compulsory schooling Archives

The Ills of Compulsory Schooling Continued

submitted by jwithrow.

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The Ills of Compulsory Schooling Continued

January 30, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $2,019 today. Gold is down to $1,263 per ounce. Oil is still floating around $44 per barrel. Bitcoin is up slightly at $230 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 1.70% today.

Yesterday we discussed the majesty that is childhood and we opined that compulsory schooling severely curtails the childhood experience and sets children up to struggle in adulthood. Today we will expand upon this and try to present a positive alternative.

First we must ask a question: why do we send our children to school?

Is it because we went to school when we were a child? Is it because we don’t have time to watch them during the day? Is it because we think they won’t learn unless they go to school? Is it because we think they must go to school in order to get into college? Is it because we think they need to go to school to learn social skills? Do we know?

Let’s glance back in time a little bit to the formative years of the modern school system:

“Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.” – William Torrey Harris, United States Commissioner of Education from 1889-1906

“Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.” – Bertrand Russel, British philosopher

“Children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society…” – John Dewey, “father of modern education”

Eww. The school’s history textbooks left those little tidbits out.

We are on the record saying the public school system fails but that’s not entirely true. The public school system certainly fails to foster critical thinking and self-reference but that’s by design. The public school system has actually been wildly successful when judged by its original mission.

What compulsory education really does is prepare our children for an institutionalized life of subordination. We send our children to school not so they can flower into beautiful individuals capable of accessing their infinite potential but rather to mold them into obedient worker bees that will willingly assimilate into the status-quo as maintained by the establishment (governments/central banks/Wall Street/multi-nationals/Big-Agra/Big-Pharma/Big-Insurance/Big-Science/mega non-profits). This is why the public school system exists. As we’ve mentioned many times, this is not an indictment of teachers and local school employees – most of them work diligently to improve their school. But how do you reform an institution that already wildly succeeds at doing what it was created to do?

In school our children learn to hide their true self by putting on a mask and conforming to whatever is popular. They learn to follow arbitrary rules and to unquestioningly obey the “authorities”. They learn to uncritically memorize whatever information is presented to them and to regurgitate that information back in a way that is pleasing to the teacher. They learn that their job is to sit quietly and listen to the teacher without interrupting; anything else requires explicit permission. They learn that grades are the sole measurement of success thus they are conditioned to constantly seek external confirmation. They learn that life is a series of hoops to be struggled through because their educational curriculum consists of a tiered system whereby students advance to the next “grade” year after year. Children are constantly told that getting good grades is necessary to get into a good college so it is implied that the purpose of life is to successfully navigate the current system in order to make it to the next system.

So after they have successfully navigated the public school system for twelve consecutive years our children are told to mindlessly rush off to whatever college will accept them. The school system has taught them absolutely nothing about money and finance but nevertheless our children are told to take on massive student loans to pay for the next step. Some public school guidance offices will even walk children through the student loan application process. “Don’t worry”, they are told, “you won’t have to start making payments until a few years after you graduate.”

So they get to college and most students view it in the same light – as a series of hoops to jump through to get to the next level. Now the goal is to maintain a good G.P.A. so they can get a good job. A few frat parties later they find themselves completing college and going to university sponsored job fairs.

What comes next? The 8-5, new suits, public transportation, parking passes, a promotion, a new car, a mortgage, a promotion, marriage, children, a new mini-van, a promotion, a home equity line to renovate the kitchen and the next thing you know our children are middle aged, stuck in a mindless career, deep in debt, and stressed to the max. They have spent the vast majority of their time working a desk job to pay for their car, their house, their vacations, and their weekend entertainment because that is what they were conditioned to do. Sure, there are plenty of people who have found fulfillment following this path but there are far more who have not.

Suppose we changed the script? What if our children were provided the time and freedom to discover and pursue their passion at a young age? What if they were not herded into school for twelve years but instead spent that time learning about themselves and the world around them? What if they developed useful skills instead of mindless dogma?

What if they then deemed college to be a waste of time and money and instead crafted a superior higher-education curriculum. The possibilities for this are endless!

Maybe they spend one year traveling the world to learn about other cultures first hand. Maybe they find a compelling opportunity during their travels and set up an international business or charity dedicated to meeting real needs and demand. Maybe they come back and seek out an internship with a master in a field they are passionate about. Maybe they skip the internship and start their own business in their chosen field. Maybe they set out to build multiple microbusinesses designed to provide diverse income streams. Maybe they decide to pursue a specialized career and seek out additional education in that field. Maybe they decide to purchase an old neglected farm and spend their days healing the land and producing superior food products.

The point is this script would allow our children to make mindful decisions about how to spend their time free from modern society’s incessant dogma aimed at guilting people into feeling the need to fit in. This script would also allow for much greater flexibility if our children decided to change careers or lifestyles at a later time – which would be extremely common. The notion of working one job for forty years and then retiring is an unnatural New Deal relic that will soon be extinct. This model is simply not viable in any capacity; the economics just do not work.

Life is not a series of rigid systems to struggle through until retirement; it is a robust opportunity for temporal exploration and spiritual growth. It would be a shame to waste such an opportunity.

More to come,

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on the “Great Reset” and the paradigm shift underway please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

The Majesty of Childhood

submitted by jwithrow.

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
The Majesty of Childhood

January 29, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $1,993 today. Gold is down to $1,271 per ounce. Oil is back down to $44 per barrel. Bitcoin has drifted to $225 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 1.75% today.

Systemic risk in the global economy seems to be growing. The Swiss National Bank recently announced a target interest rate range of -1.25% to -0.25%. The Gnomes of Zurich must have gone into hiding. Now Singapore has announced its intent to pursue a form of easing (money-printing) in order to slow the appreciation of the Singapore dollar. No one seems to want a currency that maintains purchasing power anymore – welcome to fiat bizarro world! It would be wise to have at least 10% of your capital in physical gold and silver bullion at this point.

Moving on…

Childhood is a magical experience full of awe, wonder, excitement, and purity. Children have no paychecks to earn or mortgage payments to make. They have no investment portfolios to monitor or insurance policies to structure. They may find it to be pretty, but children could not care less about what’s happening in the gold market. With no degrees, certifications, specializations, or political experience to speak of children are completely tuned out to any implication of status; they seem to understand innately that all people are endowed with individual rights that should not be violated. Children naturally expect to be treated with honesty and dignity which is why they so often use phrases like “But you said…” or “But that’s not fair…”.

Free from these trappings, children are able to live wholly in the moment. Several Eastern philosophies hold up that very state – living wholly in the present – as the highest ideal and many hours are devoted to meditation, yoga, and other techniques designed to train the mind to be still in the present. Children are able to perfectly achieve this present mindfulness without expending any effort or energy whatsoever. This is why children will enthusiastically collect pebbles and sea shells. Adults deem these objects worthless but children are able to appreciate them for their own natural beauty and uniqueness.

Children are almost entirely self-referential until we train them to submit to arbitrary rules and restrictions. Children gain fulfillment and satisfaction from their own accomplishments, no matter how minor, with little need for external incentives and motivations. I suspect this is what Jesus of Nazareth meant when he said “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

The truth is all children are born with an inner brilliance and an indomitable will. Children are natural-born learners and their thirst for understanding is unquenchable. Childhood curiosity is unmatched as children want to know the ‘why’ for everything. A child’s mental activity is through the roof!

As we discussed last month in our entry about raising children in the modern world, modern society extinguishes curiosity and subverts individual will by institutionalizing learning and imposing harsh external expectations upon children. Simply put, hierarchy is not natural to children. By enforcing a strict hierarchal structure chock full of arbitrary rules and regulations, modern schools drown the majesty of childhood in wave after wave of contradictory authoritarianism.

On the one hand we talk endlessly about freedom and independence but then we herd our children into compulsory schools that regiment their entire day with mandatory classes and their evening with mindless homework. How can the child be free and independent if he has no time for his own interests? We tell our children that every individual is special but then we tell them they must raise their hand and ask for permission to go to the restroom. That doesn’t make the kid feel particularly special. We encourage our children to play together in cooperation but then we punish them if they try to communicate with their neighbor in the classroom. What’s the kid to make of this?

Of course we justify all of this by saying the children need to learn to follow the rules and obey authority. We never make the distinction between natural rules such as “do not steal” and arbitrary rules such as “do not go to the bathroom without a hall pass”. Likewise we never make the distinction between “respect your parents” and “do not question your teachers”. This breeds a passive populace that will unquestioningly submit to all manner of arbitrary rules, regulations, licenses, restrictions, mandates, and taxes in adulthood as long as someone in “authority” issues them. Then you end up with dishonest money and a parasitic society.

I just can’t help but wonder… what if individuals with infinite potential were not automatically plugged in to institutionalized systems of compulsory education? What if more children were left free to learn in their own way on their own schedule? What if the majesty of childhood was not crushed by a regimented schedule and arbitrary rules as soon as the child reached a particular age? What if, instead of learning to hide their brilliance and subvert their will, children learned to be self-governing and self-driven?

Until the morrow,

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

Why the Public School System Fails

submitted by jwithrow.

Journal of a Wayward Philosopher
Why the Public School System Fails

January 8, 2015
Hot Springs, VA

The S&P opened at $2,036 today. Gold is checking in at $1,212 per ounce. Oil opened just under $49 per barrel. Bitcoin is trading hands at 286 per BTC, and the 10-year Treasury rate opened at 2.00% today.

The markets have kicked off 2015 with some healthy volatility! The S&P has dipped as low as $1,985 only to bounce back up. Oil has drifted as low as $47, bringing energy stocks down with it. The 10-year rate has dipped below 2% and threatened to drift lower. Bitcoin has fallen below $300 for the first time since 2013 and gold has climbed as high as $1,221.

Last month we contemplated raising children in the modern world and we decided compulsory education was not, in our humble opinion, in the student’s best interest. We reckoned that for any real learning to occur the student would have to be free to engage a topic of their own choice and then have the space to inspect, poke, jab, nudge, kick, and maybe even dance with that topic on their own timeline. Of course this method is the exact opposite of what is employed by the compulsory public school system that says the student must learn this topic in this way on this timeline with this grading scale and he better not interact with his neighbor while doing so.

As always, it is a minority position we take on the important matters of child-rearing and education. Perhaps this is why we had such an affinity for “Don Quixote” as a youngster. While the public school system is accepted as “normal” today, it is important to understand its origin.

The current public school system model was founded in Germany in the 1800s. The Germans called their model the “gymnasium” system and it was organized in part by the German military. This system separated students by grade and limited their interaction with students of differing ages. The intent was to foster a robust bond between the boys for they would be expected to train and fight together in the military as adults. Sure enough, this system created fiercely loyal soldiers.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in America, students were either educated at home or in small groups that were not separated by age. Individualized education in America was less geared towards memorizing facts and figures and more geared towards fundamental reading/writing/arithmetic, common sense, and self-confidence.

Age diversity helped older students develop responsibility and leadership skills by guiding the younger students along. Younger students got the benefit of both adult tutelage and guidance from the older kids. While seemingly a small point, having two distinct perspectives on the same topic goes a long way towards fostering critical thinking. Peter Gray, in Free to Learn, discussed this very dynamic as he observed students in Sudbury Valley School.

America began moving towards the German “gymnasium” model after the Civil War with the political class using force to move the shift along. Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law in 1852 and all states had compulsory school attendance laws on the books by 1918. Reading the work of John Dewey, one of the leading educators in 20th century America, provides troubling insight into why the shift was facilitated.

“The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”

The political objective was the centralization and control of education in order to reduce the American spirit of individualism and make students more malleable and group-oriented. John Taylor Gatto expanded upon the political shift of American education in his books Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling and The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher’s Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling.

History and political motives aside, Gatto also outlined and then expanded upon several points that demonstrate how the public school system is “dumbing us down”. They are as follows:

1. It confuses the students. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorize to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the “free” time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It makes them intellectually dependent.
6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
7. It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised.

Gatto’s points refer to the public school system itself; not to the individuals working within the system. Most school employees at the local level are well-intentioned and work hard to improve the quality of their school. But they are forced to operate within the confines of the gymnasium system and they are forced to use government-approved politically-correct textbooks. More money will not change this dynamic, it will only further empower the Department of Education and impoverish the public.

So what is a concerned parent to do? Opt out!

Until the morrow,

Joe Withrow
Wayward Philosopher

For more of Joe’s thoughts on homeschooling and educational alternatives please read “The Individual is Rising” which is available at http://www.theindividualisrising.com/. The book is also available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

The Homeschooling Renaissance

submitted by jwithrow.

Massachusetts passed the first compulsory school attendance law in 1852. By 1918 all states had compulsory school attendance legislation on the books. Prior to these compulsory education laws, a child’s education was the business and responsibility of the parents. Some children went to community schools, some went to boarding schools, and many received their education at home. The widespread emergence of compulsory public education ushered in the rise of the public school system and the majority of American children have made their way through the public system ever since.

The 1970’s and 80’s witnessed a homeschooling renaissance of sorts as a significant minority of parents began to seriously question the existing educational system. Those parents who chose to opt out of the system and homeschool their children found that they could facilitate an educational experience that was actually superior and the modern homeschooling movement was born.

Of course homeschooling was especially looked down upon in the early days of the renaissance. A few states prohibited homeschooling altogether and most school officials acted as though it were illegal everywhere. According to the HSLDA:

Homeschooling parents faced threats of jail time and having their children removed from their home. Some were arrested. Many were taken to court.

Parents were confronted by concerned neighbors, worried friends, and aghast relatives—all of whom were sure that the homeschooling mom and dad were ruining their children’s lives and dooming them to an unproductive future of illiteracy and isolation.

But those early homeschoolers hung tough. They fought the court battles. They went to the library and crafted their own curricula. And they quietly continued teaching, letting their children’s achievement answer the charges of their fiercest critics.

The valiant efforts of the 70’s and 80’s homeschoolers paired with the Internet Reformation has created a scenario today in which homeschooling can be done much more effectively and at a much lower cost than ever before. Students can now read articles and watch lectures on literally any topic imaginable with just the few clicks of a mouse. Students can use email, chat rooms, and video webinar software to interact with tutors and other students anywhere in the world without any location restrictions whatsoever. Students can even engage in freelance networks to test certain skills in the marketplace without ever leaving the security of their own home.

A world-class education is now available to every family for the price of an internet connection – something even the poorest Americans have access to. This is unprecedented in recorded human history!

According to the HSLDA, the number of families choosing to homeschool is growing at an annual rate of 7-15 percent. Parents are slowly waking up to this and removing their children from the existing educational system. The homeschooling renaissance is slowly creating the future of education.