Speaking Out About the Tight Collar of Curriculum

The idea that knowledge can be divided into subjects and neatly sewn together through curricula that children must pass tests on before moving to the next bit of subject matter is deeply challenged by unschoolers, who do not use any curricula at all or, if they do, use it in scopes and sequences that are not done in schools. Of course, the curricular arrangement of life and knowledge by school was challenged well before unschoolers came on to the scene in the late seventies, but it was usually done by alternative educators in schools, not by parents in their communities.

The notion of keeping children busy with fragmented bits of subject matter fed to them by professional teachers is powerful and unlikely to change during the tenure of our current education establishment. “Look how much the kids are learning!” is easier for adults to support than “Look how much the kids are playing,” even though what is learned through play can be equal to, or more powerful, than what is learned in a classroom. There are many institutions and industries that are propped up through the power of compulsory attendance laws and their hold is tight; they don’t want to lose their grip for any number of reasons, so experimentation with different models, time frames, and ideas is carefully conscripted to fit the existing curricular model. The fact that colleges have seen this problem themselves and haven’t addressed it in a meaningful manner is long-standing, too, as Marion Brady, a school curriculum critic, notes in a recent article in the Washington Post:

I don’t want to do away with school subjects. I want to put them in context and show how they fit together to form a mutually supportive, interconnected whole. Kids do that for themselves (and more) until about third or fourth grade. That’s when the core curriculum starts to really kick in. From then on, schooling is more and more about remembering canned answers to questions which traditionally schooled specialists think they should ask.

 I’m addressing a long-recognized problem:

The Association of American Colleges: “We do not believe that the road to a coherent education can be constructed from a set of required subjects or academic disciplines.” Project On Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees, 1985)

Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching: “The disciplines have fragmented themselves into smaller and smaller pieces, and undergraduates find it difficult to see patterns in their courses and relate what they learn to life.” Prologue to “College: The Undergraduate Experience In America,” November 1986

Letting children learn in an interdisciplinary, unforced manner, as they did from the moment they were born, is something education leaders not only do not trust, but do not believe in. They believe you must lead a horse to water and force it to drink. But, as unschoolers and teachers like Marion Brady testify, it does not have to be this way.

John Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction Speech

John Gatto had a stroke several months ago that left him paralyzed on one side of his body. He doesn’t want any more flowers and cards, but he does want prayers and love sent his way. To encourage those healing feelings I asked John for permission to make public his speech, Weapons of Mass Instruction, that he delivered at my Learning In Our Own Way conference in 2005. He said “Yes!’ before I could finish my sentence.

For someone struggling with physical disability and all the woes that come with that, I was amazed at how clearly and strongly John spoke about what is happening in schools today. Though confined to bed, the strength of his thoughts overcame his rigid body and we spoke for nearly two hours. John is a fighter, as this speech will show you, and the fighting spirit he displayed to me in the nursing facility was inspiring, as I hope you find this talk to be, too.

How School Colonizes Minds and Cultures

John Holt was deeply influenced by Ivan Illich and as I study both I am deeply struck by their vision of what education had become by the early 1970s and where they thought it was likely to go given its trajectory. Sadly, their worst predictions about schooling have come true, and the loopholes that allow individuals to learn and grow outside of institutionalized education are being closed in some countries and tightened in others in order to ensure that everyone receives the same professional treatment from school.

I’m also struck by how few homeschoolers, unschoolers, and alternative educators seem to grasp the insidious concept behind the seemingly innocuous statement that so horrified Holt and Illich, “The world is my classroom.” Indeed, I’ve seen tee shirts and homeschooling/unschooling books and articles that make this proclamation verbatim. As Holt wrote in his 1976 book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (reprinted in 2004 by Sentient Publishing):

I understand now, as I did not understand at all at first, why Illich reacted with such horror when I suggested that we should push the walls of the school building out further and further. This seemed to me a perfectly good metaphorical way to describe what I wanted to do in abolishing the distinction between learning and the rest of life. Only later did I see the danger that he saw almost immediately. Think again about the global schoolhouse, madhouse, prison. What are madhouses and prisons? They are compulsory treatment insitutions. They are places in which one group of people, A, do things to another group of people,B, without consent because still a third group, C, has decided that this is the right thing to do. Prisons, at least those dedicated to some notion of rehabilitation, which by the way a recent study shows that most prisoners hate and fear, are places in which one group says to another, “We are going to keep control of your life, keep on doing things to you until we think you measure up.” In the same way the doctors in the mental hospital say to the patients, “We are going to treat you, keep doing things to you until we think that you measure up, i.e., have recovered, are ‘sane’.” From here we see that school is exactly this kind of compulsory treatment institution. Society has decided that one group of people, the educators, shall be entitled to treat, to do all sorts of things to another group of people, the students, whether they want it or not, until the educators think that the students measure up, are ready to go out into the world and live. At no point is the student allowed to say, that’s enough. It’s for the educator to decide what’s enough.

And so a global schoolhouse would be a world in which certain people would have a constant and unlimited right to subject the rest of us to various sorts of tests, and if we did not measure up, to require that we submit ourselves to various sorts of treatment until we did. Seen in this light it is indeed a most horrifying prospect.

Illich, a priest, viewed the situation in a similar way but with a different lens:

Arnold Toynbee has pointed out that the decadence of a great culture is usually accompanied by the rise of a new World Church which extends hope to the domestic proletariat while serving the needs of a new warrior class. School seems eminently suited to be the World Church of our decaying culture . . .

. . . School serves as an effective creator and sustainer of social myth because of its structure as a ritual of graded promotions. Introduction into this gambling ritual is much more important than what or how something is taught. It is the game itself that schools, that gets into the blood and becomes a habit. A whole society is initiated into the Myth of Unending Consumption of services. This happens to the degree that token participation in the open-ended ritual is made compulsory and compulsive everywhere. School directs ritual rivalry into an international game which obliges competitors to blame the world’s ills on those who cannot or will not play. (From Deschooling: A Reader, edited by Ian Lister.)

Last year I heard of a movie, Schooling the World, that deals with these issues from today’s point of view but I had not seen it nor did I know much about it. This month my friends at the CooperativeCatalyst.org posted this excellent essay, Occupy Your Brain by Carol Black, about the colonizing effects of mass education and the global schoolhouse and I learned that she is the creator of the movie and website, Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden. Here is some of what she wrote:

Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.  Family and community are sidelined, their knowledge now seen as inferior to the school curriculum.  The teacher has control over the child, the school district has control over the teacher, the state has control over the district, and increasingly, systems of national standards and funding create national control over states. In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education—in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.

The problem with this scenario should be obvious: who gets to decide what the world’s children will learn?  Who decides how and when and where they will learn it?  Who controls what’s on the test, or when it will be given, or how its results will be used?  And just as important, who decides what children will not learn?  The hierarchies of educational authority are theoretically justified by the superior “expertise” of those at the top of the institutional pyramid, which qualifies them to dictate these things to the rest of us.  But who gets to choose the experts?  And crucially, who profits from it?

I urge you to read this essay in its entirety and to consider arranging a showing of the film as a way to encourage people to challenge the idea that compulsory education is innately good and vital for all communities.

UPDATE:

In one of those great moments of synchronicity, I just learned that the film will have a free public screening at Harvard University on April 11 as part of a film series at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, from 5—7PM at Askwith Hall, 13 Appian Way, to be followed by a discussion with its director, Carol Black. If you're in the neighborhood, come and watch it with me!

Never Judge Someone Based on Their Schooling

Grant Colfax, the homeschooler who made headlines in the eighties by getting accepted into Harvard and going into medical research, has now made headlines today as an adult. The San Francisco Gate reports:

President Obama on Wednesday appointed Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco's top HIV public health administrator, to head the Office of National AIDS Policy.

Grant spent much of his youth on a dairy goat farm in Northern California, helping his parents make the farm work and following his interests, such as searching for Indian arrowheads. Micki and David gave the keynote speech, How Children Learn from Everyday Life and Work, at the Growing Without Schooling 20th anniversary conference and I wrote about it on the HoltGWS site; here is an excerpt:

"Micki analyzes how education became separated from work—indeed how education demeans most work—and cites many historic examples to support her points. She then takes issue with descriptions of her family's unschooling as a sort of "physical work program" that was imposed on her family. She notes, "Work is not construed as a means to, but an end in and of itself, as we and our children are shaped by the work we do." She discusses Illich's Deschooling Society and Holt's work and how "we do not need to make special arrangements for learning."

Then Micki talks about how play is the work of children and how it isn't necessary to seek work for children in order to fill up their days. She further explores the nature of work as an ordeal and the types of work her children did as youngsters and teenagers. Micki wraps up her talk by describing how none of the activities, work, and play that her children did could easily predict what they would be or do as adults. For instance, she and David long felt Grant would be an archaeologist, but he became a doctor and medical researcher."

In today's conventional media I detect a backlash against self-directed learning, against learning outside of school, and against parents and teachers who support change that does more than alter curricula in schools. This zero-tolerance policy towards change agents who are not in agreement with school dogma can be stifling, if not depressing at times, so it is most refreshing to see one of the tenets of unschooling/homeschooling—that you can't predict what the future holds for anyone based on their performance or nonparticipation in school—publicly verified again.

There are many ways to learn and grow, many paths to successful careers, and we need to keep expanding, and creating, these paths instead of letting educationists block access to them. Grant's continued success is his own, not homeschooling's, but his example and contribution to society is another piece of evidence that homeschooling and unschooling do not necessarily make children anti-social, parent-dependent dolts ("My momma said I don't have to do no book learnin'" is the punch line I heard one comedian knock homeschooling with recently), nor does homeschooling make them nonparticipants in the civic arena.

Student Liberation and Childism

I recently learned about this site created by a student, Student Liberation. It is clear, simple, and direct in its stated purpose: "Getting students out of schools and schools out of students."

I especially like its selection of anti-school articles as they cover a wide range of perspectives about schooling—Barbara Ehrenreich, Alfie Kohn, Peter Gray, John Holt, Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman, etc.—yet they all come together in support of learners being active participants in their learning.

Along these same lines, here is another writer on the side of children getting involved in The War on Kids:

 Are you a childist?

The word is difficult to say, much less get your mind around. Yet Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst and biographer who died this past December, felt strongly that it should become an active part of the American lexicon. Indeed, in her recently published book, Childism: Confronting Prejudice Against Children, she argues that childism — which she defines as prejudice against children — is, and has long been, rife in our society.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2012/03/02/does-america-hate-children/?xid=gonewsedit#ixzz1odeZOn5z

I can’t wait to read this book!