School Readiness

Remember the Ten Ways For Schools To Confuse a Child? Well, I'm pretty sure someone from the federal government read it and took my suggestions seriously. Because they are planning on taking one of the items on the list and running with it. Here it is:

Does Anyone Care About the Kids?

The Institute of Education Sciences has approved a $1.6 million study of the effects of stress on education. This is great! Right?! We will see how stressful the school environment is on the kids, and maybe some drastic changes will finally be made!

Oh wait... no, nevermind. The study is not about the kids.

Ten Ways For Schools To Confuse a Child

In case parents don't do enough to sufficiently confuse their children, teachers and school administrators can do their parts as well. We can all work together to make sure no child is left thinking the world makes sense.

Each of these items is worth ten points, with a few extra credit opportunities:

1. Punish him for something that is completely beyond his control, like being late for school because of traffic or because his mother overslept.
2. Make a really big deal about how important it is for kids to get physical activity, and then force him to sit still for 95% of the school day. *extra credit for giving excessive homework, leading to more forced sitting: 1 point for each hour

Have a Parenting Question? Ask Your Child!

In my last post, Mom To the Rescue!, I mentioned a presentation I attended. The presentation was called Choosing the Right High School For Your Child. I only went because one of the presenters was Madeline Levine, who wrote The Price of Privilege and was featured in the documentary Race to Nowhere.

I thought overall Levine was pretty good. She talked about things children need like unconditional love, acceptance, and hands-on learning. I was happy to see parents around the room taking notes, writing down the words "unconditional love," in hopes that the act of writing it down would help the concept to sink in.

The rest of it was not so good. Even just the title and premise of the event did not sit right with me. It would have felt better to me if the title were Choosing the Right High School WITH Your Child, or if any of the parents who attended had brought along the person who would be attending said chosen high school (there was not one child in the audience).

Boarding school was on the list of topics covered. I don't know if that is even "a thing" anywhere else in the world besides here in New England, but apparently it is a big thing here. There was a lot of talk about why boarding school is so great and how to choose among the wonderful options.

One presenter, headmaster of a boarding school, kept saying that choosing a high school for your child is "THE most important parenting decision you will EVER make." Um, ok.

But it was a question from a father in the audience that really got me riled up. He asked the panel, "How do I know which one is better for my child- boarding school or day school?" It was at this point I wanted to jump up out of my seat and grab the microphone and say (shout):

You Might Be Going To the Wrong Dinner Parties

It's another common criticism of unschooling. A worry about raising a child without a curriculum:

Won't your child feel stupid later in life when he goes to a dinner party and doesn't know what people are talking about?

Make Sure They Learn the Right Things

When talking about unschooling with people who are new to the idea, there is another question that usually follows Aren't there things everyone needs to know? It goes like this:

How will you make sure your kids learn the right things?

The short answer is: I can't. I will explain. But first let's talk about school.

Things Everyone Needs To Know

One of the common questions about unschooling and its lack of curriculum:

Aren't there things everyone needs to know?

I'm not sure about that. When pressed to answer their own question, most people say things like "basic math" or "how to read" and then have trouble thinking of much else. Even if I conceded that these two things were absolutely necessary for every person to know, that would hardly justify me sending my kids to school, as schools try to teach a whole lot more than just those things.

TESTS, Part II: Failing is not Fun

In my last post, I explained that one thing tests teach you as a student is that you are on your own. This is terrible enough in itself, as it puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on you for no reason, since these kinds of tests rarely pop up in the adult world. But there is another thing that tests might teach you: that there is something terribly wrong with you if you don't do well on them.

The problem is that all through school, many of the tests given in each subject are basically testing the same things over and over again. Memorizing facts or formulas you probably don't care about, for a short period of time. Or writing coherent and well-formed essays about things you probably don't care about, in 45 minutes or less. Or not getting tricked by questions that were specifically designed to trick you.

So how many tests do you have to take before it's pretty obvious how good or bad you are at these things? I wouldn't be surprised if most students who regularly do poorly on tests know when they are going to fail before they even get to school on test days. I think I can understand a little bit how these kids might feel, because there was one kind of test given twice a year in middle school that was a huge problem for me.

Teaching Everyone Some Terrible Stuff (TESTS), Part I

If you are required to take one test or quiz every week of your school life, you could end up taking roughly 400 of them in twelve years. And you will be required to complete all 400 of these school tests all by yourself. You have to know or correctly guess sixty-five percent of the answers at the time of the test to be considered passing. What will these kinds of tests teach you? Something Terrible: that it is really important to know all the answers. That you are a failure if you don't remember or don't understand or never learned something. How will this prepare you for life after school?

Reforming Reform

A train has advantages over other types of vehicles. It is a highly efficient, consistent, and relatively cheap way to get a lot of people to the same place at the same time. If schooling is like riding a train, as I described in my last post, then schooling is an efficient way to make sure that all students will "get to the same place," educationally, riding on the same tracks at the same pace, right?

Most top-down education reform plans take for granted that the "train model' of schooling is inherently all right. They assume that tweaking the current system will be enough to fix it. The plans usually include at least one form of each of the following points:

All A-bored

It's like someone hands you a train schedule when you are five years old, and it shows the plan for every day of the next thirteen to seventeen years of your life. The stops are laid out, the timetable is set.

There is only one set of tracks for your school train. The same for everyone. They tell you this is the only way to get between stops, where you are tested to make sure the train is on schedule. Sometimes you might see a shortcut to the next stop, or a nice sidewalk or winding wooded path running along the tracks. You say "Look, that path goes to the same place we are going anyway. Can I use it instead for a bit?" They say that's not the right way. You have to get there the same way as everyone else, at the same time.