Public school - govenrment schooling - compulsary education.  It's always been like this, right?  No?  What came before compulsary education?

John Taylor Gatto is one of my favorite voices on the issues of public schooling.  After all, he was one of those fantastic teachers in the public schools.  Isn't it interesting that the speech he made at receiving an award for New York City Teacher of the Year was against modern education?

Here are a few excerpts:

Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.

Now here is a curious idea to ponder. Senator Ted Kennedy's office released a paper not too long ago that prior to compulsory education the state literacy rate was ninety-eight percent, and after it the figure never exceeded ninety-one percent, where it stands in 1990.

Here is another curiosity to think about. The home-schooling movement has quietly grown to a size where one and half million young people are being educated entirely by their own parents; last month the education press reported the amazing news that children schooled at home seem to be five or even ten years ahead of their formally trained peers in their ability to think.

I especially appreciate this next excerpt:

It is absurd and anti-life to be part of a system that compels you to sit in confinement with people of exactly the same age and social class. That system effectively cuts you off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety; indeed it cuts you off from your own past and future, sealing you in a continuous present much the same way television does.

It is absurd and anti-life to move from cell to cell at the sound of a gong for every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy and even follows you into the sanctuary of your home demanding that you do its "homework."

"How will they learn to read?" you ask, and my answer is "Remember the lessons of Massachusetts." When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded ones in cellblocks they learn to read, write, and do arithmetic with ease, if those things make sense in the kind of life that unfolds around them.

I love that.  "When children are given whole lives instead of age-graded one in cellblocks ... "  I felt imprisoned in school.  I watched the clock.  I was bored.  I put nail polish on every day so I could peel it off during my classes.  I made dots on an imaginary line and connected the dots to make amazing geometric images.  The teacher's voice droned on and on and on.  I watched the clock.

Some people thrive in public school.  That is, they learn the system.  They learn what is expected and how to jump through the hoops.  They learn to survive in this setting where peers are the same age as themselves.  Unlike anything they will ever experience again in life, public schooling IS age-graded, moving from cell to cell.  If children appear to be thriving in such a system, it is only because they've learned to play the game well.

There's another world out there.  It's called life instead of school.  It's called real education.  I remember the day I walked away from the fake and into the real.  It was entirely different than school had ever been.  School with it's demands that are supposed to prepare me for real life, but indeed have nothing to do with real life.  Swim make-ups, late passes, feeling owned by people who do not really own me.  Feeling entirely powerless in a situation that overwhelmed me.  Mean spirited people, drugs, english teachers teaching psycho-cybernetics, bells ringing - indicating it was time to move to the next station.  Yeah, that's real life.

Thank you, John Taylor Gatto, for putting it so plainly. 

I highly recommend reading his whole speech.  He was an amazing teacher, that John Taylor Gatto.  Sometimes we are accused here of not mentioning the good ones.  He was one of the good ones.  I say "was" because he walked away from the public school system, recognizing it was broken.  Seems he's interested in education - not schooling.  And he thinks that keeping them home where they belong is a pretty good idea.

Deb Turner (Homeschooling From the Heart)
The Old Schoolhouse Magazine
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