Education? Schooling?

There was a guy in my high school class - let's call him Dwight, for that was indeed his first name - who could reasonably be termed "obstreporous". He loved an argument. If you've been reading my blog for a while, you know that also basically describes me - so Dwight and I were good friends throughout high school and college.

Dwight and I - like a lot of our friends - took summer school every year. It was a good way for the motivated kid to get a lot of his/her general requirements out of the way, and in some cases get a class out of the way in six summer weeks with a teacher that was motivated enough to care about the subject, as opposed to the guy who taught it during the school year (who was a walking, talking ad for disbanding the teacher's union).

But I digress.

In "Government" class the summer before our senior year, Dwight delivered (as I recall) a report about education. It basically called for the abolition of education as we know it. "Heresy", I thought, being the child of a high school teacher and the grandson of two more.

Dwight had a line, though, that stuck with me through the years, and has in fact become the key log in the changing of my beliefs about education; "don't confuse "Education" and "Schooling", Dwight said.

It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

There's a line that a friend of mine quoted to me a few weeks ago that's up there with Dwight's line; I don't know who said it originally, and I'll have to paraphrase it as faithfully as I can, but the gyst is "the greatest triumph of compulsory schooling is that nobody can imagine doing it any other way".

Which brings us to Katherine Kersten's column in Sunday's Strib.

I've said it before; the more I deal with the school system (public or private), the less I think school is a place for kids under 13.

The experience of home schoolers reinforces that for me:

From the beginning, Nelson aimed to stimulate her children's thirst for knowledge and encourage independent learning. But Jessica laughs at the stereotype of home-schoolers as starved for social contact. "I was with other kids all the time," she says, "in activities like 4-H and the Greater Twin Cities Youth Symphonies."

To supplement their curriculum, the Nelsons joined a home-school support group, 90 families strong, at the Catholic Church of St. Paul in Ham Lake. In her younger years, Jessica took art, music and phy-ed classes with this group. In junior high, she studied subjects such as British literature, Latin and Spanish through co-ops for older home-schoolers. Later, she took advantage of Minnesota's post-secondary enrollment option to study math, chemistry and English at Anoka-Ramsey Community College.

What Jessica loved most about home-schooling was the opportunity to pursue her interests avidly. Her mother puts it this way: "We didn't have to close the history book at 11:45."

For Jessica, that meant competing every year in Minnesota Public Radio's music listening contest. Her favorite activity was the Minnesota Historical Society's History Day competition, which required digging for hours through library archives. Jessica made it to the national competition in Washington, D.C., three times.

Sounds cool, huh?

"But what about poor kids, or kids whose parents can't stay at home to teach them?"

On the one hand, that misses the point; so much about home schooling - or the various models of "unschooling", like the Sudbury schools - has nothing to do with "Teaching" as just letting them learn.

On the other hand, with the money we currently waste on a system that at best truly succeeds with a tiny percentage of children, we could invest in any number of ideas that could occupy children, and (most importantly) allow them to just learn without the institutional hazing that elementary school is; community centers, parochial organizations, parent groups, whatever.

Most of these kids do well academically. Studies show that home-schoolers, as a group, score well above average on standardized achievement tests.

It's not hard to see why home-schooling succeeds. Home-schooling parents, unlike classroom teachers, can focus on exactly what their children need.

They're also free to ignore the shifting and time-consuming educational fashions of the day. (Remember the recently deceased Profile of Learning, with its fuzzy-minded "performance packages"?)

Home-schooling parents can emphasize literary classics over contemporary children's fiction, which generally features a simplistic style and a narrow, adolescent mind-set. They can nurture their children's minds and hearts free from the alienated, heavily conformist youth culture.

And, more important, they can let their kids just learn, without the mindless (and pointless) regimentation of the school day, which at best is a useless exercise in collective intergenerational hazing and at worst is counterproductive.

The whole exercise in home schools, and "unschools", is more geared to how children - and everyone, really - naturally learns best; it doesn't adjust to the kid's style and rhythm and pace, it is those things.

Education and schooling; they're very different things.

Much more on this in coming weeks.

Posted by Mitch at June 2, 2005 12:06 PM | TrackBack