Ladies and Gentleman, welcome back to another edition of 'In between The Stories'.
We're gonna get into something I've been thinking about lately, partly due to my re-reading of a book by John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down. The idea of home schooling, which isn't so strange now. With a lot of parents opting out.
A school teacher in New York City for 30 years, Mr. Gatto became outspoken and critical of modern education, its ideologies, history and methods. His colleagues, and staff at times didn't appreciate his way of doing things. But, his students loved him.
Today I wanted to share some thoughts on public schooling and homeschooling. Kids are the future. Was it Aristotle who said "give me a child for 7 years, and I'll show you the man?" Those early years are critical for a child's development - mentally, physically, emotionally. As for myself, I attended public school throughout my adolescents. I've gauged some of the conversations on and offline from parents who have children in public school, and some of the concerns seem to involve the safety, and lack of support for their child's needs. Over the years there's been an uptick with parents pulling their kids out of public school. Have you noticed that in your area?
And on the flip side, you have parents and children who had a negative experience with homeschooling. Suggesting more resources toward public education - adequate teacher training, sufficient funding. When these 2 needs are met, progress can be made. Taking those things into consideration along with a few points Mr. Gatto's book highlights, fueled this episode. I hope you can join the conversation and share your thoughts, if any of it resonates with you.
Drawing from Chapter 1 of Dumbing Us Down, these are the 7 lessons discussed :
Confusion
Class affiliation acceptance
Indifference
Emotional dependency
Intellectual dependency
Provisional self-esteem
Surveillance
If you're a teacher in public schooling or a parent/student who has homeschool experience and you'd like to share some of your experience on the show. I'd be happy to connect.
'Til next time
and very soon,
PEACE!!
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Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto :
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/225850.Dumbing_Us_Down
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Listen to Chris's story :
https://rss.com/podcasts/giants-amongst-us/956757/
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Connect With Giants Amongst Us :
Website : https://giantsamongstus.org/
Show Updates & Extras : buymeacoffee.com/Giantsamongstus
To Share Your Story : giantsamongstus@tutanota.com
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Background music by :
@bnoizemusic
00:00:00
This is Giants Amongst Us.
00:00:26
Now, here's a little story I got to show you.
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Thank you for tuning in.
00:00:32
This is Giants Amongst Us, where we share in that unique human experience and where you'll hear real stories that are told by real people.
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If this is your first time tuning in, pull up a chair. Please do. Stay a while.
00:00:51
You can go back to past episodes and you can hear stories. You can hear stories from people that come from different parts of the world.
00:00:59
And they've had their own unique struggles and challenges, some with handicaps, others with addictions or trauma and neglect.
00:01:08
But the underlining theme is how they were able to work themselves out of it.
00:01:13
How they were able to find recovery and healing. It looks different for each one of them.
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Some have found it in completely removing themselves from a toxic environment or a bad relationship, but there's solutions.
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These are stories of how someone was able to overcome those obstacles.
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If you're in a bad spot right now, if you're in a bind, if things don't look like they're ever going to get any better.
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Listen to these stories and hear these experiences and know that things can get better.
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Know that you're worth it and you can make something happen right now.
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Every day we wake up, we're faced with decisions, with choices and the little steps right now can lead to something big later on.
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But all it takes is a little bit of doing. You can't snap your fingers.
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Things don't change and undo themselves in a night and in an instant.
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But these stories are examples of what taking accountability and responsibility for oneself looks like, what it feels like, and as you listen to it, what it sounds like.
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So remember, you're worth it. You're not alone and things can get better.
00:02:18
So as we move into the new year and as the show continues to evolve and I become more and more comfortable with doing this, I'd like to add more in peppering episodes in between the stories.
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Talks on issues and concerns, things that are happening around us.
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Of course we are affected, we're impacted, we're influenced by the world and what goes on around us.
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One of the things I wanted to touch on today and talk about was partly due to me re-reading a book by John Taylor Gattle.
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The name of the book is Dummy Us Down.
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And if you don't know anything about that man, John Taylor Gattle, I highly encourage you to look him up.
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This man was a beast. He was a public school teacher in New York for about 30 years back in the 90s.
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And throughout the course of his teaching, he started to have a lot of concerns and issues with the whole public education system.
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So then towards the end of his years, he was a voice speaking out against it.
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He did things differently. His methods were different, which made him not so popular amongst his peers, coworkers, staff members, the faculty.
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But his teachers and, excuse me, his students loved him.
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Remember the name of this book is Dummy Us Down. You can find it online.
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I found it online. I downloaded it as a PDF file, shot it right into my Kobo and voila!
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I have it now as an ebook. But yeah, after reading it, man, that really gets you thinking about the public education system.
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And in general, the education of our youth. I don't have any kids, but we know that the kids are our future.
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I think it was Aristotle who said, give me a child for seven years and I'll show you the man.
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That's important. Those years where they're developing, they're forming, they're becoming a unique conscience.
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During those times, how crucial it is to give them the love, the support, the patience when that isn't there.
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What becomes of a society later on? Generations later when they're now adults.
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So then you have a couple of things that come to mind when you think of the education of youth.
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Of course, you have the home environment. You know, the parents, what are they doing? What aren't they doing?
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Some of them are working two jobs and the kids and the parents hardly ever see each other.
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Probably just to have dinner. They see each other in the morning and then they go about their ways.
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The child spending six, seven hours a day in school five days a week and the mother or father working 40 plus hours a week.
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There's not a lot of time there. And then you also have schooling in general. You have public school and then you have home schooling.
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It seems like nowadays I know when I was coming up, I didn't really know of anybody who was homeschooled.
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I know I wasn't. I was sitting in the bosom of the public education system.
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So I don't have any experience when it comes to that. But it seems like now there's a big uptick in parents choosing to pull their kids out of school and homeschool them.
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There's a lot of different reasons for it. Some feel that the school just isn't safe.
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I've read stories online because also along with reading the book, you know, I did some research online and then I was also gauging the conversations had between parents who homeschooled
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and found it successful and beneficial for their children and then on the opposite end, parents and also students, children who seen homeschooling to be a complete nightmare.
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They had nothing but negative experiences and it was a horror show.
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A couple examples that come to mind of kids who said that it was a complete horror and that they're traumatized and that they're suffering because of it to this day was the fact that their parents pulled them out of school
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and sheltered them, kept them away from socializing with the other kids, keeping them as far apart from it.
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There was no free will. There was no choice. There was no, hey, you want to do this, you know, let's try it out.
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And if you don't like it, we can go ahead and put you back in with the rest of your friends and you can continue going to junior high or high school, whichever grade they're in.
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But so yeah, these parents pretty much traumatized them. The mother, the father, they kept them inside.
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They weren't allowed to socialize. They weren't allowed to make any friends.
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And I mean, what is that going to do for a kid?
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And then you have other children who talk about their parents. They pulled them out.
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But that's it. They pulled them out of public school and the kids were left to figure it out for themselves.
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How to study, what to study. There was no direction. There was no guidance.
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They pulled their kids out and left them to be. I don't know if that's a smart way to go about it.
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I mean, it's no wonder that they feel a certain way about homeschooling.
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Maybe it wasn't the homeschooling. I'm just, I don't want to be biased in this approach.
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I'd rather have a holistic view of it, at least to consider both sides of the spectrum.
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Like I said, I've never been homeschooled, but I mean, maybe the way that it was done had a lot to do with it.
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And then you have the parents who found homeschooling to be beneficial and also the kids.
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They were able to, some on account of maybe the husband making good money and the mother was able to stay at home
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and spend time with their children, but there's resources that they found.
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You can be your own university on YouTube. I mean, online, there's a lot of tools.
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There's a lot of resources for a child's education and not even a child's education,
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but even after school for you and I, for grown adults, you don't ever have to stop educating yourself.
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So yeah, you have resources. You have communities of people online and offline that are aimed at equipping parents
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with the tools to educate their child.
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And then these people also believe that it doesn't have to be a one size fit all.
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That was a big thing with John Taylor Gatto. So he was big in getting kids out of the classroom.
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He felt that there shouldn't be no reason for them to be confined to a classroom for six, seven hours a day amongst people their own age.
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Whenever he was able to, he got them out of the classroom and into the real world.
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We're talking 12 and 13 year olds.
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He said, that's a beautiful way to get them to learn and get them engaged,
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to immerse them in the world around them, mingling with people who are involved in different trades,
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who are involved in different industries like apprentice type work where they're spending a day with a truck driver.
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That's something they're interested with.
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Asking questions and also being involved in the community, volunteer work, working at a shelter, serving the homeless, things like that.
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These are valuable lessons, but you don't have that opportunity when you're going to school.
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For the most part, you're taught to memorize the material that's instructed to be memorized by the teacher who's sitting in front or standing in front of you,
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only just so you can be tested and passed that test later on.
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But how much of it is going to be valuable once this child is in the real world so that they could be independent,
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they could be self-aligned, they could be confident, they can have the critical thinking skills necessary.
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So they're able to navigate through life and follow their own moral compass with integrity and to be not just productive members of society,
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but to be mature, healthy, balanced, complete human beings.
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He was big on listening to a child, being patient with the child, so that later on in life, or not even later on in life,
00:10:04
even while they're in school, they're proactive, they don't need anybody to tell them what to do, they know what to do, and they do it.
00:10:13
So that was kind of a rant about homeschooling, and I know there's some places where it's not allowed.
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A quick search online, I found that there's about 40 countries where homeschooling isn't allowed,
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and if it is allowed, it's damn near impossible to do.
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There's a lot of red tape involved, and like I mentioned, you know, there's people who feel like we need more school.
00:10:33
The kids need more school.
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Better teachers, better funding, if those two things can be repaired, then everything's gonna be okay.
00:10:42
John Gatto, he mentions and talks about the issues that we're having with these children once they become adults.
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Just looking at today and the issues that are going on with children, with kids, teenagers, adolescents, even adults.
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In the book he mentions, there's two things.
00:11:00
This was back in 2005, there's two things that occupy most of a child's time, and those two things he mentioned were television and schooling.
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Fast forward to today, you can substitute television with a smartphone.
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Those are two things that occupy most of our time, especially a child's time.
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The smartphone, social media, endless scrolling online, and school.
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We checked online just a quick query, if that's the right way to say it, and it says a child spends about 30 hours a week on their phone.
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And there's about 180 days worth of school in the U.S.
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And in places like Germany, Finland, Hong Kong, it's about 190, so 10 more school days in a year.
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And every day, how much time does a child spend in school?
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6 to 7 hours, so worldwide we're looking at about 180 to 220 school days throughout the year for a child.
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Taking into consideration how much time they spend doing homework, a child has to sleep, eat.
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How much time is actually left for a child's private time to develop their own unique conscience?
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Those two things that are taking up most of a child's time, could they be part of the reason why?
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When you look around you, when you talk to kids, when you hear stories of parents and the issues that they're dealing with because of their children,
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and you see that the headlines are saying, kids, mental health crisis is an epidemic.
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Are those two things mentioned?
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Schooling, smartphone usage and addiction, a broken family, these type of things, could they be the cause of it?
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And everything else that we're seeing around us, the loneliness, the depression, the addictive habits,
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those type of things, are they symptoms of these two things mentioned that are occupying most of a child's time?
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I don't know, you tell me, but it's worth considering.
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John Gatto believes that, not just him, there's a lot of professionals, there's a lot of people involved in public health, doctors, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts that believe the same thing.
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You don't even have to have a degree to kind of see the correlation between the two, and that just comes to mind.
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Talk about information overload.
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I mean, we already know as adults, as grown adults, where we're not as impressionable and vulnerable as a kid who's still maturing.
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We already know that the problem with too much information, information overload, we pick up a headline, we pick up a news source,
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and then right after that, we're not even able to absorb it, think critically about it, or digest it.
00:13:48
We're on to the next thing.
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And then we're getting all this information and we wonder why our attention spans are lacking.
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We wonder why we're not able to retain any kind of information and we're confused because of this information overload,
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especially nowadays where it's so easy, you just hit a few keys and boom, whatever you want to learn or know about, you can access.
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It's at your fingertips.
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And children, imagine that where you have six, seven classes, one hour for each class.
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Once you get, if you're excited about one, if you're enthusiastic about one, 45 minutes later, the bell goes off, the horn buzzes,
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and you got to move on to the next class.
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You got five minutes to get down the hallway, go across the school campus and get to the next class.
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Drop everything you're doing and then start learning about something, a subject, a topic that has nothing to do with what you were just immersed in for an hour.
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Information overload.
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And then they're just instructed to memorize certain things, study for it so they can pass a test.
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How much of that?
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If you can think back when you were going to school, how much of that did you actually need and use in the real world?
00:15:07
So that's another thing that John Gadot gets into in the book.
00:15:14
But this book in particular, going back to the book, Dummy Us Down.
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It's a short book and every chapter in the book is an excerpt of a speech that he gave when receiving an award.
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And every time he was winning these awards, he was giving speeches criticizing the public education system and talking about alternatives and substitutions and ways to not reform it but be done with it.
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So in that book, I just wanted to go over the first chapter.
00:15:44
I thought it was interesting and worth talking about and I'd love to hear you guys's thoughts and comments on this.
00:15:51
I felt like I went on a rant long enough.
00:15:54
So if you're still with me, thank you for being patient.
00:16:00
Let's pull this thing up.
00:16:03
Right here.
00:16:04
This is the first chapter.
00:16:06
And how we're going to tie this all into the podcast Giants Amongst Us is because I would love to connect with a couple of people from both sides to hear about their struggles, their experience with homeschooling, how it worked for them, how it didn't work for them.
00:16:22
I think that still has a place here on the show.
00:16:25
And I open up the platform and send out an invitation to anybody who hears this and is interested in taking us through what they experienced with one or the other.
00:16:37
That would be awesome.
00:16:39
So, so the first chapter and this came after he was being named New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
00:16:50
And the title of the chapter is the Seven Lessons School Teacher and he goes on to say that teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills.
00:17:04
They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine.
00:17:09
So you might as well know what it is.
00:17:11
And he goes on to point out the seven lessons school teacher and I'm going to get into each lesson, just a brief overview of it to kind of bring this thing home and share it with you guys.
00:17:23
And if you're interested in reading the whole book, like I said, it's not long, but it definitely will shake you up a little bit.
00:17:32
So this is the first lesson.
00:17:35
The first lesson I teach is confusion.
00:17:40
Everything I teach is out of context, he says.
00:17:44
I teach the unrelating of everything.
00:17:48
I teach disconnections.
00:17:50
I teach too much.
00:17:52
The orbiting of planets, the law of large numbers, slavery, adjectives, architectural drawing, dance, gymnasium, choral singing, assemblies, surprise guests, fire drills, computer languages,
00:18:09
parents nights, staff development days, pull out programs, guidance with strangers my students may never see again, standardized tests, age segregation, unlike anything seen in the outside world.
00:18:25
What do any of these things have to do with each other?
00:18:29
He says the logic of the school mind is that it is better to leave school with the two kits of superficial jargon derived from economics, sociology, natural science, and so on, then with one genuine enthusiasm.
00:18:49
He goes on to say, think of the great natural sequences like learning to walk and learning to talk, the progression of light from sunrise to sunset, the ancient procedures of a farmer, a smithy, or a shoemaker, or the preparation of a Thanksgiving feast.
00:19:09
All of the parts are in perfect harmony with each other, each action justifying itself and illuminating the past and the future.
00:19:20
School sequences aren't like that.
00:19:23
School sequences are crazy.
00:19:25
Few teachers would dare to teach the tools whereby dogmas of a school or a teacher could be criticized since everything must be accepted.
00:19:36
I teach students how to accept confusion as their destiny.
00:19:41
That's the first lesson I teach.
00:19:43
And now he goes on to say the second lesson I teach is class position.
00:19:50
I teach that students must stay in the class where they belong.
00:19:55
I don't know who decides my kids belong there, but that's not my business.
00:20:00
The children are numbered so that if any get away, they can be returned to the right class.
00:20:07
He says, my job is to make them like being locked together with children who bear numbers like their own, or at least to endure it like good sports.
00:20:19
If I do my job well, the kids can't even imagine themselves somewhere else because I've shown them how to envy and fear the better classes and how to have contempt for the dumb classes.
00:20:33
That's the real lesson of any rigid competition like school.
00:20:37
You come to know your place.
00:20:39
At the end of this second lesson, he says, the lesson of numbered classes is that everyone has a proper place in the pyramid and that there is no way out of your class except by number magic.
00:20:53
Failing that, you must stay where you are put.
00:20:58
And now we go on to number three.
00:21:00
And he says, the third lesson I teach is indifference.
00:21:05
I teach children not to care too much about anything, even though they want to make it appear as they do.
00:21:12
How I do this is very subtle.
00:21:14
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.
00:21:26
It's heartwarming when they do that.
00:21:28
It impresses everyone, even me.
00:21:30
When I'm at my best, I plan lessons carefully in order to show this enthusiasm.
00:21:35
But when the bell rings, I insist they drop everything they've been doing and proceed quickly to the next workstation.
00:21:43
They must turn on and off like a light switch.
00:21:46
Nothing important is ever finished in my class nor in any class that I know of.
00:21:51
Indeed, the lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing.
00:21:55
So why care too deeply about anything?
00:21:57
Years of bells will condition all but the strongest to a world that can no longer offer important work to do.
00:22:07
The fourth lesson I teach is emotional dependency.
00:22:13
By stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces, I teach kids to surrender their will to the predestined chains of command.
00:22:26
Rights may be granted or withheld by any authority without appeal because rights do not exist in a school.
00:22:34
Not even the rights of free speech, as the Supreme Court has ruled, unless school authorities say so.
00:22:41
Individuality is constantly trying to assert itself among children.
00:22:46
Individuality is a contradiction of class theory, a curse to all systems of classification.
00:22:53
Here are some common ways in which individuality shows up.
00:22:57
Children sneak away for a private moment in the toilet on the pretext of moving their bowels.
00:23:03
Or they steal a private instant in the hallway and the grounds they need some water.
00:23:08
I know they don't, but I allow them to deceive me because this conditions them to depend on my favors.
00:23:15
As a school teacher, I intervene in many personal decisions issuing a pass for those I deem legitimate in initiating a disciplinary confrontation for behaviors that threaten my control.
00:23:29
So that's his fourth lesson, the fourth lesson teaching emotional dependency.
00:23:34
Let's get on to the fifth.
00:23:36
The fifth lesson I teach is intellectual dependency.
00:23:42
Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.
00:23:46
This is the most important lesson of them all.
00:23:49
We must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meaning of our lives.
00:23:55
The expert makes all the important choices.
00:23:58
Only I, the teacher, can determine what my kids must study.
00:24:03
Or rather, only the people who pay me can make those decisions, which I then enforce.
00:24:09
This power to control what children will think lets me separate successful students from failures very easily.
00:24:18
Successful children do the thinking I assign them with a minimum of resistance.
00:24:24
Curiosity has no important place in my work, only conformity.
00:24:29
This lesson is a bit longer, but I don't want to get too much into it.
00:24:32
I feel like I've already dragged this episode a longer bit further than I would have liked to.
00:24:39
But he also goes on to say, good people wait for an expert to tell them what to do.
00:24:44
Think of what might fall apart if children weren't trained to be dependent.
00:24:50
The social services could hardly survive. They'd vanish.
00:24:53
Counselors and therapists would look on in horror as the supply of psychic invalids vanished.
00:24:59
Commercial entertainment of all sorts, including television, would wither as people learned again how to make their own fun.
00:25:06
Restaurants that prepare to serve food.
00:25:09
The serving industry and a whole host of other assorted food services would be drastically downsized
00:25:15
if people returned to making their own meals rather than depending on strangers to plant, pick, chop, and cook for them.
00:25:23
And with that being said, he makes a point at the very end of this lesson with saying,
00:25:27
don't be too quick to vote for radical school reform if you want to continue getting a paycheck.
00:25:33
We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to teach themselves what to do.
00:25:43
It's one of the biggest lessons I teach.
00:25:46
Facebook can create an algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself.
00:25:52
Now you go online to the Amazon virtual bookshop and the moment you enter, an algorithm pops up.
00:26:00
Ah, I know you. I've been following you and following millions of people like you.
00:26:06
But this is really just the first baby step.
00:26:10
For the first time in history, books are reading people rather than vice versa.
00:26:15
As you read a book on Kindle, Kindle is following you and Kindle, which means Amazon, knows which pages you read slow,
00:26:25
which pages you read fast, and on which page you stop reading the book.
00:26:30
And based on that, Amazon have quite a good idea of what you like or dislike.
00:26:36
And then Kindle knows when you laugh, when you cry, when you're bored, when you're angry.
00:26:42
The final step, which probably will be possible in 5-10 years, is to connect Kindle to biometric sensors on or inside your body,
00:26:56
which constantly monitor your blood pressure, your heart rate, your sugar level, your brain activity.
00:27:04
And then Kindle, which means Amazon knows the exact emotional impact of every sentence you read in the book.
00:27:11
You read a sentence, what happened to your blood pressure?
00:27:14
This is the kind of information that Amazon could have.
00:27:18
It cannot only recommend books to you.
00:27:21
It can do far more spectacular and frightening things, like recommend to you what to study, or whom to date, or whom to vote for on election.
00:27:32
In order for authority to shift from you to the Amazon algorithm, the Amazon algorithm will not have to be perfect.
00:27:43
It will just have to be better than the average human, which is not so very difficult.
00:27:49
The sixth lesson that I teach is provisional self-esteem.
00:27:55
If you've ever tried to wrestle in the lying kids whose parents have convinced them to believe they'll be loved in spite of anything,
00:28:04
you know how impossible it is to make self-confident spirits conform.
00:28:10
Our world wouldn't survive a flood of confident people very long, so I teach that a kid's self-respect should depend on expert opinion.
00:28:21
My kids are constantly evaluated and judged.
00:28:24
A monthly report, impressive in its provision, is sent into a student's home to elicit approval or mark exactly,
00:28:33
down to a single percentage point how dissatisfied with the child a parent should be.
00:28:40
And with that, he says although some people might be surprised how little time or reflection goes into making up these mathematical records,
00:28:49
self-evaluation, the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet is never considered a factor.
00:28:59
The lesson of report cards, grades and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents,
00:29:06
but should instead rely on the evaluation of certified officials.
00:29:11
People need to be told what they are worth.
00:29:15
That reminds me of a talk that I had in the story that I shared with Chris and he was talking about in school.
00:29:22
He was passing with flying colors.
00:29:24
There was one teacher for whatever reason decided to give him a failing grade.
00:29:29
And for the life of him, he said I was doing everything that I needed to do, but for reasons unknown, he decided to give him a failing grade.
00:29:38
And how that really messed with him, his self-esteem, that really messed with his confidence, his self-worth, and you know, he was down on himself on account of it.
00:29:46
I get my progress report from every single teacher, math, for the first time ever, B, science, A, history, A.
00:29:54
All my classes, A's and B's, I get to English, I'm not sweating, I'm not fretting, I'm walking in, proud like a peacock.
00:30:04
She hands me my progress report. I looked at their progress report and I had a 30 out of 100.
00:30:13
You failed miserably.
00:30:14
Yeah, yeah. I walked up to the teacher and meeting him, like something is terribly wrong.
00:30:19
You know, I'm looking at the progress report as I'm telling her this and I'm like, there are zeros in places that shouldn't even have zeros.
00:30:27
Like here's a zero for a quiz right here.
00:30:29
Like how do you get a zero for a quiz when everybody does it? She had a plethora of students like complaining about her.
00:30:39
Reading that right now brought that to mind when he was sharing some of his experience with it.
00:30:44
So that's the sixth lesson. Now let's get into the seventh.
00:30:48
The seventh lesson I teach is that one can't hide.
00:30:54
I teach students that they are always watched, that each is under constant surveillance by me and my colleagues.
00:31:02
There are no private spaces for children. There is no private time.
00:31:08
And he also says I assign a type of extended schooling called homework so that the effect of surveillance, if not the surveillance itself, travels into private households where students might otherwise use free time to learn something
00:31:23
unauthorized from a father or mother, surveillance is an ancient imperative espoused by certain influential thinkers.
00:31:32
A central prescription set down in the Republic, the City of God, the Institutes of Christian Religion, New Atlantis, Leviton, all the childless men who wrote these books discovered the same thing.
00:31:47
Children must be closely watched if you want to keep a society under tight central control.
00:31:55
And now some, after hearing that, might think his stance was extreme. Others might agree with what he had to say.
00:32:02
I'll leave it up for you to decide.
00:32:04
At the very end of this chapter he talks about institutional schooling is a business.
00:32:11
He raises solutions talking about some form of free market system in public schooling is the likeliest place to look for answers.
00:32:19
A free market where family schools and small entrepreneurial schools and religious schools and craft schools and farm schools exist and profusion to compete with government education.
00:32:32
He said these options exist now in miniature. Wonderful survival is of a strong and vigorous past, but they are available only to the resourceful, the courageous, the lucky or the rich.
00:32:45
And he says that the near impossibility of one of these better roads opening for the shattered families of the poor or for the bewildered host camped on the fringes of the urban middle class suggests that the disaster of seven lesson schools
00:33:01
is going to grow unless we do something bold and decisive with the mess of government monopoly schooling.
00:33:10
In closing this chapter, he writes 30 years ago, these lessons could still be learned in the time left after school.
00:33:20
Talking about self motivation, perseverance, self reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home and community life.
00:33:33
He says 30 years ago, these lessons could be learned in the time left after school.
00:33:39
But television has eaten up most of that time in a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two income or single parent families has swallowed up most of what used to be family time as well.
00:33:54
A future is rushing down upon our culture that will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non material experience, a future that would depend as the price of survival that we follow a path of natural life that is economical and material costs.
00:34:12
These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are.
00:34:16
School is a 12 year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
00:34:23
I teach school and I win awards doing it. I should know.
00:34:29
We've turned our children into parasites. That's an ugly word, but it's absolutely true by reserving them into school rooms and having them think that they have nothing to give back to the world at all for 18 years.
00:34:45
Volunteer service teaches you not to be a parasite. It gives you hands on experience with compassion.
00:34:54
It also gives you something that kids can't get any other way. Most kids can't get any other way. It gives you real responsibility. To do your homework is a fake responsibility.
00:35:06
I like that he teaches us useful things and not just writing notes on the board that just copy it.
00:35:15
If you guys took around this long, thank you for hanging out. I'd be happy to hear your feedback, your thoughts. Some may think it's extreme, others may think right on.
00:35:29
Let's start looking at alternatives. Let's start getting involved in the education, the health and the growth of our children because that is the future.
00:35:41
And again, also an open invitation to anybody that is interested in talking about their experience with homeschooling, being homeschooled, or doing the homeschooling, being involved in it.
00:35:55
I'd be happy to connect. So yeah, thank you for hanging around before I go.
00:36:00
If you would like to be a part of the show and share your story or even a story of someone in your life that has impacted you in a positive way, you can always reach out to me via email.
00:36:16
I'd be happy to connect. Until next time, in very soon. Peace.
00:36:46
Thank you.