Photo by NC Institute
You’ve tried regular public school and it seemed decent in the 80’s and 90’s. This is no longer the case, and you’ll soon realize that it was never the case. It was built from it’s very foundation to really only serve the elite class, by creating a large population of j-o-b oriented people.
From an early age, children are separated from their parents and put in an environment with thirty different children by an authority figure that doesn't love them (be honest). They are then put on a timer for each subject, when the bell dings, it’s over and they move onto the next subject. This is not how people learn, and it’s not how children learn. Learning should be based on a child’s interest and attention span for that specific interest. Read any productivity book and it'll likely mention that it takes at least fifteen minutes to really get going on a given task.
How is a school setup? You enter a classroom, it take about 5 minutes to settle the class down and then it takes about ten minutes for the teacher to explain what you're going to do for the class. The next ten to fifteen minutes you try to maneuver into the lesson or contine where you left off from a previous day.
You've just wasted up to 30 of the 50 minutes alloted for that subject. DING! Off to the next one to start over. Seven classes times twenty minutes is close to about 2.5 hours of learning over the course of 8 hours. Efficient isn't it?
Add on top the damaging effects of homework. What free time they do have at home to pursue their own interests is crowded out by an unjust extension of the school day. These aren’t low point assignments either, as the weight of grading is balanced out enough that you’d fail if you skipped them. What’s left in the day is eating dinner, hygiene and some mindless decompression before bed to start it over again.
Photo by Annie Spratt
Without self lead pursuit of interests there is no retention and there is no drive to continue further down the path of a subject. You want to raise your children to be a specific genius in an area that they love, not to be a trivia champion, which is what the school system has devolved into.
In your professional life, you don’t see people rising to the top in a wide spectrum of areas. I imagine Steve Jobs couldn’t teach a history course, but he changed the world with technology. What if he didn’t grow in the epicenter of Silicon Valley and didn’t spend his adolescence devoted to computer technology? What if he gave equal attention to every subject, on a bell schedule, then called it a day?
Mainstream media seems to be catching up slowly to the inadequacies of traditional schooling. Within the past decade, more news outlets are reporting that those rambunctious kids in school that were considered unintelligent failures, actually became very successful game changers. They simply had to fail in school to pursue what their true interests were and they were bold enough to accept that. Tragically, most didn’t hone their potential and became criminals. Yes criminals, a large portion of children that could have become industry leaders, were guided into criminal behavior from the brainwashing setup that they were failures.
Photo by Mike Fox
Homeschooling fixes nearly all of these problems. If you are involved within this sphere, you may have noticed that to keep pace with the American public school testing standards, it takes about three hours a day. Anymore than that will outpace their grade level. The rest of the time can and should be used to let them choose their own pursuits. To make this concept more relatable, imagine in high school that from 8am to 11am, you worked on core academics. After lunch you were able to attend any interest related to learning.
Personally, I felt that I would have spent the rest of the day diving into all things computers. Maybe I would have learned coding, web design, graphic design, sales copy. That would translate to roughly three hours a day learning a readily translatable skill that I would have retained. Instead I was stuck in a class most of the day with my peers needing crowd control to really learn anything.
An objection can be made that students really should learn about Civics, American History, World History, Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology. I counter by saying that we can stop pretending that schools have a monopoly on information. What I do as an adult is find a good podcast and do a deep dive into an area of study. Usually I listen to about three hours a day on a subject. In this time I do other things. I retain much more than if I was sitting motionless for 3 hours at a school, in an anxious filled social setting that requires permission to use the bathroom and bans eating.
Photo by Remy Gieling
Public schooling isn’t designed to steer children to obtain their hidden genius, it just trains them to stay in their lane, and that lane is a steady supply of worker drones. I recognize the challenges and roadblocks to homeschooling and unschooling, but I implore all parents to work to take back their children.