decentralization article

An article about decentraliztion, about true decentralization, defined as a principal having real power over the staffing, curriculum and organization.  Though true decentralization will involve families and ultimately children who are the stockholders of schools, the article is correct in identifying the utter futility of any program that does not manage to increase democracy and lessen mass institutionalization.  Decentralization will come: the system cannot be sustained.  The growth of homeschooling is spontaneous decentralization, it is how families find ways to support their children, and in doing so, the homeschooling population, in all its diversity, is one population that has grown up outside of mass institutions.

The US public school system has grown immensely centralized over the course of the 20th century and is now a self-perpetuating organism that the majority of our citizenry have participated in and rarely question. The generations that could truly remember local schools and strong communities are deceased and those who have grown up within the system only know there is a problem. The loud corporate voices that trivialize issues into ideologies divide and conquer and only make real reform more obscure.

The homeschooling population, however, does know that education of children can be accomplished by families, by unskilled and untrained people, in many different ways.  Unafraid of learning to read, advanced high school mathematics, learning disabilities, diagnoses, and little money, homeschoolers repeatedly learn that education can be achieved by caring about kids and that living in community with children brings rich social rewards for all involved.