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.
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.