Against School - John Taylor Gatto
wesjones.com
wesjones.com
Also when reading John Taylor Gatto, please ensure you do not conflate schooling with education. You'll not like him very much if you conflate the two. Unless you really are against education, in that case please reply :)
Not that it greatly matters, of course, since there is absolutely nothing I can do about it as I have already decided not to have kids.
No. Weapons of Mass Instruction is basically just excerpts from Underground History. I think there are a few new things, but mostly what happened is that the publisher for Underground History backed out once they read the book, which left Gatto allowed to self publish it himself but unable to find another publishing deal. So Weapons of Mass instruction was basically just him going out and repackaging Underground History and publishing the best of it.
"Five areas of academic pursuit were measured. In reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.
The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area."
If you look at results from alternative schools like Montessori schools, you usually find similar results. It's not magic -- I enjoyed school but recognize in retrospect that it was an awful experience in many ways that instilled bad habits.
Also, that study was produced by an organization, (http://www.nheri.org/) that is specifically dedicated to producing studies about homeschooling. The titles of their reports all allude to defending the idea of homeschooling, and they put out guides to putting it into practice. The children for the study were "almost 12,000 home-school students from all 50 states who took three well-known standardized achievements tests", which aren't required for children to take, unless possibly if they live in Iowa or California. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that poorly performing homeschooled children would not take these tests, since they have nothing to gain from them.
For what it's worth, all the anecdotal evidence I have from growing up and knowing a number of home-schooled children, it's certainly not guaranteed to work better than public schools, and I've never met an intelligent, thoughtful person to come out of it. Not that amazingly smart people can't result, but I've never met them, and I feel like that's the attitude you're up against. I hope there are more and better stats, because presenting ones like yours above will only steel the negative opinion of most people towards homeschooling.
In any case, are their any methodological problems with this study that you can point to? Any other studies you can point to that give a different result?
I'm also curious about your anecdotal evidence, which you seem to give more weight than this study. Do you routinely ask people you meet whether they were home schooled? Do the ``intelligent, thoughtful'' people you meet routinely come out and tell you that they are not home schooled?
Almost three percent of the current US student population is home schooled[1]. You've probably met a lot more home schoolers than you realize...
[1] Study (pdf) as of 2007 at
http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdfThe Iowa tests are given to kids all over the country. I took them in Upstate NY. When I lived in NYC, we took a different achievement test... it was either a California test or a NYC-specific one.
I don't have any kids, and don't have much skin in the game. I simply presented some information. But equating parents who want to exercise the freedom to educate their kids in a way appropriate to them as abnormal is offensive to any citizen of a free society.
Was that intended as irony? If not, exactly what would it take, given the overwhelming size of the public school systems, to move the average significantly off 50?
If that were the case, these students would probably get a higher quality of education even if they were forced to go through the system.
It's this same flawed argument that always comes up with college earnings. (College grads are more successful, therefore you should go to college.) Isn't it likely that those who are likely to enroll at a college are more driven, potentially-successful people to begin with?
These kids end up absolutely unequipped to do anything but reproduce more of themselves and let the rest of us finance their existence.
You mean as opposed to kids who go through public schools (on our dimes) and end up with the same fate? What's the difference?
Home/un-schooling doesn't work for everyone. I've heard a story about a good friend of Ivan Illich who unschooled his two kids. The results were what you might expect: one went on to "great things" while the other didn't, and ended up on the dole.
I'd like to see statistics on homeschooled kids that back up your anecdotal evidence. Not that I don't believe you, but I'd be curious what the statistics say.
Government should get out of the school/education provisioning business. It hasn't worked, period. What I don't mind the government doing is providing education funding via vouchers.
Do you want a government bureaucrat deciding on how to allocate public education money? Think about it this way, do you want to maximize parent choice, and have them decide on the quality of a school, or do you want a board of education member deciding on the quality of schools?
Do you trust the decisions of a swarm self-interested parents and children or, or the decision of a self-interested government official? I trust the swarm.
We let govt decide where people can spend food-stamps and what they can buy.
Oh wait - we don't - there's not nearly the same level of govt control wrt food.
Even the most extreme interpretation of govt food control doesn't approach the amount of govt control in primary public education. (I find that folks who talk about various subsidies tend to overstate them if they're opposed and understate them if they support. Note how that lets each side claim that the other is lying. Curious that they never notice that they're both correct about that.)
Or, are you suggesting that all amounts of control are the same?
But parents very likely Can tutor their own child, better than the teacher teaches a class of 30. That's the apples-to-apples comparison that matters, since its the option facing parents.
Imaging for a minute that the classroom teacher spends the day tutoring each child. That would be, what, 10 minutes per child per day? And this doesn't of course happen.
A parent can do better than that in the first half-hour after breakfast. The rest of the day is gravy.
What does a home-schooled child miss? Socialization, practice at behaving as a member of a group, classes that require investment in equipment/facilities (art, gym, sports). These things can be mitigated by the clever parent, and honestly missing some of that is not all bad.
Anyway you end up with a different child. Not necessarily better or worse, but certainly different. And I suppose we need a few different adults.
The alternative of large schools (and what is being championed here) is home schooling children. Not only does that not scale, it also disproportionately favors the wealthy as families with already limited means are unlikely to be able to commit neither the money nor the time (on top of work everyday) to teach their children.
Even if you fix the scaling issues and the disproportionate income problems, you still have parents that simply don't care. When I was in school it was in vogue (in my locale) to take your kids out of public school and begin to homeschool them. But it turned out that parents' seemed to think that was the magic bullet, and their children were largely left to their own devices to figure out material, a schedule, and to somehow still be able to interact with kids their own age.
Obviously, I am not a big proponent of home schooling. I actually liked going through public school. I will forever wager my small town public school education against any home-schooled person's education any day.
I'm also not sure what you mean by `scaling issues'? Many districts here in New York State avereage 45-50 students per teacher. We have a large family by the national or local averages, and our five kids have one homeschooling parent all to themselves...
This doesn't mean that homeschooling is affordable for everyone -- especially given that every parent (and non-parent, for that matter) is paying (directly if they own, indirectly if they rent) for the public school system, whether they use it or not.
>scaling I did speak incompletely. I meant to to explain that school best works at scale (I meant to say "not only does that not scale down"). You have already explained this for me. Each family requires a parent to do the home schooling, where as public schools can provide a teacher for multiple children of multiple families.
>pay for it regardless Fortunately those that own, they realize an associated cost of owning is taxation. The argument could also be made that in return for paying for the public school system, those residents are able to live in a place that has a compulsory education system.
I'd be willing to bet that no one would flock to (let alone stay there for a significant portion of time) an area that did not require taxes that went to a local school system.
If you like Gatto, I'd also recommend reading up on Francisco Ferrer, A.S. Neill, Paulo Freire, and Alfie Kohn.
We home educate our children, and you are correct. It has been a genuine challenge on many levels. I've observed various families with the minimum of means achieve success home educating, but in general it is folks that have a solid single income and understand that they are making a "sacrifice". There is very little in this life that favors those of bare minimum needs.
1. Teach kid to read 2. Show him internet 3. Kick him out of house