Isn´t this uniformity a bit creepy?
All parents want to educate their kids in the best possible way. We want to nurture body, spirit and mind of our kids. When our kids are very little we might just leave them at home, but once they are 6 or 7 and about to learn to read and write, it´s mandatory in most countries that we send them to school.
At school, they are going to receive some type of education. If you remember your days in school, there will be a lot of things that you don´t like to remember that happened there (I even had a nightmare a few nights ago about being trapped in high school for not passing in my Chemistry exams – if I hadn´t cheated on that subject for the last 3 years of school, I would never have passed).
Things like having to stay in class during boring lessons, classes that back then seamed useless and now are proved to be completely useless. Maybe some sort of bullying but especially bad curriculum that was teaching you what to think and not exactly how to think. Here I mean the typical traditional school, ok? I know there are marvelous ones, I´ll get there, just hang on with me a little longer.
There is a hidden agenda behind what´s being taught in school. It´s about engaging the kids to be productive members of society leading them to find careers and jobs that will keep them in line. In traditional schooling, personal growth is not a concern, happiness is not considered, but making people fit into the economic and values system that we live in is the major concern.
Traditional education is made to uphold existing institutions, living no room for change.
What I´m saying here is nothing new. The elite of a society sets the rules of how the people are going to be taught in order to perpetuate a system that is going on.
On the other hand, there are alternative methods of education that focus on the children´s growth as individuals, independent thinkers, and joy seekers. I will write much more posts about those methods but for now I just want to mention the existence of Waldorf, Montessori, Homeschooling and Unschooling, as examples of alternatives that are available.
There are many parents around that agree with what I´m saying here and yet they keep sending their kids to traditional school anyways. There are many reasons for this. Lack of financial resources (unfortunately usually this alternative schools tend to be expensive, so parents many times feel they have no choice), living close to a school (in big cities, the distance from the facilities you need plays a big role in choosing everything), not really knowing any alternative (lack of curiosity as well) and the worst case: being too busy to think and do anything different than what the other parents are doing (their families, neighbors etc).
What I want to do is shake those parents up! And I need your help. There is nothing more important in life than how your kids are growing up and all those problems I just mentioned can be solved. For finances and living away from good schools there is Homeschooling and Unschooling with the method they would choose, some available for free. For lack of time, there are ways one can get organized or even rely on some community for help. Even create a community to pull this off, if necessary.
As a mother of a 3-year old, I many times wonder about the school I´m going to send my daughter to (if I ever will). Right now, we have a wonderful and unexpensive school in our town where she is in a mixed group of ages from 2 to 5. As in opposed to what I´ve seen in traditional schools where from a young age they are all separated by age (something that stimulates the competition – subject for a future post).
And this school she is going is still great but ends when kids are 11 years old, what would make me probably move to another city. But as I decided to take 2011 to travel with her, I´m not really sure where I´ll end and the more I read about Home and Unschooling I get more inclined to do so. But time will tell what´s gonna happen to the two of us.
I know what I won´t do for sure. And that is to simply conform and let her end up going to any school because it´s more practical. I want to take action towards a better education for her and for others. I truly hope to inspire other parents on this quest.
If our education system is so screwed up, we need to do something different with our kids, right? What are you doing differently (or what are your plans) with your kids, even if you don´t have any yet? Enrich this conversation with your comments. Even if you never have kids, let´s talk about the kids of our race, humanity. Everyone is involved in this process.
Let´s question the present authorities and let´s let our children keep questioning the authority the more we can handle it. Let´s check the most effective way to inspire them to be curious, creative and benevolent. I´m sure it´s just a matter of searching, acknowledging and acting about it.
Let´s start to use the best educational methods there are available and from those we start building up, making it better and more adjustable to what could be a universal culture or to local communities. Let´s talk on this blog about kick ass educational methods, shall we?
I´ll show you when I think I´m acting on it and hope to get great inspiration from you as well. If we all help each other, it´s going to be fantastic!
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
It has been suggested by Lao Tzu that we avoid authority. Is this profound or just avoiding confrontation? I think it is wise to be skeptical of authorities, where ever they may appear. I am often wary of my own thoughts. What happens when your child questions your authority?
Good point Patrique, it´s hard to accept our children questioning us, but it´s surelly a good exercise to practice. Luísa is too young and yet, when whe is not accepting my rules (taking a shower, brushing teeth…) I like to put myself in her shoes and see how nonsense it might look like to quit playing to do boring stuff, but as her care taker, I just do what I have to do to make her fit.
Is this what governments think of us? That they are doing what they have to do to make us fit? Well, the big difference is that we are not children being taken care of, we can take part of the decisions (unlike young kids, but even kids can be stimulated to decide on their tasks).
There must be a way to make our children follow our rules but never forget to wonder about how things could be different.
As parents we must accept that our children will outgrow our knowledge and we should leave some room for that.
I think what describes “kick ass education” varies from child to child … Little Miss M, is still much too young to know what method will work best with her, but as she is still young we will try out the Montessori Method for now, she seems to like it and work well with it. But this is not always true for every child .. some child learn in a more methodical, traditional manner, some don’t. This was true to a child I looked after for 3 years .. the first years of his life his mom had him in a Waldorf style school, and he did not progress well at all. By the age of 8 she started to see that his thinking was more methodical and needed a different learning environment. And that is what she did, put him in a “traditional” school (although I think it was private) and he did GREAT!
The trick to finding “kick ass” education for your child is KNOWING your child and what works best for him/her. Many parents do not take the time to create a strong bond and get to know their children .. therefor the question about education and their children gets lost
Thanks for jumping in with more information on this Tanya. I guess you are right, each child will have a different way of learning. I´m a bit skeptical about a traditional education still, maybe traumatized… But if it worked better for the kid you are talking about (and probably for many others) than it´s proven to be the best for him.
I think we give too much weight to school in educating children theese days, particularly in developed countries schooling and education are often identified and many parents shug off their responsabilities expecting the benevolent state to provide the best possible education for their children. I share Marilia’s suspicion of the school system because it is simply “unnatural”, whether there are hidden agendas or not. In one of Francis Fukuyama’s books I read with shock some figures about the ammount of school children that are prescribed Ritalin in the US, around a quater, I recall, are treated for hyperactivity! Fukuyama says that there is nothing wrong with these childen, it is only that evolution has not prepared them to sit still and pay attention to endless hours of formal teaching. We are the product of millions of years of evolution and until now the “natural” way of leaning was mainly playing and imitating adults just like many animals do. We feel outrage when we see third world children working, but in reality doing some work within the family is a healthy way to prepare those children for the world they are to live in. I don’t want to condone the far to common cases of expoitation and cruelty against children in the poorest countries, I mean the natural integration of children in the economy and activities of the family, helping their parents in the fields even if they miss some days of school during harvest etc or taking care of the younger ones while their parents work, learning responsability and participating in their parents lives as actors not mere recipients. On the contrary, our children in developed countries are an often-overprotected, separated cast from the “adult world”, they may have only a vague idea of that their parents’ work is about and parents know little about what they do in those long hours at school. As parents need longer hours to work and commute to work in large cities, children spend more time on after-school extra courses and lessons separating them even further. I dont’t have an answer for what kind of school system we should have or the pedagogy to be applied but I see clearly that school should be shrunk rather than expanded, and more practical and playful educating alternatives should be sought beyond the slavery of the classroom, that would be undoubtedly more natural for our children and certainly more fun!
Keep up the good work Marilia!
Thank you for sharing your thought Eric!
I really liked how you put this: “our children in developed countries are an often-overprotected, separated cast from the “adult world”.”
The craziest thing is that this system that separates children from adults and the responsibility to educate children shifting from the family to the school that we are living in is quite recent. I guess it´s started with the last generation of mothers working full time and being away from the family. As something new, we are being able to see the results only now, which is the starting point to change what we think is not going well, right?
BALANCE .. BALANCE . BALANCE .. like you said children need to learn through play, work, being around other children., etc … which is usually not the case in most third world countries, they are not being held from school for just a “few days of harvesting” but forever. Its simply NOT right, children need to be children… and learn some important tools in life, like literacy. After living in Brazil for 4 years and also teaching ESL to adults in the USA and seeing the amount of illiteracy due to working and NO school .. is amazing and very detrimental to the lives of these children when they are adults. I am all for learning through “untraditional methods” (play, imagination, real life skills, etc) but I also think there needs to be BALANCE in there and the necessary key skills such as reading, writing, speaking, need to be part of that. And to reiterate what I said before, no mind thinks alike. We are all different beings. What works for one child may not work for another. Some children need and thrive of a more traditional, methodical approach, as I have experienced first hand, and frankly I see nothing wrong with that. That is how their mind is wired…
I guess we all agree that children working and not having any education is wrong. What are we going to do about it is the big question.
Also, I don´t think that untraditional methods mean not having reading, writing and speaking in their program. There are so many different methods and a huge amount of variables to make them work or not.
The traditional education, however, is the one we have practiced and can see how it works (actually, having come from it it´s unlikely that we get the necessary objectivity to analyze it).
The more I think about the traditional education the more bad things I see in it. Things that can be no good to any child. Things like sitting in lines instead of in a circle, being evaluated through tests (maybe simply being evaluated), having subjects separated by periods of 50 minutes, not allowing the development of the interest further than that specified time and the list could go on and on.
I´m sure there are more methodical approaches better suited for some kids, but they are not necessarily in a traditional school.
What´s good is that we can look for the best thing for each kid. Each individual will have a different way of learning, and each needs to be attended as in having it´s interest in learning aroused and nurtured.
On a side note, last night I had another school dream about not passing in Math…
I came across your blog via an e-mail from Karol Gajda.
I absolutely love this post, thank you for your thoughts and insights.
As a mother of two little ones, I am very particular and conscious about their education. I believe that the public school system generally teaches children to learn how to fall in line with preset rules that that may not serve them well. There is a big push in teaching children that they cannot solve problems creatively or even think a lot of things for themselves. My husband teaches middle school in a middle class neighborhood and he is being taught to teach the children how to let him think FOR them. It is interesting…
We put our son into a public school preschool, where he was taught that he CANNOT use his creativity in his work and MUST do and work on what his peers are working on. He was bullied and taught that he had to socialize in a certain way in order to be “normal.” There was also a big push for parents (we live in a lower-income neighborhood) to accept and look for government help, which I think is great if you need it; but, I don’t believe that it is in our best interests to depend on it so much. We give away our autonomy and freedoms when we do this…
We were blessed to find a Montessori school for him to attend. If we had not had this opportunity, I would have unschooled him.
Thanks again for the post! I’ll go and subscribe now…
Blessings, Beth
Hi Beth, thanks for letting me know how you found me and that you are subscribing. It´s nice to see how this virtual world works for real (and cool to know that you are a fellow Freedom Fighter).
What a crazy experience you had in that public school. The “don´t think by yourself” agenda is not so hidden as your story can tell.
I´m glad you found a Montessori school and solved the situation and that you would take all the responsibility to unschool your kid if you needed, that´s the way to go.
And even if we have our kids in good schools, we still need to act consciously towards their education when they are home. I guess we are on the right path
Thank you for : “we have a wonderful and unexpensive school in our town ”
Lolita
Lolita, thank you for reading
(Lolita is one of my daughter´s awesome teachers)
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