What Do Teaching, Learning, and the Death Penalty Have in Common?

The answer is: Susannah Sheffer.

Susannah is my friend and colleague who edited Growing Without Schooling magazine for 16 years and she has a new website that brings her beautiful and diverse writing together in one place.

Of particular note to homeschoolers is this page, where Susannah’s work with GWS, adolescent girls, North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, and her insightful writing about teaching and learning is gathered:

http://www.susannahsheffer.com/teaching--learning.html

Susannah is also involved with death penalty and prison issues, and her new book, Fighting for Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys, is coming in March 2013. Here is how it is described:

Intimate conversations with the dedicated lawyers who try, but too often fail, to prevent executions.

How do those who represent clients facing the death penalty cope with the stress and trauma of their work?  Through conversations with twenty of the most experienced and dedicated post-conviction capital defenders in the United States, Fighting for Their Lives explores this emotional territory for the first time.

I know Susannah has been working on this book for a few years and I can’t wait to read it and tell you more about it. I hope you’ll buy it and read it too.

The Student Resistance Handbook

 Unschooling explicitly provides children with far more opportunities for self-expression than conventional schooling permits, but unschooling is limited to those adults who are willing to try it with the children in their care. In school students are increasingly treated like cogs in the education manufacturing machine: the only rights students’ seem to have in school and in society are the right to be compelled to attend school and the right to obey authority. Complaints about school by students are often perceived as whining and student government is often just political show rather than genuine governance. The War on Kids is full of examples of the mistreatment of students in schools and the film’s creator, Cevin Soling, has recently added a new component to help students in school: The Student Resistance Handbook (click on Take Action to get the free download).

This is a work in progress and I’ve offered to help Cevin fine tune and promote this as a way to give voice to students who feel powerless to change anything about their school experiences. We don’t want to get students in trouble but we also don’t want to make them feel there is nothing they can do when school treats them so poorly. Please comment and let us know your opinions, pro and con.

Here’s a bit from the Handbook about the purpose of resistance for students in bad school situations:

Resistance can take many forms.

Direct confrontation will likely lead to adverse consequences and accomplish little. The complete lack of rights and due process in schools leave students in a vulnerable position. Oppressive institutions do change if large groups organize, walk out, and strike. Because of the climate of fear and routine indoctrination, it may be close to impossible to get large groups of students to rally to a cause.

A better strategy is to use the same techniques that are used to hold down students. Identify the methods of the captors, name them, and understand them. Once these methods are understood, they can be used both by small groups of students or a student acting alone. Schools are miserable oppressive environments and that waking nightmare should extend to administrators and teachers so they experience the dread of having to be there to the same degree as students. This, combined with making the cost of running the school untenable, are two of the main tactics outlined in this handbook.

The Salem witch hunts ended when the wife of the governor of Massachusetts was accused of being a witch. Joseph McCarthy was stopped when he accused the military of harboring communists. Zero Tolerance and other irrational policies will not end by students begging for change. They will end when those in power are subjected to the same treatment.

This handbook was devised to provide suggestions for legal means to minimize the oppressive nature of your incarceration in school and to expose the hypocrites who support the institution. Keep in mind that many of the people who judge, grade, punish, restrict, repress, oppress, control, and prevent students from pursuing their own best interests, actually believe they are helping students. They do not see themselves as prison guards. Pointing out how oppressive the school environment is will probably upset them and will likely harden their beliefs long before it changes their minds. When students insist on exposing inhumane conditions and agitating for change, they cannot expect support from the staff. They can expect pushback and anger. You are threatening to undermine their power.

This is what you are up against. Stand your ground. Know that you are in the right.

Faking College Degrees to Feed One’s Family

Prostitution caused by degree desperation is hitting a new high in the 21st century. In 1980, when I finished my Master’s degree in English, there were no teaching jobs open for tyros like me, and the only job I could find was as a cashier for a downtown bookstore. The owner of that store had a sign for cashiers that said, “Must have a college degree.” After a few weeks of work I realized that having a college degree had nothing to do with being a good employee in a bookstore (just a few of my fellow cashiers read a lot or cared about the books), and the only reason that was a requirement for work, that I could see, was to keep the many urban minorities seeking work from bothering the owner.

 People with means can always buy a ticket rather than earn a ticket to the job market, promotion, or school entrance, and this sense of unfairness, of gaming the system, has caused many to question the value of college and corporate work over the years. In the August 2012 issue of Harper’s Magazine Thomas Frank writes a blistering essay (titled "A Matter of Degrees") about our worship at the altar of college and the residue it leaves upon the minds and spirits of the worshippers. He notes, “Choosing the winners and losers is a task we have delegated to largely unregulated institutions housed in fake Gothic buildings, which have long since suppressed any qualms they once felt about tying a one-hundred-thousand-dollar anvil around the neck of a trusting teenager.”

Frank goes on to list a number of high profile cases of fake degrees being used by deans and officials at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, Bishop State College in AL, Texas A&M, and the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A background checker estimates:

40% of job applicants misrepresent in some way their educational attainments. And he reminds me that this figure includes only those people "who are so brazen about it that they’ve signed a release and authorization for a background check.” Among those who aren’t checked . . . the fudging is sure to be even more common.

I fear Frank’s call for more regulation of higher education degrees will lead to an even more byzantine system of credentialing; in education, in particular, where have we seen rules and regulations decrease in the past 50 years? Indeed, Frank ends this thought-provoking essay with these sobering thoughts:

Never has the nation’s system for choosing its leaders seemed more worthless. Our ruling class steers us into disaster after disaster, cheering for ruinous wars, getting bamboozled by Enron and Madoff, missing equity bubbles and real estate bubbles and commodity bubbles. But accountability, it seems, is something that applies only to the people at the bottom, the ones who took out the bad mortgages or lied on their resumes. The pillars that prop up the system, meanwhile, are visibly corrupt: the sacred Credential signifies less and less each year but costs more and more to obtain. Yet we act as though it represents everything. It’s a million-dollar coin made of pot metal—of course it attracts counterfeiters. And of course its value must be defended by an ever-expanding industry of resume checkers and diploma-mill hunters . . .

The Vatican Comes Out in Support of Homeschooling

As homeschooling grows the pushback from educationists (professional educators who feel mandatory education is necessary for everyone’s salvation) is getting stronger. There is concern that children learning at home won’t find their place in our modern economy because their parents aren’t teaching them math properly, or that homeschoolers are creating an “I got mine, you get yours” tribal culture that undermines democracy, and so on. Of course, such handwringing by educationists neglects the vast numbers of homeschoolers who have been active for decades in our economy and democracy, as well as the large numbers of children in school who do not learn math, or families who send their children to exclusive private schools and colleges so they will be with “their peers,” and not the general public.

It is fascinating, therefore, to read an affirmation from the leaders of the Catholic Church for institutional and governmental respect for people to choose when, where, how, and from whom they will learn. A Statement by the Holy See Delegation of the United Nations (April 24, 2012) claims the

delegation has noticed a disconcerting trend, namely, the desire on the part of some to downplay the role of parents in the upbringing of their children, as if to suggest somehow that it is not the role of parents, but that of the State. In this regard it is important that the natural and thus essential relationship between parents and their children be affirmed and supported, not undermined.

 The Statement largely reaffirms Catholic Church teachings, so it is quite specific about defining the family as an “indissoluble union between man and woman,” supporting greater investments in education to enroll more children in school, and ensuring obedience: “Parents must cooperate closely with teachers, who, on their part, must collaborate with parents.” What’s the difference between “must cooperate closely” and “must collaborate?” There seems to be an unequal footing that keeps teachers firmly in the driver’s seat in this formulation, but we’ll only know how this works out in practice over time.

However, for Catholics and non-Catholics, this section caught my attention not just because of the questions it begs, but also because of its support for homeschooling:

As affirmed in international law, States are called to have respect for the freedom of parents to choose for their children schools, other than those established by the public authorities, to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions which equally applies to their right to make judgments on moral issues regarding their children (cf., e.g., UDHR, Article 26, 3, ICESCR, Article 13, 3, and the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, Article 12, 4). There are about 250,000 Catholic schools around the world. The Catholic school assists parents who have the right and duty to choose schools inclusive of homeschooling, and they must possess the freedom to do so, which in turn, must be respected and facilitated by the State. Parents must cooperate closely with teachers, who, on their part, must collaborate with parents.

By linking homeschools to private schools, the Vatican affirms the importance of choice in education as being more than just choosing how to learn to read, write, and calculate. The Vatican ends this statement with a paragraph that I find echoes the unschooling ethos in particular, namely that the learner should be at the center of all “development concerns” (“development,” as Illich so often notes, is an incredibly loaded term, but I’ll save that for another day) and that young people should be recognized for their contributions to society.

An authentic rights based approach to development places the human person, bearing within him or her infinite and divine inspirations, at the center of all development concerns, and thus respects the nature of the family, the role of parents, including their religious and ethical values and cultural backgrounds, and affirms the contribution that young people can and do make to their community and society (cf., ICPD Programme of Action, Chapter II). The more the countries recognize this, the more they will be able to put into place policies and programmes that advance the overall wellbeing of all persons.

It is good for homeschooling to have a powerful, international ally that supports diverse religious, ethical, and cultural backgrounds as a model to strengthen society, rather than the economy-driven, one-size-fits-all (unless you can afford a better one), educationist model. Homeschooling, as this Statement shows, creates mixed alliances that we should build and nurture as best we can, because the juggernaut of mandatory continuing education as a requirement for participating in society shows no signs of stopping anywhere in the world.

To read the Statement in its entirety, click on this link.

The War on Kids to Air May 6 on the Documentary Channel

Cevin Soling's documentary about schools and the repression of children has been shown around the world for over a year, but only recently has a cable channel in the United States decided to air it. John Gatto, Alfie Kohn, myself, and many other critics of conventional schooling are interviewed in it. You can watch The War on Kids on the Documentary Channel May 6 at 8 and 11pm ET/PT.

Fox News.com ran a story about the film yesterday, focusing on how Soling compares public schools to prisons. This is just one aspect of the film, but certainly one of its most telling sections.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/05/03/documentary-war-on-kids-compares-us-public-schools-to-prison-system/#ixzz1tuJWanhP