Well, a lot of people had very strong opinions last week – and no one prevented them from being heard. Isn't that great?

I’d like to share some of my own experiences from my school years this week, but first I’d like to address a few things that some of our passionately pro-public schools friends had to say.

It’s tempting to address at length all the little irrelevant items – complaints about grammar (it’s a blog, folks; teacher blogs are rife with all the same mistakes, as are most blogs) and outrage over willingly subjugated wives (hang around in homeschool circles a while – you’ll not meet more empowered women), but there are other fish to fry.

Someone made the point (and someone else found it an apt analogy) that while there are atrocious teachers, there are also atrocious clergymen, firemen, grocery store checkers and neighbors. And surely there are, but they are not people who are empowered by the state to shape the minds, emotions and morals of children. Furthermore, while it is quite easy to walk away from all the other atrocious people, it’s not so easy to bypass atrocious teachers. Some parents have even faced court action when they’ve tried to save their children from abusive or dysfunctional school situations.

But this isn’t just about teachers. It’s about institutionalization, which tends to bring out the worst in many, many people – teachers, students, and parents. Whether the institution is a school or a prison or a mental health facility or some other facility, it tends to be an incubator of the worst side of human nature.

Healthy institutions are possible – just not very common. Where free individuals join together for a common cause and work constantly to make sure their institution is true to that cause, it can work (an example is the school I attended in seventh grade, referenced below).

Public schools are not healthy institutions. They lack the essential of being founded and run by free people. They lack the essentials of accountability (all rhetoric to the contrary, including the rhetoric of NCLB), and the common core values that would help immunize them against an endless supply of social and education fads. And they lack foundational principles of morality.

Now, I’ll say it one more time – there are some good teachers and other good people who work in public schools, but that does not make the schools are good places for children. It only means that some children will enjoy a reprieve from the worst of it all during their school tenure. A few children will luck out and get many good teachers. Fewer still will experience a school that breaks the mold and is something close to a healthy institution. I’ve talked with thousands of people over the years, and I’ve encountered fewer than I can count on both hands who could show that their children’s public schools were healthy places – intellectually, morally, emotionally and spiritually – for their children to be growing up in. Not many can say it of their children’s private schools either, unfortunately.

Since I was originally charged with the job of writing about my experiences talking to desperate public school parents and students who were investigating other options, I’ll sort of get back to the topic.

I want to talk about my own schools years. I would have chosen homeschooling if I had known about it, and I think my parents would have, too.

I attended seven different schools growing up, including one suburban top-rated school, several rural schools and two private schools – one small and rural, one inner-city.

My first experience with a really good teacher was second and third grade. This lady, Mrs. K, alternated between those two grades so she could work with the same group of children for two years. The year before I started second grade, my school system did away with phonics and embraced the look-say method of teaching reading. Mrs. K refused to cooperate, so they let her keep her old-fashioned methods and labeled her class experimental. Thank goodness I got her for two years.

My first experience with a poor teacher was fourth grade. She was generally unpleasant, unkind and mind-numbingly boring, and all the 10-year-olds in her class were afraid of her.

In fifth grade I had a fun-loving teacher with a temper to match. He got angry easily and usually responded by throwing things at students, including books, if nothing else was handy. A book once missed my head by only inches (though it was not thrown at me). Most of the time he threw chalk and erasers, which students often hid from him. He dealt with one difficult student by moving his desk into a corner and blocking him in with a piano.

Second half of sixth grade (we moved halfway through the year): This year’s teacher was truly cruel. I’ll share the incident that upset me most that half-year. There was a very poor boy in our class. His hair was always a mess and his clothes in disrepair. He was a poor student, too. One day, after the boy had failed yet another spelling test, the teacher posted his test on the hallway bulletin board, then made the boy go around to the other sixth grade rooms and invite them to come look at the test. They all came, along with their teachers, and stood around laughing and making fun of this poor boy who had been ordered to stand next to his test. I was so outraged I was shaking and near tears. I told my parents about it that night, fully expecting that they would march to the school and do something. They didn’t. They were intimidated by the system, too. Thinking about this incident all these years later still enrages me.

In seventh grade, I attended a tiny private school – only 60 students in K-7, two grades to each teacher. It was a wonderful school where everyone seemed like family.

Eighth grade is another year that brings back many heartbreaking memories – mostly regarding students, but not entirely. There was one teacher – my English teacher – who was obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe. We read Poe and watched Poe movies all year long. The Telltale Heart was the source of many nightmares for me (just for the record, I love Poe’s poetry, which we hardly touched on that year).

The real nightmare that year was how so many students treated one another. I recall the Jehovah’s Witness girl who was the brunt of daily mockery because she wouldn’t salute the flag. Then there was the girl with very large feet – cause for endless torment from her fellow students. And there were the twins with a disorder that caused them to hold themselves in very rigid positions and to blink their eyes constantly – they clung to one another constantly and would not talk to anyone in an effort to protect themselves from the incessant mockery. And there was the chubby girl who couldn’t walk down a hall without being called names. And the special ed students who faced a daily onslaught of torment, including name-calling and having their books knocked from their hands. I could go on and on. Every lunch hour and most times between classes you could witness some student being mocked or harassed (were they the ones who grew up most prepared for the “real world”?).

In ninth grade, we were treated to a new school with “open classrooms.” Sixty or more students would meet in one giant room where a teacher would give some brief instruction and an assignment. Small rooms shot off the large rooms. Supposedly students could go to one of these rooms for help if they needed it. But there were never any teachers there. They abandoned both the small and large rooms after giving out the assignments, and we were left to ourselves. Often a film (usually a documentary) was put in. You can imagine how much work got done – very little.

Ninth grade was also the year of the guidance counselor for me – I was sent there often. Why? Well, I guess I didn’t quite conform. I wore long skirts (called maxi skirts in the 70s), which was okay – but it wasn’t okay to go barefoot under them. It was a counseling-level offense to sneak kittens into school. It wasn’t okay to wear your jacket in school (and it wasn’t a security issue then). It was dysfunctional to be too modest to shower with fellow students. It was not okay to prefer standing to sitting in the counselor’s office. And it wasn’t okay to add options to multiple choice tests or to (even respectfully) question a teacher’s decision about a grade or to refuse to learn Zen meditation techniques or to do new math the old way.

It was at this new school that I routinely saw male teachers walking down halls with their arms draped over the shoulders of female students – usually cheerleaders. There was also the usual routine of students who were “different” being mocked and made generally miserable by other students while teachers either didn’t notice or looked the other way.

I had a friend (recently passed away) who told me she was one of the mockers when she was in school – part of a group of very popular girls who actually plotted how they would make the lives of less popular girls miserable. Looking back from her adult self, my friend was appalled at the person she was as a teenager and deeply angry that no adult ever stepped in to set her straight and to protect other students from her cruelty.

In tenth grade, I attended a private school in an inner city. We wore uniforms and boys were required to open doors for girls. On the surface, everything was all order and politeness. There were almost no discipline problems in the school even though about half the student body belonged to gangs outside school. But the immorality that went on in the hallways and restrooms and sometimes under the tables in classrooms was rampant. Did the teachers see it? I don’t know; if they did, it didn’t make any difference.

And so on.

So, this is one person’s experience with seven schools. I did have a handful of good teachers. Besides Mrs. K and my seventh grade teacher, there was a sixth grade music teacher and another in ninth, and a good art teacher in eighth. The rest were probably average, I suppose -- I wasn’t paying much attention, to tell you the truth. I resorted to doodling and hiding real books within textbooks to stave off the boredom that nearly drove me mad.

The default mode of most students in institutional school settings is self-preservation. You are under constant scrutiny by teachers, counselors and other students, constantly in danger of being failed, labeled, ostracized, mocked, and in many schools, physically hurt. The defense mechanism of choice for many students is “be a hurter, not a hurtee.” Others turn to a wide variety of self-preservation techniques. The system fosters insecurity and poor self-image while at the same time it inculcates self-absorption.

The psychiatric industry for both children and adults is thriving. Books, seminars, TV programs, pshychiatrists and counselors specialize in how to have healthy relationships with others. Prisons overflow with people who couldn’t resolve conflict peaceably and others who couldn’t deal with life without drugs.

We do not live in a socially/mentally healthy age, and state schools – the very people who claim to be the guardians of our social progress, the people who demand we turn over our children and who then monopolize the larger portion of their development – must certainly accept a significant share of the responsibility for this and stop trying to pass the buck.

The good news is that parents can still salvage their children and more and more are doing it.

More next week, because too many parents and children are afraid to air the truth, so someone must tell some of it for them.

Tammy Drennan has homeschooled and helped others start homeschooling for 23 years. Her web sites and blogs include: www.homeschoolstarter.com and www.educationconversation.wordpress.com.

You can read ALL the comments originally left for this post over at Home Where They Belong.