One day, whilst splitting wood, I was listening to Stefan Molyneux's podcast. He had on one Laurette Lynn and they were talking about her book "Don't Do Drugs, Stay Out of School." I was naturally hooked because I knew, deep in the deepest of my soul, that most of my K-12 education was anything but, and was likely a scam I could never put my fingers on. Now, in hindsight, i realized it was just a racket for talentless people posing as "teachers," abusing children to extract resources from the private sector.
And no, that's not hyperbole.
And no, that's not rhetoric.
It's the truth.
School was a god damned prison and a miserable experience for myself and the majority of other children.
So when Laurette and Stefan were talking I thought it would be preacher to the choir. However, it wasn't just preaching to the choir, it was them (specifically Laurette) opening my mind to greater heights to see just what was going on, and just what a disgusting epitome of evil our education system has become.
Naturally, this prompted me to purchase her book, which I read on the flights to and back from Vegas.
"Don't Do Drugs, Stay Out of School" is a combination manifesto, ultimatum, and plan. It is a screed against the current educational system. It delivers an ultimatum to parents to actually PARENT and educate their own children instead of outsource them to the state. And it finally is a plan on how to homeschool your own children.
Some of it was stuff I already knew (because of my visceral hatred for school), but it was really eye opening on two levels. One, it made me realize just how few parents actually love their children. They'd rather pursue a career and dump their kids off at what is REALLY a mental prison. Stefan Molyneux said it best - if you dump your kids in daycare/school so you can pursue a career, that is no different than cheating on them as you are depirving them an upbringing. And two, just how unnecessary public schools are. You DON'T need two incomes. You DON'T need to send your kids to school. And you SHOULD have one parent (oh I don't know) ACTUALLY RAISE THE FUCKING KID WHICH INCLUDES EDUCATING THEM!
You throw in the savings of day care, afterschool activities, and the resultant familial stability that doesn't result in psyschiatrist bills or divorce lawyers, and (who knew!) the nuclear family with a parent at home can beat most government ordained familial structures.
About the only two complaints I would have about the book is that
1. It was repetitive in its intent on proving the public schools are bad
2. The last quarter was a bit idealistic on setting up voluntary communes to home school kids.
Both criticisms are largely due to my personal situation. You don't need to convince me about the despicability of public schools, but you DO need to convince otherwise brainwashed-parents who don't know any better. Also, I have no children, so I have no vested interest in how a utopian home-schooling system would work.
In short, this is not a book for minimalist bachelors who hated school in their youth (though it is therapeutic).
IT IS, however, A MANDATORY book for any mother or father who are genuinely concerned about the education and futures of their children.
Your kids are going to grow up fast. And if you want to have them spend more time with their daycare provider and government teachers than you during their formative years as you pursue a social work career raising other people's kids, then by all means. But if you actually love your kids and want what's best for them, then I suggest buying Ms. Lynn's book.
4 comments:
"One, it made me realize just how few -p-a-r-e-n-t-s- mothers actually love their children. They'd rather pursue a career and dump their kids off at what is REALLY a mental prison."
FTFY, because fathers don't get that choice; pursuing a career is a requirement, not an option. Feminism is, after all, the prioritization of women's interests ahead of children's and men's interests, what else can
I plan on shopping very carefully for schools, monitoring my children's education closely, and if necessary (which I believe it will be), pulling them and homeschooling.
What I'd expect to see, rather than a shift to communal homeschooling, is a rise in private educational services that fill in the gap between full homeschooling and conventional schooling. Beefed-up tutoring centers, in other words.
Standardised testing showed that I could have taken GCSE O-levels or something similar by the end of year five. I could have worked on my A-levels in year six and most likely gone to university five years early.
Instead, I was told, along with my family, that I would be "missing out" on increased "socialisation", meaning that I wouldn't have at least five additional years of anti-intellectual hazing at the hands of barely average and slightly-better-than-average people.
My family fell for the ruse -- I didn't.
Since nobody was looking out for me, I looked out for myself. I finished my education at libraries and quietly made sure I could pass my A-levels by year seven, after which I began to treat my internment in the Pedagogical Penal Colony as a dark comedy. I spent year twelve onward as an early enrollee in a nearby university, being simultaneously a university student and a sixth former.
There was a book for Americans a while back called "The Teenage Liberation Handbook" which would have helped a bit, but I wasn't aware of it. I was, however, aware of Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", which although being Marxist did provide an emphasis on what would turn the tide, and of Ivan Illich's ideas on alternate methods of education.
Freire's work showed that simply undertaking projects, even if you didn't finish them, would provide the catalyst for learning.
I soon churned through every project I could imagine -- how to design my own radio circuitry, how to program computers built from boards I would etch and wire myself, and so forth. When I wanted to learn how to write more clearly, I found English grammar and study guides from a previous era, ones that were more rigorous than what was being taught to me during my "prison work" during the day.
If I were stuck with the false duality of "home schooling" versus "penal pedagogy" as a parent, I would opt for a third way, one in which you teach your children through the creation of extremely difficult projects that force them to learn a wide range of skills.
You don't even have to know the subjects yourself -- as Rancière has pointed out in "The Ignorant Schoolmaster", it is possible to teach people things you don't actually know yourself.
Then again, it sounds like this is the normal state of affairs in the American pedagogical system.
It's fairly obvious that the Gary Schools in America are meant to be production facilities for a standardised type of person, and that the American social system cannot regard the independent person as anything other than a potential threat.
If I were stuck in this situation, I would, using the concepts of Mr Vox Day, treat every day as if were Rabbit Season ...
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