For my unschooling commentary I am summarizing a talk given by Daniel Quinn that was published in The Unschooling Unmanual. It is primarily about the history of schools and their purpose.
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Our children are being prepared in school to step boldly into the only fully human life that has ever existed on this planet. The skills they are acquiring in school will not only bring them success but deep personal fulfillment on every level. What does it matter if they never do more than work in some mind-numbing factory job? They can parse a sentence! They can extract a square root!
Of course, everyone knows that the citizen's education does no such thing. Schools are failing-and failing miserably-at delivering on these enticing promises. Ah well, teachers weren't being paid enough, so what could you expect? We raised teachers' salaries-again and again and again-and still the schools failed. Well, what could you expect? The schools were physically decrepit, lightless, and uninspiring. We built new ones-tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them-and still the schools failed. Well, what could you expect? The curriculum was antiquated and irrelevant. We modernized the curriculum, did our damnedest to make it relevant-and still the schools failed. Every week-then as now-you could read about some bright new idea that would surely "fix" whatever was wrong with our schools: the open classroom, team teaching, back to basics, more homework, less homework, no homework-I couldn't begin to enumerate them all. Hundreds of these bright ideas were implemented-thousands of them were implemented-and still the schools failed.
Suppose the schools aren't failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want them to do-but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do they do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only-and they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that their parents earn.
Of course the situation was very different two hundred years ago, when we were still a primarily agrarian society.Youngsters were expected to become workers at age ten, eleven, and twelve. But as the character of our society changed, fewer youngsters were needed for farm work, and the enactment of child-labor laws soon made it impossible to put ten, eleven, and twelve year olds to work in factories. It was necessary to keep them off the streets-and where better than in schools? Naturally, new material had to be inserted into the curriculum to fill the time. It didn't much matter what it was. Have them memorize the capital of every state. No one wondered or cared if these were things kids wanted to know or needed to know.
During the Great Depression it became urgently important to keep young people off the job market for as long as possible, and so it came to be understood that a twelfth-grade education was essential for every citizen. As before, it didn't much matter what was added to fill up the time, so long as it was marginally plausible. Let's have them learn how to analyze a poem, even if they never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them study Euclidean geometry, even if two years later they couldn't prove a single theorem to save their lives.
It was in the good years after the Second World War, when there were often more jobs than workers to fill them, that our schools began to be perceived as failing. But of course by then the curriculum had achieved the status of scripture, and it was too late to acknowledge that the program had never been designed to be useful. No one was about to acknowledge that the program had been set up to keep young people off the job market-and that it had done a damn fine job of that at least.
But keeping people off the job market is only half of what the schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children in aboriginal societies have completed what we, from our point of view, would call their "education." What this means is that their survival value is 100%. All of their elders could disappear overnight, and there wouldn't be chaos, anarchy,and famine among these new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost.
But the last thing we want is our graduates to have a survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please. We don't want them to do whatever they please, we want them to have exactly two choices. Get a job or go to college. Either choice is good for us, because we need a constant supply of entry level workers and we also need doctors, lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, geologists, biologists, school teachers, and so on.
So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.
The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that children will not learn unless they're compelled to-in school. It is part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning and will avoid it at all costs-and they point to school children to prove it.What they fail to recognize is that the learning curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain-but quickly levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grades it's completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a boring, painful experience they'd love to avoid if they could.
But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn. They won't all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they studied. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
_________
Our children are being prepared in school to step boldly into the only fully human life that has ever existed on this planet. The skills they are acquiring in school will not only bring them success but deep personal fulfillment on every level. What does it matter if they never do more than work in some mind-numbing factory job? They can parse a sentence! They can extract a square root!
Of course, everyone knows that the citizen's education does no such thing. Schools are failing-and failing miserably-at delivering on these enticing promises. Ah well, teachers weren't being paid enough, so what could you expect? We raised teachers' salaries-again and again and again-and still the schools failed. Well, what could you expect? The schools were physically decrepit, lightless, and uninspiring. We built new ones-tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them-and still the schools failed. Well, what could you expect? The curriculum was antiquated and irrelevant. We modernized the curriculum, did our damnedest to make it relevant-and still the schools failed. Every week-then as now-you could read about some bright new idea that would surely "fix" whatever was wrong with our schools: the open classroom, team teaching, back to basics, more homework, less homework, no homework-I couldn't begin to enumerate them all. Hundreds of these bright ideas were implemented-thousands of them were implemented-and still the schools failed.
Suppose the schools aren't failing? Suppose they're doing exactly what we really want them to do-but don't wish to examine and acknowledge?
Granted that the schools do a poor job of preparing children for a successful and fulfilling life in our civilization, but what things do they do excellently well? Well, to begin with, they do a superb job of keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only-and they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that their parents earn.
Of course the situation was very different two hundred years ago, when we were still a primarily agrarian society.Youngsters were expected to become workers at age ten, eleven, and twelve. But as the character of our society changed, fewer youngsters were needed for farm work, and the enactment of child-labor laws soon made it impossible to put ten, eleven, and twelve year olds to work in factories. It was necessary to keep them off the streets-and where better than in schools? Naturally, new material had to be inserted into the curriculum to fill the time. It didn't much matter what it was. Have them memorize the capital of every state. No one wondered or cared if these were things kids wanted to know or needed to know.
During the Great Depression it became urgently important to keep young people off the job market for as long as possible, and so it came to be understood that a twelfth-grade education was essential for every citizen. As before, it didn't much matter what was added to fill up the time, so long as it was marginally plausible. Let's have them learn how to analyze a poem, even if they never read another one in their whole adult life. Let's have them study Euclidean geometry, even if two years later they couldn't prove a single theorem to save their lives.
It was in the good years after the Second World War, when there were often more jobs than workers to fill them, that our schools began to be perceived as failing. But of course by then the curriculum had achieved the status of scripture, and it was too late to acknowledge that the program had never been designed to be useful. No one was about to acknowledge that the program had been set up to keep young people off the job market-and that it had done a damn fine job of that at least.
But keeping people off the job market is only half of what the schools do superbly well. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, children in aboriginal societies have completed what we, from our point of view, would call their "education." What this means is that their survival value is 100%. All of their elders could disappear overnight, and there wouldn't be chaos, anarchy,and famine among these new adults. They would be able to carry on without a hitch. None of the skills and technologies practiced by their parents would be lost.
But the last thing we want is our graduates to have a survival value of 100%, because this would make them free to opt out of our carefully constructed economic system and do whatever they please. We don't want them to do whatever they please, we want them to have exactly two choices. Get a job or go to college. Either choice is good for us, because we need a constant supply of entry level workers and we also need doctors, lawyers, physicists, mathematicians, psychologists, geologists, biologists, school teachers, and so on.
So you see that our schools are not failing, they're just succeeding in ways we prefer not to see. Turning out graduates with no skills, with no survival value, and with no choice but to work or starve are not flaws of the system, they are features of the system. These are things the system must do to keep things going on as they are.
The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that children will not learn unless they're compelled to-in school. It is part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning and will avoid it at all costs-and they point to school children to prove it.What they fail to recognize is that the learning curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain-but quickly levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grades it's completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a boring, painful experience they'd love to avoid if they could.
But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn. They won't all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they studied. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
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Glacier and Olympic are my two favorite parks. I guess I like the north. I could easily spend two weeks more at Glacier doing longer day hikes. There are so many we could not do with the kids. I would really like to backpack along the Hoh River Trail in Olympic one day as well.
Our campsite in Glacier was fairly small and on a hill. However, at the bottom of the hill, down a short trail, through some trees, was Lake McDonald. A child's dream. I'm not too sure what the kids did down at the lake because us adults mostly just minded our own business. I heard some talk of "Indians" though and Seun mentioned her "boat" repeatedly.
On our first full day in the park we drove the Going to the Sun road and hiked to some waterfalls.
Nature's playground.
On the way back, we stopped at the Logan Pass Visitor Center and caught a glimpse of this mountain goat.
We also stopped along the river for the kids to play and Shina tried fly fishing again.
He decided to venture out into the freezing water this time and was much more successful.
Back at the campsite.
On our second full day in the park, we decided to hike the Trail of Cedars on the way to Avalanche Lake. It was a little over 2 miles up to the lake. There was quite a bit of complaining and wanting to turn around, but I forced them onward. There is always a reward at the end, I say.
This next picture is blurry but I wanted to catch their faces when they finally reached the so called reward. Was it all worth it?
I think so.
I forgot to take diapers or wipes on the hike and paid dearly for my mistake. Kunbo pooped and peed profusely. I threw out the poop, but the pee weighed her down until eventually her diaper just wouldn't stay on. Soon after this, I held her and she fell asleep. By the time we reached the trailhead I was covered in urine.
My sister will tell you she didn't like Olympic as much because of the rain. However, the rain at our campsite was just the slightest drizzle. If you stand under a tree you stay dry. Also, the temperature was perfect. Not too hot or cold even when wet. The rain in the rain forest was a bit harder, but what's a hike in the rain forest without rain!? The coast was clear.
Here is a picture of our campsite. It was perfect. The kids made up a game of fairies and ogres almost as soon as we set up camp. There were force fields and Wale came up with the name "Boomeranger" for himself. He wanted Grandpa to knight him "ogre of lightning and thunder."
The campsite next to us also had a group of kids. At first, it was two separate and rival gangs. Who is allowed to walk on the big tree dividing the campsite and that sort of thing. Eventually, the two gangs became one.
Glacier and Olympic are my two favorite parks. I guess I like the north. I could easily spend two weeks more at Glacier doing longer day hikes. There are so many we could not do with the kids. I would really like to backpack along the Hoh River Trail in Olympic one day as well.
Our campsite in Glacier was fairly small and on a hill. However, at the bottom of the hill, down a short trail, through some trees, was Lake McDonald. A child's dream. I'm not too sure what the kids did down at the lake because us adults mostly just minded our own business. I heard some talk of "Indians" though and Seun mentioned her "boat" repeatedly.
On our first full day in the park we drove the Going to the Sun road and hiked to some waterfalls.
Nature's playground.
On the way back, we stopped at the Logan Pass Visitor Center and caught a glimpse of this mountain goat.
We also stopped along the river for the kids to play and Shina tried fly fishing again.
He decided to venture out into the freezing water this time and was much more successful.
Back at the campsite.
On our second full day in the park, we decided to hike the Trail of Cedars on the way to Avalanche Lake. It was a little over 2 miles up to the lake. There was quite a bit of complaining and wanting to turn around, but I forced them onward. There is always a reward at the end, I say.
This next picture is blurry but I wanted to catch their faces when they finally reached the so called reward. Was it all worth it?
I think so.
I forgot to take diapers or wipes on the hike and paid dearly for my mistake. Kunbo pooped and peed profusely. I threw out the poop, but the pee weighed her down until eventually her diaper just wouldn't stay on. Soon after this, I held her and she fell asleep. By the time we reached the trailhead I was covered in urine.
My sister will tell you she didn't like Olympic as much because of the rain. However, the rain at our campsite was just the slightest drizzle. If you stand under a tree you stay dry. Also, the temperature was perfect. Not too hot or cold even when wet. The rain in the rain forest was a bit harder, but what's a hike in the rain forest without rain!? The coast was clear.
Here is a picture of our campsite. It was perfect. The kids made up a game of fairies and ogres almost as soon as we set up camp. There were force fields and Wale came up with the name "Boomeranger" for himself. He wanted Grandpa to knight him "ogre of lightning and thunder."
The campsite next to us also had a group of kids. At first, it was two separate and rival gangs. Who is allowed to walk on the big tree dividing the campsite and that sort of thing. Eventually, the two gangs became one.
The same day we arrived we decided to hike to the nearby Sol Duc Falls.
See my dad on the bridge?
The park is very spread out and we spent the first full day driving to the Hoh Rainforest and the coast.
While we were walking along the beach I saw the rocks you see to the right in the picture below. They don't look too far right? I decided I wanted to walk to them and it was about at this point that the older girls stayed behind.
The rocks turned out to be about a mile and a half away and took a bit longer to walk to than expected.
When we got back to where the girls were, my sister and I knew we were in trouble. Grandpa was pissed and Grandma had adopted the girls and renamed them, Granddaughter 1, 2, and 3.
Grandma and Grandpa left the following day (they had been staying at the Sol Duc Lodge where we also spent a lot of our time). We headed to Hurricane Ridge.
I just looked at the girls' journals to see what I forgot. I totally forgot that we stayed in Bremerton at the Flagship Inn for two nights and took the ferry to Seattle. It was a nice break. Jamie was happy to shower and do laundry. We stuck our gum on the gum wall in Seattle.
Ayo mostly draws pictures in her journal and maybe writes a sentence. She drew the lake near the campsite in Glacier and said they played "Indians" and she made a necklace (out of natural materials found near the lake). Seun details every thing she eats. She must really love food. Every meal in detail I swear. Ice cream, pancakes, Asian buffets (for my birthday in Washington), dumplings, etc. It's all there.
Next up: Thoughts on Unschooling Part 4 and the California Three
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