It's Time to Homeschool College

For decades I've been carrying a message from John Holt that has really come home to roost now that my children are college age: Our oldest has graduated college; our middle child hated college, left, and is working instead; our youngest starts college this fall. Plus I've been advising and consulting parents about how to get their nontraditionally educated children into college since the eighties. A popular speech of mine that we turned into booklet in the early nineties was titled: "Teenage Homeschoolers: College or Not?" wherein I argued against going to college just because you are 18 and can do so. I argued there must be better reasons for going than "because I can." But the message of John's that echoes more today than ever for me is this: college is among the chief enslaving institutions of America.

When Holt said this I believe he was thinking about graduates who spent time and money on degrees to work in fields they no longer enjoy but are now trapped by their mortgages and loans into staying. Now this critique is gaining traction outside the circle of alternative schooling, probably because the cost of higher education is so out of alignment with its benefits. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom is we must send our kids to college so they can make more  money than high school graduates do. James Altucher, a Wall Street Journal writer, claims: "in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now." Here are two of the seven reasons not to go to college that Altucher makes that take the money argument on directly:

3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on).

4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case.

There are other good reasons not to go to college that he presents and I recommend reading the full article.

Anti-creativity Checklist

Though intended as a critique of business practices, I think with little effort one can substitute "education" for "business" and see the parallels. It is also important to remember that very often we shut-down creativity in our homes by resorting to these knee-jerk responses to different ideas about how we can do things. I hope the next time something different and unusual crops up in your life that this 14-point checklist will come to mind and make you think about it more seriously.

My Anti-Creativity Checklist from Youngme Moon on Vimeo.

Homeschooling's Liberal Judge and Other Piece's of Interest

The news in the Boston Globe was interesting:

Margaret H. Marshall, the first woman chief justice of the state’s highest court and the author of the landmark 2003 decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, announced yesterday that she will retire this fall to spend more time with her ailing husband...

But it was an email from a friend about Justice Marshall that made me smile at the complex relations we have as we learn and grow in America. My friend noted that Justice Marshall isn't just the Massachusetts "gay marriage" judge, she's also the Massachusetts "you-can't-do-home-visits-to-homeschooling-families" judge! It is a poignant reminder that no one political party has a monopoly on protecting the rights of homeschoolers, and that friends and allies of freedom can be found everywhere.

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The Indian Express wrote an article about how the "teach 'em and test 'em" methods of Indian schooling are burning their students out and creating a new class of students, "school leavers," and "gappers." Now homeschooling, gap years, and alternative schools are finding more interest and support from Indian parents. Shikshantar: The Peoples' Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, is featured in this article.

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Seth Godin has a great blog entry about the coming demise of higher education. Though predicted decades earlier in work by Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and John Holt, among others, the commodification of degrees has become as out of control as the commodification of health care (which Illich also addressed in the seventies in his book Medical Nemesis). In a nutshell, turning education and health into products that must be administered more and more by licensed professionals leads to a cost-spiral that creates further classes and divisions in our society.

Innovative Instruments: The Vegetable Orchestra

Years ago in the John Holt Book and Music Store we sold a video about how kids can make homemade instruments using everyday items from around the house. One was a recorder made from a cucumber, something we tried at home with our girls to mixed results. I know that the skills and thinking it takes to make a musical instrument from an object not normally associated with music are certainly "educational" and fun, but I never thought of them as being socially important too, until I was introduced to The Vegetable Orchestra.

Not only do they create unique soundscapes from fresh vegetables (as you can see in the video below), they create a social bond, a musical group, and a unique awareness of the value and utility of food. Founded in 1998 and based in Vienna, Austria, The Vegetable Orchestra creates new sounds and instruments from their daily trips to the market. The group writes in their FAQ:

What do you do with the vegetables when you're done with them?

Part of the vegetables which are left over after preparing the instruments go into the vegetable soup which is served to the audience after the concert.
Part of the instruments and other remaining vegetables we give to the audience after the concert and another part goes into the organic waste. 

This is, to me, a great example of thinking outside the box that we see children do naturally, such as pretending a piece of celery is a flute, and that adults, when they put their minds to it is as these folks do, can take to a whole new level of fun and exploration. Homeschoolers have probably encountered impromptu vegetable concerts, accompanied by pots and pans percussion, in their homes already, but here's a more organized way to approach the music. Perhaps cash-strapped school districts can form their own Vegetable Orchestras, combining nutritional, agricultural and musical studies into an interdisciplinary stew?

Valedictorian Says Goodbye to Standardized Schooling

A month ago I spoke at the AERO conference in Albany, NY and I spent some of my time with my friend John Gatto. It is always stimulating to hear John's thoughts however, despite John's fame and following, I often get the feeling at events like this that we're preaching to the choir and that those who are in a position to make, or at least serioiusly support, the changes being presented at alternative education events never attend or simply dismiss such educators as nuisance outliers. For instance, I met a superintendent from Michigan who not only sponsored a talk by Gatto at his school, but tried to implement some of John's ideas in his district. The superintendent nearly lost his job in the ensuing brouhaha, as Gatto's comments and ideas upset more parents, teachers and administrators than excited them about making changes to their school.

So I was pretty amazed to read the following in a high school valedictory speech, given by Erica Goldson at the Coxsackie-Athens High School (NY) graduation ceremony. Ms. Goldson is clearly influenced by the work of Gatto and other education outliers, giving me hope that the message of self-determination and social consciousness that is embedded in those writings are actually being heard beyond the small alternative schooling community. As John Holt noted in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine (August, 1977): "We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it without much coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that... This does not trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing." Ms. Goldson provides evidence that our numbers are slowly growing beyond our homeschooling/alternative schooling enclaves. Here is an excerpt from her speech that I hope you'll enjoy.

 Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.

John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts, "We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that." Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.
H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that "the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States." (Gatto)