I enjoyed William Upski’s No More Prisons (a book that had surprisingly little to do, directly anyway, with prison reform/abolition) so last year I checked out a book he’d brought up, Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Upski tried unsuccessfully to convince people like me that homeschooling was great and formal education sucked, and while he didn’t make the case very well, I figured Llewellyn might. What it did was further solidify my basic distrust and dislike of alternative education in general and homeschooling in particular.
Let me get my own bias about home schooling out on the table here. I’ve known smart and nice people who home school. I’ve known successful and confident people who were home schooled, and I know there are a handful of families for whom anything other than home schooling is untenable. But as a rule, home schooling is still bullshit.
People generally home school their kids because they’re afraid of those kids getting exposed to ideas from a big, corrupting society that the parents just don’t like. Sometimes the parents don’t want their kids dealing with a race they don’t care for, but I don’t want to confuse the issue by pretending that these latter types are the majority, which they probably aren’t. I think the average home schooled kid has well meaning parents without much intellectual rigor who are terrified of their kids learning versions of history that don’t match up with their socio-political biases, science that does not confirm an earth 5,000 years old, health education that tells their daughters that the bleeding that started last week isn’t a sign of original sin and that the game they’ve been playing with billy next door could get them pregnant, and that there are books out there like Catcher In The Rye and The Lorax. More so than the classes, I think what frightens parents is that they’ll meet kids from different ways of life who think, believe, and speak differently. They’re afraid their kid will hang out with the kid in the turban or, if their kid wears a turban, that kid in the du rag.
Fundamentalists aren’t where that line begins, of course; political extremists of many stripes have been fans of home schooling for decades. Of course, some people simply don’t trust the public schools to offer a decent education, which is understandable in some cases but still problematic. Very, very few people have an overview of multiple disciplines that would allow them to educate a child fully for 12 years. I don’t want to be a dick here, but I’m smarter than most people I know, with a college education and a decent understanding of several subjects I’ve studied mainly outside of school (comparative religion, philosophy, history, sociology, biology, and others). I still would be terrified at the responsibility of furnishing a child’s complete education, even if I was clear to do that and nothing else for the next 12 years. Instead of trying to replace formal education, a herculean task, parents would be better off trying to actually work to make the public school system workable.
The last thing I have against home schooling is the way it prevents socialization. And sorry, socialization is more than going with another home schooling family to the park (although I think more parents taking kids to the park would be a good thing), it includes some pretty weird and sometimes downright unpleasant experiences. You learn to deal with people in all their mercurial glory, sometimes without an adult hovering right over you. This is an essential part of maturing and to this day I can’t think of a single home schooled kid I’ve known who didn’t seem a little socially off, not necessarily awkward but never really adept at dealing with others.
Imagine my surprise to find out that what Llewellyn is advocating is even nuttier. It heads to the opposite extreme so far as to say that one should avoid the educational process altogether and only study what one wants to. Christ, where to begin? To start with, most kids aren’t very good at learning stuff that isn’t immediately interesting to them. Left to my own devices in fourth grade, I would never have gone to class and would have hung out in the desert all day reading comic books and sci fi novels and listening to Chuck Berry (yeah, I was a dorky kid, shouldn’t shock anyone too badly). We also don’t just let kids eat nothing but candy and chips or play alone in alleys after dark. Well, I know that a lot of parents do, but that’s another issue. One totally insane idea a lot of “progressives” have decided to pick up and run with is that kids are just miniature adults, who need to just learn experientially with no parental interference, and Llewellyn seems to buy into this quite happily.
Llewellyn makes the case that one does not need a teacher to learn, one can study any subject on one’s own if the interest in present. This may be technically true, but a lot of fields of study require human help from somebody knowledgeable. trying to learn a language is nearly impossible without a fluent speaker teaching you, for example; you can’t learn usable Chinese or Spanish from books and CDs alone, though they can certainly help. You can’t learn the ins and outs of martial arts or sports from a book or doing it on your own before you’ve established a foundational knowledge. Even a subject like math or even history can be much, much illuminated by a good teacher that could catch mistakes that a book would not.
Since I’m being candid about prejudices, I’ll just come out and say Llewellyn seems like a typical hippy. She says that her book “is built on the belief that life is wonderful and schools are stifling. It is built on an impassioned belief in freedom. And it is built on the belief that schools do the opposite of what they say they do. They prevent learning and they destroy one’s love of learning.”
I hate shit like this. It’s such a wimpy, sugar coated version of reality that I can’t stand it. Life sometimes is not fun and inspirational and free. Life sometimes requires hard work, a little bit of boredom, discipline, and things that occasionally do not, at that exact moment, set our spirits free to wander the universe. Sometimes learning something takes effort, discipline (again), or even *gasp* organization.
I’m not arguing that everyone should accept lives of dull tedium, or not learn things experientially. In fact, I feel that a lack of experiential knowledge is part of the problem with homeschooling or with overly academic types I know. But saying “Okay, no structure from now on, everybody just go pursue your fancy and you’ll learn that way” would be disastrous for 99.9999% of the adolescents who did it. Llewellyn ironically can write such an eloquent plea for semi-Thoreauian education most likely because she has a formal education and in fact was a teacher herself at some point. She actually criticizes home schooling and alternative schooling because they’re apparently too much like school. Seriously. When she bothers going beyond hippy buzzwords about the magical creativity of youth, she horribly misappopriates concepts of others, like the Chinese concept of ‘balance’ (which isn;t exclusively Chinese but whatever). A concept that, you know, is generally expounded on by scholars who were educated in a canon of Chinese classics that make a PHD workload look light in comparison. Sigh.
Why the venom for one simple, innocuous book most kids have never bothered reading? Because I think adults trying to explicitly get kids to fuck up their lives with manipulative language is appalling, but beyond that I’m more sick of progressive thought as an excuse for laziness and a synonym for a bohemian lifestyle. If Llewellyn actually studied Daoism in any depth beyond just getting stoned and reading Lao Zi, she’d probably come to the conclusion that a good set of learning principles was necessary to start off the journey before one could get to the state of wu wei. But that’d take, you know, structure maaaaaaaaaaan. Daoist (and Buddhist, and Sufi) teachers I’ve met, incidentally, are often considerably more stern than the average public school teacher. And students travel across the world to seek them out. If you spend your adolescence drinking OE 800 and watching TV, and believe me, that’s where many kids I know would be with no expectations or restrictions, nobody’s gonna seek you out unless they really want to know who America’s next Top Model is going to be.
