Nigel 13 CA

Elementary school was fine. It builds a great foundation. Middle school adds to that.

But then highschool is just this disaster, of memorization, testing, stress and useless abstract theory. It doesn't teach you to think. It churns out robots. There's this huge opportunity cost of wasted time, wasted classes.

Highschool should be very, very specialized. Throw out all this theory and junk. Why not have an ebay/entrepreneurship class when you're 17? Why not master your personal finances at 16, 17, 18? Why not make it enjoyable and fun?

The "test" to graduate isn't some piece of paper that you bubble in and send to your state capital. The test is....your finances are looking good. You're applying what you know. Your social skills are better, your public speaking skills are better...and you're optimistic about the future.

Turning out graduates, so they can forget everything they learned, and then struggle to get a minimum wage job? That's an embarrassment.

I appreciate your sense of frustration on this topic, and agree with you that the system is broken. As someone who participated in public, private, and homeschooled curricula in the course of my K-12 years, I feel that the public system leaves much to be desired and that private options are not that far ahead. Your argument is a systemic one and so perhaps we're not at odds, but I feel compelled to make a defense of the power of real educational experiences. Our schools are not good at producing real education, but you seem to deny even its possibility.

I would throw entire knowledge sets out of the window as useless in school, precisely because we don't remember what we don't need or want to learn, as you note above. But there is so much of use in teaching and coaching students in how to learn, in how to acquire and analyze information. And there is a whole other universe of merit in mentoring and helping students to grow and develop strength of character and depth of person. I think it would be a grave mistake to throw our population into what is often the grind of working life as soon as they've completed third grade. As a society we've achieved / exploited a level of affluence that allows a significant portion of early life to be carved out for personal development, growth, and education. I guess I would argue for new minds working on new schemes for actually achieving those goals, rather than giving up on those possibilities all together. If that is what you meant by creating a mode of education that truly serves the kids we are educating, then we are of a mind on this issue.

Have you read Grace Llewellyn's Teenage Liberation Handbook? It is an excellent manual for wresting one's own education from the hands of the powers that be and making it serve true and good purposes. Having experienced this kind of self-directed, self-sustaining education, with the benefit of significant family and community resources aiding me in the task, I've always struggled with how such an education could be made available in a more systematic way for more people. Maybe it requires a transformed society in which families and communities are able to contribute continual time and energy to the individual needs, curiosities, and talents of each developing person in their midst? I'd like to live in such a society, but I fear that it too is utopian. How might we marry the best of a self-directed homeschooled education with the promise of providing education to all, regardless of the intellectual or material resources that each family might directly contribute to the process?