The Decision to Unschool

The following is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to Dr. Nathan Parker, the superintendent of the Orange School District after resigning from my job as a biology teacher at Orange High School in NJ. It more or less explains why Lucia and I decided to unschool:

I no longer believe in schools. This may seem a shocking statement coming from a teacher, but it is a position that has come about through a careful evolution of thought, experience, and research over the past two years. One of the most important catalysts in this process was my work at Orange High School. Therefore, while my time there was not always easy, happy, or fun, I have no regrets and no resentments against any person or part of my experience at the school. In fact, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to experience the function, or more accurately, the dysfunction of an inner-city school because it has brought me that much faster to a whole new philosophy of education and how I wish to live my life and raise my own child.

This letter is not intended as a condemnation of Orange. I believe that much of what I observed there happens, at least to some degree, in all schools. Neither should this letter serve as a litany of specific grievances to be redressed. I don’t believe, working within the confines of the school tradition, that there can be any redress for the problems apparent on a daily basis in schools all across the U.S. and, indeed, around the world. As superintendent of a school district, you are in quite a perplexing position, Dr. Parker, and I don’t envy you. You are charged with the mission of bringing success and achievement to all students while working within a system that, by its very nature, is designed to guarantee the failure of most of them. The very structure of our society depends on maintaining a social hierarchy drawn very much along racial and socioeconomic lines. School is one of the first places in which we draw those lines. I recently read a book called Instead of Education by John Holt in which he states,

“[an] important and indeed essential social function of Schools is ranking – that is, grading and labeling, putting children into pecking orders, dividing them into winners and losers. All modern societies, like most societies in the past, are organized into a few winners, and a great many losers, a few “decision-makers” who give commands and many who carry them out. It is of course not always easy to tell where the line is between winning and losing. The line is in the mind… those who feel like losers are losers”

Most of the students I encountered in Orange were losers because they felt like losers. They didn’t bother to bring a notebook to class because they expected to fail the test whether they took notes or not. They didn’t do the homework because they assumed they wouldn’t understand it. They didn’t attempt the reading because for many of them reading is an arduous activity in which they’ve often met with failure. When did these students decide that they were losers? How did they reach this conclusion?

We can of course point to problems external to school such as an unhealthy home environment, violence, drugs, absentee parents, and other community-related issues. There is no denying that these play a role in the making of a “loser”, and in a community such as Orange where these external problems are more common than in a suburban school, for example, the school has an even greater responsibility to act as a refuge, as a safe, supportive and nurturing place where students can escape the tumult of home or community and be themselves. Instead, because of the traditional roles and structure of schools in our society, and in spite of the efforts of many well-meaning individuals within the school system, school is simply yet another place where students have no control, where others’ values are imposed on them, where they are forced to submit to others’ will and yield up their individuality. It is little wonder that the students at Orange High School have such an antagonistic relationship with their teachers, their security staff, their administrators. I believe that the greatest responsibility for producing “losers” lies with the school system. I’m not just talking about Orange. Every school needs to have its losers, and the pecking order needs to be established early in order to be firmly in place by high school. Much of this is accomplished through the traditional school practice of age segregation .

My daughter, Lucia, attended kindergarten this past year at the Rand School, a well-regarded public elementary school in Montclair. She was grouped in a classroom together with 25 other children who had two things in common. They were all residents of Montclair, and they would all have turned 5 by October 1st. Other than that, the students came from different areas of town, were of different ethnicities and had different first- or home-languages. Some had attended preschool. Others had not. Some had a stay-at-home parent, others were from single-parent homes, and some lived within alternative family units. Some had traveled to other countries. Some had attended Hebrew school. Some could swim underwater. Some could write their name. Some were vegetarian. Some had been to a planetarium. Some had pets. Some had musicians in the family. In short, these children were, in every sense, 26 individuals in varying stages of personal development and with a wide variety of experiences, preferences, personalities, and physiological differences. And yet, based on nothing other than their age they were all equally called upon to demonstrate mastery of the Kindergarten curriculum. Lucia’s rather cryptic report card included a list of no less than 70(!) individual and specific skills for which my daughter was to be assessed at three regular intervals during the school year. Among the more ridiculous were:

· (Social/emotional development) Demonstrates self control – This would imply that the teacher has the ability to intuit the very interaction between id and superego within my child’s mind. With 26 children in the class I doubt my daughter’s teacher ever had time to engage in this level of individual psychoanalysis. Self control means something vastly different for different people. One child may be exercising self control by keeping from crying when mom drops him off in the morning. Another may be exercising the utmost restraint in keeping herself seated in a chair for more than two minutes. In both cases the teacher could be totally unaware of the internal conflict taking place. The very words “self control” suggest that the only person who can assess the act is the individual him- or her-self.

· (Language development) Remains on topic during group discussions - This is surprising in its overt cultural bias. Not only are some conversational traditions much more meandering than others and valued for being so, but the ability to listen, understand, and relate what’s being said to something else in one’s experience and to flow smoothly into a new idea is probably a more cognitively complex “skill” than simply staying on a single topic!

· (Visual arts) Demonstrates creativity/originality/imagination – Whoever wrote this one hasn’t spent much time around 5 year-olds.

The list goes on, and so could I, but perhaps that’s for another conversation. In sum, the list is nonsense. It is arbitrary and subjective and inappropriate. It serves no real purpose. Any parent who spends a reasonable amount of time with his or her child could make a more accurate assessment of any of these “skills” if he or she was so inclined. But the report card serves a very important purpose in terms of social order. It is a tool for ranking .By the end of kindergarten my daughter had proven herself a “winner,” and if she chose to remain in the school system through high school, odds are she would remain so.

But in this race not everyone can be a winner. By necessity some of her classmates must have been “losers”. While I haven’t seen the other children’s report cards, I do know that some of the children in her class, boys in particular, were considered to have behavior problems. They could not have received the same marks as Lucia in “Demonstrates self control” or “Demonstrates personal problem solving skills.” Perhaps these young, energetic, inquisitive boys were preoccupied with other, more pressing interests at the time that kept them from considering others’ feelings or the interests of the class as a whole. Perhaps their developing body chemistry did not allow for the type of interaction that was desired of them at that time. Perhaps, perhaps… there are countless reasons for children to fail to perform the way we expect them to perform when we want them to perform. This means nothing. Given another couple of months these children will be entirely new children, with thousands of new connections established in their brains, ready for new experiences and new kinds of relationships. And yet some of these Montclair 5 year-olds are already “losers” and will likely remain so throughout their school experience and into their adult lives.

So how did my students in Orange become losers? It must have happened very early on, and it must have been reinforced regularly, probably daily. It was the result of unrealistic expectations determined by something as arbitrary as age and validated through a series of distorted assessments that fail to consider the whole child as an individual. My daughter has described incidents to me in which one of the “troublesome” boys in her class failed to listen and do what he was told. It seems he had become so interested in an activity that he didn’t want to stop what he was doing and clean up at the appropriate time. As Lucia put it, “Mr. ______ had to push ______ out of the way and clean up the table himself.” Was this child being disciplined for becoming too engaged in a classroom activity? Can you imagine the confusion that might cause in a child? Many of my students were at some point in their school experience made to feel similarly inadequate and inferior compared to others of their age. Eventually their minds gave up on school all together, but their bodies were still required to attend, like walking zombies. My attempts at doing things differently, creatively, enthusiastically in the classroom were often met by resistance from the very people they were meant to benefit, the students themselves who had been stripped of their innate curiosity and motivation long before they got to me. Regarding teachers attempting to do exciting and interesting things in their classrooms John Holt states, and I agree,

“Even the students themselves may object, and insist on playing the school game as they have always played it! “Tell us what to do,” they say, “and then we’ll see if we can figure out a way to get out of doing it.”

I did not become a teacher because I enjoy forcing people to do things they don’t want to do. But during my time at Orange High School I found that this is the true job of a schoolteacher – to get students to do things they don’t want to do through coercion, threats, and bribery. I refuse to do that job.

John Taylor Gatto in The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher does a wonderful job of describing some of the other duties of a schoolteacher that I will never perform. If you haven’t already, I urge you to read this brutally honest exposé written by a former New York State Teacher of the Year (1991). Mr. Gatto describes how teachers, by doing the job expected of them, contribute to the perpetuation of an atmosphere of repression, condemnation, and debasement such as exists at Orange High School. This contribution is usually not made through a teacher’s conscious choice. Choice, after all, implies that there were clear options available. All of the teachers I’ve met in my life have themselves been products of our school system. They are simply doing what was once done to them. They don’t question or think about it very much. They can’t imagine another way because they’ve never experienced anything else. What they do is usually described as “maintaining control” over their classes. This takes many forms.
The favorite strategy at Orange seemed to be keeping students busy (to keep them out of trouble) with endless worksheets or some other tedious, rote task. Most of the students like this because it does not require them to think. They therefore don’t run the risk of proving themselves inadequate as they have in past experience (as discussed above). They are simply required to find the answers in the prescribed textbook and fill in the blanks on the worksheet - like robots. The information passes between the eyes and the hand and completely circumvents the brain. If they hand in enough of these hand outs they will receive a passing grade, and the teacher has written proof that he or she has “covered” the required material. If the students show resentment (as any self-respecting, thinking person would) at being forced to waste their time jumping through such degrading hoops they may be punished by having to repeat the whole process again in summer school. If you walk around and look inside every classroom at Orange High School as I did daily during my Block 4 attendance duty you will see the same scene in almost every room. There is no learning going on. The students are sitting in clusters, some wearing headphones, some text-messaging on a cell phone concealed under the desk, or even out in the open. Some have textbooks open on their desks and are simultaneously writing on a worksheet and carrying on a conversation about boys or girls or music or fashion. Nor is there any teaching going on. The teacher is sitting behind his or her desk, not interacting with the students save for the remote correction of minor infractions. He or she may be using the time to catch up on grading, reading, or doing nothing.

“Well,” you may be thinking, “those teachers are not doing their jobs. They should be conducting exciting, engaging activities in order to motivate those students.” In other words, the teachers should be jumping through hoops of their own. Well, Dr. Parker, I jumped through many hoops. I performed, I played music, I danced, I invented games, and I spent a great deal of my own money on everything from pineapples to chicken hearts. I organized field trips and set up debates. I stayed up until two in the morning writing lesson plans, tweaking labs, designing rubrics, and developing ‘genuine’ assessments. I spent hours writing encouraging, reflective comments on each of my students’ assignments.

A handful of my students really noticed and appreciated my effort. They read my comments, dissected my chicken hearts, and scored well on my assessments. These are the “winners” who have somehow maintained their self-respect and self-motivation. They liked that I did things differently and that my class was fun, but for all my hoop jumping I cannot claim responsibility for motivating these students. They achieved A’s in my class because they are achievers. They also achieved A’s in other, less interesting classes. They will do well no matter what. They will play the game and fill in the blanks. They don’t need me to stand on my head for them. The rest of my students spent most of their time devising ways to avoid participation in class. They did not respond to my efforts because they will never respond to anything in school. They feel no connection to the classroom or anything that happens in it. They were made “losers” long ago. There was nothing I could do to change that. They don’t need my hoop-jumping either. So, why jump at all? What I first viewed as laziness or indifference on the part of teachers I now see as logic and reason. Only a crazy person would stay up until two in the morning if, in the end, a stack of worksheets will get you the same results. The “winners” will always do well, and the “losers” will always fail. The nature of our school system guarantees it – beginning on the very first day of kindergarten.

However, the winners and losers do have something in common. Neither will actually learn anything at Orange High School. The winners may memorize in order to regurgitate on a test, but their knowledge will be fragmented at best, and lacking in genuine understanding. Real learning cannot be forced upon a person. Real learning is the result of an urgent need to know. It is the result of passion. Passions cannot be dictated by curriculum. Passions arise through a natural exploration and engagement with the world, through freedom, choice, and responsibility.

Why are we so mistrustful of students? Why do we consider them entirely incapable of making real decisions? Why do we train them to defer to a higher authority in order to know what is valuable to learn? Certainly teaching is a political act dictated by the culture of power in our society. Having grown up in a struggling working class community and endured public school myself, I have long been aware of the ‘pedagogy of poverty’. Poor kids in this country receive a very different education than rich kids because they are being groomed to occupy different positions in society. Poor kids are taught through menial tasks and rote memorization so they’ll be ready for menial, repetitive jobs. My wealthy summer camp friends, on the other hand, talked about the papers they’d written and creative projects they’d carried out at expensive private schools. Clearly they were being kept busy with something other than boring old worksheets. I was terribly envious. I realize now that although wealthy students are given more apparent responsibility and so-called leadership opportunities, they are also being groomed to carry out a certain function as adults. In short, their job will be to maintain the status quo, to become successful enough to be good consumers and support our oil-based economy, to defer to television to find out what to value and where to buy it. They may not lead fulfilled, enriched lives, but elaborate corporate marketing schemes will convince them that they do. They won’t question government corruption or injustice. They will uphold our precious racial and class hierarchy out of fear of losing their own privileged standing. Theirs may be a glass cage with a two-car garage, but it is a cage nonetheless.

I want my daughter to know a cage when she sees one. Lucia will not be returning to Rand School in September. She will not be attending school of any kind. When I talk to other parents about our decision to keep Lucia free from school I am amazed at how similar their reactions are. The main concern expressed by most is the question of “socialization”. Doesn’t she need the socialization? This question strikes me as odd for several reasons. First of all, where do these people get the idea that socialization is something to be received only at school? Have we surrendered ourselves so fully to the authority of schools that we are unable to socialize our own children? Are we so busy being good consumers that we are too exhausted for social interaction outside of work and school? In a society where families have been known to take trips to the mall as a form of weekend entertainment I would venture to say yes. Families are spending less and less time together, which makes their relationships more and more strained. This in turn leads to further avoidance and the perpetuation of a cycle of alienation within the family. Teenagers are especially susceptible to negative outside influences when lacking a supportive family unit. As a society we have come to depend on schools to raise our children, to the neglect of our own responsibilities as parents, siblings, aunts and uncles.

Secondly, isn’t education supposed to be the primary purpose of school? And yet the question on everyone’s mind has nothing to do with curriculum or standards. School is all about socialization. And we all know it. Socialization in this context of course means learning your place in society - getting comfortable in your particular cage. If Lucia does not attend school, how will she learn where she fits in? How will she know what to do to be accepted? Whom to envy, whom to shun? How will she grow accustomed to her ‘winner’ status and come to feel fundamentally different from the ‘losers’? How will she know what to buy, what to wear, what opinions to hold, how to be viewed by boys? The adults who ask the “socialization” question are afraid of freedom. They’ve never truly had it, and they can’t imagine what someone might do with it. Personally, I’ve experienced the school brand of socialization. Lucia doesn’t need it.

Lucia will be homeschooling, or, more accurately, unschooling, a word which refers to the practice of giving children the freedom to do what they do best – to learn. Millions of years of evolution have honed our brains into fine, responsive instruments designed for the purpose of seeking out knowledge. Children learn everything they need to know – they learn to walk, to talk, to connect with others. They learn at their own pace, and they take great pleasure in doing it! They would continue on this trajectory if we let them. Instead we snatch them up at about age five and begin a thirteen-year campaign to convince them that they are incapable of learning anything on their own, that they need to be told what to learn, when to learn it, how to learn it, and what to do with it when they’re done. We confine them to an institutional setting that is all too often a grim, dilapidated, smelly place with fluorescent lighting. We tell them that pleasure plays no part in the learning process. We feed them processed foods rich in sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils. And then we quantitatively measure their worth and send scores home to their families. By the time they are finished with compulsory schooling we have guaranteed that a large majority of these students will never in their lives pick up a book to read for pleasure. What a crime to bind them, to break them of their most natural learning instinct! And yet that is what happens in schools every day.

more from John Taylor Gatto: www.johntaylorgatto.com
more from John Holt: http://www.holtgws.com/index.html