The Director's Blog – Rob Shearer, Francis Schaeffer Study Center, Mt. Juliet, TN
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Textbooks and tutors after you decided to homeschool your daughter through high school: $5,000
Salary you would have received if you had continued teaching high school instead of homeschooling: $40k/year
Text message from your daughter during her first week in college: “I got extra credit cause I was the only one who recognized a line from 1984” : PRICELESS!
Tags: high school, Homeschooling
It’s done! Finished, edited, proofed and approved. And we have copies on the shelves!
The sequel to Famous Men of the Renaissance and Reformation.
Rather than reprinting Famous Men of Modern Times (which is a bit uneven in both tone and selection), we have made the decision to complete the Famous Men biography series with four new books:
The 17th century was an age of religious wars and revolutions. The French had seven civil wars of religion from 1570-1590. The German Empire had a religious civil war from 1618-1648. The English had a civil war from 1642-1649. It was also the century in which the English and French settlements were founding colonies in North America at Jamestown, Plymouth, Boston, & Quebec. But learning the wars will not convey to students what the times were like. Biographies will. Twenty-eight key individuals are profiled in chronological order:
Birth Crowned Death
| 1519 |
1547 |
1589 |
Catherine de’ Medici |
| 1553 |
1589 |
1610 |
Henry of Navarre (Henry IV) |
| 1533 |
1558 |
1603 |
Elizabeth I |
| 1540 |
1595 |
Sir Francis Drake | |
| 1552 |
1618 |
Sir Walter Raleigh | |
| 1566 |
1603 |
1625 |
James I |
| 1552 |
1610 |
Matteo Ricci | |
| 1564 |
1616 |
William Shakespeare | |
| 1580 |
1631 |
John Smith | |
| 1583 |
1634 |
Wallenstein | |
| 1594 |
1611 |
1632 |
Gustavus Adolphus |
| 1575 |
1635 |
Samuel de Champlain | |
| 1564 |
1642 |
Galileo | |
| 1585 |
1642 |
Cardinal Richelieu | |
| 1600 |
1625 |
1649 |
Charles I |
| 1599 |
1658 |
Oliver Cromwell | |
| 1590 |
1620 |
1657 |
William Bradford |
| 1588 |
1629 |
1649 |
John Winthrop |
| 1623 |
1662 |
Blaise Pascal | |
| 1606 |
1669 |
Rembrandt | |
| 1608 |
1674 |
John Milton | |
| 1632 |
1675 |
Johannes Vermeer | |
| 1630 |
1660 |
1685 |
Charles II |
| 1629 |
1674 |
1696 |
Jan Sobieski |
| 1650 |
1688 |
1702 |
William of Orange (William III) |
| 1632 |
1704 |
John Locke | |
| 1653 |
1706 |
Johan Pachelbel | |
| 1638 |
1643 |
1715 |
Louis XIV |
I am particularly pleased with how the chapters on the colonial founders turned out. John Smith (Jamestown), Samuel de Champlain (Quebec), William Bradford (Plymouth), and John Winthrop (Boston) all have incredible and fascinating stories. A simple comparison of their backgrounds and their reasons for leaving England and France will give students far more understanding about the founding of the colonies than any textbook can.
I also enjoyed greatly retelling the events of the English Civil War, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These events (with a number of larger-than-life characters) were critical in shaping the political ideas of America’s Founding Fathers – whose stories I am looking forward to telling in Famous Men of the 18th Century.
I’ve also included accounts of the lives of artists (Rembrandt, Vermeer), a musician (Johan Pachelbel), and writers (Shakespeare & Milton) so that students will become acquainted with more than just the political history of the times.
The reading level is targeted on upper elementary/jr. high, but even older students and adults will find much here that gets left out of the textbook accounts.
Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century is 28 chapters, 228 pages and retails for $17.95, directly from Greenleaf Press.
Get ‘em while they’re hot off the press!
- Rob Shearer, (author and) Publisher
Tags: 16th Century, 17th Century, Famous Men, Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century
With the imminent publication of Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century, I decided to review, revise, & update the Greenleaf scope and sequence for the study of history.
After 20 years of teaching history, talking to homeschooling parents, and continuing to read and write on historical topics, I am more convinced than ever that the keys to teaching history to children are Chronology and Biography.
And I am also equally convinced that we need to be teaching the Bible to our children as a historical document. The Bible is not a collection of morality tales like Aesop’s Fables. The Bible is a historical account of God acting in history from the call of the Patriarchs through the Exodus, the Conquest, the Exile and the Restoration. I believe strongly that our kids should know the history of Israel as their first “model” for how to approach history. And the Bible’s pattern is to tell the story in chronological order and to focus on one key person at a time. The historical books of the Bible tell the story of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, etc… down to Daniel, Esther, Ezra, & Nehemiah.
With the new Famous Men book (and with a few excellent books from other publishers), Greenleaf is able to offer a complete history program for grades 1-8, and a plan for a second study of western civilization in the high school years.
You can download our 3-page Scope and Sequence here. Feel free to copy, forward, and/or print out as many copies as you’d like.
Page One is the plan for the elementary grades.
Page two is the plan for high school students:
And page three are alternate plans to do Western Civilization in four, five, six, or seven years of elementary school:
I’ll have more information about the imminent publication of Famous Men of the 16th & 17th Century over the next few weeks.
- Rob Shearer, Publisher
Ms. Spears and I exchanged several email messages this morning (in my capacity as Vice President of the Tennessee Association of Church-Related Schools). I am happy to report that she has issued the following letter of clarification:
Dear Home School Parent:
It was brought to my attention that the letter sent out prior was misleading so I decided to send you the section of the law that pertains to the annual requirements of the home school parent so there would be no misunderstanding of what is expected.
In reference to section (2) (A) church related home school parents can disregard the notice mailed regarding the annual filing.
Parents who choose to independently home school are not required to personally report to the school board in person however I do like to meet my home school parents and provide them assistance as needed. If you would like to personally bring your notice of intent to my office, I will gladly sit down with you.
If the student plans to re-enroll in the public school, the parent should provide at the time of the re-enrollment a copy of the transcript of subjects the student covered while being home schooled.
Sincerely,
Sharon Spears
**********************************************
Original Post follows:
There are some bureaucrats (aka educrats) who just can’t seem to grasp the idea that they are not in charge of ALL the children. Doesn’t matter what the law says, parents cannot be allowed to teach their own children un-supervised. They’re not professionals! How will we know if the children are being properly socialized?
Sharon Spears is the Attendance Supervisor for the Coffee County School System. The Coffee County seat is Manchester, 60 miles southeast of Nashville, halfway to Chattanooga, down I-24. Sharon Spears has been listed as the Attendance Supervisor since at least 2001. She’s also listed as the GED co-ordinator, she is in charge of Dropout Information, she is the Liason for Homeless Children. She is the contact person at the school system for issues relating to Juvenile Court and the Truancy Board. Perhaps she’s been too busy to ever learn what Tennessee law is concerning homeschooling. That would be kind of ironic, since her page on the Coffee County School System website has a link to the Tennessee Department of Education’s page on homeschooling where the law is clearly explained.
How do I know that she hasn’t learned the Tennessee law on homeschooling?
Here’s the text of a letter she sent to homeschooling families in Coffee County a few days ago:
(dated) July 15, 2009
To All Home School Parents:
The state requires all parents who plan to home school their children to register annually with their local school system. You will need to stop by the Coffee County Board of Education in the Administrative Plaza to complete the necessary paperwork.
If you were conducting an Independent Home School during the 2008-2009 school year, please, bring your attendance record and your child’s transcript/grades with you. The deadline for notification without penalty is September 1st.
If you have additional needs or questions, you can contact me at 931-723-5150. Thank you so much for your prompt attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
(signed)Sharon Spears
Attendance Supervisor
This letter misrepresents the law in at least three very significant ways.
ONE: The State does NOT require ALL parents who wish to homeschool to register with their local school system. Parents have the CHOICE of signing up with their local school system OR with an umbrella school. If they sign up with an umbrella school, they are NOT required to sign up with the local school system.
TWO: Even Parents who have decided to homeschool AND register with the local school system do NOT have to “stop by the Coffee County Board of Education. . . to complete the necessary paperwork.” You may, and probably should file your notification by mail, with proof of delivery requested.
THREE: Parents signed up with the local school system do NOT have to supply their child’s transcript or grades to the school system. The only thing required to be reported to the local school system is attendance. And you don’t have to do it in person. Send in a calendar noting which days you conducted school with your children. Verify that the days total 180. Send it in.
Coffee County homeschoolers can safely ignore the arbitrary requirements of Ms. Spears’ letter. If you decide to homeschool and sign up with an umbrella school, you can ignore the Coffee County School System completely. If you choose to homeschool and sign up with the public school system, you can send your “notice of intent to homeschool” form in by mail. And you have no obligation to report to them anything other than your attendance records.
Ms. Spears should know better. She is attempting to require more than the law requires. She is attempting to force parents to submit records and information they are not required to submit.
She should know better. She’s been there for over eight years.
She should be ashamed of herself. However, when the misleading sections of her letter were pointed out to her, she promptly issued a “clarification document” which addressed each of these three issues and revised her requests to just those items required by state law.
And the director of schools for Coffee County, Kenny Casteel, should also be ashamed chagrined. You see, that same homeschooling law referred to on the Department of Education’s webpage contains this sentence:
“The director of schools or the director of schools’ designee shall ensure that attendance teachers are informed of parents’ rights to conduct a home school pursuant to § 49-6-3001(c)(4), subsection (a) of this section, and § 49-50-801 upon employment of such persons and at the beginning of each school year;”
They have no right to claim they didn’t know what the law said. The Director of Schools and the Attendance Supervisor have a legal obligation to make sure they understand the law and know what parents’ rights are.
Tags: Coffee County School System, Homeschooling, Kenny Casteel, nanny state, Sharon Spears
To read all the details, and a REALLY excellent article, click on over to the Link Homeschool News Network and read the article by Diane Flynn Keith.
Back in September, we were very pleased to announce that we had become the publisher for Valerie Bendt’s Reading Made Easy. Reading Made Easy is a complete, phonics-based, reading instruction program. Valerie and her husband Bruce have homeschooled all six of their children and literally thousands of children have learned to read using her easy, step-by-step, reading program. One of the best things about Reading Made Easy is the love of reading that Valerie exemplifies and communicates throughout. In the appendix, Valerie lists eight pages of recommended books for parents to read aloud to their children – these are the children’s classics, time-tested titles like Curious George, Peter Rabbit, and Madeleine. Also included are two pages of suggested first readers for children.
We are now VERY pleased to announce that there are now four Student Activity Books available which supplement and provide additional practice for the lessons in Reading Made Easy. Each of the four Student Activity Books covers 27 of the lessons in Reading Made Easy and provide:
The Reading Made Easy Student Activity Books offer parents and teachers the additional materials to make sure their students master each lesson before moving on to new concepts. It also enables the students to create notebooks which display the material they have learned. The notebooks are wonderful keepsakes and are a valuable addition to students’ educational portfolios.
Here are some sample pages:
Greenleaf Press is announcing the availability of all four Student Activity Books today.
Or you can purchase all four Student Activity Books together at a 10% discount for $45.00 ($50.80 if purchased separately!)
We are also now able to offer the Complete Reading Made Easy Package which includes a copy of Reading Made Easy (511 pages, $49.95) and all four Student Activity Books may be purchased for $89.95 ($100.75 if purchased separately!)
As with all Greenleaf products, every book is guaranteed to be twaddle-free. If you decide you don’t want to keep a book you have purchased from us for any reason, you may return it within 30 days for a full refund.
If you’re looking for a family-friendly, mom-friendly, complete reading instruction package, we highly recommend Reading Made Easy
- Rob Shearer, Publisher
Greenleaf Press.
Tags: phonics, Reading Made Easy
It’s in the news again.
Created in 1989, the Convention (often abbreviated as the “CRC”) has a number of laudable goals and features. It has been ratified by 193 countries around the world. The only two UN member states which have NOT ratified it are Somalia and the United States (which proponents of the treaty often cite as something that should be embarrassing to the United States).
There is much in this treaty which is admirable and non-controversial. There are some parts of it which are simply innocuous. And there are some parts of it which pro-family and pro-homeschooling advocates in the United States find objectionable.
But why all the hubbub over a UN Convention? Isn’t this simply a non-binding statement of principles?
For many countries, that might be the case (and probably explains why many of the 193 have ratified – for them, ratification has no practical effect on their own laws and practices).
But the effect of ratifying a treaty in the United States is different, because of Article VI of the US Constitution and the 14th Amendment.
Article VI (often called the “Supremacy Clause”) states, in part:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The Supremacy Clause makes all treaties ratified by the US Senate binding in all Federal AND in all State courts. Which means that the United States Senate should be very careful when it votes to ratify a treaty. It also helps explain why the ratification of a treaty requires a 2/3 vote of the Senate – Treaty ratification is akin to amending the Constitution, and comes close to it in its wide-reaching consequences and significance.
Non-Controversial Sections of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child include the prohibitions on kidnapping, child labor, child prostitution, and using children as soldiers. Ironically, the United States HAS signed and ratified both of the optional protocols which have been appended to the CRC: one on the use of children in military conflicts and one which prohibits child pornography.
The problematic parts of the CRC are in articles 13-17 which enumerate children’s rights which all parties to the CRC agree to recognize. These rights are described in legal language which is at times ambiguous, perhaps deliberately so. They include the right to freedom of expression, the right to receive information, freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of association and peaceful assembly, a right to personal privacy and a right to access mass media. And here is where the issues arise. It would be one thing to assert that a child has these enumerated rights and that children must be protected from any attempt by the state to interfere with them. But the CRC leaves open and unresolved whether a child has these rights and can appeal to the state to prevent any of these rights from being abridged by parents. Given the Constitutional status afforded treaties and the social activism of parts of the legal community, it is quite probable that these rights would be raised in legal proceedings against parents by advocates acting in the name of children. If the CRC intended to protect children from any abridging of these rights by the State (but not by parents), then it should have said so. Because it does not limit its applicability to actions against the states, in the US Courts, it would inevitably be invoked in cases of conflicts between parents and children, with the result that parental authority would be eviscerated and children would be free to make dangerous and/or inappropriate choices, with parents forbidden from interfering. To take but one example, if parents decided to enroll a child in a religious school, the child could object and bring action citing the CRC and veto the parents’ decision.
Ratification of the treaty would provide the basis for the state to intervene in parenting decisions regarding education, media, and friends. It would radically undermine the rights of parents to direct the care, upbringing and education of their children.
The CRC has been repeatedly interpreted by the UN, by its committees, and in other judicial settings as requiring ratifying governments to “prohibit all forms of violence, including corporal punishment, in the upbringing of children.”
For some, this is simply one more reason to support ratification. But the overwhelming majority of parents in the US believe that corporal punishment by parents is a legitimate form of discipline. In any event, the definition of child abuse and neglect is currently made by state law, interpreted by state courts. Ratification of the CRC would, in effect, be the enactment of a federal ban on corporal punishment. No matter how you feel about the issue, federalizing it will have terrible consequences for families.
The CRC also establishes a UN committee and requires ratifying states to submit a report on implementation of the CRC within two years and every five years thereafter. The Committee may request additional information, review, and comment on States’ reports, but it does not appear to have any enforcement authority. I view the Committee as, at worst, an annoyance. Various states have already received chiding comments from the Committee, but they have little practical effect, other than in the court of public opinion (which is to say hardly at all). Of far greater concern is potential enforcement actions of the US federal courts, acting with the authorization of the US Constitution’s attribution of legal authority to all ratified treaties.
Here’s a link to the full text of the Convention (at the UN web site): http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/k2crc.htm
I would encourage everyone interested to read the text for themselves, paying particular attention to articles 13-17.
There is also an interesting article in the Emory International Law Review by Prof. David M. Smolin of the Cumberland Law School, which identifies the issues pretty clearly. Prof. Smolin believes the objections to Articles 13-17 could be overcome by the adoption of “reservations” by the US Senate, and argues that the treaty is not self-executing and therefore should not cause concern. The treaty is NOT self-executing, but the US Constitution spells out the mechanism by which treaties become supreme law which must be followed by all federal and state judges. I think Prof. Smolin has missed this point.
Further Reading:
U.N. Fairy Tales About Children, Kay S. Hymowitz,
City Journal
Abandoning Children to Their Rights, Bruce C. Hafen and Jonathan O. Hafen, First Things
HSLDA has a series of articles, all linked from this page: http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/Issues/U/United_Nations.asp
ParentalRights.org also has a well documented and footnoted article, 20 Things you Need to Know about the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child
This Thursday night (6/4/2009), at 8:00 PM Pacific/10:00 PM Central/11:00 PM Eastern, I’ll be on the blogtalkradio show Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism.
The show is hosted by Babe Huggett (who blogs at TheRealityCheck.org) and Warner Todd Huston (who is a prolific blogger and owner of StopTheACLU).
You can click on the Life, Liberty link to go to the show’s homepage and listen to the show on your PC, streamed over the internet.
Hosts Babe Huggett and Warner Todd Huston discuss and examine current political events, put them in historical context and follow trends to their logical conclusions through a conservative, Christian viewpoint. Phone in comments from listeners always welcome! Call-in Number: (347) 237-4040
On this Thursday’s Episode (6/4/2009) of Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Conservatism
Hosts Babe Huggett & Warner Todd Huston dig deep & analyze the news with their usual insightful and historical approach all the while being as politically irreverent as possible! It’s time to spend your Summer 2009 vacation cramming & jamming with home schooling advocates, Kay Brooks & Rob Shearer, as they educate us tonight about the deliberate persecution of home schooled graduates, the dumbing down of students in government propaganda factories a.k.a. public schools & the erosion of educational liberty in Tennessee in particular & the USA in general.
Tags: Babe Huggett, blogtalkradio, Kay Brooks, Warner Todd Huston
A friend (and colleague from the world of homeschooling) sent me a message (on facebook, of course!) this morning:
Rob, I should have guessed you’d be lead geek in any party… how do you use Twitter?
My answer turned into an essay:
First a joke: “Twitter is the internet service for people who wish they had a stalker.”
My thesis is that the internet & homeschooling are an important mix. Parents are NOT (for the most part) using the internet an a means to teach their children. Parents (mostly moms) ARE however, voracious users of the internet as a way to find homeschool products and to network with other homeschooling families (mostly moms) for advice, encouragement and fellowship. And this has been, by and large, a good thing. Twitter fits into all of this in an organic way.
Twitter is in some ways, micro-blogging. Think of it as a series of blog entries, limited to 140 characters each. But it is also more than that – more interactive, and closer to realtime.
When websites started (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth in the prehistoric 1980s!), they were conceived of as static repositories of information. But the ease of updating rapidly produced a new variant, the blog (A contraction of “website log”–>”web log”–>”blog”).
Initially, users bookmarked sites they liked and made periodic visits to see if there was anything new. I remember the days of opening up my favorites (organized by topic) and running through, clicking on each URL to see what was new. Fun, but inefficient. Then came RSS (Really Simple Syndication). I prefer the google reader, but I’ve not made an exhaustive study. I’m currently subscribed to 146 websites. Any new content is excerpted/copied and placed in the “inbox” of my RSS reader where I can browse through it. I read and scan through them quickly (a necessity). I can flag anything significant with a star, and with a click or two, forward things to friends & family. You can view items from my RSS feed that I have “starred” in a widget on the left side of my blog (http://redhatrob.com).
Twitter is the next step in all of this. In one sense, it’s an aggregation of all the facebook status updates from all of your friends. But that’s only one way in which it is being used. Imagined another way, it is a giant real-time chat room with several million users all sending in sentences all at the same time. You can get a visual on this (slowed down and excerpted) by going here: http://beta.twittervision.com/
All of the individual messages (140 characters each) go into the public stream. But, of what use is this firehose of messages? Twitter gives you a few simple tools to extract the posts you are interested in. You “follow” a select group of twitter users whose messages you want to read. This stream of messages is visible on your twitter homepage, and you can scroll back through messages to read up on what you might have missed. you can also search the public stream for keywords you might be interested in.
The twitter stream is also public via some open software routines which has led to a variety of interesting tools that expand on the basic searches that twitter allows you to do.
Key Word Alerts
There is a service (tweetlater) that will scan the entire twitter public stream and aggregate messages which contain key words you are interested in. As an example, I get an aggregated email message every four hours which shows me any messages with the words “Greenleaf Press” in them. I search on other keywords as well (wink!). Tweetlater started as a service to let you schedule your messages to be posted at times you select, but i find the keyword alerts to be the most valuable feature.
There is also a wonderful tool called tweetdeck which takes the concept of a live “search” on the twitter stream and executes it with great power. Tweetdeck allows you to configure multiple columns, each filled with a stream of twitter messages which match a search criteria you have established.
Hashtags
Twitter users have adopted the convention of using “hashtags” to efficiently identify the topic of certain messages they are sending, or the community they wish to address. One of the most popular hashtags is #tcot. (stands for Top Conservatives On Twitter). A number of twitter users add the hashtag #tcot to the messages they send with comments on current politics & social issues. In tweetdeck, you can configure a column to retrieve all of the messages that contain the hashtag #tcot. in that column you will see an ongoing, realtime conversation between individuals around the country (and sometimes the world) on political topics. Sometimes the senders interact with each other, sometimes they are simply posting a link to a story / blog post that they have found or one they have authored. Links in twitter messages are “live.” You can click on them and your browser will immediately open a tab showing that site.
During real-time, breaking events, folks with mobile phones and twitter accounts have quickly adopted a hashtag (by convention and tacit, un-coordinated agreement), and then posted real-time updates from the field to the twitter stream. When the terrorist attack occurred in Mumbai (November, 2008), the best real-time info from around the city came from the hundreds of people posting messages using the hashtag #mumbai. People all over the world were literally reading short text messages posted by people trapped in hotels trying to figure out how many terrorists were out there and where they were.
Weird URLs
To conserve message space (remember, messages are limited to 140 characters), most users “shorten” the URL of a link using any number of public services. Think of it as a link shorthand, or link encryption.
Mobile phones
This is one of the most interesting and intriguing facets of twitter. You can have messages from certain selected users forwarded to your cell phone as text messages, AND you can send twitter messages from your cell phone. You register your cell phone with your twitter account and adjust the settings there. I “follow” over 1,000 twitter users, but I have only 3-4 forwarded to my cell phone. We’ve effectively used this feature during legislative lobbying, to keep track of the real-time location of key people we needed to speak to and to co-ordinate our activities.
It’s also a fun way to impress your friends. I’m one of 52,375 people following the twitter account of Karl Rove. I have his messages forwarded to my mobile phone (usually only 2-3 a day). It’s fun to hear the phone beep in a meeting and then turn to someone and say, “Excuse me, I have a text message from Karl Rove.”
Public and Permanent
The real caveat on twitter is that the entire message stream is public, and permanent – occasionally folks forget this, with embarrassing results.
Twitter & Google
At first thought, these seem to be very different animals, but in another way they are not. Google works by ranking relevant websites based on how other users on the internet link to and evaluate them. Twitter is likewise a real-time source of information. You can go to the twitter stream at any time and search for what thousands of people are saying about a particular topic. Or you can post a message yourself and invite responses. If you pay attention to the twitter stream for a few minutes, it is often (though not always) self-correcting. Think The Wisdom of Crowds, and/or Adam Smith’s invisible hand. If you ask a question of a random man on the street, you may get an erroneous, inaccurate answer – but if you get the attention of a crowd and ask them, and let them interact and refine the answer, they do a surprisingly good job.
All of this is still evolving. It may prove a fad and collapse. On the other hand, it is such a decentralized and democratic community that the potential for “networking” is tremendous. Like all tools, it can be used for good or ill.
I find that I need to discipline myself and schedule/ration the attention I give to this. 15 minutes, twice a day is my current limit. But it is a new part of my communication strategy – and I find I have been connecting with other like-minded folks in new and interesting ways.
Incidentally, there is a #homeschool hashtag being used. Probably will be others…
Sorry to be so long-winded, but it helps me to organize my own thoughts when I write all of this out.
- Rob
Tags: google, twitter, wisdom of crowds
John Taylor Gatto has a new book out. That is cause for celebration. For those who are not familiar with him, a bit of his biography is in order. Gatto taught for 30 years in the public schools of New York City, specifically Community School District 3, Manhattan. He was named New York City Teacher of the year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In 1991 he quit his teaching job rather publicly, with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal which began thus:
Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.
You can read the rest of his provocative essay / editorial / resignation letter at his website: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue2.htm
In 1992, Gatto published a revolutionary book, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Seventeen years later, that book is still in print. Since 1992, he has been writing and speaking nationwide. Among other things he has been outspoken in his admiration for the modern homeschooling movement – though he didn’t homeschool his own children.
In 2001 he published The Underground History of American Education
And now we have his newest composition. In some important ways, I think it may be his best work. Many of the themes of his writing are repeated here, but they are more polished, more concise, more persuasively presented. And there are some provocative and startling new ideas here as well. Ideas that will (or should) make anyone involved in the education of children think.
The dedication opens poignantly:
I dedicate this book to the great and difficult art of family-building, and to its artists, the homeschoolers in particular . . .
From Gatto’s Prologue: Against School:
Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surly put that banal justification to rest.
A little later, Gatto quotes H.L. Mencken with approval:
The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. . . Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim. . . is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States. . . and that is its aim everywhere else.
In chapter one (Everything You Know about Schools is Wrong) Gatto summarizes the startling and alarming statistics on literacy, gathered from a large and impeccable source, US Army induction records. In the early 1930s, the literacy rate for young men was 98%. By 1944, it was 96%. But by 1951 it had fallen to 81% – a startling decline. By 1973, the tests on young men inducted into the military revealed that male literacy had fallen to 73%. All of this in spite of the increased attention in the 1950s and 1960s on education. Spending on education had skyrocketed. New teachers had been trained and hired. New methods had been developed and adopted. What went wrong? Gatto suggests that education was never the stated purpose of compulsory schooling – control and conditioning was. He has quotes from the founding documents of public schooling to back up his assertions.
In chapter two (Walkabout: London), Gatto celebrates the lives of successful men and women who have achieved remarkable things without formal “schooling” (which doesn’t mean they weren’t educated!). Sir Richard Branson, David Sarnoff, & Bill Gates are 3 of his more important examples but there are others with life-stories every bit as compelling.
In chapters three & four (Fat Stanley and the Lancaster Amish & David Sarnoff’s Classroom), Gatto continues his examples and contrasts those who have learned how to think with the stunting effects of twelve years of classroom confinement.
Chapter five (Hector Isn’t the Problem) tells the tragic story of a student with behavior problems who is labeled and kept in school’s version of “protective custody. In Chapter six (The Camino de Santiago) Gatto begins to lay out one of the guerilla techniques he developed to help his students really learn – by helping them to escape the artificial setting of the classroom and observe the real world. Chapter seven (Weapons of Mass Instruction) expands on this theme and gives more examples of what Gatto discovered really helps students and how schooling systematically stifles them.
Chapter eight, (What is Education?) is a thought experiment in which Gatto imagines what the goals and methods of a new school, a humane school would look like. No testing, flexible time commitments, no walled compound:
I know how odd this all sounds: first I tell you reading, writing, and arithmetic are easy to learn as long as they aren’t taught systematically, and now I tell you that the very “comprehensive” school institution which Harvard called for in the 1950s is ruining our children, not helping them. I know you’ve been told by experts that the complicated world of today requires more school time, longer school days, longer years, more testing, more labeling.
Well. . . you’ve been bamboozled, and I hope your own experience will confirm that by little reflection. How do you think millions of Americans learned to be literate on desktop computers, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the information society? Not at school, that’s for sure.
Chapter 9 is a personal plea from Gatto entitled, “A Letter to My Granddaughter About Dartmouth.” In it, he advises her to take a few years off and work until she understands herself better. And then he gives her a frank appraisal of what she will, and won’t, learn at Dartmouth.
Chapter 10 (Incident at Highland High) was my favorite chapter in the book! Gatto relates two incidents. The first was the 2008 incident in Germany in which a sixteen-year-old girl was forcibly removed from her home by a group of fifteen policemen and city officials. Her crime – she was being homeschooled and did not want to attend the local public schools. Gatto reprints the letter he wrote to the German ambassador in the US. He also relates his own experience in dealing with official repression and over-reaction. In 2004, while giving a talk to the students at Highland High School in Rockland County, NY he was interrupted by three police officers who burst into the auditorium and announced (via bull-horn) that the assembly was over and all students were to return to their classrooms. The superintendent of schools had found Gatto’s talk to be so inflammatory that he called the police to stop it.
In his Afterword, Gatto announces, An Invitation to an Open Conspiracy: The Bartleby Project. Inspired by Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, a boycott of standardized testing:
Mass abstract testing, anonymously scored, is the torture centrifuge whirling away precious resources of time and money from productive use and routing it into the hands of testing magicians. It happens only because the tormented allow it. Here is the divide-and-conquer mechanism par excellence, the wizard-wand which establishes a bogus rank order among the schooled, inflicts prodigies of stress upon the unwary, causes suicides, family breakups, and grossly perverts the learning process – while producing no information of any genuine worth. Testing can’t predict who will become the best surgeon, college professor, or taxicab driver; it predicts nothing which would impel any sane human being to enquire after these scores. Standardized testing is very good evidence our national leadership is bankrupt and has been so for a very long time.
His solution? When the tests are handed out on test day, Gatto urges young people to write across the front of the test, “I would prefer not to take your test.” And don’t. “An old man’s prayers will be with you.”
Weapons of Mass Instruction is a hardback, 215 pages. It can be purchased directly from Greenleaf Press for $24.95 by clicking on any of the links in this review.
- Rob Shearer
Tags: Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction
