From: bd474@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bill McDonald)
Newsgroups: misc.education
Subject: Re: Homeschooling
Date: 26 Aug 92 21:13:16 GMT
Reply-To: bd474@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bill McDonald)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)


In a previous article, rollo@xylogics.com (Dena Rollo) says:

[Much of Dena's rantings have been buried, at a tragic cost to the
local landfill]

I didn't think there were any left.  I'm pleased to know that there are
at least still some brave souls who are willing to stand up and
unabashedly defend this country's public school system.  In this day and
age of absymal test scores, rising violence and higher-than-ever
illiteracy rates, I didn't think there was anyone left who had the guts
to defend the bloated and rotting hulk that is government education.
Tell me Dena, do you work for the NEA?

Most of what you said I've written off as mere spleen-venting and
therefore quite flushable, but a few things are worth the time and 
bandwidth:

>BUT - IMO it makes much more sense to make sure she learns what
>we think is important (in our family it's respect for others,
>                                     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

<Ahem> Dena, are you sure you're fully qualified to teach this subject?
Perhaps you might want to consider a quick refresher course on tolerance
before you leap off into such a stretch....

>that everyone has the responsibility to contribute to the
>community, that racism,classism,sexism, heterosexism are stupid
>and wrong, that those in authority do not always know best,
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(like maybe a few million education professionals? ;-/   )

>etc etc etc) and then to SEND HER OUT INTO THE WORLD, where
>she can figure out how to hold on to her values (or choose to 
>change them ;<) amid others. And to be there for her if/when
>she comes home confused. And to supplement her education where
                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>I think it's lacking.
 * ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Now this, in *MY* humble opinion, is the heart of the discussion.
Apparently, Dena, it's OK for you to invoke the right to supplement *your*
child's education when you think its lacking.  But apparently it isn't
OK for others to do the same.  The homeschoolers you so deplore are,
as shocked as you may be to discover it, on the same continuum with you.
All of us who have undertaken a home school are simply attempting to
supplement our children's education as *we* see fit.  The schools in my
city are incapable of offering a decent education to my children; and
the national record indicates that most other government schools are in
equally bad health.  To throw a child into the maw of a machine designed
to eat children alive, in grave homage to some high-faluting social agenda
is, IMO, an abandonment of parental responsibilty.  Things haven't
changed much since that first bunch of Massachusetts kids were marched
off under gunpoint to the first government schools in 1880.  You and
those of your ilk require that the present be sacrificed for some vague
and undefinable future full of roses and rainbows.  No thank you!

>I do understand how those whose only choices are physically
>dangerous schools or home schooling might choose the latter -
>I would have a hard time sending my child to a school where
>she was scared for her safety. That's a hard place to be, but
>not one I think the majority of home schoolers here are posting
>from. And let's all remember that the parents of the kids who
>have no choices don't find it any easier, and that having the
>parents with choices abandon the system like a sinking ship is
>a disservice to us all.
>
>
Apparently its OK, under your catechism, for parents to remove children
from the system when they are physically in danger, but you balk when
parents attempt to save their children from an educational death.  Well,
you go ahead and throw your darlings to the machine and watch what
happens.  Dena!  Dena!  Wake up!  The ship *is* sinking and watching
your child gurgle and choke on your personal politics isn't going to fix
either the system *or* improve her life. 

>
>
>-Dena
>

*-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-*
  Bill McDonald             | "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison
  Southwestern Bell         |  ne connait point -- The heart has its
  rambo!pbm@texbell.sbc.com |  reasons that reason cannot understand"
*-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-*

PS.  As a service to those who are interested, I am attaching a copy of
John Gatto's "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher."  Many folks have quoted
from Mr. Gatto, I thought some of you (Dena, are you still with us?)
might like to read an excellent treatise on what government schools are
*really* for.  It's great reading and the best argument for home
schooling that I know of.  It's also an excellent answer to those who
feel that government schools supply a superior form of "socialization."

Oh, BTW, I do have permission from John Gatto to reprint the article.

Enjoy and/or despair.


--------------------------TEXT FOLLOWS------------------------------


The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto
New Society Publishers, 1992; reprinted with permission.


  Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having
nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at
schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an
instructor of English language and English literature, but that
isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school--
and I win awards doing it.
  Teaching means different things in different places, but seven
lessons are universally taught Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They
constitute a national curriculum you pay more for in more ways
than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is.  You
are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you
like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this
presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things
you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will:


                               I.

  A lady named Kathy wrote this to me from Dubois, Indiana the
other day:

  "What big ideas are important to little kids? Well, the
  biggest idea I think they need is that what they are
  learning isn't idiosyncratic--that this is some system to
  it all and it's not just raining down on them as they
  helplessly absorb. That's the task, to understand, to make
  coherent."

  Kathy has it wrong.  The first lesson I teach is confusion.
Everything I teach is out of context... I teach the unrelating of
everything. I teach disconnections. I teach too much: the
orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery,
adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral
singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer
languages, parent's nights, staff-development days, pull-out
programs, guidance with strangers you may never see again,
standardized tests, age-segregation unlike anything seen in the
outside world... what do any of these things have to do with each
other?
  Even in the best schools a close examination of curriculum and
its sequences turns up a lack of coherence, full of internal
contradictions. Fortunately the children have no words to define
the panic and anger they feel at constant violations of natural
order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education.
The logic of the school-mind is that it is better to leave school
with a tool kit of superficial jargon derived from economics,
sociology, natural science and so on than to leave with one
genuine enthusiasm. But quality in education entails learning
about something in depth. Confusion is thrust upon kids by too
many strange adults, each working alone with only the thinnest
relationship with each other, pretending for the most part, to an
expertise they do not possess.
  Meaning, not disconnected facts, is what sane human beings
seek, and education is a set of codes for processing raw facts
into meaning. Behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences, and
the school obsession with facts and theories the age-old human
search lies well concealed. This is harder to see in elementary
school where the hierarchy of school experience seems to make
better sense because the good-natured simple relationship of
"let's do this" and "let's do that now" is just assumed to mean
something and the clientele has not yet consciously discerned how
little substance is behind the play and pretense.
  Think of all the great natural sequences like learning to walk
and learning to talk, following the progression of light from
sunrise to sunset, witnessing the ancient procedures of a farm, a
smithy, or a shoemaker, watching your mother prepare a
Thanksgiving feast--all of the parts are in perfect harmony with
each other, each action justifies itself and illuminates the past
and future. School sequences aren't like that, not inside a
single class and not among the total menu of daily classes.
School sequences are crazy. There is no particular reason for any
of them, nothing that bears close scrutiny. Few teachers would
dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher
could be criticized since everything must be accepted. School
subjects are learned, if they can be learned, like children learn
the catechism or memorize the 39 articles of Anglicanism.
  I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite
fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related
to television programming than to making a scheme of order. In a
world where home is only a ghost because both parents work or
because too many moves or too many job changes or too much
ambition or something else has left everybody too confused to
stay in a family relation I teach you how to accept confusion as
your destiny. That's the first lesson I teach.

  The second lesson I teach is your class position.  I teach
that you must stay in class where you belong. I don't know who
decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The
children are numbered so that if any get away they can be
returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways
children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is
hard to see the human being plainly under the burden of numbers
he carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable
business, though what the strategy is designed to accomplish is
elusive. I don't even know why parents would allow it to be done
to their kid without a fight.
  In any case, again, that's not my business. My job is to make
them like it, being locked in together with children who bear
numbers like their own. Or at the least endure it like good
sports. If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine
themselves somewhere else because I've shown how to envy and fear
the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes.
Under this efficient discipline the class mostly polices itself
into good marching order. That's the real lesson of any rigged
competition like school. You come to know your place.
  In spite of the overall class blueprint which assume that 99
percent of the kids are in their class to stay, I nevertheless
make a public effort to exhort children to higher levels of test
success, hinting at eventual transfer from the lower class as a
reward. I frequently insinuate that the day will come when an
employer will hire them on the basis of test scores and grades,
even though my own experience is that employers are rightly
indifferent to such things. I never lie outright, but I've come
to see that truth and schoolteaching are, at bottom, incompatible
just as Socrates said they were thousands of years ago. The
lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in
they pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by
number magic. Until that happens you must stay where you are put.

  The third lesson I teach kids is indifference. I teach
children not to care about anything too much, even though they
want to make it appear that they do. How I do this is very
subtle. I do it by demanding that they become totally involved in
my lessons, jumping up and down in their seats with anticipation,
competing vigorously with each other for my favor. Its
heartwarming when they do that, it impresses everyone, even me.
When I'm at my best I plan lessons very carefully in order to
produce this show of enthusiasm. But when the bell rings I insist
that they whatever it is that we've been working on and proceed
quickly to the next work station. They must turn on and off like
a light switch. Nothing important is ever finished in my class,
nor in any other class I know of. Students never have a complete
experience except on the installment plan.
  Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth
finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?  Years of bells
will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no
longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of
schooltime; their argument is inexorable. Bells destroy the past
and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an
abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even
though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with
indifference.

  The third lesson I teach is emotional dependency. By stars and
red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces I
teach you to surrender your will to the predestined chain of
command. Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority,
without appeal because rights do not exist inside a school, not
even the right of free speech, the Supreme Court has so ruled,
unless school authorities say they do. As a schoolteacher I
intervene in many personal decisions, issuing a Pass for those I
deem legitimate, or initiating a disciplinary confrontation for
behavior that threatens my control. Individuality is constantly
trying to assert itself among children and teenagers so my
judgements come thick and fast. Individuality is a contradiction
of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.
  Here are some common ways it shows up: children sneak away for
a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their
bowels; they trick me out of a private instant in the hallway on
the grounds that they need water. I know they don't but I allow
them to deceive me because this conditions they to depend on my
favors. Sometimes free will appears right in front of me in
children angry, depressed or happy by things outside my ken;
rights in such things cannot be recognized by schoolteachers,
only privileges which can be withdrawn, hostages to good
behavior.

  The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency. Good
people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most
important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better
trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives. The
expert makes all the important choices; only I can determine what
you must study, or rather, only the people who pay me can make
those decisions which I enforce. If I'm told that evolution is
fact instead of a theory I transmit that as ordered, punishing
deviants who resist what I have been to think.
  This power to control what children will think lets me
separate successful students from failures very easily.
Successful children do the thinking I appoint them with a minimum
of resistance and decent show of enthusiasm. Of the millions of
things of value to study, I decide what few we have time for, or
it is decided by my faceless employer. The choices are his, why
should I argue? Curiosity has no important place in my work, only
conformity.
  Bad kids fight this, of course, even though they lack the
concepts to know what they are fighting, struggling to make
decisions for themselves about what they will learn and when they
will learn it. How can we allow that and survive as
schoolteachers?  Fortunately there are procedures to break the
will of those who resist; it is more difficult, naturally, if the
kid has respectable parents who come to his aid, but that happens
less and less in spite of the bad reputation of schools. Nobody
in the middle class I ever met actually believes that their kid's
school is one of the bad ones. Not a single parent in 26 years of
teaching. That's amazing and probably the best testimony to what
happens to families when mother and father have been well-
schooled themselves, learning the seven lessons.
  Good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do. It is
hardly an exaggeration to say that our entire economy depends
upon this lesson being learned. Think of what would fall apart if
kids weren't trained to be dependent:
  The social-service businesses could hardly survive, they would
vanish I think, into the recent historical limbo out of which
they arose. Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as
the supply of psychic invalids vanished. Commercial entertainment
of all sorts, including television, would wither as people
learned again how to make their own fun; Restaurants, prepared-
food and a whole host of other assorted food services would be
drastically down-sized if people returned to making their own
meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop and
cook for them. Much of modern law, medicine, and engineering
would go, too, the clothing business and schoolteaching as well,
unless a guaranteed supply of helpless people poured out of our
schools each year.

  The sixth lesson I teach is provisional self esteem. If you've
ever tried to wrestle a kid into line whose parents have
convinced him to believe they'll love him in spite of anything,
you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits
conform. Our world wouldn't survive a flood of confident people
very long so I teach that your self-respect should depend on
expert opinion. My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
  A monthly report, impressive in its precision, is sent into
students' homes to signal approval or to mark exactly down to a
single percentage point how dissatisfied with their children
parents should be. The ecology of good schooling depends upon
perpetuating dissatisfaction just as much as commercial economy
depends on the same fertilizer. Although some people might be
surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these
mathematical records, the cumulative weight of the objective-
seeming documents establishes a profile of defect which compels a
child to arrive at certain decisions about himself and his future
based on the casual judgment of strangers.
  Self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical
system that ever appeared on the planet, is never a factor in
these things. The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is
that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but
need to rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People
need to be told what they are worth.

  The seventh lesson I teach is that you can't hide. I teach
children they are always watched by keeping each student under
constant surveillance as do my colleagues. There are no private
spaces for children, there is no private time. Class change lasts
300 seconds to keep promiscuous fraternization at low levels.
Students are encouraged to tattle on each other, even to tattle
on their parents. Of course I encourage parents to file their own
child's waywardness, too. A family trained to snitch on each
other isn't likely to be able to conceal any dangerous secrets.
  I assign a type of extended schooling called "homework",too,
so that the surveillance travels into private households, where
students might otherwise use free time to learn something
unauthorized from a father or mother, or by apprenticing to some
wise person in the neighborhood. Disloyalty to the idea of
schooling is a Devil always ready to find work for idle hands.
  The meaning of constant surveillance and denial of privacy is
that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.
Surveillance is an ancient urgency among certain influential
thinkers, a central prescription set down Republic, in City of
God, in Institutes of the Christian Religion, in New Atlantis, in
Leviathan and many other places. All these childless men who
wrote these books discovered the same thing: children must be
closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central
control. Children will follow a private drummer if you can't get
them into a uniformed marching band.


                               II.

  It is the great triumph of compulsory government monopoly
mass-schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers,
and among the best of my student's parents, only a small number
can imagine a different way to do things. "The kids have to know
how to read and write, don't they?" "They have to know how to add
and subtract, don't they?" "They have to learn to follow orders
if they ever expect to keep a job."
  Only a few lifetimes ago things were very different in the
United States, originality and variety were common currency; our
freedom from regimentation made us the miracle of the world,
social class boundaries were relatively easy to cross, our
citizenry was marvelously confident, inventive, and able to do
many things independently, to think for themselves. We were
something, we Americans, all by ourselves, without government
sticking its nose into our lives, without institutions and social
agencies telling us how to think and feel; no, all by ourselves
we were something, as individuals.


  We've had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War and such a society
requires compulsory schooling, government monopoly schooling to
maintain itself.  Before the society changed, schooling wasn't
very important anywhere. We had it, but not too much of it and
only as much as an individual wanted. People learned to read,
write, and do arithmetic just fine anyway, there are some studies
which show literacy at the time of the American Revolution, at
least on the Eastern seaboard, as close to total. Tom Paine's
Common Sense sold 600,000 copies to a population of 2,500,000, 20
percent of which was slave and another 50 percent indentured.

  Were the colonists geniuses? No, the truth is that reading,
writing and arithmetic only take about 100 hours to transmit as
long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is
to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is
on him. Millions of people teach themselves these things; it
really isn't very hard. Pick up a fifth grad textbook in math or
rhetoric from 1850 and you'll see that the texts were pitched
then on what would today be college level. The continuing cry for
"basic skills" practice is a smoke screen behind which schools
preempt the time of children for 12 years and teach them the
seven lessons I've just taught you.
  We've had a society increasingly under central control in the
United States since just before the Civil War: the lives we lead,
the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the green highway signs
we drive by from coast to coast are the products of this central
control. So, too, I think, are the epidemics of drugs, suicide,
divorce, violence, cruelty, and the hardening of class into caste
in the U.S., products of the dehumanization of our lives, the
lessening of individual and family importance that central
control imposes. The character of large compulsory institutions
is inevitable, they want more and until there isn't any more to
give. School takes our children away from any possibility of an
active role in community life--in fact it destroys communities by
reserving the training of children to the hands of certified
experts--and by doing so it ensures that they cannot grow up
fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in
community life you could not hope to become a healthy human
being. Surely he was right. Look around you the next time you are
near a school or an old people's reservation, that will be the
demonstration.
  School as it was built is an essential support system for a
vision of social engineering that condemns most people to be
subordinate stones in a pyramid that narrows as it ascends to a
terminal of control. School is an artifice which makes such a
pyramidal social order seem inevitable, although such a premise
is a fundamental betrayal of the American Revolution. In colonial
days right through the period of the early Republic we had no
schools to speak of--read Franklin's Autobiography for a man who
had no time to waste in school--and yet the promise of Democracy
was beginning to be realized. We turned our backs on this promise
by bringing to life the ancient dream of Egypt--compulsory
subordination for all. That was the secret Plato reluctantly
transmitted in The Republics when Glaucon and Adeimantus exhorted
from Socrates the plan for total state control of human life that
would be necessary to maintain a society where some people took
more than their share. "I will show you," said Socrates, "how to
bring about such a feverish city, but you will not like what I am
going to say." And so the blueprint of the seven lesson school
was first sketched.
  The current debate about whether we should have a national
curriculum is phony--we already have one, locked up in the seven
lessons I just taught you and a few more I decided to spare you.
Such a curriculum produces physical, moral, and intellectual
paralysis and no curriculum of content will be sufficient to
reverse its hideous effects. What is currently under discussion
in our national school hysteria about failing academic
performance is a great irrelevancy that misses the point. Schools
teach exactly what they are intended to teach and they do it
well--How to be a good Egyptian and where your place is in the
pyramid.


                              III.

  None of this is inevitable, you know. None of it is impossible
to overthrow. We do have a choice in how we bring up young people
and there is no one right way; if we broke the power of Egyptian
illusion we would see that. There is no life and death
international competition threatening our national existence,
difficult as that is to even think about, let alone believe, in
the face of a constant media barrage of myth to the contrary. In
every important material respect our nation is self-sufficient,
including energy. I realize that runs counter to the most
fashionable thinking of political economists, but the "profound
transformation" of our economy these people talk about is neither
inevitable nor irreversible. Global economics does not speak to
the public need for jobs, affordable homes, adequate schools and
medical care, a clean environment, honest and accountable
government, social and cultural renewal, or simple justice. All
global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and
the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am
convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if
they had a choice. We might be able to see that if we regained a
hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is
genuinely to be found--in families, in friends, the passage of
seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in
curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a
decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive
things out of which real families, real friends and real
communities are built. Then we would be truly self-sufficient.


  How did these awful places, these "schools", come about? 
Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of
forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But total-schooling
as we know it is a byproduct of the two "Red Scares" of 1848 and
1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution among our own
industrial poor. Partly, too, total schooling came about because
old-line American families were revolted by the home cultures of
Celtic, Slavic, and Latin immigrants--and revolted by the
Catholic religion they brought with them. Certainly a third
contributing cause to making a jail for children called school
must be located in the prospect with which these same families
regarded the free movement of Africans through the society after
the Civil War.
  Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching confusion,
class assignment, dulled responses emotional and intellectual
dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance--all of these
things are good training for permanent underclasses, people
derived forever of finding the center of their own special
genius. And in later years it became the training shaken loose
from even its own original logic--to regulate the poor; since the
1920s the growth of the school bureaucracy and the less visible
growth of a horde of industries that profit from schooling just
exactly as it is, has enlarged this institution's original grasp
to where it began to seize the sons and daughters of the middle
classes.
  Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that
he took money to teach?  Even then, philosophers saw clearly the
inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would
take, preempting the teaching function that belongs to everybody
in a healthy community. Professional teaching tends to another
serious error: It makes things that are inherently easy to learn,
like reading, writing, and arithmetic, seem difficult by
insisting they be taught through pedagogical procedures.
  With lessons like the ones I teach day after day, it should be
little wonder we have a national crisis the nature of the one we
have today, young people indifferent to the adult world and to
the future, indifferent to almost everything except the diversion
of toys and violence.  Rich or poor, schoolchildren who face the
21st century cannot concentrate on anything for very long, they
have a poor sense of time past and to come,they are mistrustful
of intimacy like the children of divorce they really are (for we
have divorced them from significant parental attention); they
hate solitude, are cruel, materialistic, dependent, passive,
violent, timid in the face of the unexpected, addicted to
distraction.
  All the peripheral tendencies of childhood are nourished and
magnified to a grotesque extent by schooling, which prevents
effective personality development by its hidden curriculum.
Indeed, without exploiting the fearfulness, selfishness, and
inexperience of children our schools could not survive at all,
nor could I as a certified schoolteacher. No common school that
actually dared to teach the use of dialectic, the heuristic, or
other devices that free minds should employ would last very long
without being torn to pieces. School has become a replacement for
church in our secular society, and like church its teachings must
be taken on faith.
  It is time that we faced the fact squarely that institutional
schoolteaching is destructive to children. Nobody survives the 7-
Lesson Curriculum unscathed, not even the instructors. The method
is deeply and profoundly anti-educational. No tinkering will fix
it. In one of the great ironies of human affairs, the massive
rethinking schools require would cost so much less than we are
spending now that powerful interests cannot afford to let it
happen. You must understand that first and foremost, the business
I am in is a jobs project and a an agency for letting contracts.
We cannot afford to save money by reducing the scope of our
operation or by diversifying the product we offer, even to help
children grow up right. That is the Iron Law of institutional
schooling--it is a business neither subject to normal accounting
procedures nor to the rational scalpel of competition.

  Some form of free-market system in public schooling is the
likeliest place to look for answers, a free market where family
schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools
and crafts schools and farm schools exist in profusion to compete
with government education. I'm trying to describe a free market
in schooling just exactly like the one the country had right up
until the Civil War, one in which students volunteer for the kind
of education that suits them, even if that means self-education.
It didn't hurt Benjamin Franklin that I can see.
  These options now exist in miniature, wonderful survivals of a
strong and vigorous past, but they are unavailable only to the
resourceful, the courageous, the lucky, or the rich. The near
impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the
shattered families of the poor or the bewildered host camped on
the fringes of the urban middle class foretells the disaster of
7-Lesson Schools is going to grow unless we do something bold and
decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.

  After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the
method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't
be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or
good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and
daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come
about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent
children from keeping important appointments with themselves and
with their families, to learn lessons in self-motivation,
perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and
lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of
home life.
  Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the
time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that
time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar
to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of
what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow
up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in.
  A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist
that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a
future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow
a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons
cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting
life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the
only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards
doing it. I should know.