Jan. 2, 2009 -
I just read a very good article on MotherJoy's Blog, from the Harvard Crimson. I had to post a part of the article and link on my site for those who check in w/ me. It's not written by a homeschooler or those who even support our movement but it's very interesting!
Abolishing High School
Decline and Fall By ROSS G. DOUTHAT
"What we really need to do is to get rid of high school.
Oh, I'm perfectly aware that we never will. The idea of high school is, alas, so deeply embedded in American life that it would take some sort of natural disaster to uproot it.
Still, it would nice if we recognized that there is something bizarrely ill-fashioned about the way we go about "educating" our adolescent population. The teenage years are a critical period of transition, when "children" are transformed into "adults," with all the privileges and responsibilities of age. Teenagers are dangerous--they have adult desires and passions, but without the experience necessary to handle their new-found inner turmoil. In a word, they need to be socialized.
Of course, this is exactly what high school sets out to do. But high school socializes adolescents by forcing them to spend all their time, not with adults who offer examples of maturity, but with other adolescents. The only adults in grades 9-12 are teachers, whose role as disciplinarians casts them as adversaries rather than as role models. Few high school students set out to emulate their instructors--instead, they set about emulating their peers....But it's so important for kids to spend time with their peers, the objectors will bleat. Well, yes, time with one's peers is great--but must it be every day, from eight till five and beyond? Surely this is arrant nonsense. Adolescents are messed-up, confused, insecure human beings, each buckling under an individual, angst-ridden burden. Why on earth would it be good for them to spend all of their time with other angst-ridden, insecure, unhappy types?
In a saner world, they would be forced to live with, and as, adults for large chunks of time--making it more likely that they would actually become adults. Such a world would encourage home-schooling, for instance, by easing the economic burden for parents who choose to stay home and teach. It would offer a more flexible, decentralized system of education, balancing classroom time with, say, vocational training and programs allowing kids to work under and alongside adults in local workplaces. It would be a world where adolescents were integrated into society, not ghettoized in the local high school. "
To read the entire article http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=103526
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