School Days
I recently finished reading Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto, and the things he wrote about the experience of institutional schooling for children made me think back over my own life. School was a mixed bag of experience for me, some good and quite a lot not so good. In fact, school seemed to be made up of a string of embarrassments and humiliations. My salvation in school was that the material was generally easy for me to understand (with the exception of math) and even though a great deal of each day’s energy went into the social interactions between myself and my peers I still managed to get good grades.
But oh, the humiliations. During grade one, at six years old, I was forced to go outside and walk through muddy puddles in my socks during a fire drill in the pouring rain, because I wasn’t wearing my inside shoes as I was supposed to be doing, I got pushed down the slide by an older boy because I was afraid to go down by myself, I got sent home from school because I was playing outside in the rain (fair enough, I guess, because I was soaked to the skin and didn’t have a change of clothes), was berated by the teacher for counting on my fingers during math, and felt incredibly ashamed to have chosen red as my favorite colour instead of blue like nearly every other child in my class. Apparently, as children get older they prefer darker hues, so the youngest children prefer yellow, then red, then blue. Even now I’m stumped as to how this relates to any kind of lesson we should be learning as six year olds.
When I was in university I considered becoming a schoolteacher, but decided against it because I didn’t like the atmosphere in schools. If I wouldn’t go back there myself, even as an adult in a position of authority, why should I send my child there?
well, you could always home school her…and then she would be picked on for being one of “those” kids.
I’m just saying, you may just delay the inevitable.
I used to be picked on for being one of “those” kids and I wasn’t homeschooled. I don’t think school is particularly good at producing well socialized kids in the first place, so why not choose an education based on some other merit?
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap1.html
You should read Ivan IIich’s Deschooling Society
The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.
His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work
ooh, interesting. this caught my eye:
I feel like having two homebirths has totally changed the way I look at things. If I didn’t need an institution to give birth, and in fact I had a safer, more meaningful and transformative experience at home, could the same thing be true of education? I am glad there are hospitals and schools for those who need them, but I’m starting to think that the vast majority of people really don’t need an institution-based birth, death or education, and that those institutions primarily serve the interests of their directors and the network of service providers who stand to make money from them.
An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. They ultimaely “feed” off what they were set up serve. The church set up by Jesus to save people but became a rich institution “processing” people from birth to death and always for a profit.
Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions.The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) British economist.