How the Pandemic Forced Us to Re-define What Education is

/in , , , , /by

Whatever your opinion on if, when, or the exact manner in which schools should have closed down, there is no denying that education in the U.S. is changed forever. One major way it has changed, is by bringing in the old to deal with the new. Unschooling seems like a new trend the “uber-liberal and passive millennial parents” are doing. But it actually started in the 70’s when a certain John Holt got disillusioned with the traditional school system and started championing the rights of children to dictate their own learning. It has been rather niche, until a certain pandemic made it seem more practical than counter-cultural.

You probably have seen Facebook and LinkedIn posts about compromises and hacks of parents trying to survive the pandemic. This a particularly well-known and extreme one:

Or is it? Isn’t it a parent’s ultimate goal to do what is best for their child? The fear of losing their job and contracting Covid can easily overshadow the fear of shame from others. It is not important anymore that your kid can’t pay attention to several zoom lectures in a row (I mean, neither can many adults, nor should they). What if one could have their cake and eat it too? What if you didn’t have to chase after your kid for every “class” and pay for tons of equipment that they may use for only one year? All this, and be able to focus more on your job?

The whole premise of unschooling and self-directed learning (SDE) is that kids are naturally motivated to learn, and will at their own pace. This has long been the anti-thesis of the current school system, which is based off the premise that kids cannot learn on their own and must be scheduled all day for five days a week to become productive members of society. For the most part, the latter argument won out as it seemed to make more sense. I think it only made sense because schooling was abstracted away, with the main result parents seeing (andtold that mattered at all) being grades and college admission results. What was behind the curtain got revealed when most of the students got sent home for virtual learning. They listened to teacher’s bark at students based on what they saw on a screen, saw the arbitrary and ridiculous schoolwork, and watched their kids’ existential crises implode along with their own.

The reality of it is, the pandemic forced us to re-think many aspects of day-to-day life. As far as here is concerned, we need to ask “What is school?”. To answer that, we then need to ask “What matters?” Well, we can start with the obvious. The safety of our children, and their well-being. That is why they were pulled out of in-class school in the first place, when we weren’t sure about the true nature of the spread of Covid-19. Then there is their preparation for adult life. This is a contentious problem that so far we have seeming to to be trying to solve by doing the same broken solutions more (see Common Core, No Child Left Behind). Essentially, we think that the more tests a student can pass, the better citizen in a functioning society they can be. You say it that way, it sounds insane, doesn’t it? I feel like I have met more people than not who share this opinion. I have definitely met ex-teachers who have left because of all the increased testing. Schools have become essentially testing centers at the expense of the well-being and development of the students. We expect them to stress out for tests that only tell us how well they might do in college (which is only one of many paths).

Now parents’ well-being matters too. After all, the kids can’t be alright if the parents are not alright long enough (see above tweet). This is the more complicated part as school is (and was made) to provide parents respite. They could keep trying to force their kids to a certain schedule as they are barely able to keep to their own. I think this is why SDE and unschooling are appealing to more families. Detractors might say that this lack of standardized ways to educate your kids just puts more work on the parents. I argue that the standardized traditional schooling is the way that adds more stress. What is the best educational plan will vary from student to student, family to family. The lack of standardization is the whole point of SDE. Some parents lay out a schedule for their kids at the beginning of the day for when to do their work. Others let their kids decide for themselves. Maybe you have older kids that can teach the younger ones. Doesn’t this all sound better than forcing your kids to a schedule other people decided, who don’t know your kids? Moreover, also don’t know your responsibilities outside your kids you have to keep your kids housed and fed?

So we answered what education shouldn’t be. But what should it be? To understand the conclusion many families came to, you will have to open your mind, rather than change it. As a child is growing up, what isn’t considered learning? Well, to start, many parents would be quick to say the mass amounts of time on Fortnite or Minecraft isn’t learning. The data suggests otherwise: Minecraft has inspired as high as 85 million to learn to code. I myself have met more than a handful of people who got started coding by creating mods for Minecraft. Well, what about the massive multi-player games? Also don’t have to be a waste of time. Kids can learn valuable interpersonal skills and how to communicate effectively virtually (as a remote freelancer, I can personally attest to the need). Now that kids are home from school, they can spend more time cooking. That presents many opportunities to learn basic chemistry, fractions, cooperative skills, etc. The limits are only within your mind. Older kids can help with taxes and the family budget more, or even shadow you at your job.

As for actual resources outside of the textbooks and workbooks, the sky is the limit as well (or however high the internet exists). I recommend going on TikTok and exploring for a second. Yes, there is a lot of “cringey” and low value content (as anywhere), but many people have taken to sharing tidbits about their culture, lifestyle, identities, and favorite subject. The hours your middle-schooler spends on TikTok might be more educational than the day of schoolwork ahead. I know for a fact I learned more on YouTube than the low-effort charter school my parents paid way too much for me to go to. If you want to know what I am talking about, look up CrashCourse, ElectroBoom, Ask a Mortician, and Butterfly Spanish on YouTube. You will immediately see what I am talking about, and probably start watching some videos yourself.

While many parents will be glad to just send their kids back to school and return to the way it was, many will not. There will be special-needs kids who were found to do better at home. Parents who got proof that no, Tommy isn’t just over-sensitive, his teacher is actually a sociopath. Teenagers who promise to learn to self-teach so they do not have to return to school as to evade cliques and bullying. We probably did not need a pandemic to tell us that the traditional schooling system isn’t working for many bright young minds, but perhaps we did need one to compel us to change.

Sources:

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2020/7/17/21328316/covid-19-coronavirus-unschooling-homeschooling

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/homschooling-boom-pandemic/616303/

https://www.mother.ly/child/unschooling-kids-during-coronavirus

How Schools Promote Bullying

/in , /by

What I am about to say will be quite controversial so I would like to declare up front what I am NOT saying. I am not saying that teachers, school officials or administrators, school owners or school boards themselves actively promote bullying or are secretly in favor of bullying. Though I am not discounting the fact that some of these people can themselves be the biggest bullies of all. But in general, I will readily assert that most of these people are good and kind-hearted and only want the best for our kids.

What I am asserting when I say that schools promote bullying is that the traditional SYSTEM of schooling itself provides the structure and breeding ground of bullying, REGARDLESS of the desires or intentions of those who run the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, a research professor at the Department of Psychology of Boston College, names at least 3 structural elements in school that promotes bullying (in the book Free to Learn):

  1. Grading/Ranking
  2. Age Segregation
  3. Lack of Free Play

Top Ten, Honor Roll, Honors’ Class, Valedictorian, Salutatorian, Gold Medal — from the time children start school all the way until they are of legal age, these terms ingrain upon their minds that school is ultimately a place for competition. Since the highest honor in most schools is to be the valedictorian, the implication is for each student to look out for himself or herself rather than to help others. Cooperation is not the highest goal, not if it means sacrificing one’s grade.

In the words of Dr. Gray, “By design, it teaches selfishness…Indeed, too much help given by one student to another is cheating. Helping others may even hurt the helper…Some of those students who most strongly buy into school understand this well; they become ruthless achievers, more interested in beating others than in helping them.”

Again, and I cannot stress this enough, it is the design, the system itself that teaches selfishness. I am certainly not saying that teachers teach selfishness, but that the structure itself rewards selfishness — and kids can see that very early on. They are more perceptive than we think.

Now of course, not everyone can be academic achievers and kids understand this very early on. So they try to find a niche where they can be at the top. They will try to excel in sports, in the arts, or in being the most fashionable, the coolest, the most notorious, the most daring, and so on. And while the latter may not earn them any medals from the school, they earn approval from their peer groups — which they will come to value more than any recognition they get from the school.

So although the school may have a system for ranking the best in academics and even the best in behavior, the students themselves have unconsciously devised a way of ranking themselves in other ways, inspired by the basic idea that life is about ranking and gaining approval even at the expense of others.

The stage is now set for bullying, and the atmosphere is exacerbated by the other two factors.

Part 2

Before schools came along, there was no age segregation. Children were a natural part of the community. They would easily and freely interact with whoever — older kids, younger kids, and even adults. There was no formal distinction made between what a kid ought to be doing vis-a-vis other kids. One kid could be happily playing by herself, another could be helping his dad harvest the potatoes.

In older hunter-gatherer tribes, kids could be tasked with adult responsibilities like climbing trees for fruits or setting traps or even hunting wild animals — as long as they could show that they were up to the task. Age was not so much a factor as was ability and interest. A teenager may not be strong enough to bend a bow but may show an aptitude for plants and can assist the tribe herbalist in creating potions and medicines.

With mass schooling came the idea to group children together in batches, according to their age, and then expecting them to learn the same things at the same time. This was a novel idea and proved to be very efficient — much like mass production in factories. Children were yanked from the playgrounds, from the fields, and from whatever nook and cranny they were hiding in, and placed in neat little rows of desks listening to an adult delivering lectures on history, mathematics, science, and whatever else adults thought was important for the kids to learn.

Now, because of grades and the ranking system (discussed in part 1), the survival instinct to excel and be number 1 becomes more pronounced with batching. Kids were now being forcibly compared with others of their same age. “Hey, the neighbor’s boy can read already at age 7. You’re almost 8. Why can’t you read yet?”

So here people are labeled as “bright”or “dumb” and no matter how much we lecture on political correctness or tell people that kids have multiple intelligences and may develop in different degrees and speeds, the system itself makes us still use those two labels, even if only in our heads — because we are too polite or ashamed to say them out loud.

Even in play and sports, age segregation has a negative effect. Studies have shown that mixed-age play triggers the nurturing instincts of older children. At Sudbury Valley School, for example, where there is unrestricted age-mixing — a game of basketball could be played by a mixed group of teenagers and 8 year olds. The interesting thing one would notice is that the kids will naturally form opposing teams that would more or less have the same number of teenagers and 8 year olds. The teenagers would not group themselves together and say, hey, let’s pound those 8 year olds.

Even during the game, the teenagers would bump and shove against other teenagers but they would not be rough towards or even guard the 8 year olds — leaving the other 8 year olds on their team to deal with them. This allows the younger kids to learn and enjoy the game.

The same principle could hold true for any other endeavor. Kids like learning from older kids because they are, in general, contextually more in tune with them than adults. And older kids enjoy a sense of accomplishment when they are able to help younger kids.

This dynamic is lost in age-segregated schools. No matter how much we lecture on bullying, how to prevent bullying, and so on, the problem persists and gets even worse because we haven’t changed the system.

Dr. Peter Gray, in his book Free to Learn, says, “The age-segregated, competitive atmosphere of school…provides the ideal conditions for the generation of competitive coalitions, or cliques, which provide a foundation for bullying. Children who are not accepted into any of the prevailing cliques may be picked on mercilessly, and they have no way to escape.”

Part 3

Adults often underestimate the value of play. They look at it as merely recreation, a break from the serious stuff, a way to de-stress from work. Take a look at how school is structured and you will see that very little time is devoted to play. 15 minutes of recess in the morning and then another in the afternoon. The rest is devoted to work.

Class activities that include games don’t count. Playing according to a teacher’s rules, without the option to not play, is not really play. It is still work. The child is not playing because they want to, but because an adult said so, and disobedience can have serious consequences.

Real play is about freedom — doing what one wants instead of what one has been told to do, and along with that is also the freedom to quit when one doesn’t want to play anymore, or to do something else. Playing, then is not just about the activity, but one’s state of mind in doing certain tasks.

When I write these articles, I am playing. It is something I want to do, and something I have immense fun in doing. That doesn’t mean I write gibberish and nonsense. I even induce pressure on myself by always writing in the early hours of the morning before the deadline. Does that contribute to my stress levels? Certainly not. I have fun beating the deadline this way and I’ve been doing it week after week for more than 6 years.

The benefits of play are enormous. A study published in 2002 by Howard-Jones, Taylor and Sutton on The Effect of Play on the Creativity of Young Children During Subsequent Activity found that children who were put in a playful mood 25 minutes before engaging them to create picture collages were assessed to have more creative outputs than those who were conditioned to do serious work (like copying text) before the actual task.

Other researchers have created similar studies, all showing that a playful mood results in creative, insightful and out-of-the-box problem solving.

Dr. Peter Gray writes, “Learning, creativity, and problem solving are facilitated by anything that promotes a playful state of mind, and they are inhibited by evaluation, expectation of rewards, or anything else that destroys a playful state of mind.”

So let’s go back to the title of this piece. What does all this have to do with how schools promote bullying?

By the act of forcing children into age-segregated classrooms; restricting their free play; coercing them to listen to lectures they may or may not be interested in, and then evaluating and judging them based on those; by hinging their self-worth on grades, promotion to the next level, commendations and medals; by imposing arbitrary rules on things like haircut, uniforms and the kind of shoes one ought to wear; by the explicit or implicit glorification of the sciences over the arts; by all these and more, the school system, and those who perpetuate it are the biggest bullies of all.

Part 4

A problem that is systemic in nature cannot be solved by good intentions, high ideals or hard work. A teacher who sees the problem and tries to remedy the situation might get away with small changes here and there, but those don’t really do much. Sooner or later, she is going to come up against a principal who will tell her to not rock the boat too much, to follow the system, or else.

A principal radical enough to allow teachers certain freedoms will sooner or later come up against a district supervisor, or the government’s Department of Education (DepEd) telling him to stand down, or else. The system is more likely to swallow individuals than have individuals change it. Those in their comfortable seats of power rarely want to do anything that might jeopardize their position, and of course people with new and interesting ideas would more often be seen as a threat and a potential rival, rather than as a welcome guest.

This is what Dan Greenberg saw when he decided to start Sudbury Valley School. This is what Ken Danford and Joshua Hornick realized when he decided to start the North Star Center for Self-Directed Learning. This is what Tomis Parker and Arthur Brock realized when they started Agile Learning Centers. Change cannot come from within the system. It is too huge, too political, too entrenched for any individual to really do anything about them.

Let me share a couple of anecdotes. My eldest daughter homeschooled her senior high year. Last year, we went to DepEd asking about their placement test for homeschoolers. This test was supposed to be a diagnostic exam that would determine the equivalent grade level of the student on the K-12 system. Guess what we found out — there was no such test in place for grade 12. This was in 2018, seven years after K-12 was first implemented. I wonder what DepEd has been doing all these years.

Here’s another encounter that I had. Since we had plans to open a school, we went to DepEd early this year to get a list of the requirements. The first thing we were told was that we had to submit everything by August 2019 and the earliest we could open was by 2021. I mean, really? It takes them 2 years to approve? And included in the list of requirements is the school building, facilities, and even a full roster of faculty — all of which will supposedly sit and twiddle their thumbs for 2 years waiting for approval.

I mean, really, this is the agency that’s going to accredit my school and determine if it is up to standard? No thanks. And if you want to understand bullying on a large-scale systemic level, you need look no further than this.

—

Reposted with permission. Original series of articles were published on Andy Uyboco’s blog Freethinking Me.

The ADHD Overdiagnosis Epidemic Is a Schooling Problem, Not a Child One

/in , /by

Childhood exuberance is now a liability. Behaviors that were once accepted as normal, even if mildly irritating to adults, are increasingly viewed as unacceptable and cause for medical intervention. High energy, lack of impulse control, inability to sit still and listen, lack of organizational skills, fidgeting, talking incessantly—these typical childhood qualities were widely tolerated until relatively recently. Today, children with these characteristics are being diagnosed with, and often medicated for, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at an astonishing rate.

While ADHD may be a real and debilitating ailment for some, the startling upsurge in school-age children being labeled with and medicated for this disorder suggests that something else could be to blame. More research points to schooling, particularly early schooling, as a primary culprit in the ADHD diagnosis epidemic.

Over the last several decades, young people are spending more time in school and school-like activities than ever before. They are playing less and expected to do more at very young ages. When many of us were kids, kindergarten was mellow, playful, and short with few academic expectations. The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet.Now, 80 percent of teachers expect children to learn to read in kindergarten. It’s not the teachers’ fault. They are responding to national curriculum frameworks and standardized testing requirements that over the past two decades have made schooling more oppressive—particularly for young children.

The youngest children are the ones most often caught in the ADHD medical dragnet. Last fall, Harvard researchers found that early school enrollment was linked to significantly higher rates of ADHD diagnosis. In states with a September 1 school enrollment age cutoff, children who entered school after just turning five in August were 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than children born in September who were about to turn six. Immaturity, not pathology, was the real factor.

Marilyn Wedge, author of A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became An American Epidemic, sounds the alarm on ADHD overdiagnosis. In a Time Magazine article called “The ADHD Fallacy,” she writes:

By nature, young children have a lot of energy. They are impulsive, physically active, have trouble sitting still, and don’t pay attention for very long. Their natural curiosity leads them to blurt out questions, oblivious in their excitement to interrupting others. Yet we expect five- and six-year-old children to sit still and pay attention in classrooms and contain their curiosity. If they don’t, we are quick to diagnose them with ADHD.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the percent of very young children (ages two to five) who were diagnosed with ADHD increased by over 50 percent between 2007/2008 and 2011/2012. As of 2016, data show that 9.4 percent of all American children, or over six million kids, had been diagnosed with ADHD, and almost two-thirds of current ADHD-diagnosed children were taking medication for it. A March 2019 report on ADHD by Blue Cross and Blue Shield found that among commercially insured children of all ages, ADHD diagnosis rates increased 30 percent in just eight years.

While the symptoms of ADHD may be troublesome, looking first at the environment, rather than the child, may be an important step toward curbing the ADHD diagnosis epidemic. In his book, ADHD Does Not Exist, Dr. Richard Saul, a Chicago behavioral neurologist, explains that individuals diagnosed with ADHD either have external factors that exacerbate normal symptoms or have some other underlying condition that should be identified and treated. In the latter instance, he finds that once the underlying condition is discovered and treated, the ADHD symptoms usually disappear. In the former instance, changing the environment is a key step toward improvement. This is true for both children and adults with an ADHD diagnosis. Dr. Saul writes:

Like many children who act out because they are not challenged enough in the classroom, adults whose jobs or class work are not personally fulfilling or who don’t engage in a meaningful hobby will understandably become bored, depressed and distracted. In addition, today’s rising standards are pressuring children and adults to perform better and longer at school and at work.

Addressing an environmental mismatch for ADHD-diagnosed adults could mean switching one’s job or field of study or pursuing a true passion. Maybe you’re an accountant who wants to be a carpenter or a nurse who wants to be an entrepreneur. For ADHD children, changing the environment could mean removing children from restrictive schooling altogether. As Boston College psychology professor Peter Gray writes:

What does it mean to have ADHD? Basically, it means failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling. Most diagnoses of ADHD originate with teachers’ observations.

Jennifer Walenski saw firsthand how transformative removing her ADHD-diagnosed child from standard schooling could be. She shares her family’s journey at The Bus Story and told me:

Our kids were actually in public school originally. Our son also was diagnosed with both ADHD and autism while he was in the school system. And they wanted to medicate him. But we said no. Then we took him and his sister out of school and began homeschooling them. Fast forward several years, he has absolutely no need at all for medication. He is just a normal boy who did not belong in that kind of environment. And most of us don’t. Think about it.

Walenski’s experience echoes that of other parents who removed their ADHD-diagnosed children from standard schooling. In an informal survey analysis, Gray discovered that when ADHD-labeled children left school for homeschooling, most of them no longer needed medication for ADHD symptoms. Their ADHD characteristics often remained but were no longer problematic outside of the conventional classroom.

Gray’s analysis also revealed that the ADHD-labeled young people who fared best outside of standard schooling were those who were able to learn in a more self-directed way. He found that the

few kids in this sample who were still on ADHD medications during homeschooling seemed to be primarily those whose homeschooling was structured by the parent and modeled after the education one would receive in a conventional school.

Replicating school-at-home can also replicate the problematic behaviors found at school, whereas moving toward unschooling, or self-directed education, can give young people the freedom to flourish.

Ending the ADHD overdiagnosis epidemic depends on a societal reality check where we no longer pathologize normal childhood behaviors. Much ADHD-labeling originates from forced schooling environments with learning and behavioral expectations that are developmentally inappropriate for many children. Freeing young people from restrictive schooling and allowing them to learn and grow through their own self-directed curiosity can lead to happier and healthier families and children.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

school schooting

In the Wake of Mass Shootings, Parents Reconsider Mass Schooling

/in , , /by

In the wake of recent tragic school shootings, anxious parents are contemplating homeschooling to protect their children. After February’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the Miami Herald reported that more parents were considering the homeschooling option. And after Friday’s disturbing school shooting in Sante Fe, Texas, a local ABC news affiliate in Alabama reported the increasing appeal of homeschooling.

“If I had the time, I would teach my kids myself, and I would know that they’re safe,” a father of four told ABC station, WAAY31. A public school teacher interviewed by the channel disagreed with the idea of homeschooling. According to the news story, the teacher “says resorting to homeschooling is teaching your children to run from reality.”

But that raises the question: Is compulsory mass schooling “reality”?

Public Schools Are Consuming More and More of Kids’ Time

Segregating children by age into increasingly restrictive, test-driven classrooms where they are forced by law to be unless a parent or caregiver liberates them is hardly “reality.” What’s worse is that young people are spending increasingly more time in this coercive “reality” than ever before.

In the case of teens, spending more time in school and school-like activities may be further separating them from the actual real world.

For young children ages six to eight, schooling increased from an average of five hours a day in 1981-82 to an average of seven hours a day in 2002-03. And for today’s teens, schooling consumes much more of their time than it did for previous generations, seeping into summertime and other historically school-free periods. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 42 percent of teens were enrolled in school during July 2016, compared to only 10 percent enrolled in July 1985.

In the case of teens, spending more time in school and school-like activities may be further separating them from the actual real world in which they previously came of age. As Business Insider reports: “Almost 60% of teens in 1979 had a job, compared to 34% in 2015.” Spending more time in the contrived reality of forced schooling and less time in authentic, multi-age, productive communities may be taking its toll on today’s youth.

Compulsory Mass Schooling Is Hurting Our Kids

New findings from researchers at Vanderbilt University show a disturbing correlation between time in school and suicidal thoughts and attempts by young people, which have been increasing over the past decade. Whereas most adults see suicide spikes in July and August, most kids see suicide dips in summer. Children’s suicidal tendencies appear strongest during the school year.

Boston College psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray believes that increasingly oppressive schooling is leading to serious psychological damage in some children. He writes on his blog at Psychology Today:

Children now often spend more time at school and at homework than their parents spend at their full-time jobs, and the work of schooling is often more burdensome and stress-inducing than that of a typical adult job. A century ago we came to the conclusion that full-time child labor was child abuse, so we outlawed it; but now school is the equivalent of full-time child labor. The increased time, tedium, and stress of schooling is bringing many kids to the breaking point or beyond, and more and more people are becoming aware of that. It can no longer be believed that schooling is a benign experience for children. The evidence that it induces pathology is overwhelming.”

Recent school shootings may be extreme examples of this rising school-induced pathology.

Choosing to Homeschool Isn’t “Running from Reality”

Instead of overreacting, parents who decide to remove their children from school to homeschool them may be acknowledging the disconnect between the inherent coercion of compulsory mass schooling and the freedom to live in the genuine world around us. Rather than sheltering their children, parents who select the homeschooling option may be endeavoring to widen their child’s community, broaden their experiences, and restore their emotional well-being.

Former New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, writes in his book Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling about his growing disillusionment with mass schooling:

I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”  

Parents who remove their children from the confines of the conventional classroom are not running away from reality. They are running towards it.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Are Factory-Like Schools the Child Labor Crisis of Today?

/in , /by

Most American children and teenagers wake early, maybe gulp down a quick breakfast, and get transported quickly to the building where they will spend the majority of their day being told what to do, what to think, how to act. An increasing number of these young people will spend their entire day in this building, making a seamless transition from the school day to afterschool programming, emerging into the darkness of dinnertime. For others, there are structured afterschool activities, followed by hours of tedious homework. Maybe, if they’re lucky, they’ll get to play a video game before bed—a rare moment when they are in control.

There is mounting evidence that increasingly restrictive schooling, quickly consuming the majority of childhood, is damaging children. Rates of childhood anxiety, depression, behavioral problems, and other mental illness are surging. Teenage suicide rates have doubled for girls since 2007, and have increased 30 percent for teenage boys. Eleven percent of children are now diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and three-quarters of them are placed on potent psychotropic medications for what Boston College psychology professor Dr. Peter Gray describes as a “failure to adapt to the conditions of standard schooling.”

Dr. Gray goes on to explain:

It is not natural for children (or anyone else, for that matter) to spend so much time sitting, so much time ignoring their own real questions and interests, so much time doing precisely what they are told to do. We humans are highly adaptable, but we are not infinitely adaptable. It is possible to push an environment so far out of the bounds of normality that many of our members just can’t abide by it, and that is what we have done with schools.

In the early twentieth century, concern about children’s welfare in oppressive factories was a primary catalyst for enacting child labor laws and simultaneously tightening compulsory schooling laws. Yet, for many of today’s children, the time they spend in forced schooling environments is both cruel and hazardous to their health. Gone are the oppressive factories, but in their place are oppressive schools. Where is the outrage?

In a New York Times Op-Ed article this week, author Malcolm Harris posits that young people are placed into these high-pressure, increasingly competitive schooling environments by corporate interests aiming to push job training to younger ages without having to pay for it.  He writes:

There are some winners, but the real champions are the corporate owners: They get their pick from all the qualified applicants, and the oversupply of human capital keeps labor costs down. Competition between workers means lower wages for them and higher profits for their bosses: The more teenagers who learn to code, the cheaper one is.

Harris’s solution is to encourage students to unite collectively, following a labor union paradigm, to demand better schooling conditions.  He asserts:

Unions aren’t just good for wage workers. Students can use collective bargaining, too. The idea of organizing student labor when even auto factory workers are having trouble holding onto their unions may sound outlandish, but young people have been at the forefront of conflicts over police brutality, immigrant rights and sexual violence. In terms of politics, they are as tightly clustered as just about any demographic in America. They are an important social force in this country, one we need right now.

While Harris and I agree that the conditions of forced schooling are untenable and rapidly worsening, we disagree on the solution. To suggest that students unionize to demand better compulsory schooling conditions is similar to suggesting that prisoners unionize to demand better prisons: It’s a fine idea but it’s completely futile. Children are mandated under a legal threat of force to attend compulsory schools.

The first step to addressing the oppressiveness of forced schooling and its harmful effects on children is to fight the compulsion. Rather than trying to improve the conditions of an inherently unjust, state-controlled system, the system itself must be overturned. After all, humans cannot be truly free when they are methodically, and legally, stripped of their freedom under the pretense that it’s good for all.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

school schooting

Is School Causing Teen Depression and Anxiety To Skyrocket?

/in , /by

Dovetailing with World Mental Health Day earlier this week, The New York Times published an article about the skyrocketing rates of teenage anxiety, depression, and suicide. It highlights recent data revealing that hospital admissions for suicidal teens have doubled in the last decade, with the highest spike in admissions occurring in early fall as students return to school.

Profiling a young man named Jake, the Times describes his incapacitating school-related anxiety that began in his junior year of high school and reached a breaking point when, at 17, “he refused to go to school and curled up in the fetal position on the floor.”

After a suicide attempt, various antidepressant medications, several hospitalizations, and time spent at a residential treatment facility in New Hampshire, Jake finally managed to get through his senior year of high school and into college, where his anxiety has largely disappeared.

While the article describes various tactics schools and therapists use to address mounting teenage anxiety and depression, one question not asked is this: If schooling is causing these serious problems for teenagers, then why are they going?

In his compelling book Teen 2.0: Saving Our Children and Families From the Torment of Adolescence, researcher and former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today Dr. Robert Epstein explains that adolescence is largely a western societal construct.

“In more than a hundred cultures around the world, teens have no such difficulties—no depression, no suicide, no crime, no drug use, no conflict with parents, Epstein writes. “Many cultures don’t even have a word for the period of life we call adolescence. Why are American teens in such turmoil?”

Epstein goes on to suggest that much of this teenage angst results from the “infantilization of teens” as they are confined and enclosed for much of their adolescence, and their actions and thoughts are controlled by others.

“Driven by evolutionary imperatives established thousands of years ago, the main need a teenager has is to become productive and independent,” Epstein writes. “After puberty, if we pretend our teens are still children, we will be unable to meet their most fundamental needs, and we will cause some teens great distress.”

The word adolescence was coined in a mammoth 1904 book by G. Stanley Hall, the first president of the American Psychological Association.  Hall’s book, the 1400-page Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, struck a chord with policymakers and educators hoping to expand mass schooling.

An American Heritage article on the history of adolescence claims: “Among the book’s supporters were secondary school educators who found in Hall’s writing a justification for their new enthusiasm about moving beyond academic training to shape the whole person. They also found in it a justification for raising the age for ending compulsory school attendance.”

Enclosing young people in compulsory schooling environments for most of their teenage years severely restricts their freedom and challenges their evolutionary adaptability.

It is perhaps no wonder that Jake’s anxiety lessened as he left high school and went on to college, where he gained more freedom and more personal control over his schedule, his classes, and his social life.

In an article for The Huffington Post, author Blake Boles writes about how high school should be more like college, with teenagers given the freedom, independence, respect, and real-world immersion they so desperately need.  He writes: “Real learning thrives when students have real choices. Give high school students the same freedom as college students, and we’ll take education a step in the right direction.”

Boles should know. His company, Unschool Adventures, works with unschooled and homeschooled teenagers through immersive travel programs and self-directed learning initiatives.

While it is critically important to help teenagers struggling with school-related anxiety and depression, it is worth considering the evolutionary mismatch between forced schooling and adolescence. Designed to be fully immersed in real-world experiences and productive work, dictating their own thoughts and actions, and surrounded by adult mentors, teenagers are instead cut-off and controlled. Freedom may be their best medicine.

–

This post A Theory on Why Teen Depression and Anxiety Are Skyrocketing was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.

Why We Shouldn’t Import China’s Education System

/in , /by

I remember a story my college economics professor told my class many years ago about the differences she saw between her American economics students and the Chinese ones she taught during frequent sabbaticals to Beijing. She said that the Chinese economics students generally had superior math skills and the ability to quickly solve complex calculus problems, but her American students generally had a better grasp on the underlying concepts and context, were able to better recognize when certain calculations were incorrect (like a negative number for the Price of a good), and were more creative with solutions.

While it is certainly important for U.S. students to have strong academic skills, trying to replicate the Chinese education system may not be the best approach. Yet, that is just what author Lenora Chu advocates in her new book, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve.

As an American journalist living in Shanghai, Chu recounts the experience of her young son attending a Chinese school for five years. Chu acknowledges the often “draconian” ideas and tactics of Chinese schools, but her book touts the benefits of these approaches and suggests American schools should adopt some of them to become more competitive.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article about her book, Chu writes about the ways her son was force-fed eggs by his teacher, prohibited from bringing his asthma inhaler to school, and “isolated” in a separate classroom with threat of demotion after he “failed to follow in ‘one-two’ step during a physical exercise.”

(Related: “What Zhang Knows That Johnny Doesn’t”)

Yet, she says that these practices are beneficial because they give teachers and schools total authority to push for strong academic outcomes. Parental sovereignty and individual liberty become secondary to teacher control and school performance. Chu writes:

“This deference gives the teacher near-absolute command of her classroom. My son became so afraid of being late for class, missing school or otherwise disappointing his teacher, that he once raised a stink when I broached the possibility of missing a few school days for a family trip. He was 5.”

Fortunately, other scholars are speaking out against importing more standardization and control into America’s already coercive, test-driven mass schooling model. In his 2014 book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China Has The Best (And Worst) Education System in the World, author Yong Zhao explains that the emphasis on subservience to authority and an all-out focus on academic outcomes and test scores may propel China to the top of international education comparisons (see below), but it’s at the price of freedom and autonomy. Skills and scores replace ingenuity and agency.

Chinese Test Scores Versus Other Countries_PISA

In The Washington Post this week, Zhao, an education professor at the University of Kansas, wrote a response to Chu’s book and her Wall Street Journal Article. He states:

“I did not see any convincing evidence in the book that supports the proposal that American students need Chinese schools. Quite to the contrary, I understood the book as further evidence for not importing Chinese schools into America. Little Soldiers is far from a love affair with Chinese schools as the title of the Wall Street Journal article suggests. It is, rather, a vivid portrayal of an outdated education model that does serious and significant damage.”

 

Chu doesn’t seem to mind the trade-off between authoritarianism and freedom. She concludes her Wall Street Journal article with the statement: “Sometimes, it is best when parents—and children—are simply obliged to do as they’re told.”

We should be careful that America does not become a society of obedient “little soldiers,” abdicating our individual liberty to the powers of the state under the guise that it’s good for us. High test scores may be commendable, but not if they come at such a high price.

(Related: “What Zang Knows That Johnny Doesn’t”)

–

[Image Credit: CIEE College Study Abroad]

This post China’s Education System: A Case Against Importing It was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.

Why is Solitary Confinement Used in Public Schools?

/in , /by

If parents were to lock their children in a confined space for a lengthy period of time, it is highly likely that those parents would be arrested for child abuse and their parental rights threatened. (In fact, this just happened in Arizona recently.) If public schools do this, however, the outcome is quite different.

The use of physical restraints, locked “seclusion rooms,” and solitary confinement for children is rampant throughout the nation’s public schools. In a comprehensive 2014 analysis by NPR and ProPublica, analysts found that “restraint and seclusion were used at least 267,000 times nationwide” in the 2011-2012 school year. Schools put children in seclusion rooms approximately 104,000 times in that one year. ProPublica reports that the restraint and seclusion practices included “pinning uncooperative children facedown on the floor, locking them in dark closets and tying them up with straps, handcuffs, bungee cords or even duct tape.”

Many school officials contend that using restraints and locked seclusion for children are sometimes necessary when children are out of control in the school building and need to calm down. But a 2014 U.S. Senate report on these practices argues that these extreme tactics are unnecessary and damaging to children.

The report asserts: “There is no evidence that physically restraining or putting children in unsupervised seclusion in the K-12 school system provides any educational or therapeutic benefit to a child. In fact, use of either seclusion or restraints in non-emergency situations poses significant physical and psychological danger to students.”

Particularly troubling is that the NPR/Pro Publica analysis of school seclusion and restraint practices found that the vast majority of the cases (75%) involved children with disabilities. In a separate analysis earlier this year, the Education Week Research Center found that 70,000 special education students were restrained or secluded in the 2013-2014 school year.

Beyond the obvious emotional trauma to a child of being physically restrained or locked in a secluded room, these restraint and seclusion practices sometimes result in serious injury. A 2012 ABC News investigation found that “thousands of autistic and disabled schoolchildren have been injured and dozens have died” from the use of seclusion and restraint protocols in the nation’s public schools.

Writing earlier this week in The Huffington Post, educator Laurie Levy shared a story of a small, first grade special education girl in her school district who was placed in locked seclusion, “crying hysterically for 45 minutes in what was euphemistically called the ‘Calm Down Room.’”

Levy goes on to write: “The closet had a panel window that permitted an adult to look in, but the window was blocked by taped-up paper from the floor to four feet from the ground and also at the top, so the child could not look out. This also made the closet rather dark. The child was repeatedly slapping the window with her hands but was not tall enough to see anything.”

Actions that are considered criminal when parents do them are somehow tolerated in the nation’s public schools. Locking children in dark closets or physically restraining them with ropes and ties can cause serious emotional trauma and bodily harm. Parents shouldn’t do it, and neither should the state.

—

[Image Credit: Paramount Pictures]

This post Solitary Confinement is Quite Common In Public Schools was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.

What if School Was More Like Summer Camp?

/in , /by

For many children, summer camp is transformational. Working collaboratively, mostly through play and hands-on experimentation, campers try new things, encounter new challenges, and meet new mentors and friends. They are often outside, exploring the world around them, with ample opportunities for freedom and self-expression. Then summer ends and they go back to school, confined in a classroom for most of the day, passively learning what others want them to know.

Some educators are challenging this divide between summer learning and fall schooling. Why, they ask, isn’t school more like camp?

In his book, The Art of Self-Directed Learning, author and educator Blake Boles writes:

“School taught me how to memorize a fact until Friday and alter the margins on an essay to create a higher page count; camp taught me how to figure out what I want, take the initiative, conquer my fears, own my victories, and learn from my failures. To my teenage sensibilities, the annual ratio of camp to school didn’t make sense. Why didn’t I go to camp most of the year and then head off to school for a couple months to learn grammar, algebra, and whatever else camp didn’t teach?”

Boles now spends his time trying to bridge the gap between the self-directed learning he experienced in summer camp with the prevailing forced schooling model. He works with teenagers outside of schooling to support their own passion-centered learning, or to reignite their self-directed learning senses that are often dulled at school. Through his Unschool Adventures program, Boles leads extensive, multi-week trips around the world for teenagers throughout the year. His goal of extending the benefits of summer camp past summer is being realized with hundreds of young people who learn by being fully immersed in the people, places, and things around them.

In Massachusetts, educators are also blurring the lines between summer camp learning and academic year schooling. At Parts & Crafts, a self-directed learning center just outside of Boston, summer camps with long waiting lists provide young people with the freedom to explore their own interests and passions, while helpful facilitators are available to assist.

Parts & Crafts, a community makerspace that encourages creativity and innovation through hands-on tinkering, building, and collaboration, continues its summer camp philosophy of self-directed learning throughout the academic year. It offers a schooling alternative program for local homeschoolers, as well as an after-school program, where young people are free to learn without coercion.

Away from the fetters of the standard compulsory schooling model, summer programming provides a glimpse of what education could be. A mix of public and private organizations, church-based groups, neighborhood co-ops, and family-focused arrangements combine to nurture and nourish children all season.

In summer, children have more opportunities for play and hands-on discovery, and become more active participants in their lives rather than passive onlookers. With interactive camps, engaging summer activities through local organizations, and closer connections with their own family members, it is no wonder that most young people would prefer not to go back to school come fall. Perhaps we should look more to summer for the solutions to our school-year woes, and challenge a system that puts more emphasis on containment than freedom.

–

This post What if School Was More Like Summer Camp? was originally published on Intellectual Takeout by Kerry McDonald.

“Back to School” Is Not Inevitable

/in , /by

The New York Times article on “6 Things Parents Should Know About Sending Kids Back To School” begins:

Surely there are some kids who are eager for school to start, but I have not met them. My 9-year-old and 5-year-old daughters have little interest now in trading day trips to the beach and family movie nights for an unfamiliar classroom and nightly homework.”

So don’t make them.

Our culture treats schooling as if it’s inevitable. Like death and taxes, it’s a necessary evil. Even if we know kids don’t want to return to school – are dragging their heels or are downright obstinate – we laugh it off. Everyone knows school stinks. You just have to hold your nose and jump.

For many progressive reformers, dating back to the days of John Dewey, the key is just to make schooling gentler. Spruce it up a bit, make it more engaging and relevant, paint the classroom walls a prettier color. Then it will be ok.

I don’t buy it. You can add curtains to the jail cells but it’s no less a prison.

Out-of-the-Box Education

I often have people say to me when I advocate for alternatives to school that we shouldn’t “throw the baby out with the bathwater.” There’s no need to do away with compulsory schooling, they say; we just need to reform what we’ve got. But progressive reformers have been trying this for decades with little impact, at least inside of the mass schooling monopoly. Not only have progressive reforms not worked, by most accounts mass schooling has become even more restrictive.

Within the context of a system of coercive schooling, created by 19th-century ideologues to bring order and compliance to the masses, there is no room for creativity, no palate for innovation. We need to look outside of standard schooling for education models that actually work. And we often need to look way outside for models that work and that retain children’s natural curiosity and exuberance for learning.

Schooling is the box. What does learning look like?

NorthStar, a self-directed learning center for teens in western Massachusetts, has a great motto: “Learning is Natural, School is Optional.” Schooling alternatives, like NorthStar, recognize that thinking out-of-the-box about education isn’t enough. You have to reject the box altogether and create an entirely new geometric shape. Schooling is the box. What does learning look like?

This process takes some imagination. Most of us have been schooled to believe that schooling is necessary, that learning is unpleasant, that all kids dread September and the daily confines of the classroom walls. That is Life, we are told. Suck it up. Because then someday you’ll have to be an Adult and spend your days in a job you hate with bosses you can’t stand in a confining, mind-numbing workplace that saps your soul. Get used to it.

We rarely question why. We rarely challenge the origins of mass schooling to cultivate such conformity, such hopelessness, such inevitability. It just is.

It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Schooling is one mode of education, but it is not the only one. There are other ways to learn, to know, to be educated. There are real models of education – that look nothing like school – that are wildly successful in nurturing children’s learning and development. Unschooling, democratic schooling, self-directed learning centers are just a few of the educational possibilities that reject the schooling box and create something entirely new.

As back-to-school time approaches and articles swarm on how to make the transition to September easier and more successful, maybe it’s worth pausing to ask: If something is so unpleasant for so many of us, why are we doing it?

Reprinted from Whole Family Learning.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.