The School Experiment

We’ve been home for less than a week, and already I’ve had the justification of unschooling conversation more than once. I seem to have become the go-to-girl for Montclair parents dissatisfied with the public schools (and believe me, there are many of them). It’s made me realize how much I didn’t talk about unschooling while we were living in Europe. In Europe I was an American, which carries its own set of ambassadorial responsibilities. In Montclair I’m the unschooler. Fortunately I find it much easier and much more fun to explain the unschooling lifestyle than to attempt to explain the actions of the Bush administration.

Because Lucia had already attended public school kindergarten our unschooling life began with an awkward period of having to explain and justify our actions not only to family members and friends, but also to the members of the school community we’d connected with over the previous year. Montclair is one of those towns where word gets around, and if you stop by the farmers’ market or take a walk down our popular Church Street promenade, you are guaranteed to run into several people you know. It’s a feature of Montclair that is simultaneously endearing and off-putting. During our unschooling transition I found myself almost daily in the position of attempting to explain our unfamiliar approach to education, often in response to the question, “Why haven’t we seen Lucia at school yet?”

On the one hand I was excited about our choice. I was reveling in our new lifestyle and could see the immediate positive effects it was having on our family. So I wanted to talk about it and share my thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, it is simply impossible to explain unschooling in a passing curbside conversation. Add to it that my audience was not always a receptive one. People generally don’t like to hear that you’ve chosen to reject a system to which they still subscribe (and which they’re working like dogs to support with outrageously high property taxes). And they really don’t want to hear your many well-founded reasons for doing so. They tend to get defensive.

While I’ve had many positive and reaffirming exchanges about unschooling in Montclair, I’ve also encountered a number of negative and misguided reactions to my choice. It’s been suggested that I’m an irresponsible parent. It’s been suggested that by removing my competent, high-performing child I’m contributing to the demise of the public school system. It’s been suggested that I leave Montclair – I don’t belong here. (Seriously, someone actually said that to me.) But my all time favorite comment was this:

I wouldn’t want my child to be an experiment.

My response: Then you should seriously consider removing her from public school.

For I can think of no more experimental approach to educating my child than to hand her over to strangers about whom I know next to nothing, to confine her to an intentionally isolated environment far removed from the normal daily interactions of her family and community, to allow her learning to be dictated by a set of standards imposed by yet another group of strangers whose values and perspectives may bear no resemblance whatsoever to my own.

If education is an experiment, then we as unschoolers are in fact the control group. For we are raising our children outside of the experimental treatment called public schooling.

In Montclair we have a form of bread and circus called school choice. During the spring before their children enter kindergarten Montclair parents begin touring the town’s six magnet elementary schools, and everywhere you go the air is laden with anxious conversation about school choice. The whole process is nonsense. The schools are fundamentally all the same. Each school has its own “theme,” and certainly there are some cosmetic differences, but ultimately they all follow the same standardized state curriculum. They all have age-segregated classrooms with desks and chairs. They all assign homework. They all issue grades and report cards. I never understood what it was that parents were supposed to be looking for on these school tours. What would attract me to one school over another? The theme? How was I supposed to decide if my five-year-old child would fare better in a science and math themed school as opposed to an arts themed school, or an international school vs. the university magnet? Doesn’t it seem a little early for pigeonholing? Shouldn’t all the schools offer opportunities in all those areas?

(Of course the magnet school system was originally an attempt to integrate the racially segregated public schools. And it worked – to an extent. School integration and classroom integration are two different things, however. And that’s a subject for another post…)

But these days the school choice process mostly serves to distract parents from the real issues. They spend so much time and energy on asking which school is best for their children that they neglect to ask if school is best for their children.

At this time in history school is so completely ingrained in the American way of life that we simply take it for granted. We can barely imagine life without it. What would the kids do all day? But it wasn’t always like that. It certainly wasn’t like that for my grandmother growing up in rural Wisconsin less than a century ago. To her family school was a pretty new idea. While she was required to attend the local one-room age-mixed schoolhouse through the eighth grade, she certainly never considered it her sole means of attaining an education. She and her ten siblings found plenty to occupy themselves with in their daily lives. Outside of school they learned through apprenticeships and work and independent study. They learned with the help of mentors found among family and community members. They learned the way children had been learning for thousands of years. And they were some of the last children in America to have that opportunity.

In just the few generations since then we’ve submitted so entirely to the notion of schooling that we no longer question its usefulness, its relevance, its effectiveness, or even its purpose. Our notion of school is colored by our own desires. We want school to be a place where our children are nurtured and loved, where they are free to express themselves creatively, where they can enjoy the challenge of solving complex problems and utilizing higher order thinking skills, where they can experiment and learn from their mistakes. We want school to be a place where our children of many backgrounds may learn to coexist, where they are respected as individuals, and where their contribution to community is facilitated and recognized. We want all this for our children (don’t we?) so we assume that school should be compatible with these goals.

But just because we want something doesn’t make it so. In fact the school system was never intended to address any of these desires – quite the opposite.

The experiment we call schooling has served a variety of purposes throughout history. The earliest schools in America were probably those established by the New England Puritans who believed that literacy was necessary not so that people could lead more fulfilled happy lives, but so they could read the bible and avoid going to hell. In terms of schooling objectives that’s about as noble as it gets, and it’s all down hill from there. In the 1850’s Horace Mann became enamored of the Prussian system of education which was designed to produce an obedient, easily controlled military workforce. He introduced this model in Massachusetts, and it soon spread to the rest of the country. At the beginning of the 20th century, schools were intended to assimilate and prepare immigrant children for jobs in the new urban industrial economy. (Between 1906 and 1920 Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller spent more money on public schools than the government did.) With the establishment of child labor laws the schools became a means of keeping kids off the streets. Today’s schools continue to support the capitalist system by training children in the art of consumption.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe that school administrators sit around rubbing their hands together and thinking up new and more devious ways of squelching children’s spirit and creativity. I wish it were that simple. Then we could identify the culprits and oust them. No, the problem is that the school system is actually filled with lots of well-meaning, dedicated people who simply don’t understand or can’t admit that they are working within a system that is inherently anti-child. Some of them do understand this but choose to try to change the system from the inside – something I personally have concluded is impossible. Many progressive, passionate educators have attempted to create positive learning opportunities for children in school. And they have succeeded in some small pockets of the school system. But because schools were never intended for this purpose in the first place, because the nature of the school infrastructure is in direct opposition to these kinds of attempts, they are doomed always to be greatly limited in their impact. Large-scale school reform efforts fail because would-be reformers approach the system as if it were broken and in need of repairs when in actuality it is working perfectly. It is doing precisely what it was intended to do – it is producing an easily managed pool of conformist consumers and worker bees. And you can’t fix it if it ain’t broke.

Even if you don’t accept the idea that public schooling was not created with children’s best interests in mind, even if you think schools are intended to promote growth and discovery and learning, then you’d still have to admit that the school experiment has failed. The “back to basics” movement in schooling is absolutely baffling to me because the great majority of our children don’t seem to learn much beyond the basics in public school anyway.

According to PISA (the Program for International Student Assessment), in its 2006 study of 57 countries we scored below average and ranked 28th in science trailing behind Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, Croatia, Estonia, Hong Kong – China, Liechtenstein, Macao – China, Slovenia, and Chinese Taipei.

In math we came in 30th out of 40 participating countries scoring well below the international average and trailing behind Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, Hong Kong – China, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Macao – China, and the Russian Federation.

I think this failed experiment has gone on long enough. The American school system should be done away with and replaced with something entirely different. And yes, I have a pretty good idea what it should look like. We would do well to learn from some of our higher ranking international peers who defer the start of compulsory schooling until age seven, whose children spend much less time in school overall, who emphasize age mixing, who take a more flexible and innovative approach to scheduling, and who allow opportunities for curricular integration and child-led, project-based learning. We should also take our cues from truly innovative school models such as the democratic free schools and the Sudbury schools. But that’s also the subject for another post. Until that happens (and even after it happens) I’ll keep unschooling with Lucia because…

I wouldn’t want my child to be an experiment.