7.14.2006
Screw You Guys...
...I'm going home schooling. If you don't watch South Park you might think I'm mad at you right now, but you can just forget that idea. According to a recent CBC article, it turns out that an estimated 80,000 kids in Canada are homeschooled. Much of the rhetoric for it attempts to draw a wedge between pedagogy and learning: "motivation must come from within, and, so the theory goes, when people are given charge of their choices with practical support they will come to perceive themselves as life-long learners." The difference is subtle, but potentially revolutionary.
One of the more prominent supporters of homeschooling, John Taylor Gatto, has argued of national education that "the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."
That may very well be the case, but what follows from that assumption? What strikes me as odd about the homeschool situation is the way that the parents may inadvertently teach an extremely cynical lesson in supporting a "highly individualized conception of learning, one that prizes a customized experience to enhance a child's personality, idiosyncratic talents, cognitive style and sense of self." At the level of form this lesson is not only a critiqe of a failing school system, but a way of encouraging people to absolve themselves of political, social responsibility when the going gets tough.
I'm sure that many brilliant young minds are allowed to more fully flourish in a homeschool setting, and they go on to lead fulfilling and interesting lives, but the question remains as to whether they have any responsibility beyond their individual growth. Does social responsibility end once your taxes are paid? Parents can tell their kids that they need to care about society, but what message do they send when they themselves fail to do so? I think the most important question that arises from all this is, how can parents turn public education into a forum for learning as opposed to didacticism?
