Life before 2008 08 May 2006 07:48 am
School’s Out by: Daniel H. Pink, part 2
So when we step into the typical school today, we’re stepping into the past — a place whose architect is Frederick Winslow Taylor and whose tenant is the Organization Man. The one American institution that has least accommodated itself to the free agent economy is the one Americans claim they value most. But it’s hard to imagine that this arrangement can last much longer — a One Size Fits All education system cranking out workers for a My Size Fits Me economy. Maybe the answer to the riddle I posed at the beginning is that we’re succeeding in spite of our education system. But how long can that continue? And imagine how we’d prosper if we began educating our children more like we earn our livings. Nearly 20 years ago, a landmark government report, A Nation at Risk, declared that American education was “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” That may no longer be true. Instead, American schools are awash in a rising tide of irrelevance.
Don’t get me wrong. In innumerable ways, mass public schooling has been a stirring success. Like Taylorism, it has accomplished some remarkable things — teaching immigrants both English and the American way, expanding literacy, equipping many Americans to succeed beyond their parents’ imaginings. In a very large sense, America’s schools have been a breathtaking democratic achievement.
But that doesn’t mean they ought to be the same as they were when we were kids. Parents and politicians have sensed the need for reform, and have pushed education to the top of the national agenda. Unfortunately, few of the conventional remedies — standardized testing, character training, recertifying teachers — will do much to cure what ails American schools, and may even make things worse. Free agency, though, will force the necessary changes. Look for free agency to accelerate and deepen three incipient movements in education — home schooling, alternatives to traditional high school, and new approaches to adult learning. These changes will prove as pathbreaking as mass public schooling was a century ago.
The Home-Schooling Revolution
“School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.” Those are the words of John Taylor Gatto, who was named New York state’s Teacher of the Year in 1991. Today he is one of the most forceful voices for one of the most powerful movements in American education — home schooling. In home schooling, kids opt out of traditional school to take control of their own education and to learn with the help of parents, tutors, and peers. Home schooling is free agency for the under-18 set. And it’s about to break through the surface of our national life.
As recently as 1980, home schooling was illegal in most states. In the early 1980s, no more than 15,000 students learned this way. But Christian conservatives, unhappy with schools they considered God-free zones and eager to teach their kids themselves, pressed for changes. Laws fell, and home schooling surged. By 1990, there were as many as 300,000 American home-schoolers. By 1993, home schooling was legal in all 50 states. Since then, home schooling has swum into the mainstream — paddled there by secular parents dissatisfied with low-quality, and even dangerous, schools. In the first half of the 1990s, the home-schooling population more than doubled. Today some 1.7 million children are home-schoolers, their ranks growing as much as 15 percent each year. Factor in turnover, and one in 10 American kids under 18 has gotten part of his or her schooling at home.
Home schooling has become perhaps the largest and most successful education reform movement of the last two decades:
*While barely 3 percent of American schoolchildren are now home-schoolers, that represents a surprisingly large dent in the public school monopoly — especially compared with private schools. For every four kids in private school, there’s one youngster learning at home. The home-schooling population is roughly equal to all the school-age children in Pennsylvania.
*According to The Wall Street Journal, “Evidence is mounting that home-schooling, once confined to the political and religious fringe, has achieved results not only on par with public education, but in some ways surpassing it.” Home-schooled children consistently score higher than traditional students on standardized achievement tests, placing on average in the 80th percentile in all subjects.
*Home-schooled children also perform extremely well on nearly all measures of socialization. One of the great misconceptions about home schooling is that it turns kids into isolated loners. In fact, these children spend more time with adults, more time in their community, and more time with children of varying ages than their traditional-school counterparts. Says one researcher, “The conventionally schooled tended to be considerably more aggressive, loud, and competitive than the home educated.”
“Home schooling,” though, is a bit of a misnomer. Parents don’t re-create the classroom in the living room any more than free agents re-create the cubicle in their basement offices. Instead, home schooling makes it easier for children to pursue their own interests in their own way — a My Size Fits Me approach to learning. In part for this reason, some adherents — particularly those who have opted out of traditional schools for reasons other than religion — prefer the term “unschooling.”
The similarities to free agency — having an “unjob” — are many. Free agents are independent workers; home-schoolers are independent learners. Free agents maintain robust networks and tight connections through informal groups and professional associations; home-schoolers have assembled powerful groups — like the 3,000-family Family Unschoolers Network — to share teaching strategies and materials and to offer advice and support. Free agents often challenge the idea of separating work and family; home-schoolers take the same approach to the boundary between school and family.
Perhaps most important, home schooling is almost perfectly consonant with the four animating values of free agency: having freedom, being authentic, putting yourself on the line, and defining your own success. Take freedom. In the typical school, children often aren’t permitted to move unless a bell rings or an adult grants them permission. And except for a limited menu of offerings in high school, they generally can’t choose what to study or when to study it. Home-schoolers have far greater freedom. They learn more like, well, children. We don’t teach little kids how to talk or walk or understand the world. We simply put them in nurturing situations and let them learn on their own. Sure, we impose certain restrictions. (”Don’t walk in the middle of the street.”) But we don’t go crazy. (”Please practice talking for 45 minutes until a bell rings.”) It’s the same for home-schoolers. Kids can become agents of their own education rather than merely recipients of someone else’s noble intentions.
