In school your payoff comes from giving up your personal responsibility, just doing what you're told by strangers even if that violates the core principles of your household.
Shocking Origins of Public Education, John Taylor Gatto [1]

I will be coming out soon from a gag order I've been on discussing anything having to do with education. I have been reticent about writing on the subject for a whole variety of reasons. When we were homeschooling, or may I say "unschooling", life became our learning platform and as many of you know by my writing there's not a lot I write about my private life, especially when it comes about my kids. It's hard to write without including massive details about the spawnage. I do believe children have a right to privacy.

Now that my kids have been in school since September, I am ready to explode. I have been biting my fingers and tongue because, grock, I hate the culture of schools.

Homeschooling in New York is a double full time job for secular parents with no church groups to pick up the slack of classes, workshops, study groups or just plain old playtime and baby-sitting. If you are one of the thousands of evangelicals, mormons or conservative jews homeschooling in New York, you will have a church, tabernacle or temple as a support system that's got your back. If you are an atheist like us, good luck.

Religious organizations enjoy the perks of no-taxes and so buildings are readily available to them. Sure, there are non-denominational groups inside churches, but that's not the point. Real estate prices, and the culture of 'flying under the radar' of homeschooling New Yorkers have doomed any attempts to create independent learning centers or homeschooling co-ops that could help working class parents homeschool. Homeschooling in New York City comes at a great personal and financial cost that comes from building a "schooling" or learning infrastructure from scratch.

So schooling was the option put on my kids table. They were willing to try if it meant being in one place and with one group of people at a time. Of course, they hate it. Sure they have the consistency of one place. They hate the fact they cannot do things at their own pace, and at their own peace.

That's the fundamental problem of schooling. Unnatural time-tables of what a child is supposed to learn by when are also complicated by the battery of educratical assessment tests and the whole myth of "educational failure" that springs from schooling culture.

So even as I have my kids going to school, homeschooling --or in my case, unschooling, has not diminished. On the contrary, it's intensified.

My oldest is in fourth grade. This year he is supposed to take some assessment test upon which, as one hysterical father said to me, his whole middle school existence will rest.

Ummm. Yeah.

I honestly don't understand the hysteria over these exams. Everybody hates them, but not one schooling parent I talk to seems to know a way out of the hysteria. "It's horrible, the teachers have to teach to the test", they all say while rending their shirts and gnashing their teeth.

Me? I always sit there blinking :

So what's the problem with that?

What do you mean what's the problem with that? It's not learning, it's not education, it's blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblah.

So? It's a test, what's the big deal?

My response usually baffles people --and most of the time people have no idea that :
(1) I was not a homeschooling but I am unschooling [2] mom.
(2) I used to teach high school and college.
(3) I hate, nay, despise assessment tests.

It's been 20 years since I first started teaching. I was once a private tutor, then a bilingual high school History teacher and then an undergraduate Spanish and Latin American literature adjunct. Yet it wasn't until I became a mother that I really reckoned how humans learn. Also, I used to be one of those people who hyperventilated when taking tests. I wasn't always like that. I was a nerd after all who was in the top 10 highest scores for the College Board in Puerto Rico. Of course, that test was mostly in Spanish. Coming to this country and having to adjust my skills to compete in the English actually made my comfort nerd zone vanish. Panic attacks were de riguer around testing time --be it through exams or term papers, by the way.

I always joke that parenting has a little bit of National Geographic, a great dose of Desmond Morris' Human Zoo and a lot of Monty Python and parenting with unschooling reveiled the necessary evil of tests.

My "Aha!" moment came one day when my oldest, Thing 1, was of crawling age and discovered the magic of the TV cabinet door. I was in one of those anthropologist mommy moments, observing while pretending to read. There he was, prying his little fingers around the door exploring the wooden rectangle. Then he heard a "pop" and the latch came loose. To his amusement, he discovered that pushing it would take it back to it's prior state. So he tries to close it but it pops open again. He sits up : Open. Close. Open. Close. Giggles of delight. He does this for what seems like an eternity and then, when actually notices the machines that lay inside the cabinet, he was ready to attack.

"Uh-uh", I said. "You can't play with that. Close the door".

Thing 1 just blinked back at me.

"Close the door".

More blinking.

Finally I gesture to him with my hand, "Close". He looks back at me and then the door, now with interest. So I get down on my knees, sit next to him and touch the door. "This is a door". He looks surprised and squeaked an "oh!". Then I motion and declare "Close" and "Open" with the door. This time he squealed with excitement an "oh oh oh oh oh!".

As a language teacher, I loved hearing from my students their aha! moments. It was the stories of "dreaming in Spanish" or of them understanding conversations in the train that brought tears to my eyes and a "Yes!" to my lips. Those stories were the validation that I had somehow helped them find their way.

Notice, I don't use the word teach. They each had their own timing, their own experiences, their own learning rhythm and groove. I was their to just make sure they could get the mechanics of the language, just like my son go the mechanics of "open/close".

That Open/Close moment proved to me that learning cannot be forced, coerced, or bludgeoned into humans. Testing, unnatural timetables or definitions of "success" or even worse, the branding iron or "failure" are not just obstacles to learning. Coerced schooling (aka Compulsory Education [3]) is not about learning and all about keeping child welfare officers off the streets.

Read New York State's education law [4]. It's a morass of definitions of hierarchies, preocuppied with who gets to control what part of the budget and decision process in the department. This is where the comissioner is described as a god-like ruler of education for the state [5], followed by defintions of deputies, superintendents, teachers, staffers, and then parents.

This hierachy of definitions, by the way, is framed by child abuse (sections Article 23-B and Article 65). Also of inteterest is the language used to define parents (section 3212): Verbs denoting submission and force are part of the vocabulary.

It's clear that parents are expected to submit to the SED and the commissioner's will by "causing" their charges or natural children to attend school. Non attendance is tantamount to child abuse.

The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn -- nor is it supposed to. Schools were conceived to serve the economy and the social order rather than kids and families -- that is why it is compulsory. As a consequence, the school can not help anybody grow up, because its prime directive is to retard maturity. It does that by teaching that everything is difficult, that other people run our lives, that our neighbors are untrustworthy even dangerous. School is the first impression children get of society. Because first impressions are often the decisive ones, school imprints kids with fear, suspicion of one another, and certain addictions for life. It ambushes natural intuition, faith, and love of adventure, wiping these out in favor of a gospel of rational procedure and rational management.
Shocking Origins of Public Education - Gatto [6]:

One of my fears of having the kids go to school is starting to realize. Thing 1 has started to call himself stupid and dumb for not figuring out answers expected from him in the time set by the teacher, the school, the board of education, and the Regents. A kid who has doing math problems in his head since the age of seven, now is calling himself a failure because he's not answering questions in the alloted seconds expected from him.

I am, of course, seething with anger. I won't give into it. This is an opportunity to show my son how to fight back intellectually and socially.

My son's teacher went on and on about how she hated testing. We seem to agree with that. What we don't agree with is the approach on handling testing. I'd rather she focused on the obvious : the tests are about data management. If the kids can organize and manage the words in order to answer the test question, they can pass ANY test.

Going back to the drama over the assessment tests, my battle cry is "It's just a test". We spend an inordinate amount of time discussing how to break the texts in order to organize the information needed for answering the questions. It's so obvious that wether a written "social studies test" or one of those mentally-retarding math problems, they are all about two things : data analysis and data management. Why is it such a big deal to just teach the kids these analytical and logistics skills?

Well, it's up to me to teach my son how to cut open the motherfucking beast's belly all by himself. So when the other day he was crying about how dumb he felt doing one of those pre-tests, I went into battle mode.

Especially since he is supposed to do these tests by himself. I have been asked by the teacher not to correct them because, and I quote, "I need to know how he is doing in order to teach him".

Really?

So I sat at the table by Thing 1 and asked him to read. He just turned all those sentences into a "Catcher in the Rye" moment.

"Stop, you're depressing me".

"But I'm depressed mommy".

"Ok, I'll read and we're going to break it down together. I won't look at the test questions because that's your job. But I'm going to show you how to break down the story into it's ideas".

"(Huge Sigh) Ok."

The article was title "Pocket full of posies and the black death". When I read the title, I couldn't remember the whole song, so I sang that verse. A yelped "Oh Oh Oh Oh, I know that song" came out of his mouth. Then the a realization : "That baby song is about the plague?! Cool. Gross."

So we underlined words. We wrote by each paragraph one word summaries. He boxed words he didn't immediately know what they meant. Arrows connecting ideas were shot.

He's eyes kept getting wider and wider, as if the secrets to the illusion of a magic trick had been revealed. It was the "Open/Close" scene of 9 years ago all over again. By the end, Thing 1 was beaming.

"Ok mommy, now I'll take the test".

"You do that, I'll cook some dinner".

He answered all 10 questions in less than 10 minutes. What his teacher did not accomplish in 15 weeks, I was able to accomplish in one hour.

The solution? It's in another post. Oh, and no, I'm not talking aboutfree market education [7] either. What I am talking about is akin to this:

A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public's chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market. It should use modern technology to make free speech, free assembly, and a free press truly universal and, therefore, fully educational.
Full text of DESCHOOLING SOCIETY by Ivan Illich courtesy of Paul Knatz | General Characteristics of New Formal Educational Institutions [8]

For now though, I'm not supposed to say anything else about schooling .... Riiiiight.