Readers of my Homeschooling Freedom, yesterday’s On the Square column, may enjoy an article on homeschooling by a very bright young man who is now a homeschooled high school senior, and explains what his life is like in an article published in Imagine, the magazine of Johns Hopkins Center for Gifted Youth. He’s obviously exceptional even among homeschoolers, but still represents the range and depths of interests of those we know.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011, 11:00 AM
March 29th, 2011 | 12:10 pm
Quite a well-written article. Sounds like he’ll go far. His interests: “writing, art and game design.” Now there’s the future of our culture!
March 29th, 2011 | 2:22 pm
[...] at First Things, this First Thoughts blog referenced this essay by a homeschooler who addresses some of the persistent questions faced by [...]
March 29th, 2011 | 2:37 pm
Good essay, and an impressive young man. But he seems to miss the boat on one point: he seems to think what he’s doing is some sort of realization of the ideal of what currently passes for education in this country, rather than something entirely other – a self-directed, self-driven burning desire to be educated (supported by his family, of course, but it wouldn’t work if it didn’t also come from him).
Homeschoolers, in my not insignificant experience, fall largely into two camps: the ones who want to do exactly what they think the public schools were set up to do, only way better, and those – like me – who fundamentally reject the very idea of graded classrooms presided over by certified ‘educators’ as a model for education.
The first group would put their kids back into school in a flash if only the schools were more of a laundry list of adjectives: disciplined, academic, moral, religion-friendly, peaceful – and so on. They have no real problem, conceptually, with handing off their kids to the state to be educated. The second group rebels at the very idea that children are, like so much raw lumber, to be processed, graded and fitted to the tasks their betters have determined for them.
So, I applaud this young man’s achievements, while deploring the tacit approval he gives, in concept, of having the state control education.
March 29th, 2011 | 5:34 pm
They have no real problem, conceptually, with handing off their kids to the state to be educated. The second group rebels at the very idea that children are, like so much raw lumber, to be processed, graded and fitted to the tasks their betters have determined for them.
The schools were set up during a time when the future workers needed to be able to obey instructions, sit still, pay attention, etc.
In the future, our needs will be different. Education is already starting to change. (For instance, look at the number of reputable schools making educational content freely available online.)
March 29th, 2011 | 6:25 pm
I think it is the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (CTY). Both my daughters attended their summer enrichment programs, and my younger daughter took accelerated Honors Biology on line from them. Excellent program. Just wish they would stop hitting on me for donations.
March 29th, 2011 | 6:26 pm
“The schools were set up during a time when the future workers needed to be able to obey instructions, sit still, pay attention, etc.”
Future workers still need to obey instruction, sit still, pay attention, etc. Those who can’t join the ranks of the unemployed–or middle management.
March 29th, 2011 | 7:31 pm
Well, so much the worse for us, if our future is soon to be better fitted for inattentive, disobedient fidgets, but perhaps the crux of this matter can be perceived in the presumption that the purpose of education is to train workers…
March 29th, 2011 | 11:52 pm
There are many more education models available these days. The range of public and private schools are quite large. My son entered a wonderful program in the public school system. As our views on education change so will the schools. The “state” isn’t some “other” monster it’s just us. Sometimes the bureaucratic cogs take awhile to catch up.
March 30th, 2011 | 1:26 am
“The “state” isn’t some “other” monster it’s just us. Sometimes the bureaucratic cogs take awhile to catch up.”
Not to be rude, but this is completely baffling – is this true of all states, or just ours? Just ours, right? Not the USSR? If just ours, why, then, do we have elected offices and bureaucracies? If they’re just us, how is it that they have special powers and privileges? Are the members of Goldman Sachs who run ‘our’ Treasury Department for the benefit of Goldman Sachs just us, only way richer? Can we just get rid of them? How?
The claim that the state is just us is simply incoherent.
March 30th, 2011 | 3:28 am
“The schools were set up during a time when the future workers needed to be able to obey instructions, sit still, pay attention, etc.”
Future workers still need to obey instruction, sit still, pay attention, etc. Those who can’t join the ranks of the unemployed–or middle management.
Factory work is gone.
It’s just gone.
Teaching our kids that the important thing is that they not fidget or daydream is great, if the goal is that they get a job where staying “on task” (with a supervisor looming over them) is the end goal.
But if you want our future workforce to have traits like “initiative” – or any of the other traits that our current workforce lacks – then the “siddown and shaddup” style of schooling is inappropriate.
In education, there are choices involved: do you want them to learn how to go for eight hours without daydreaming once? Because you are not only making them able to take certain types of jobs – you are also closing the door on certain other types of jobs.
For instance, there is now a wide body of evidence available on “creative” and “problem solving” types of thinking, and the very discipline and restraint that we value in our mindless drones may actually be precisely what makes so many of us incapable of generating, recognizing, identifying, and valuing good thoughts. Those who teach things like “creativity workshops” actually are teaching how to unlearn those “skills” – because those “skills” involve repressing trains of logic, for the sake of a deliberately mindless conformity – very necessary in certain corporate cultures, but not appropriate for others.
There is no trait you can instill that does not involve a trade-off.
Even the primary decision we make – to group children by age, rather than by ability levels – involves a value judgment: we are saying we prize social/age group conformity or uniformity over academic achievement. Think about that. Then think about what it means, when a significant percentage of the population is going to “fall behind” (note the metaphor, suggesting a footrace or maybe a marathon), in the year after a traumatic crisis: a divorce, an illness, a death in the family.
March 30th, 2011 | 10:32 am
“Teaching our kids that the important thing is that they not fidget or daydream is great, if the goal is that they get a job where staying “on task” (with a supervisor looming over them) is the end goal.
But if you want our future workforce to have traits like “initiative” – or any of the other traits that our current workforce lacks – then the “siddown and shaddup” style of schooling is inappropriate.”
Blake, I am not sure what you do for a living. I myself am a self-employed consultant-writer, a part of the so-called “knowledge economy” that is supposed to supersede the industrial economy.
I can tell you from hard experience that the key to success in any endeavor is the ability to stay on task, to focus on the work at hand, and to use DISCIPLINED imagination to solve problems.
People constantly ask me what the most important skill they need to master in order to be a writer, and I always respond, “Application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair”. To learn to write, one must write. To write, one must focus, stop fidgeting, and stay on task.
To master any discipline, any skill, requires focus, practice, discipline and the ability to follow instructions.
One of my early jobs was writing Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) manuals for the Navy. Writing those manuals, and working closely with EOD technicians, taught me the importance of proper procedures, of paying attention and staying on task, and of using words with surgical precision (like the difference between must, shall, can and may). EOD guys who daydreamed or went for undisciplined approaches can be found in cemeteries all around the world. The same can be said of lots of different professions: pilot, truck driver, electrician, plumber, carpenter, welder, chemist, fireman, policeman. . .
Do you really want me to go on with this?
Get a real job in the real world and then get back to me. I bet you change your mind about this “follow your dream” nonsense.
March 30th, 2011 | 1:12 pm
Right, discipline, the ability to stay on task, and the ability to accept and meet the expectations of others in performing tasks or producing outcomes are neither antithetical to, nor even unnecessary for, “creative” work. They’re necessary everywhere.
Granted that “sit still in a chair” is not a necessary or desirable trait for every job function, “do what you need to do whether you feel like it or not” (otherwise known as “discipline”) is, and learning to do what you’re told when you’re told, in the little ways, is one of the ways in which a child learns to be disciplined.
As I’m a homeschooler, my kids spend very little time just sitting still just because they’re told — church would be about the only example of that I can think of. If they’re doing their own work, they’re as likely to be sprawled across the floor as at a desk. If I’m teaching them, we’re generally curled up on the sofa and they’re allowed to move around and speak their minds so long as they don’t distract the lesson completely. They do their work in a much more free-form way. BUT, they’d better be sticking on task, they’d better be doing their work instead of something else, and they’d better be putting their best effort into their work even when they dislike the work or just generally would much rather be doing something else. I think these requirements will benefit them much more than harm them in later life.
March 30th, 2011 | 2:39 pm
Kids like that wind up fantastically educated, but they are contolled by parents, and often are at a loss dealing with people. You don’t get “initiative” by shutting up and doing whatever mommy tells you. Or by being a good student and getting bussed to a dead langauge class.
You can’t raise a creative class by making conformist children. Public school can produce them, but at least it isn’t omnipresent. You go home at the end of the day. Homeschool you can never leave.
March 30th, 2011 | 4:07 pm
Dblade, most of those points are very well made.
Only, what do they have to do with homeschooling?
March 30th, 2011 | 4:08 pm
And more to the point, what does any of that have to do with the article? Did you read it?
March 30th, 2011 | 10:30 pm
Do you really want me to go on with this?
Get a real job in the real world and then get back to me. I bet you change your mind about this “follow your dream” nonsense.
I don’t know what you’re talking about.
You seem to be responding to a straw man of your own making, rather than responding to what I am actually saying.
I am saying that how you design a classroom involves trade-offs, and we should be making more intelligent trade-offs than we are.
You seem to be constructing some sort of false contrast – that either we keep schools exactly as they are, or else humanity will stop valuing traits like “discipline” altogether and kids will never stay on task again, or something?
What I do: I am a writer. I don’t see why it matters, though, except that you seem to be suggesting that I am unemployable and stupid as a core component of your argument or something???
March 31st, 2011 | 7:07 am
“What I do: I am a writer.”
If you are a successful one, then you know your statement about the irrelevance of discipline (and disciplined thinking), of focus upon the task at hand, of mastery of skills was all blather. It is you who create false dichotomies, not me.
March 31st, 2011 | 10:16 pm
I am honored by how much discussion my article has generated. Thank you all for your comments.
One misunderstanding seems to have arisen. Dblade, you suggest that homeschooling produces conformist children because “you can never leave [the home].” As I tried to clarify in my article, however, my own homeschooler experience has not stifled my creativity but stimulated it. Much of my time is self-structured, and I am personally responsible for setting and meeting deadlines for much of my school work. Also, I spend a great deal of time each week outside the home, as many of my classes take place with other students or with tutors at different locations.
April 1st, 2011 | 12:03 am
“What I do: I am a writer.”
If you are a successful one, then you know your statement about the irrelevance of discipline (and disciplined thinking), of focus upon the task at hand, of mastery of skills was all blather. It is you who create false dichotomies, not me.
No, I don’t.
I attended an “experimental” elementary school where lessons from Montessori were mixed in. We learned at our own pace & we had wide latitude in choosing our own methods of learning our objectives.
The only “discipline” I was forced to submit to was outside of the classroom – piano lessons. This is no doubt a good thing, because I learned that enduring the practice led to a “payoff” – the joy of being able to play well. A lesson, I would note, that I seem to have learned much better than people who spent six hours a day drilling and grinding in subjects that they largely viewed as irrelevant to their own lives.
It so happened that this experimental program discovered early that my “preferred learning style” is to gather massive research and then compile it into a project. That is what I like to do, and I do it well.
I am lousy at doing things I hate doing. But unlike the rest of America, I never once considered spending my precious life’s resources chained to a job I hate. What’s the point?
Call me specialized. But in a world where most people “of my social class” (that is, working class) view “education” as something you do until you get a job – then stop – what you can’t call me is “undisciplined”. I never learned that education is pointless. I never spent hours on end looking forward to the day when I could get away from “learning”.
You can say what you like about Mozart’s dysfunctional family, but the truth is, if Mozart were alive today, and were put into a public school, he’d be punished each time he tried to explore music (or its near relation, mathematics). Even if he were lucky enough to get into a school that taught “music”, they’d force him to spend a full year and a half mastering the concept of “whole note, half note”. His family would still be just as dysfunctional, only he’d have no way of pouring himself into his music to escape his overbearing, obnoxious father.
I think your standards for what constitutes “success” are screwed up. Being able to successfully contribute to the well-being of the human race is “success”, and every human being does that best by developing what they’re best at doing, and what they love doing.
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