If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
Tag: homeschooling
The Quiet Exodus from Mass Schooling
Parents are fed up. As mass schooling becomes more restrictive, more standardized and more far-reaching into a child’s young life, many parents are choosing alternatives. Increasingly, these parents are reclaiming their child’s education and are refocusing learning around children, family, and community in several different ways.
Homeschoolers: The Enemy of Forced Schooling
Holt observed through his years of teaching, and recorded in his many books, that the deepest, most meaningful, most enduring learning is the kind of learning that is self-determined. As “the enemy,” we homeschoolers reject the increasing grip of mass schooling.
Bully-Proofing Won’t Work Until We Give Kids More Freedom
Children who are bullied in school have very few choices and very little recourse. Required by law to attend an assigned public school, many children and their parents have minimal agency to withdraw from a bullying scenario. Some parents will look for alternative schooling options for their bullied children, like private schools, charter schools, online schools, or homeschooling. But for many families, these choices are not available or accessible.
Arbitrary Wagon Wheel Education
Have you ever asked yourself why children are compelled to attend some kind of school – including home education – for exactly 180 days per year, and study particular state-mandated subjects, and blah blah blah?
How My Daughter Reminded Me What Self-Directed Education Really Means
On the walk home from the park, I told my kids about this new idea for a dedicated time allotment for various “subjects.” I suggested that maybe it was something we could try and wanted to know what they thought about the idea. My 10-year-old daughter’s answer was priceless. “Mom, no, I don’t think so. That sounds sort of ‘schooly’, don’t you think?”
Homeschooling Can Be Tough Sometimes
In a span of 24 hours this week, I heard from two homeschooling moms threatening to send their kids to school. First, was a text with “I can’t do this!” Next, was a conversation with a mom who wants to send her child back to school and catch a break. Both moms were feeling frustrated, tired, and uncertain. Both were feeling that school would be easier, better; yet knowing deeply that isn’t true. Both were feeling what we all feel sometimes.
How Mass Schooling Perpetuates Inequality
For kids like Matt, schooling can bring out the worst behaviors. Like a trapped tiger–angry and afraid–they rebel. Unable to conform properly to mass schooling’s mores, they get a label: troubled, slow learner, poor, at-risk. They will carry these scarlet letters with them throughout their 15,000 hours of mandatory mass schooling, emerging not with real skills and limitless opportunity, but further entrenched in their born disadvantage.
Challenging Societal Defaults
The problem with mass schooling is that it is not serving children well. It kills creativity, punishes individuality, and pathologizes difference. As mass schooling expands and becomes more restrictive, there is mounting evidence that it is causing serious psychological harm to many children. In addition to these troubling outcomes, mass schooling simply isn’t working. Children aren’t learning.
Why You Should Pull Your Kid Out of School
Kudos to these parents for listening to their parental instincts, despite pressure from the school to do otherwise. They saw that forcing their son to read at age 6, before he was ready, was causing him to hate reading and despise books. They recognized that the rigidity and uniformity characteristic of the mass schooling model was smothering their son’s curiosity and innate, self-educative ability.