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.

The War on Kids: A Free Screening at Harvard University

I'll be hosting a free screening of Cevin Soling's documentary The War on Kids this coming Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 7PM. 

The free screening is at the Harvard Science Center - Hall D, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA.

There will be Q&A with the director after the screening.

If you're in the area, drop in, enjoy the show, and join in the discussion. It is sure to be lively!

British Homeschoolers and The War on Kids

Two interesting things happened to me in the past two days: I went to a screening of Cevin Soling’s documentary, The War on Kids and I learned that British homeschoolers were able to help defeat legislation that would have severely curtailed their rights to raise and teach their children as they wish. The connections between these events for me are the strategies and tactics being used to control both kids and parents who don’t conform to school regulations.

The War on Kids documents many of the major problems children face just by attending school, from zero tolerance policies to the extreme overuse of drugs to control their behavior. I watched the movie on DVD on my own earlier, but seeing it with an audience is a different experience, and one I’m glad I had. First, I got to hear and speak with the director, Cevin, who is an extremely articulate and thoughtful man. His descriptions about his own education, and how he learned so much more outside of school than in school, were honest and interesting. Second, I got to hear some audience reactions to the subject matter of the film. Most of the college students in attendance—it was screened at Tufts University—seemed interested in the material though not particularly moved to action by it. I got the sense that many felt the problems presented in the movie did not apply to them and their schooling, though it seemed to resonate with a few. Waking people up to the real issues of schooling—they are about how we treat children, not how we teach and grade them—is nearly impossible because we’ve all been schooled and learned helplessness in the face of authority as a result. As a homeschooling mom wrote in the 1920’s, “You can’t learn democracy in a place that doesn’t practice it.” Fortunately, we can deschool ourselves and unschool our children or, if you can afford to and want to, you can find private schools or other alternatives that allow for more personalized learning. However, as the recent brouhaha over homeschooling in Great Britain shows, we in the US may be in for serious challenges to our homeschooling freedoms on the grounds of psychological, educational and physical abuse.

In the late nineteen eighties I became aware of a new psychological illness that was noted in Britain, School Phobia. I can’t remember the book title, but Holt Associates/Growing Without Schooling sold a book from Britain that challenged that diagnosis at the time. This diagnosis is now used in the US. Since then I’ve heard about homeschooling parents and children who, when they get belligerent in the face of authorities who challenge their homeschooling, are told they have Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Further, Graham Badman, the man whose report spurred the restrictive homeschooling legislation in Britain, remarked that he felt many homeschooling mothers probably suffered from Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. He also noted that homeschooling parents are twice as likely to be child abusers as non-homeschooling parents. Apparently one does not need to provide any data to make such claims, just evidence that the child or parent disagreed with you in an excited manner. Why use a certified psychiatrist to make these judgments when they’re so evident and easy to do yourself?

Indeed, Dr. Peter Breggin and other professionals interviewed in The War on Kids, make the point about how easy it is for a child to be diagnosed and put on behavior modifying drugs in the US. I read an article about “smart pills” in The New Yorker last year; Ritalin is considered to be such a pill because it enables the user to stay up late and focus narrowly on their work. Ritalin has become a drug of choice for many college students as a result, and they don’t need a black market to get it. Students interviewed in the article noted how easy it was to pretend they had attention deficit disorder in order to get the doctors to prescribe Ritalin for them.

As homeschooling grows there will be more “push back” from the education establishment, including from homeschoolers who share many of school’s assumptions about how and why children learn. Apparently one of the primary cheerleaders for the Badman Report in Britain was a homeschooler who didn’t think other homeschoolers were doing it the correct way, i.e. like conventional school. Homeschoolers, and unschoolers in particular, need to be acutely alert to the dangers of teachers, politicians, and social workers applying psychological diagnosis to people just because they do not use conventional education.

It is shameful that psychological problems that are very real for some people are being used as a rationale to force or shame healthy people into staying in school or to punish them for trying something different for their children. Yes, there is a War on Kids occurring, and I urge you to see this movie to learn more about it (Disclaimer: I appear in this movie). However, there is also a War on Parents occurring, and both wars are attempting psychological warfare to subdue parents and kids.