Corporate propaganda: Educational Testing Service, from their manicured campus in Princeton, New Jersey, and their CEO Kurt Landgraf, formerly of DuPont Pharmaceuticals, say they have your child's best interests at heart as they expand the already global reach of testing services into your home, co-opting your family to be America's Smallest School.
For homeschoolers, a business or public institution describing the learning and growth that takes place within the family as a school only makes clear the complete arrogance of our educational institutions who now see all learning done by human beings as part of something they feel authorized to control.
No, the family is not the child's first school and the parents are not the child's first teachers. All learning cannot be contained within the word school and this invasive use of a metaphor diminishes the deep craftwork of motherhood and fatherhood, the first human relationships of the child.
The vast majority of human existence has been lived without schools and many things have been learned, from language to farming, without schools. The implicit metaphor reveals how deeply embedded the experience of mass compulsory schooling is within our collective psyche. The family provides the child's first human relationships and human relationships are critical to our mental and physical health. Schools are not.
In fact, families of all kinds pay for teachers and schools and, in a truly democratic society, these services should work for families providing voluntary educational services of a wide range as needed and requested.
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