11041 Home Schooling for Families

The schools ain't what they used to be and never was. — Will Rogers

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. — Albert Einstein

Ideology drives the debate on education more than actual concerns about learning. The various groups contending for power in our society understand that to capture the youth is to control the tomorr1ow. That’s one reason we have so much administration. The system can’t just allow teachers to teach. It must ensure that the teaching conforms to topics, subjects, and content that the ruling elites approved of. Otherwise, something might happen and students might learn to think and that is a fate that our aristocrats want to avoid at all costs.

Like everything else — education follows the pattern set for it.

Schools “as we know them” feature regimented military-like patterns. The system arbitrarily divides students into grades segregated loosely by age. Educational bureaucracies segment information by subject, often via schemes mandated by politicians. No one teaches whole systems thinking. Administrators focus on obedience, which have little to do with education and everything to do with forming obedient worker bees for the military-industrial complex.

There often is a primary emphasis on sports, which have little to do with education but are great for keeping students and parents entertained and distracted. Politicians and educational bureaucrats benefit when no one pays much attention to the poor job of education done by most schools.

Discipline is always a problem. Cafeterias feed students diets high in carbohydrates and junk food. Nutritional content appears to be optional. Few whole foods are on the menu. Indeed, in many school cafeterias, nobody cooks anything. They simply warm up industrial food-like concoctions bought in large quantities by central purchasing agencies.

Corporations and the military have free reign to indoctrinate students with the culture of gluttony, greed, and violence that support their institutions.

The goal of the conventional education system is to create obedient worker-bees with high self-esteem who won’t question authority or rock the boat.

I know there are many fine teachers working under impossible conditions in the public school system. They bale a flood with a teaspoon and are locked by dysfunctional patterns into a failing system that cannot be reformed.

In response to the known problems of education, some parents choose home schooling, or unschooling, to educate their children. To explore these possibilities, start with the Wikipedia article on unschooling — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling — and then read John Holt’s books How Children Fail and How Children Learn. Then go on to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society.

If you decide on some form of un- or home schooling, look online for resources. It is easier than ever to home school children and in many areas, you can find resources for extracurricular activities such as music, sports, and art.

Many home and unschooling families form mutual support communities to help with the process and provide extracurricular activities.

When it comes to the education of your children, the most important thing to remember is that energy follows the pattern.

If you put your children into the public school system, their personal energy will be constricted and deformed by the institutional pattern which will achieve the purposes of the institution. It’s possible that you’ll find a school that’s an exception. That’s not the way to bet.

If you want something different, you will need a different pattern for their educational path to follow.