that there are benefits which outweigh the harms. But I refuse to see victims as mere collateral damage and I am outraged at the indifference and blasé attitudes I see about what we allow these systems to do to children.
If you have doubts or questions about anything I have said, I will be more than happy to answer respectful questions.
Carolyn,
Please do not let my negativity discourage you from expressing your thoughts and opinions. Your original statement appeared to be very defensive and intimated that I had said in effect that I was anti-school or against teachers or that I am one of the people who is trying to “destroy public education”. It was all the more upsetting because you did acknowledge the harm which is done and has always been done in traditional schools. It felt a little too much like a personal attack but I appreciate very much your understanding and desire to clear the air.
I see no way to address compulsory attendance as a separate issue. The proximate cause of the harm IS precisely the attendance law and everything that follows it. Forced attendance and the “attendant” or logically coherent conceptions of learning as drudgery, unpleasant “work”, and externally sourced are so ingrained in our psyches that no one can imagine that children would go and learn without coercion. The idea that it is okay for government to be the agent of force in this one exceptional case (involving innocent and impressionable naïve children, no less) doesn’t seem to disturb people in the least. Getting rid of the law is a taboo subject which even people with great awareness about other topics (such as Thom) are not able to think about objectively. This is very sad and has been a massive frustration for me for over five decades.
This is not rocket science. Long before anyone tried to privatize schooling or before the libertarians tried to eradicate the liberty from education the schools were failing in their own stated mission and doing Immeasurable harm, however well disguised and deflected. The cartesian perspective on knowledge and knowledge acquisition were and are still predominant. The connection between coercion and the whole institutional usurpation of the educational function got obscured. We will not have democracy much longer if we do not figure this out and get rid of the bad laws.
Carolyn,
Here is that big mistake, again, better known as the “Error of the Third Kind”, identifying and fixing the wrong problems. You say that “Public schools need to re-invent themselves”. Public schools have tried six million times (probably not an exaggeration) to re-invent themselves. That is the whole point of my assertion. Power resides externally. There are impenetrable barriers to change, innovation, and “school or educational reform”. Those barriers emanate directly from the law and from the illegitimate authority and control that under the law must go to state officials, designated appointed or elected authorities, school board bigwigs, and school administrators. None of those people know squat about education! Who is kidding whom?
We have some wonderful examples of good schools. They do not educate in the way that people have imagined that schools should because that is a pathetic misconception. Schools are very limited in what they can do and education is a matter for personal growth and development which cannot be legislated or bought. However, free schools are great examples and experiments which provide autonomy and a free environment for learning, teaching, and organic development. Many public schools have tried to imitate the free schools and many advocates have tried to spread the free school philosophy. They invariably and almost immediately hit the brick wall. Compulsory attendance law is about control, management, authority, social engineering, and making sure the people remain passive and obedient. Freedom and democracy in schools, as Dewey and so many others have found out the hard way are directly at odds with what the laws require. Reforms are DOA. Changes are dead in the water. The school must always go back to business as usual. The status quo is baked into the cake. Tell your friends. The ironic thing is that getting rid of the laws would not cost anything or "interrupt the flow of money" except to remove the middlemen which Thom has noted are making a killing on textbooks, programs, workshops, etc., etc.