What will college mean for our kids?Posted by admin on June 3rd, 2009
Today, I’ve voraciously read two books that are at once profoundly disturbing and wildly inspiring.
The first is one I’ve had my eye on since I began to refer to The Natural Child Project (naturalchild.org) for great parenting articles and advice, but only now got around to reading: The Unschooling Unmanual. It’s a compilation of essays from famous educators and thinkers, as well as average parents, who have experienced the stark contrast between a child who is “educated” in a stifling classroom and one who is trusted with his/her own learning in the safe environment of his/her own home. Unschooling is not homeschooling in that there are no textbooks nor state standards to follow; it is the antithesis of structured learning.
Along with some thought-provoking observations about the arbitrary choice we make to suddenly send our children off to be taught, after they have naturally learned to walk, talk, and interact as babies and toddlers, the book provides an historical context for the education debate. In particular, a piece by Daniel Quinn (author of Ishmael, one of my all-time favorite reads) plots the timeline of public schooling. He states that, following the Great Depression, schooling beyond 8th grade was introduced primarily to keep large numbers of teenagers out of the work force — i.e. prevent them from creating competition for newly-enthused workers. The secondary school years provided nothing practical, and, he argues, still don’t. They are simply an extension of the inane grouping of subjects in which students have little interest and will likely not remember. Public school (which now encompasses any form of compulsory schooling) fails in its original intent to prepare our citizens for success and happiness, and instead supports a capitalist market that needs plenty of people to fill the bottom rungs of the ladder. This is why we find it so difficult as parents, teachers, and tutors to answer those inevitable questions that pop up during algebra homework: “When will I ever use this?” Those of us who have suffered through those years know the answer: YOU WON’T. And that’s the answer upon which unschooling advocates expand when they let their children guide the learning process.
In a surprising bit of synchronicity, I discovered the same theme in Barbara Ehrenreich’s This Land is Their Land. As the voice of the middle class, and a superbly entertaining writer, she litters her bits of economic and social commentary with loads of appalling statistics. One chapter that had me fully enraptured, probably because I am sitting in the middle of the post-college period to which she refers, is entitled “Party On.” It discusses her recent trip to UConn’s commencement ceremony, at which plenty of the graduates were visibly intoxicated. She wonders if they have discovered the sad fact that college “is becoming less of a stepping stone and more of a holding pen,” and encourages them to “party on” for the last time. Though it was an afterthought in the piece, her mention of the reality that no college would mean for our unemployment rate (30 percent of 18-23 year-olds are currently attending college) was strikingly similar to Quinn’s piece in the book I read this morning. What would we do with a bunch of young people floating around in the work force? They are better off wasting away behind desks — after all, they will be doing that in some form or another for most of their lives.
School has become one more piece of the giant myth that there will always be something better to strive for in America. While America is falling far behind the rest of the world on many counts, and as the income gap is growing, we sit around in denial and take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans so that our children can have the ultimate college experience, praying that it will amount to a lavish, or at least fulfilling, career. In fact, it means much less than either of those things: taking whatever $8/hour job comes along because the grace period has expired on those loans. What are we really preparing our children for? What kind of country creates a generation of young adults with big dreams and few skills, only to send them off to face the reality of lifelong debt? If today’s BA is yesterday’s high school diploma, what will a Ph.D. mean for our babies in 20 or 30 years?
We have to stop the cycle somewhere and admit to ourselves that we have all been fabricating this “American dream.” Or, we can just take Ehrenreich’s advice and spend our last pennies on means of escape.
July 29th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
The part about young people being “better off wasting away behind desks” made me smile.
An important aspect of unschooling is that it does not train children to sit around passively and take orders. If children are not ingrained with the idea that their highest goal in life should be to become a well-functioning cog in a large machine, they will not feel helpless and powerless when they can’t find a machine to be a part of. Hopefully, they will use their own talents and gifts to add value to the world, most likely by creating their own business.
The tenet that school crushes entrepreneurial impulses and molds children into passive consumers is central in many of John Tyalor Gatto’s books. If you haven’t checked him out already, I think you’d love his work.
July 30th, 2009 at 10:39 pm
I just ordered Gatto’s Weapons of Mass Instruction, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages. As a tutor, I encounter many different styles of learning and observe their intersection with various methods of instruction. As a parent, I see that “learning” can be defined in more ways than one.
Perhaps I am a little bitter at having been one of those kids, ingrained with book learning. But I often wonder if I simply responded to it well because part of that love for all things scholarly was innate. The balance between the self and the social is fascinating, especially when it comes to education.