"They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around."

Boredom.  I wrote about that last time.  I want to talk about boredom in our government schools just a bit more.  I want to share an article written by a hero of mine - John Taylor Gatto.  He wrote this article in 2003, about boredom in our nation's schools.

Please, help yourself to this excerpt.  He says everything much better than any of my feeble attempts:

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

 

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

Everytime politics come into play, so does the teachers' union.  "More money please!" is the cry.  I can see the man behind the curtain quite clearly, thank you very much.  How do I know we don't need school to get an education?  I've seen it happen in my home.  I've seen a curiosity about life, a love for learning, an interest in many things, and an opportunity to focus on their own particular gifting(s) and become excellent at it (them).  Home where they belong, they are not moving like cattle from class to class, and bringing home three hours of homework to further hold them hostage - separated from family, and "doing something real," as the quote at the top of the page states. 

Please do read the rest of John Taylor Gatto's excellent article.  And if you haven't yet, bring your children home.  I've been homeschooling for 20 years, and no regrets - not one.  Yet I do regret my years in public school, and the years that I did put a few of my children in public school.  Bring them home where they belong - where true education can take place.

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