What Really Goes On (in schools)

[Keith Hamburger]

This is a section heading of the book I'm currently reading by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto was New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year with 30 years teaching in public schools before he finally had enough. The book is at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm and you can read it for free.

This section says ...

School wreaks havoc on human foundations in at least eight substantive ways so deeply buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for children to grow up:

1) The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like walking and talking. This is done so pleasantly and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us would agree has few problems is elementary school—even though it is there that the massive damage to language-making occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders.

2) The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic is basic, all curriculum is subordinate to standards imposed by behavioral psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian precepts compounded into a hash with "third force" psychology (centering on the writings of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow). None of these systems accurately describes human reality, but their lodgement in university/business seven-step mythologies makes them dangerously invulnerable to common-sense criticism.

None of the allegedly scientific school sequences is empirically defensible. All lack evidence of being much more than superstition cleverly hybridized with a body of borrowed fact. Pestalozzi’s basic "simple to complex" formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster in the classroom since no two minds have the same "simple" starting point, and in the more advanced schedules, children are frequently more knowledgeable than their overseers—witness the wretched record of public school computer instruction when compared to self-discovery programs undertaken informally. Similarly, endless sequences of so-called "subjects" delivered by men and women who, however well-meaning, have only superficial knowledge of the things whereof they speak, is the introduction most kids get to the liar’s world of institutional life. Ignorant mentors cannot manage larger meanings, only facts. In this way schools teach the disconnection of everything.

3) The third lesson schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which they have been assigned. This is an Egyptian outlook, but its Oriental message only begins to suggest the bad fit it produces in America. The natural genius of the United States as explored and set down in covenants over the first two-thirds of our history has now been radically degraded and overthrown. The class system is reawakened through schooling. So rigid have American classifications become that our society has taken on the aspect of caste, which teaches unwarranted self-esteem and its converse—envy, self-hatred, and surrender. In class systems, the state assigns your place in a class, and if you know what’s good for you, you come to know it, too.

4) The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically. If nothing is worth finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don’t you see how one follows the other? Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers.

5) The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States, so all-pervasive at century’s end that few people can imagine a different way to go about management. And indeed, there isn’t a better one if the goal of managed lives in a managed economy and a managed social order is what you’re after.

Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted.

6) The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done. Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them what to do. Principals are evaluated according to an ability to make these groups conform to expectations; superintendents upon their ability to make principals conform; state education departments on their ability to efficiently direct and control the thinking of superintendents according to instructions which originate with foundations, universities, and politicians sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations, and other interests.

For all its clumsy execution, school is a textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic chain of command is supposed to work. Once the thing is running, virtually nobody can alter its direction who doesn’t understand the complex code for making it work, a code that never stops trying to complicate itself further in order to make human control impossible. The sixth lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all important choices, but it is useless to remonstrate with the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as you are to change the system.

7) The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards, standardized tests, prizes, scholarships, and other awards in effecting this process is too obvious to belabor, but it’s the daily encounter with hundreds of verbal and nonverbal cues sent by teachers that shapes the quality of self-doubt most effectively.

8) The last lesson school teaches I’ll call the glass house effect: It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.

The most sensitive children I had each year knew on some level what was really going on. But we choked the treacherous breath out of them until they acknowledged they depended on us for their futures. Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment agencies where they converted themselves into manageable cynics.

While the book gets some into religion and the author doesn't care for objectivity, there is a lot of good in what he says beyond all that.

If I were of an age to have children again, I would never subject them to institutionalized schooling, public or private. Institutional schooling is a destroyer of children.

Keith

[Compugasm]

No argument here. Unfortunately, these 8 things don't end once you get out of school.

[someguymp3]

So you would homeschool? I'm sure that will help them become well-rounded, successful people

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: someguymp3 So you would homeschool? I'm sure that will help them become well-rounded, successful people

I pulled my youngest son out of government schools in the 8th grade for a number of reasons. At the time, the quality of education was the least of them. He is now 21 and married with a great little boy. He has a job paying roughly the same as I do and I graduated high school and have a BS and 18 years of experience in the field in which I'm working. He owns his own house, two cars and more than the necessities of life.

He was, at the time he got his certification, the youngest A+ certified computer tech in the country (14 years old). He does his own auto repairs, at least as well as I can and I almost never pay a mechanic to do anything to my vehicles. A couple of weeks ago we replaced the glow plugs on my diesel pickup, a job that would have cost over $1000 to pay someone else to do. He is capable of doing home repairs, he hasn't yet had to do much at his house but he helps me with all the stuff around mine, we just re-roofed my house and remodeled my kitchen. He has completed half of an associates degree, with work and family he just hasn't had a chance to finish the rest.

What else would you require for someone to be well rounded?

In school the main thing he was learning was to be submissive to bullies and conform to the administrations definition of "a good boy". Somone would pick on him about something and he would defend himself, usually verbally, and they would both get in trouble. Someone else would do something and again they would both get in trouble, first incident for the kid who "started things", second for my son. Someone else might do something and now my son has had a third incident and the administration is talking about expelling him, even if he were defending himself against a physical attack from someone else. Same sort of thing would happen year after year.

My two stepkids? One is 33 years old and in prison. The other is 35 and working for near minimum wage and can't seem to get ahead no matter what she does.

They one in prison was left in school until he completely failed and dropped out a year before graduating. The other finished high school with very high grades, tried a year of college, dropped out of college and never seemed able to get anywhere.

I'm glad government schools were able to turn my stepson and stepdaughter into such well-rounded and successful people.

Keith

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: Compugasm No argument here. Unfortunately, these 8 things don't end once you get out of school.

Of course not, because 99+% of everyone you deal with in daily life has been indoctrinated in the same manner. This system has been in place for over 100 years. Before the system was put in place people were self-sufficient and, as another poster claimed couldn't happen without government schools, "well rounded".

Today we have a system which the explicit purpose cited by the founders of the system were to make us complacent cogs in the industrial machine. Our kids are taught that they can't learn, that they can't better themselves. The best they can hope for is to get a reasonable job, work and consume until they retire, then hope for the best.

Keith

[RickSp]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger If I were of an age to have children again, I would never subject them to institutionalized schooling, public or private. Institutional schooling is a destroyer of children. Keith

My kids enjoy their school which is small, well run and founded by parents. Their teachers are good, the school administration accountable and most importantly, my kids are learning. My eldest son was just accepted at a highly competitive magnet high school. A destroyer of children? Ah, no. Histrionics are fine, but they bear no relation to my kids' education.

[brien]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger This is a section heading of the book I'm currently reading by John Taylor Gatto. Gatto was New York City Teacher of the Year and New York State Teacher of the Year with 30 years teaching in public schools before he finally had enough. The book is at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm and you can read it for free. This section says ... School wreaks havoc on human foundations in at least eight substantive ways so deeply buried few notice them, and fewer still can imagine any other way for children to grow up: 1) The first lesson schools teach is forgetfulness; forcing children to forget how they taught themselves important things like walking and talking. This is done so pleasantly and painlessly that the one area of schooling most of us would agree has few problems is elementary school—even though it is there that the massive damage to language-making occurs. Jerry Farber captured the truth over thirty years ago in his lapidary metaphor "Student as Nigger" and developed it in the beautiful essay of the same name. If we forced children to learn to walk with the same methods we use to force them to read, a few would learn to walk well in spite of us, most would walk indifferently, without pleasure, and a portion of the remainder would not become ambulatory at all. The push to extend "day care" further and further into currently unschooled time importantly assists the formal twelve-year sequence, ensuring utmost tractability among first graders. 2) The second lesson schools teach is bewilderment and confusion. Virtually nothing selected by schools as basic is basic, all curriculum is subordinate to standards imposed by behavioral psychology, and to a lesser extent Freudian precepts compounded into a hash with "third force" psychology (centering on the writings of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow). None of these systems accurately describes human reality, but their lodgement in university/business seven-step mythologies makes them dangerously invulnerable to common-sense criticism. None of the allegedly scientific school sequences is empirically defensible. All lack evidence of being much more than superstition cleverly hybridized with a body of borrowed fact. Pestalozzi’s basic "simple to complex" formulation, for instance, is a prescription for disaster in the classroom since no two minds have the same "simple" starting point, and in the more advanced schedules, children are frequently more knowledgeable than their overseers—witness the wretched record of public school computer instruction when compared to self-discovery programs undertaken informally. Similarly, endless sequences of so-called "subjects" delivered by men and women who, however well-meaning, have only superficial knowledge of the things whereof they speak, is the introduction most kids get to the liar’s world of institutional life. Ignorant mentors cannot manage larger meanings, only facts. In this way schools teach the disconnection of everything. 3) The third lesson schools teach is that children are assigned by experts to a social class and must stay in the class to which they have been assigned. This is an Egyptian outlook, but its Oriental message only begins to suggest the bad fit it produces in America. The natural genius of the United States as explored and set down in covenants over the first two-thirds of our history has now been radically degraded and overthrown. The class system is reawakened through schooling. So rigid have American classifications become that our society has taken on the aspect of caste, which teaches unwarranted self-esteem and its converse—envy, self-hatred, and surrender. In class systems, the state assigns your place in a class, and if you know what’s good for you, you come to know it, too. 4) The fourth lesson schools teach is indifference. By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically. If nothing is worth finishing, nothing is worth starting. Don’t you see how one follows the other? Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers. 5) The fifth lesson schools teach is emotional dependency. By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States, so all-pervasive at century’s end that few people can imagine a different way to go about management. And indeed, there isn’t a better one if the goal of managed lives in a managed economy and a managed social order is what you’re after. Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted. 6) The sixth lesson schools teach is intellectual dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. Good people do it the way the teacher wants it done. Good teachers in their turn wait for the curriculum supervisor or textbook to tell them what to do. Principals are evaluated according to an ability to make these groups conform to expectations; superintendents upon their ability to make principals conform; state education departments on their ability to efficiently direct and control the thinking of superintendents according to instructions which originate with foundations, universities, and politicians sensitive to the quietly expressed wishes of powerful corporations, and other interests. For all its clumsy execution, school is a textbook illustration of how the bureaucratic chain of command is supposed to work. Once the thing is running, virtually nobody can alter its direction who doesn’t understand the complex code for making it work, a code that never stops trying to complicate itself further in order to make human control impossible. The sixth lesson of schooling teaches that experts make all important choices, but it is useless to remonstrate with the expert nearest you because he is as helpless as you are to change the system. 7) The seventh lesson schools teach is provisional self-esteem. Self-respect in children must be made contingent on the certification of experts through rituals of number magic. It must not be self-generated as it was for Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison, or Henry Ford. The role of grades, report cards, standardized tests, prizes, scholarships, and other awards in effecting this process is too obvious to belabor, but it’s the daily encounter with hundreds of verbal and nonverbal cues sent by teachers that shapes the quality of self-doubt most effectively. 8) The last lesson school teaches I’ll call the glass house effect: It teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols. The most sensitive children I had each year knew on some level what was really going on. But we choked the treacherous breath out of them until they acknowledged they depended on us for their futures. Hard-core cases were remanded to adjustment agencies where they converted themselves into manageable cynics. While the book gets some into religion and the author doesn't care for objectivity, there is a lot of good in what he says beyond all that. If I were of an age to have children again, I would never subject them to institutionalized schooling, public or private. Institutional schooling is a destroyer of children. Keith

The government schools are a disgrace to Education. I would like to see some statistics how they compare to government run schools in Japan, China, Canada, Germany and the Scandanavian countries. I have a suspicion it would prove that the government schools here in America are a poor excuse for what the Dept of Education touts them to be in America. So if anyone has these figures, I would be more than interested in either confirming my suspicions or better understanding what is happening in terms of results here in American government schools.

[tman_ndsu08]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger If I were of an age to have children again, I would never subject them to institutionalized schooling, public or private. Institutional schooling is a destroyer of children.

Since so few of us have the money and time to home school our children, how would you design a grouped or otherwise distributed education if you had complete control? IE, something cheaper than home schooling.

[belverron]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger What else would you require for someone to be well rounded?

Certainly something more than the materialistic account of your son's success you provide.

Quote by: Keith Hamburger Before the system was put in place people were self-sufficient and, as another poster claimed couldn't happen without government schools, "well rounded".

You put words in his mouth. He came closer to saying home-schooling does not produce well-rounded individuals, which statement in my experience is absolutely true. One of my close friends, who was home-schooled, is nice, and brilliant in his own way, but he will forever be socially awkward, and he's been indoctrinated by his parents as surely as others are by the public schools.

Ultimately it comes down to the child's suggestibility rather than the method of indoctrination. There is always the potential for a high degree of indoctrination, and everyone buys in to some extent.

[brien]

Quote by: tman_ndsu08 Since so few of us have the money and time to home school our children, how would you design a grouped or otherwise distributed education if you had complete control? IE, something cheaper than home schooling.

tman: If I may. Education needs to be returned to the control of the parents whose children are being educated. It perhaps must be controlled at the local level instead of being mandated by state and federal government programs.

Simply put, if schools were controlled by the local people whose children are attending the school, then the results may be very different than we have now. Local boards of education are mostly controlled by elitist educators. They tell parents to sit down and shut up because they (the educators) are the professionals. People know what they want their kids to learn.

Let the locals control the schools through local referendum, and I think you will find a totally different school with totally different results. No unfunded mandates. No elitist educators dictating to parents an agenda that is designed by the NEA, the AFT, or the government. Sure, let there be guidelines, but let the control end there. When local people control local schools, children will learn according to the will of the people. The only aspect of Education that should take preference over everything else is that little known document called the Constitution.

This is neither a radical idea nor is it unattainable. It simply needs to be embraced by those whose children are currently in the government schools. Local referendums can strip the BOE of its elitist power and return it to those families and taxpayers whose children are being educated. It just takes enough people to understand what is really going on in the government schools today. Something the staus quo doesn't want us to understand or to know. "Sit down and shut up, we're the professionals here." :rolleyes:

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: RickSp My kids enjoy their school which is small, well run and founded by parents. Their teachers are good, the school administration accountable and most importantly, my kids are learning. My eldest son was just accepted at a highly competitive magnet high school. A destroyer of children? Ah, no. Histrionics are fine, but they bear no relation to my kids' education.

I wouldn't consider a school put together by parents who hire their own teachers to be an "institutional school". That is one reason I really do hate the term "public" schools. The main ones we have are government schools, not "public" schools. Public schools can include small community schools such as the one you talk about. I wish there were more such where the teachers are directly accountable to the parents who can decide whether to hire, fire, promote the teachers.

That is a definite contrast to government schools.

Keith

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: brien The government schools are a disgrace to Education. I would like to see some statistics how they compare to government run schools in Japan, China, Canada, Germany and the Scandanavian countries. I have a suspicion it would prove that the government schools here in America are a poor excuse for what the Dept of Education touts them to be in America. So if anyone has these figures, I would be more than interested in either confirming my suspicions or better understanding what is happening in terms of results here in American government schools.

Actually, according to the book, our government schools are modeled strongly off of the German model. I wouldn't have much faith in German schools. And many of the ideas implemented in American government schools were tested in China in the late 19th and early 20th century. As far as making students good conformists I expect Chinese schools are no better than our's. Of course, with China's history and culture of conformity over the past couple of millenia it may well work better there than here.

Keith

[RickSp]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger I wouldn't consider a school put together by parents who hire their own teachers to be an "institutional school". That is one reason I really do hate the term "public" schools. The main ones we have are government schools, not "public" schools. Public schools can include small community schools such as the one you talk about. I wish there were more such where the teachers are directly accountable to the parents who can decide whether to hire, fire, promote the teachers. That is a definite contrast to government schools. Keith

My kid's school is a "public" school. It is just a public charter school. It is a government school by any standards.

There are good schools and bad schools. When I was in school, I survived both. I frankly find your representations about "institutional" schools to be oddly disconnected from even the bad schools that I am familiar with.

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: tman_ndsu08 Since so few of us have the money and time to home school our children, how would you design a grouped or otherwise distributed education if you had complete control? IE, something cheaper than home schooling.

I like the model that RickSp cited earlier. True community schools founded by parents who have final authority to curriculum and staff.

I don't know about that being cheaper than home schooling, when you home school the entire world is available, virtually for free, as material for education. And the costs of two parents working is rarely made up for by the income so, unless both parents are earning close to the same and over about $40,000/year it's often cheaper for the lower wage earner to stay home with the children, work part time, find a way to work from home or some such.

Keith

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: belverron Certainly something more than the materialistic account of your son's success you provide.

Did I mention happily married? Did I mention his wonderful son? Is showing skills in several areas that promote independence not an example of "well rounded and successful" which is what the initial question was?

Or do you consider something other than a wide variety of interests, strong knowledge in a number of areas and a happy family do be the definition of "well rounded and successful"?

Quote by: belverron You put words in his mouth. He came closer to saying home-schooling does not produce well-rounded individuals, which statement in my experience is absolutely true. One of my close friends, who was home-schooled, is nice, and brilliant in his own way, but he will forever be socially awkward, and he's been indoctrinated by his parents as surely as others are by the public schools. Ultimately it comes down to the child's suggestibility rather than the method of indoctrination. There is always the potential for a high degree of indoctrination, and everyone buys in to some extent.

As I said above, he said "well-rounded and successful". I guess you should give us your definition of that and show us how government education does a better job.

OK. Let's go for some testimonials from the book ...

Just under eighteen hundred people wrote letters to me in the year I was New York State Teacher of the Year, in response to a series of essays I wrote about what I had witnessed as a schoolteacher, essays which have now become part of this book. In a strange way, those different letters were eighteen hundred versions of the same letter, a spontaneous outcry against the violation that so many feel in being compelled to be a character in someone else’s fantasy of how to grow up. Listen to a few of these voices:

Huntington, West Virginia "Homeschooling may be stressful but it’s nothing compared to the stress I experienced watching my daughter’s self-respect and creative energy drain away within the first few weeks of third grade."

Toronto, Canada "Little has changed since I was asked to sit in straight rows and memorize an irrelevant curriculum. Recently my wife quit her job because we fear losing contact with our children as they enter a school system we cannot understand and are unable to change."

Frankfurt, Illinois "I had a rich personal inquiry going on in many things. School was for me a tedious interruption of my otherwise interesting life."

Yelm, Washington "My passion is that my daughter be allowed to grow up being completely who she is. Right now she is a happy, enthusiastic, self-taught child of eight and a half. She taught herself to read at four, reads everything. School to me has always felt sick at the core of its concept."

Madison, Wisconsin "I’m desperate what to do. Three bright and lively children but everyday I see a closing down of enthusiasm as they grind their way through a predetermined school program."

Reno, Nevada "My wife and I came to the end of the rope with public education four years ago. I was tired of seeing my once happy child constantly in tears."

Santa Barbara, California "I just took my eight-year-old daughter from school. Bit by bit she was becoming silent, even fearful. From her anxiety to reach the school bus on time to the times she was visibly shaken from criticism of her homework. Day by day she was changing for the worse. But the absolute end was the destructive effect the culture of schoolchildren’s values had on her behavior. Now she laughs again. I have my laughing girl back."

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania "School started to destroy my family by dividing us from one another instead of joining us. It created separatism among the kids, among the classes, among ages, among parents and children. After I took my second grader from school she began to blossom. She loves her time now, the time is the gift."

Huntersville, North Carolina "I defined myself as a child by my accomplishments at school just as I had been taught to. I was a National Merit Scholar and a Presidential Scholar but I couldn’t even make it through two years of college because my own authoritarian schooling had left me completely unprepared to make my own decisions."

St. Louis, Missouri "Mr. Gatto, you are describing my daughter when you name the pathological symptoms our children display as a result of their schooling. And you are describing me—which pains me almost unbearably to recognize and admit."

Haverhill, Massachusetts "I have no certificates of great accomplishment, no titles, no diploma except a high school one, no degree except when I have a fever. Yet I do have experience gained while raising three daughters. I’d like to paint a picture for you. I had to take my daughter out of kindergarten after five weeks. This happy, self-regulating child I was raising showed great signs of stress in that short of a time. I remembered the rebellion of my two angry teenagers, suddenly made the connection, and took her from school. And so the last girl I raised as a free child. There have been no signs of anger or rebellion since then. That was seventeen years ago."

I've seen it myself dozens of times. Especially in the most intelligent students who either withdraw into themselves or lash out when they start to get even an inkling of what school is doing to them as individuals.

You cite a single example of a child misled by their parents but I could easily find thousands of children who have been destroyed by government education, in the town I live in alone.

My stepson I mentioned earlier who is in prison has been shown to have an IQ in the 140 range. His sister, at least that. What did government eduction do for them?

Keith

[Keith Hamburger]

Quote by: RickSp My kid's school is a "public" school. It is just a public charter school. It is a government school by any standards. There are good schools and bad schools. When I was in school, I survived both. I frankly find your representations about "institutional" schools to be oddly disconnected from even the bad schools that I am familiar with.

They are not solely my representations, they are quoted from a highly successful teacher with over 30 years of experience who has spent considerable time researching the history of education in America.

Perhaps you should read the book.

Keith

[RickSp]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger They are not solely my representations, they are quoted from a highly successful teacher with over 30 years of experience who has spent considerable time researching the history of education in America. Perhaps you should read the book. Keith

If the excerpt you posted is representative of the book, I doubt I will bother. I went to a lousy high school but instead of being "destroyed" I learned how to learn, regardless. I also learned to question authority, so I do question even John Taylor Gatto, his thirty years experience and his mantra of desperation, hopelessness and dependency.

[tivodan1116]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger Did I mention happily married? Did I mention his wonderful son? Is showing skills in several areas that promote independence not an example of "well rounded and successful" which is what the initial question was? Or do you consider something other than a wide variety of interests, strong knowledge in a number of areas and a happy family do be the definition of "well rounded and successful"? As I said above, he said "well-rounded and successful". I guess you should give us your definition of that and show us how government education does a better job. OK. Let's go for some testimonials from the book ... ... I've seen it myself dozens of times. Especially in the most intelligent students who either withdraw into themselves or lash out when they start to get even an inkling of what school is doing to them as individuals. You cite a single example of a child misled by their parents but I could easily find thousands of children who have been destroyed by government education, in the town I live in alone. My stepson I mentioned earlier who is in prison has been shown to have an IQ in the 140 range. His sister, at least that. What did government eduction do for them? Keith

None of which is empirical, scientific data. Give us something besides purely anecdotal evidence about how great your son is (coming from his dad no less! how objective!) or about other individuals.

In short, you haven't put forth any proof that what you are saying is anything but huffing and puffing.

[RickSp]

Quote by: Keith Hamburger I like the model that RickSp cited earlier. True community schools founded by parents who have final authority to curriculum and staff.

It is a charter school. The model is not perfect but it is more politically sustainable than most alternatives, including vouchers.

Center for Education Reform

Coalition of Essential Schools

[someguymp3]

Here's another example: I was educated in state-provided education and I've had a great life, I'm wealthy, I've seen the world and I've had some amazing experiences.

An example on it's own proves nothing.

I doubt I would be quite so great if I had missed out on all the life experiences mainstream education brought me, if I didn't know how to get on with people so well and how to deal with my problems and those of others.

Put it this way, whilst your son's peers were throwing a ball about, getting drunk and discovering girls - basically making mistakes and finding out about the world - he was becoming "the youngest A+ certified computer tech in the country (14 years old)."