post in space: socialization

Showing posts with label socialization. Show all posts

the bullying ethos

John Jensen: Bullying and the American Ethos | Education News:

John Jensen looks at bullying as it relates to evolutionary as well as contextual influences in a strong and important post. The fundamental power dynamic of compulsory schooling plays a huge role in bullying behavior and Jensen grasps that fact. Schools greatly accelerate peer pressure and peer group identification in young people, even more now that the social capital outside schools has diminished greatly since the early 20th century. Jensen understands the underlying power dynamic of schools:

Is it not ironic that in a planned society of controlled workers given compulsory assignments, where religious expression is suppressed, the press controlled, and all media of communication censored, where a puppet government is encouraged but denied any real authority, where great attention is given to efficiency and character reports, and attendance at cultural assemblies is mandatory, where it is avowed that all will be administered to each according to his needs and performance required from each according to his abilities, and where those who flee are tracked down, returned, and punished for trying to escape–in short in the milieu of the typical large American secondary school–we attempt to teach “the democratic system”?

Yes, that describes our own schools. Our style of pedagogy has yet to align with our ideals. The governing assumption, without which we apparently are unable to educate, is that those with more power control those with less of it. The national ethos continues with every new day at school: “You will do what we say, or else!”

And this, too:

Entire school bodies—staff and students—would do well to re-instruct themselves in a cooperative version of human society capable of sustaining civilization–if we are to improve on the primitive, instinct-driven model in use now. A school might examine its exercise of power, how power is channeled constructively by negotiation and cooperation, how big people can exercise power more considerately over the little. School should be an island of safety for all, where people appreciate rather than dominate, where cooperation rather than control is “what we do.” We identify the strivings for significance that each manifests, and provide rules for a field within which emotional needs can be satisfied, and a longer-term direction for the expression of personal power.

Bullying on IRFE in March 5, 2007, the first c...

Photo by Diego Grez. [GFDL or CC-BY-3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons

Compulsory Attendance is a Power Structure
We will have to change the underlying power fundamentals of schools to attain real change. That power structure is built on compulsory attendance and it shows in everything that schools do. It is not a democratic model and as schools have become ever more central to the common economic experience, the antri-democratic nature of the school show more and more.

We do not have to use compulsory attendance as a model. Homeschooling is a social movement that counters this approach by reaffirming the value of families as a social world for children. It is not that the family is an ideal, as some religious people believe, but rather that an institution that is structured to diminish the family is hurting the child. And in a society where almost everyone has been indoctrinated in mass schools, envisioning a different way means that people have had to get out of the system and experience learning in a new context. That has been happening now for 40+ years and technology like the Internet only accelerates the change.

We can move toward making schools service-oriented toward their communities, a model that is democratic and offers families more control and input. It is unnecessary to compel people to attend and the goals of mass schooling could be achieved using a model like the public library. Compulsory attendance for brief years in the early 20th century when the large majority of jobs were still in agriculture and unrelated to schooling, may have seemed necessary to ensure that skills were gained across wide segments of the society. But we face entirely different issues today when children are over-processed, poorly socialized in excessive mass peer groups for ever longer periods of time. Today, the school experience itself has become the problem. Schools now create a core amount of illiteracy by mangled instruction and management which is then exploited by remediation industries.

Compulsory attendance was a quick fix. The pasteurization of milk was a quick fix that was easier than the alternative which would have been inspection, education and support for small producers. But pasteurization was only the first technocratic step toward homogenization, ultra-pasteurization and genetic manipulation of milk and cows and all of this has damaged the core constituents of milk as a food. Wheat that is hybridized to ensure output, made pesticide-resistant, and genetically altered has lost some much of its digestibility and nutrients. These solutions generated many more problems which organic agriculture, and raw milk movements, are trying to address. They are not dissimilar to the problems in education.

And so, compulsory attendance for a few years has now been extended through 12+ years, currently recommended 14+ years of school, with a programme of grading, sorting and testing that has become the problem itself. The entire social context surrounding this system that supported kids and families has been eroded. Schools as learning centers that families could access as they need would alter this core flaw and allow us to begin addressing some of the damage to our social and intellectual lives.

If kids and families are bullied into schools, bullying will remain an issue.

catalogue of damage

What a wonderful resource this is! David Gribble has collected so many resources and so many pieces of educational activism, wisdom and ideas. Clickthrough to see the pages underneath, come back and study a bit more. Authoritarian Schooling: A catalogue of damage by David Gribble, from the Don't Let That Bother You pane:

No school would deliberately cultivate selfishness, and yet children are told that they must go to school for their own good. Children are trained to work only for their own personal benefit, and then society is blamed for a 'me me me' attitude.

When they are at home some children look after younger siblings or care for a sick parent, but when they get to school they are treated as incompetents who cannot take any responsibility. School is a place where their responsibilities and caring skills are forgotten, and they are encouraged to concentrate on their own needs rather than the needs of other people. The school restricts their activities to what the school has decided they must do for their own benefit.

Examination results become the dominant issue, and social interaction is simply not valued. Even the discussion of important issues may be forbidden. As I heard one young person say, 'You can't talk about mental health because you have to read this poem.'

Mental health is not the only important issue that there is no time to discuss. There is no time to discuss poverty, or parental discord, or sibling rivalry, or love, or death. Teachers often declare openly that their work is to teach, not to care for the children in their classes. The remark I overheard could as well have been, 'You can't talk about Susie's mum dying, because you have to learn this list.'

You have to learn this list for your own good, in order to be able to earn a good living in society. Forget about your mother's illness or your friend's distress. Think of your own needs. Be selfish.

school-life balance

Work-Life Balance Benefits Low-Wage Workers, Employers - Miller-McCune:

"In late summer, with the back-to-school shopping season in full swing, a small group of clothing retailers in Chicago will challenge convention by offering their low-wage, mostly part-time workers a list of perks normally reserved for management: flexible hours, time off when needed, and a locked-in schedule of shifts that allows workers to plan a full month, rather than a few days, in advance."

Surprise: human beings work better when they are able to have coherent lives. Extending these benefits to low wage workers will prove valuable and helpful. Generalizing to the schools, we could also ensure that schools help families strengthen their ability to cope if families could actually control what services they access within the schools. Families who could have these choices, would be happier and more productive. It would be a school-life balance that would greatly help kids.

“We’ve been talking about work-life balance for a long time, but we haven’t been talking about who has been excluded from these kinds of arrangements,” Lambert says from her Chicago office, noting a mild pang of guilt for the flexible workplace benefits she enjoys. “The people who really need flexible arrangements often don’t have them.”

The days of families with 9-5 union jobs that all eat dinner at 5:30 are gone. Now families often have two working parents and schedules that change and often fewer extended family members and less social capital. Families offered the ability to achieve a school-life balance would lessen their stress and be able to help their kids lead better lives. Families would make the small adjustments that are crucial to their happiness and ability to cope. Schools that provided learning services where families had the ability to choose could help families stabilize and cope with the massive stress a troubled economy places on them.

All government services should move toward greater democracy and citizen access. It would benefit the economy as well as strengthen families and communities.

young people are stressed, globally

Mental Health Disorders Prevalent Among Youth Worldwide | Brain Blogger:

"Overall, mental health disorders were the most prevalent source of disability for young people worldwide, accounting for 45% of total morbidity. Disorders included major depression, substance abuse, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. The next most prevalent causes of disability were injuries (12%) and infectious and parasitic diseases (10%)."

Correlation is not causation but it is worth noting the huge changes in young people's lives since the factory system of education went global. The ever-lengthening years of schoolwork, all indoors, has greatly changed the lives of young people in the past 100 years. (NOTE: There is an error in the text re US stats, that should read "substantially higher.")

In the United States, the prevalence of mental health disorders among adolescents and young adults is substantially lower than what was reported in this study. Approximately one-third of young people in the US meet the criteria for at least one mental health disorder, with anxiety being the most common condition. Comorbidity among mental health disorders is high, and four out of ten young people with one mental health disorder meet the criteria for an additional disorder. Overall, more than one in five young people experience severe impairment or stress due to mental health disorders.

But is massive screening the answer?

Why Screening Teens for Mental Illness Is a Terrible Idea | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network:

"Mental illness is devastating for children as well as adults, and medication, when used wisely and sparingly, can help. But clearly our current approach to treating disturbed young people is broken. Let me give Whitaker the last word: “Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every 15 Americans enters adulthood with a ‘serious mental illness.’ That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good.”"

Large pharma corporations have already provided massive medication since pills are what big corporations push. Other therapies cost too much and more and more don't have health care coverage anyway. Many families need better food and more time to cook, exercise and more time to get it, more positive time together, and more control over their schedules. Many families need better institutions: work and schools that are more democratic, more open access, and flexible and creative, like the top corporations are.

We could try changing the schools instead of changing the people.

We could allow kids and families far greater control over a system that increasingly, young people are medicating to cope with. Kids and families that could control what they learned and when, kids and families who were not in involuntary factory schools would begin building schedules and lifestyles that were more personally productive and tailored to their family choices. And kids would learn more and be happier, each in a customized situation.

Sustainable institutions need to become far more flexible and humane. In a world where human capital matters, we need to understand that people are our most valuable resource. Unsustainable institutions can be changed. Factory schools that rank and grade their standardized product and have been stripped of the ability to provide good food and positive social interactions are relics of history: top global firms don't work that way.

Neither should the schools.

kids in jail

(tagline from Real News) Bart Lubow: Zero tolerance policies and racial bias are pushing many kids out of school and into jail
Bart Lubow: (transcription mine)

"... the majority of kids who are in custody in this country are kids who are being locked up because they frustrated or angered an adult primarily for acts of defiance more than acts of violence .."

"Research on delinquency has long held that a weak connection to the educational system is a strong risk factor for delinquency."

"... if we push those kids out of the school system whether because of zero tolerance policies ... if we kick those kids out of school now, we increase the odds that they are going to engage in criminal behavior ..."

"Cuts to education funding are going to motivate school officials to push the poorest performing, most behaviorally challenging kids out the school quickly..."

Lubow goes on to call for a wholesale reconsideration of zero tolerance policies, many put in place after the Columbine school shootings which have resulted in the "mindless suspensions" of hundreds of thousands of kids for offenses that were not always considered worthy of that.

Zero Tolerance Comes from Families Having Zero Power
Zero tolerance policies are part of the police mindset that has taken hold within schools that do not see themselves as community resources for families. Schools have never been directly accountable to parents or communities and have been sheltered by compulsory attendance laws that allow them to police kids and families while dismissing their needs in favor of curricular schemes of content and testing quants in remote corporations. They know what kids need and they have the power to make or break kids and families. And they do.

The vast majority of people I talk to believe that voluntary attendance is a code for neglect or ignoring kids. Nothing could be further from my point of view. And I am also uninterested in doing away with government or taxes: they are here to stay. But so is the fact that we need sustainable systems of life for people and mas coercion is not an approach that will work in the long run.

Working-class and poor families know better than anyone else the value of education. I think all families need the police out of the schools and families with fewer resources, if they were empowered to ask for learning services, would be down there asking for more services than schools expect. And I would expect the schools to start delivering them. Families need to be able to make real, substantial choices and a system with a different structure would allow that to happen. Choices like: what to take and when to take it. Real choices.

Fake on socialization

By Richard Morgenstein, [CC-BY-SA-2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons]
Caterina Fake, entrepreneur, on homeschooling and socialization (she is a homeschooling mom).
Social Psychology: Are home educated children as socialized as publicly educated children and is there any solid research on this topic? - Quora:

"Personally I believe our society is broken in that people mainly associate with people their own age. My relatives in the Philippines, if they threw a party, would include everyone -- babies, kids, teenagers, people in their 20s, 30s, 40s -- and grandmas in their 80s. This was not unusual, and I think, the mark of a healthy society. However I rarely see this kind of intergenerational mixing in the States, except with first generation im-migrants. "

Fake has good thoughts and provides links, even discusses Gatto. And she sounds like she was well socialized.

social deficit
creeping institutionalization
reforesting the commons
undermining the child and the family

bullying families and children

licensed image via Wikipedia

Statewide school bullying laws and policies in the United States, especially as they pertain to sexual orientation and gender identity (check link to see if changes made)

DARK PURPLE: Law that prohibits discrimination against students based on sexual orientation and gender identity
DARK BLUE: Law that prohibits discrimination against students based on sexual orientation only
GREEN: Law that prohibits bullying of students based on sexual orientation and gender identity
LIGHT PURPLE: School regulation or ethical code for teachers that address discrimination and/or bullying of students based on sexual orientation and gender identity
TURQUOISE: School regulation or ethical code for teachers that address discrimination and/or bullying of students based on sexual orientation only
RED: Law that forbids school-based instruction of LGBT issues in a positive manner
PINK: Law that forbids local school districts from having anti-bullying policies that enumerate protected classes of students
DARK GRAY: Law that prohibits bullying in school but lists no categories of protection
LIGHT GRAY: No statewide law that specifically prohibits bullying in schools

Bullying Affects a Quarter of High Schools Students - High School Notes (usnews.com):

"About a quarter of high school students were bullied at least once during the 2008-2009 school year, and about 7 percent were bullied online by other students, according to new data released Monday by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Alarmingly, 4.1 percent of students ages 12-18 who were bullied—approximately 289,000 students—reported bringing a gun, knife, or other weapon to school; 7.4 percent of students who were cyber bullied reported bringing a weapon to school."

For years homeschoolers have been accused of having poorly-socialized children. Our emerging conversation about bullying is only the beginning of a bigger conversation about how poorly designed our mass schools are for human beings as social animals.

Mass schools run in sorted and graded hierarchies run against everything the 20th century learned about human nature, evolution, psychology, neurology, and more. Mass schooling was about ease and centralization for administration because administration has no structural limit, no check and balance. Most businesses have to please customers (corporations that capture regulatory functions of the state are exempt from checks and balances also) but schools have a captive audience.

The parents are the natural source of push back against an administrative structure that wants to extend itself without limit but parents are completely disempowered by compulsory attendance laws. Parents have absolutely zero to say about what, how or when their kids "learn" even though parents know the kids the best. This is the schools way of removing the people who would limit their power.

The overgrown school district grew over many years, the extension of compulsory schooling also grew longer over many years, and the decay of wages, communities, and support for families and kids has grown in the past 30+ years as centralization and concentration of wealth and power continue to flow to the top. Real change is about understanding what the problem is and the core problem with our mass coerced schooling model is compulsory attendance and how that has prevented families from working with schools to get what they need.

A New Model
I have written before how moving toward a voluntary model is hard but understanding the function and consequences of compulsory attendance is critical to moving in the right direction. States that want to save money but ensure a high-quality education is available will have to start learning these facts in order to make policy that actually works and to build a sustainable model of providing learning services for families and communities.

Changing our model, ensuring that we have a substantial connection between the lowest level and the top, means anchoring administration to what families and kids need rather than allowing the top to design and administer programs downward. Changing our model will also change our lives and communities as we begin to use our social natures in a positive way.

When you stop pouring chemicals and fertilizers on crops and begin building the soil, you can start to grow food that is qualitatively different and healthier. Poisonous pedagogy and mass institutionalization allied with weakened families and communities mean that outbreaks of bullying, like insect infestations, will be frequent and hard to control. Strengthening our social soil: dropping grading and hierarchy-based sorting, as well as lessening stress by moving toward families customizing schedules will be the way real social health begins.

background
voluntary attendance
make public schools truly public
what's wrong with the schools?
understanding school funding

related

Unschooling and attachment parenting in Asia | The Sattvic Family:

In Korea and Thailand, family is important to the culture. Not that it isn’t everywhere, but I have noticed it is especially so here. And they love children. I will be honest with you: in Cortona, it was much more reserved and less kid friendly. As a child growing up in France, I didn’t notice this as much, but then again we were in the South of France, and the motto their is ‘tranquille’. I feel more comfortable being a mom now that I am in Asia, especially in Phuket, because even if someone disagree with my homeschooling Kaya, they respect that that is what we do and have that same ‘tranquille’ attitude, which they call ‘ mai pen rai’. Think of this as ‘its all good’.

A lovely post on travelling and living in Asia is up at The Sattvic Family blog.

Mothering is amazing work for many women, a journey that has deep physical, emotional and psychological impact in a culture where mothering has been dispensed with in the name of efficiency. I was an older mother who had the good fortune to have journeyed through attachment parenting and I have learned many things from that journey. One is that our society devalues the work of caring and the work of relationships. Another is that we do not grasp how human relationships work in our institutions.

I have written how thinking about voluntary learning in a culture of coercion is not unlike the work breastfeeding advocacy takes on to change a bottlefeeding culture. We ignore relationships, we cannot fathom how anyone can learn anything "on their own," we devalue the learning happening everyday around us, and we are unaware of how deeply peer-orientation works. Consequently, we cannot see how our education system works against our deepest human instincts and we confuse socialization with peer dependence and automatization.

Unschoolers focus on building relationships and in doing this, accomplish great things many cannot seem to grasp. Supporting human beings instead of manipulating them may seem too unfocused or soft or lacking in control but it is a deeply feminine and natural way to help human beings grow and thrive and learn.

Related articles

curfews

I was at a community input meeting recently giving my input on a new local curfew law. Curfews are massively used in the US to control youth movement and it is worth noting that people are more restricted than ever before. Towns and cities as common spaces are rapidly fading. (I read my son a book about two kids who travelled on horseback across the US to visit Teddy Roosevelt. They were 6 and 10 years old. ) And years spent in mass coerced schooling makes us far more comfortable with this approach than we should be. From this 1997 survey, pre-911:

A 1995 survey by The U.S. Conference of Mayors found that 272 cities, 70 percent of those surveyed, had a nighttime curfew. Fifty-seven percent of these cities considered their curfew effective.

Curfew.org has a Brief History of Curfews up:

They became popular for youths in the early 1900s. The curfew bell could be heard throughout America in former part of the century, the sign to teenagers and children that it was time to head home.

Curfews decreased in popularity over the years to come. Not many were actually repealed, they simply weren't enforced. But come the late 80s, they started being enforced again. Over the next few years, this trend increased. By 1995 curfews were being enacted at a maddening rate, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had begun to get involved, suing on behalf of affected children.

President Bill Clinton, in May of 1996, announced that he was supporting a new teen curfew policy. His policy recommended weekday curfews at 9:00pm for teenagers, with punishments of fines and court summons for parents of offenders. Though this was widely seen as a half-hearted election-year tactic, it gained a great deal of attention from both the press and lawmaking bodies around the country. New curfews were added in greater numbers than ever.

Many of the police chiefs and city councilors that got these laws passed a few years back are no longer holding their positions. They simply passed these laws because it was the trend. So it leaves organisations like the ACLU & fed-up parents to fight to have these casually-passed laws repealed. It is, unfortunately, generally far easier to pass a law then to remove one.

Real and substantial quantitative support curfews is lacking. I blog because I think the schools are where we need to provide learning services for families including families who do not have the money to fund a wealth of extracurricular activities. If schools could function as social service providing families with learning services, most families could more easily provide their children with things to do. Schools extending hours will not get us there. We need extended hours and lots of choices as services are driven by what families want and need.

This is me in a clip downtown working against a proposed local daytime curfew law. I am third in line. I was discussing the specific requirements for homeschoolers that have been removed from the bill and that would have been especially difficult to implement. After I made my statement about group punishment, I discussed crime and trying to get more kids and people out in the community rather than less.

The local decision has not yet been made.

just playing around

Just as mass industrialized agriculture can manufacture vegetables with low or no vitamin content, so mass coerced schooling is dumbing us down. In the past 50 years, the amount of time the average US citizen spends in an education institution has greatly increased and calls for more schooling dominate the news.

There are side effects to mass institutionalization for ever longer timespans. One is that people confuse education with schooling and in doing so devalue many ways of learning that our predecessors accepted without question. But in mass schooling, the sooner you get started on the race through the long arc of training, the better.

Play-Based Education or Drills? Babble.com

Take literacy. Around the time I was worrying about Clara's inability to write lowercase letters, she came home with a story that she had dictated to one of her teachers. I thought the project was nothing more than a way to encourage imaginative thinking. What I didn't understand until much later was that this exercise was a crucial step in preparing Clara to read.

"It's very important for young children to understand that what they say can be written down," Daniel explains. "Think of what it means from a child's viewpoint: An adult is paying attention, writing down what I say. What I think and say is important. That's a powerful incentive for learning."

Or consider the play kitchen, where I feared Clara was merely re-enacting the domestic drudgery generations of women have endured. "When children are taking on roles, planning scenarios, changing the script — all that requires a high degree of self-regulation," says Daniel. "Dramatic play gives all kinds of opportunities for problem solving and decision making."

Those skills go beyond any one academic subject; they affect how a child learns from then on. A four-year-old who is trained to sit and practice specific drills may well be reading by kindergarten, and her math scores may be ahead of the curve in second or third grade. But studies have shown that children who haven't had to make their own decisions — using that all-important self-regulation — have a harder time in later grades, when independent thinking becomes more critical.

david friedman talks unschooling

Libertarian Parenting: David Friedman and Unschooling (Video) « Little Alex in Wonderland Part three in a series on Libertarian Parenting. A long interview with David Friedman, a professor and son of Milton and the remarkable Rose Friedman.

I agree with the Friedmans that we need to empower families and give them choices but a voucher doesn't seem to offer much real choice to families to me. All a family can do is choose another school. Even the universal voucher used in Sweden seems to confine what is called choice to an exceedingly narrow band:

While schools must adhere to the Swedish national curriculum and testing, they are free to design their own programs and implement any teaching style they see fit.

That's not much of a choice. How about families choosing what they want at the schools they already support? How about the schools providing services for families rather than families being drafted and ordered to serve?

But all that aside, in this interview, David Friedman talks insightfully about: the status of children, "adults who deal routinely with children .... are likely to be intellectually sloppy because of the superior status they have" and discussion of the corrupting influence of having power over kids, gaming; how gameboy time is more productive than being in school, learning what you are interested in, how his unschooled son learned math for college and much more.

Oh and if you wonder about Friedman's proof that two cars hitting each other at 50 mph are not the same as one car hitting a wall at 100 mph, surf over to the utube home of the video and the discussion there has some commenters exploring that a bit.

training passivity

Homeschoolers will not be surprised to read about how schools train passivity and compliance. The homeschool community is a diverse group with diverse views but the ability to think for yourself and form independent conclusions has never been more essential in a time of mass media and polarization.

Changing the structure of schooling in the US could ensure a more stable society and could allow more independent solutions to arise to common problems, solutions not on the lists of corporate political parties.

8 Reasons Young Americans Don't Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance | Activism & Vision | AlterNet:

"3. Schools That Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy. Upon accepting the New York City Teacher of the Year Award on January 31, 1990, John Taylor Gatto upset many in attendance by stating: “The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions.” A generation ago, the problem of compulsory schooling as a vehicle for an authoritarian society was widely discussed, but as this problem has gotten worse, it is seldom discussed."

And there is more:

"The more schooling Americans get, however, the more politically ignorant they are of America’s ongoing class war, and the more incapable they are of challenging the ruling class. In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8 percent of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “subtreasury” plan (that had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population. Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”; however, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade. "

The author does not note the effects of peer-dependence and groupthink, both accentuated by raising kids in mass settings and a possible cause of the so-called political polarization where politicians depend inordinately on reacting to each other's views instead of forming more independent opinions.

And there is still a large component of physical punishment in US schools that is also not examined.

background posts
a concise summary: Gatto
Gatto: state-controlled consciousness
undermining the family and the child
sanctioned violence in our schools
voluntary attendance
make public schools truly public

unschooling rules

This post has a player and Clark Aldrich reading the Introduction to his book Unschooling Rules. The brief reading is a good one and Clark's book is, too. He captures in brief language the rules of unschooling akin to Michael Pollan's Food Rules. I like the comparison and I think it is fitting. Many people cannot believe you can grow vegetables without poisons especially farmers themselves. Many people no longer remember what reading instruction was about before processed phonics curricula. Many people do not realize how much community involvement the majority of people had before cars and suburbs became the rule. Anyway, Clark gets all this and puts it into an easy format:

But the education landscape is finally getting some diversity. Just as followers of Michael Pollan are no longer relying on the industrial food complex to provide them their sustenance, so too are a growing number of homeschoolers and unschoolers questioning the assumptions of today’s industrial education.

They are striving to evolve new approaches, not from the once-removed vantage of politicians or board members or even smart individuals grinding through the Sisyphean task of trying to get a few policies changed, but by abandoning the model and starting over.

Perhaps the hardest part of this revolution, however, is parents realizing how ingrained the traditional school habits of teaching children are. Homeschoolers and unschoolers have to adopt the genuine best practices of schools, while leaving behind ineffective legacy processes and industrial conceits, and then fill in the gaps. This book, whose name is both an oxymoron and a double entendre, is the result of my research to identify and frame the guidelines that these home and unschoolers are uncovering in childhood education.

Clark is probably realistic in his expectations that education will not change fast. But I live in areas where poverty is a real and persistent problem and there are parents who need schools to become accessible and open community resources to keep their kids from becoming criminalized and thrown into the school to prison pipeline. Schools are the elephant in the room, a resource that cannot be restricted in communities already strapped and facing steep increases in hardship in an economic situation industrial academics cannot seem to fix. Apparently, it wasn't on the test.

We may not be able to figure out how to provide everyone a good job but we can open our schools to providing resources and classes for kids. This is one way to de-stress communities and families and ensure we start getting kids out of the school-to-prison pipeline. It is not a matter of a zillion more dollars (though why we need to spend on 6 wars I'll never know), it is a matter of understanding why schools work as one-size-fits-all work camps instead of community learning centers.

Tough financial times? Keep an eye peeled: Clark sometimes offers the book for a .99 download price. Better yet, request that your library buy a copy.

social deficits

I wrote this in the Ten Key Values tab:

The acculturation to invasive and abusive bureaucratic structures may condition us to a learned helplessness when confronted with corporate gangs or class warfare. The reverse is also true: brutal competitors feel justified and confirmed by the 12+ years of training in forced labors in schools whose mitigating social context has weakened drastically thereby creating an entitlement attitude instead of a community-minded attitude.

I'm not sure how reduce to prime factors the dynamics driving the absolute inability to comprehend the threat of inequality on the part of our politicians. Corruption and ambition are frequently cited but as a homeschooling mother of three, I spent some time the other day wondering just what impact sitting through 16+ years of graded, hierarchical schooling has had on people's abilities to perceive injustice as a problem. After all, injustice isn't a problem in school: its a way of life.

In the classroom, all those messy aspects of life are not there. When you get a grade and pass, the other students who have failed all walk out of the room and the building and disappear. Our schools are huge and we will not necessarily see the other 28 students in each class again. We didn't know them in the first place. Our cities are large and cars take us far. We do not easily see the consequences of our actions. We spend more time in institutions and less in our neighborhoods as we commute and compute our minutes away. We navigate a processed food wonderland and have forgotten how our food is grown.

Our politicians are overly busy in endless meetings and sessions. They remind this woman in her 50s of a bunch of teens clinging to their pals, unsure of what is actually going on but deep in their clique and its issues. The political language in Washington may sound Victorian but the dysfunction is 21st century and has deep psychological roots. Identification with authoritarian tactics because of time spent in institutions and the excessive peer-orientation institutional life engenders are not just evils for homeschooling families to avoid: they are part and parcel of our current political debate.

learning to count

How Does School Wound? Kirsten Olson Has Counted Some Ways | Psychology Today Peter Gray discusses Kirsten Olson's book and provides an overview of her work interviewing many different people about their school experiences. Olson categorizes these wounds in this way:

1. Wounds of creativity. School stifles creativity.
2. Wounds of compliance. In school students must continuously follow rules and procedures that they have no role in creating and must complete assignments that make no sense in terms of their own learning needs.
3. Wounds of rebellion. Some students respond to the arbitrary rules and assignments by rebelling rather than complying.
4. Wounds of numbness. The constant grind of school, doing one tedious assignment after another according to the school's schedule, following the school's procedures, can lead to intellectual numbness.
5. Wounds of underestimation. In her interviews Olson found that some described ways in which they were wounded by assumptions made about them because of their race, social class, gender, or performance on one or another test that was supposed to measure intelligence or aptitude.
6. Wounds of perfectionism. High grades and high scores on intelligence tests, too, can wound. Students who develop identities as high achievers may feel extraordinary pressure to continue high achievement, in everything.
7. Wounds of the average. The middling student, who is neither sinking nor soaring in the eyes of the school officials, may suffer from invisibility. In Olson's interviews, these people described themselves as feeling insignificant, as people who don't really matter much.

Gray also links to his own take on the theme: Seven Sins of Our System of Forced Education | Psychology Today His excellent discussion focuses around these points:

1. Denial of liberty on the basis of age.
2. Fostering of shame, on the one hand, and hubris, on the other.
3. Interference with the development of cooperation and nurturance.
4. Interference with the development of personal responsibility and self-direction.
5. Linking of learning with fear, loathing, and drudgery.
6. Inhibition of critical thinking.
7. Reduction in diversity of skills, knowledge, and ways of thinking.

And a link to my post a concise summary: Gatto's dumbing us down summarized by blogger Mahdi Lock:

Confusion

Class Position

Indifference

Emotional Dependency

Intellectual Dependency

Provisional Self-Esteem (reliance on experts and peers)

One Can't Hide (constant surveillance)

I've blogged before about how homeschoolers represent the first group to step outside of this experience. That means there is now a control group or a set of people outside the norm. And that means we can actually start to discuss what the experience of mass coerced schooling is doing to us.

In a country with wars on 4-5 countries and war on all terrorism everywhere as well as war on all drugs everywhere, all cruising along even after a global financial crisis. The failure of the academy to allow dissent, re: economics, produced people who could not foresee an actual economic tidal wave. And relentless peer-orientation induced the so-called smartest guys in the room to create financial instruments of mass destruction.

Maybe its time to start thinking about how we got here: pipelining oil across the globe and people into prison and others into the Ivy League. Once wealthy citizens setup private universities and paid their own way but now they can use the system to ensure they get access many state institutions whose own citizens are "not prepared" but are still able enough to pay, on the slimmest of earnings, their taxes to help support these "public" institutions.

It may be only one piece of a larger puzzle but maybe thinking about our lives in schools will help us start to understand lives spent in other mass institutions, like multinational corporations and the military-industrial complex.

There are wounded children in a lot of places these days.

This photo taken by a cell phone on Aug. 22 obtained by the Associated Press Tuesday Sept. 9, 2008, shows an Afghan child who was allegedly killed during a US- led raid in Azizabad village of Shindand district of Herat province west of Kabul, Afghanistan. The bodies of at least 10 children and many more adults covered in blankets and shrouds appear in pictures obtained by The Associated Press, lending weight to Afghan and U.N. allegations that a U.S.-led raid last month killed more civilians than the U.S. reported.
Read more: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/rawanews.php?id=734#ixzz1S3ssZVdc

social networking fail

Steve Hargadon: Ugh. Classic Politics Now Extends to Social Networking in Education.: Hargadon has a good post up about the controlling attitude of educators, the efficiency trap, as he so aptly puts it, of centralization. The whole post is good and worth a read.

"This seems to indicate that the hundreds to thousands of teacher-initiated social networks that are out there will be made better by 'more efficient and coordinated' efforts. Honestly, I don't think so. I think a great part of their value is because they are not 'efficient and coordinated,' that they are autonomous places for conversation, where educators can pick and choose on their own who they want to talk to and what they want to talk about. The problems identified in this statement aren't really the problems of social networks for educators, they are the problems that fit the narrative of centralized solutions. The great efficiency trap is the same one that locks students and teachers into a education system that touts its efficiency but forgets the cost of those efficiencies: personal control and agency."

The system is only efficient for those administering the system: it isn't a system that has the user in mind. So the efficiency is less than it seems when you look at it from the user's point of view. And no one ever looks at it from the kid's point of view because kids do not really count as users. They're just kids, what do they know?

real social networks grow from real social interactions

An example of a social network diagram.
By User: Wykis, public domain,
via Wikimedia Commons

Changing schools from the current compulsory, factory format to open-source learning centers could help create and sustain vital social networks that would help empower and change communities in many ways, from increasing economic activity to allowing broader relationships among people who are free to choose their interactions. Underestimating the limitations of the factory model, especially now that they are confining kids for 16+ years, is routine since most adults were raised within the schools and accept the status quo without questioning it.

The ranking and grading once thought necessary has been proven in the 20/21st century to be unnecessary and an impediment to a more positive social climate that would do wonders for all schools and communities. Real social networks have a long history and hierarchical ones are a blip on the radar screen of history: our school factories are dumbing us down in many ways.

From Harvard's Complexity and Social Networks Blog:

Prehistoric Social Networks

Contemporary humans exhibit spectacular biological success derived from cumulative culture and cooperation. The origins of these traits may be related to our ancestral group structure. Because humans lived as foragers for 95% of our species' history, we analyzed co-residence patterns among 32 present-day foraging societies (total n = 5067 individuals, mean experienced band size = 28.2 adults). We found that hunter-gatherers display a unique social structure where (i) either sex may disperse or remain in their natal group, (ii) adult brothers and sisters often co-reside, and (iii) most individuals in residential groups are genetically unrelated. These patterns produce large interaction networks of unrelated adults and suggest that inclusive fitness cannot explain extensive cooperation in hunter-gatherer bands. However, large social networks may help to explain why humans evolved capacities for social learning that resulted in cumulative culture.

This change in social climate alone could boost intelligence and ability.
Socialising led to bigger brains in some mammals:

For the first time researchers have attempted to chart the evolutionary history of the brain across different groups of mammals over 60 million years. They have discovered that there are huge variations in how the brains of different groups of mammals have evolved over that time. They also suggest that there is a link between the sociality of mammals and the size of their brains relative to body size, according to a study published in the PNAS journal. [Encephalization is not a universal macroevolutionary phenomenon in mammals but is associated with sociality PNAS 2010 ; published ahead of print November 22, 2010]

Schools create an artificial and increasingly harmful social atmosphere that could be completely transformed by allowing families and kids to be human beings, who naturally learn and grow in social networks. Voluntary, open-source learning centers providing choices for families and kids could be transformative institutions.

more
voluntary attendance
Ouchi on decentralization
attendance laws are limiting our ability to change schools
update on williams-bolar

related
Human Nature May Not Be So Warlike After All (wired.com)

creeping institutionalization

Socialization is something homeschoolers like to talk about. And it is always an interesting topic. It is a big and impersonal word for a process that was face-to-face and observable in traditional societies.

The Fact of Groupthink
I had a chance to re-read Elizabeth Warren's wonderful post What is a Fact? - Credit Slips, widely circulated within the blogosphere. I am a Warren fan; I really liked her books and I am always happy to see mother-daughter teams (Warren and her daughter worked on the The Trap of the Two-Income Family, a book that caught my eye as a homeschooling mom.) From the post, an account of a classroom experience teaching law students at Harvard:

They were smart and sophisticated in their arguments, but the bottom line was that they "proved" the fact of lower costs deductively by appyling what they saw as immutable economic principles. ...

What struck me, and the reason I bring it to this group, is how these very bright students seemed to believe that deductive logic produced a "fact" that they could not or would not challenge. Perhaps my class was abberational, but it made me wonder about how we are educating our students, both before and during law school. Is it all about deduction, with nothing left over for reality?

I speculate that my contracts class includes several future law teachers and future policy makers, many future community leaders and a lot of future voters. If the deductive logic of economics is all-controling, then empirical work--indeed, empirical questions--will always remain at the intellectual and political margins.The class reminded me that empirical scholarship is important, but empirical teaching may be more important. These students are our future.

But re-reading this post recently, I thought that the lack of empiricism she discusses might be an effect of excessive institutionalization or too much time in large, artificial social settings. As the number of years of schooling has increased, the activities and practices that tied young people to the real world have also declined. When compulsory attendance laws were first put in place, the majority of Americans lived on farms and the years in school were far shorter. Now we spend many, many years in institutional settings and young people have far less experience with realities outside the literacy-focused factories.

Manipulation by Incentives
I also read a short piece by James Kwak on health care incentives that don't work and it seemed as though the same effect as that identified in Warren's class was at work. There has been a reliance on beliefs about what makes policies and people work rather than an insistence on the fieldwork of gathering data and looking at what actually could be done.

Another way of looking at the problem is to note that there is no one who is trying to brings costs down directly. Sure, insurers try to do it, but they do it through the types of monetary incentives that economists love: higher copays, lower payments for various procedures, etc. But that’s not actually what most companies do when they have a cost problem. If you run an auto company and it’s costing too much to build a car, you don’t lower the transfer price that you pay to that factory and let incentives solve the problem. You go and figure out what the problem is and you engineer a solution, whether by redesigning the manufacturing process, reengineering the product to use cheaper parts, negotiating lower wage costs, negotiating lower input costs, or something else. That’s how you solve most problems in the business world — not by tweaking some clever incentive scheme.

Incentive schemes are manipulations of people of a rather low-level that oversimplify problems and oversimplify people. Incentives seem to be remote methods of exercising control as opposed to actual problem solving and direct intervention. This one might stem from too much time spent assuming the nonsense of grading is somehow meaningful. After all, every child is exposed to grading for a very long time now.

Both of these issues -- over-reliance on deductive half-truths and belief in a reward system -- are accompanied by an unwillingness to directly interact or intervene that could be attributed to the social impact of mass, coerced schooling that extends now 12-16+ years. That experience will affect us somehow no matter what grades we get or what classes we take. And because it is all so similar, the factory model is universal, there should be some pretty big effects felt across the board.

Do students like Warren's become the regulators Kwak discusses?

Who Knew?
Incentives derive their contemporary meaning from the Second World War:

incentive

early 15c., from L.L. incentivum , noun use of neut. L. adj.incentivus "setting the tune" (in L.L. "inciting"), from stem ofincinere "strike up," from in- "in, into" + canere "sing" (see chant). Sense influenced by association with incendere "to kindle." The adjective use, in reference to a system of rewards meant to encourage harder work, first attested 1943 in jargon of the U.S.war economy; as a noun, in this sense, from 1948. American Psychological Association (APA): incentive. (n.d.). Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved March 25, 2011, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/incentive

links 2-24-11

Socialization in the news: a look at bullying as an integral part of popularity, a mass socialization process within the schools, a process shaped by the authoritarian, factory system it occurs within even if this approach is mitigated by the many comforts of high economic class status for some. This homeschool blog offers a take with a lot of thoughts many homeschoolers would share.

Milton Gaither has a post up John Holt's Conversion to Homeschooling:

A few days ago I received an email from Tunya Audain, a Canadian libertarian and home education activist. I have no way to corroborate her anecdote, but if true it is remarkable. In my book I explain how Holt’s encounter with Ivan Illich’s CIDOC in 1970 in Mexico was transformative. Audain’s account, which I reproduce here exactly as she sent it to me, sheds further light on this transformation

Geek Moms has a post on the Curies and the new book by Lauren Redniss as well as a video on making a cyanotype.

A Education Superintendant who wants schools to be able to refuse students

The Bartleby Project urges activism against school tests (one dad's take is here)

Reading Wikipedia on German education, I found this statement (emphasis mine):

Some German teachers' representatives and a number of scientists disputed the PISA findings.^[12] Claiming among other things that the questions have been ill-translated, that the samples drawn in some countries were not representative, that Germans (most of whom had never done a multiple choice tests in their lives before) were discriminated against by the multiple choice questions, that the PISA-questions had no curricular validity and that the PISA was "in fact an IQ-test", which according to them showed that dysgenic fertility was taking place in Germany.^[13]^[14]^[15]^[16]^[17]^[18]^[19]