These will help, but she helped us understand that the problem is much deeper than that. I also have a unit on abused, neglected and homeless children, and one of my guests is a former homeless mother who tells movingly of her flight from domestic violence, her moving from shelter to shelter, and her attempts to get her three children in school only to be stymied by hostile school clerks and her inability to prove the kids had had their shots. We also look at alternative school arrangements. Well, young people don't help on the farm these days, but we still have the long vacations, which plague parents and teachers alike. We also look at the alternative of not going to schools.
Home schools are in fact growing dramatically.
My studio guests included people who have taught their children at home, and we also had four eloquent home-schooled children telling about their experiences. We even co-opted a father into the act, who had unwittingly come along as a casual observer and found himself fielding a barrage of questions. So we paid a video visit to an inner city school in Chicago whose dynamic principal is trying some innovative approaches, including promoting a dormitory for inner city students so that the school can counteract the adverse pressures of society. Then we looked at a charter school in Milwaukee's inner city, called the Urban Waldorf School. Waldorf schools are schools based on the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner who set up his first school in Stuttgart, Germany, in the early part of this century.