Ngram: school and family

My recent post on tax breaks for homeschoolers discussed the schools and families as institutions etc.  So I generated this Ngram.  I will add that compulsory attendance laws became more widespread in the years 1900 - 1920 see below.  (Quote below from this link at stateuniversity.com.)

A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that school attendance rates in 1900 were significantly raised in those states that combined compulsory school attendance with child labor laws. By the second decade of the twentieth century, a majority of states had specific child labor laws that set the minimum age for employment at fourteen and included specification of the completion of school grades and other educational requirements.

Also, homeschooling was rising in the 1970s when back to the land movements were common.  Illich published Deschooling in 1971.  And homeschooling on a wide scale took off around 1980 after books by the Moores and John Holt came out.

we need less school, not more

We need less school, not more, to learn more science, a paper discussing this is entitled The 95 Percent Solution: School is not where most Americans learn most of their science, from the American Scientist via GFBrandenburg.  

The scientific research and education communities have long had a goal of advancing the public’s understanding of science. The vast majority of the rhetoric and research on this issue revolves around the failure of school-aged children in the United States to excel at mathematics and science when compared with children in other countries. Most policy solutions for this problem involve improving classroom practices and escalating the investment in schooling, particularly during the precollege years. The assumption has been that children do most of their learning in school and that the best route to long-term public understanding of science is successful formal schooling. The “school-first” paradigm is so pervasive that few scientists, educators or policy makers question it. This despite two important facts: Average Americans spend less than 5 percent of their life in classrooms, and an ever-growing body of evidence demonstrates that most science is learned outside of school.  

We contend that a major educational advantage enjoyed by the U.S. relative to the rest of the world is its vibrant free-choice science learning landscape—a landscape filled with a vast array of digital resources, educational television and radio, science museums, zoos, aquariums, national parks, community activities such as 4-H and scouting and many other scientifically enriching enterprises. The sheer quantity and importance of this science learning landscape lies in plain sight but mostly out of mind. We believe that nonschool resources—used by learners across their lifetimes from childhood onward—actually account for the vast majority of Americans’ science learning. If this premise is correct, then increased investment in free-choice (also known as informal) learning resources might be a very cost-effective way to significantly improve public understanding of science. Taking this view, though, requires dismantling a widespread misconception that out-of-school educational experiences only support superficial science learning and the recreational interests of a limited percentage of the curious public, rather than the learning of real science by all citizens.

In a time of limited resources, we can use the wonderful public resources better by making our schools community learning centers, democratic and open access.