Why Schools Can't Work - Part III - The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

When De Tocqueville came to America, he noticed something astounding; the peasants could read! "Simple" farmers would spend their evenings reading by the fire, soaking up everything from the latest penny potboilers and broadsheets to the latest and greatest in political philosophy.

Where and how did they learn not only to read, but to crave reading and the learning that came with it? From nearly as many places and by as many means as there were people, practically; from small one-room schools, from older siblings and parents, from church (reading the Bible was a key precept of the protestantism that drove so many colonists)...

...but the "How" and "Where" is less interesting than the "Why". The reason De Tocqueville was shocked by the literacy of the American farmer was that it was in stark comparison to the illiteracy of the European peasant. Americans learned to read because America was built on an idea - and to be up to speed on the idea, one had to practice the currency of its trade, just as one had to know how to use a plow to practice farming. The currency of liberty (both political and religious) was literacy. And so Americans learned how to read - by any means available and necessary.

Today, it's accepted both as an article of faith and a challenge; a kid's gotta learn to read before he or she is seven, or there's something drastically wrong. They need to be gotten into a remedial reading class, and forced to learn to read, NOW, or their entire future will be at risk!, for the love of God!

It's not like this everywhere.

In the Sudbury School, in Framingham, Massachusetts, kids aren't required to learn to read at all. Nobody tells them to learn their ABCs. Nobody tests their fluency in their native language.

And yet every single kid at Sudbury (and the many schools around the country modelled after it) learns to read. When they're ready, they do it; some learn from other kids, some from the staff, some even teach themselves from the bits of phonics they pick up from learning the alphabet; kids can be incredible at applying logic to problems around them. And while nobody tells them to do it, they all do - every single one, according to friends who are involved with Sudbury schools around the country. And they do it for the same reason the farmers did it 200 years ago - because it's obviously in their interest to do it, and because they realize they can.

Sudbury advocates use an interesting parallel; almost every child learns how to speak, barring some sort of mental or physical defect that makes normal learning impossible. Speaking is vastly more complicated than reading - and yet, by hanging around adults and watching and hearing it done, and seeing the results of verbal communication and feeding their innate thirst to participate in that communication, somehow, almost every child manages to be fluent in their family's native language by age five.

But if Government were to step in and decree that "all children must learn to speak by age three", and added the force of compulsion and the stigma of failure to the process of learning, and stick their butts in chairs so that the university-trained experts could teach them to speak now! (under threat of action against the parents if they declined), you'd see a logarithmic increase in the number of "speech disabilities" diagnosed, new remedial speech programs springing up in buildings around the country, and entire departments full of learned academics devoted to studying a "disability" that does not exist in the wild.

So if most children can learn the gargantuan task of speech without the aid of teachers, specialists, programs and post-graduate expertise, why are the relatively trivial tasks of reading, arithmetic and composition seeming to get harder and harder to "teach", the more resources we put into them?

Not only does the system not work - it is completely counter to the way people actually learn things.

How does this relate to politics?

Tomorrow.

(See Part I and Part II)