Guest post: Why can’t it be better now?

(From Chris, originally posted at ABlogAboutSchool)

After news of yet another suicide by a gay teenager who had been tormented at school, Dan Savage has started a YouTube channel called “It Gets Better,” in which gay and lesbian adults talk about how life really does get better after high school. From the New York Times:

Q: Why did you decide to create a YouTube channel to talk to gay teenagers?

A: There was another suicide of a teenager, a kid who was being harassed for being gay. I put up a link to the story, and someone said in a comment that they wished they could have talked to the kid for five minutes to tell him it gets better. That’s always been my reaction too. I realized that with things like YouTube and social media, we can talk directly to these kids. We can make an end run around the schools that don’t protect them, from parents who want to keep gay kids isolated and churches that tell them that they are sinful or disordered. . . .

Q: The video advice you offer kids is to just hang in there. Why aren’t you telling them that you can help them now?

A: We can’t help them. That’s what makes gay adults despair and feel so helpless when we hear these stories. We can’t barge into these schools. I get to go to colleges and speak, but high schools don’t bring me in, and those are the ages that young gay people are committing suicide. I’ve read these stories for years. Because of technology, we don’t need to wait for an invitation anymore to speak to these kids. We can speak to them directly.

The channel is now filled with videos telling kids to have faith: high school will end, and things will get better. (Savage’s own video is here.)

The project is admirable and moving, but there is also a layer of sadness over it. The best that it can promise these kids is that if they can just survive for four more years, their pain will subside and they’ll find some happiness. Until then, though, there is no prospect of relief.

Intolerance and cruelty are almost universally seen as immutable features of childhood -- something to be endured, but not avoided. Is it true? How is it that, as almost everyone acknowledges, this cruelty largely dissipates the minute the kids set foot on a college campus? Is it because an extra year has utterly transformed their characters? Or is it because they suddenly find themselves in a very different kind of institution?

The cruelty of kids is a form of dehumanization: the victim is treated as an object to be used, rather than as a full-fledged human being. You don’t have to look far, in K-12 schooling, for models of that kind of behavior. Much of the national debate about education is framed in exactly those terms: kids are a means to the goal of improving the gross national product and boosting our competitiveness in the global marketplace. Our job is not to engage them as partners in their own development, but to manipulate, trick, coerce, and punish them into doing what we think is best for us -- er, I mean, for them. We give them little or no say in how they are treated, and discourage them from thinking critically about the institution they are confined to. We give them no outlet for their grievances against those institutions. We reduce their civil liberties to a minimum. We insist that they be quiet and obedient. In short, we push them around a lot -- though we tell ourselves it’s for their own good -- and we can do it because they're powerless to stop us.

Is that the recipe for getting kids to treat each other with respect and dignity?

Guest post: Will homeschoolers save the schools?

(From Chris, originally posted at ABlogAboutSchool)

It seems like virtually everyone now knows at least one homeschooling family. Most people are still skeptical about the practice, but the mere existence of these families forces people to think, however briefly, about the possibility of doing things differently than they’ve been done in the past.

I know that there are all kinds of arguments about homeschooling, pro and con, and that it’s impossible to see homeschooling as the solution to the challenge of educating a nation full of kids, since it’s just not an option for that many people. But I do wonder if the mere presence of homeschoolers will ultimately make people look differently at certain features of our educational system that we might otherwise just take for granted.

Do homeschooled kids end up exactly the same as schooled kids? Probably not; otherwise there would be no point in doing it. They may be worse off in some respects, and better off in others. Presumably they’re different, but the more we see of them, the less it seems like there is anything disastrous in the difference. Are the outcomes perfect? No. Are the outcomes of conventional schools perfect? Hell, no.

It’s hard to generalize about homeschooling because there are so many different approaches to it. But the more traditional “school-like” homeschoolers have more in common with the lefty/libertarian “unschoolers” than you might think at first glance. They all value the opportunity to treat the child as an individual, rather than as a face in the crowd; to take each child’s particular needs into account; to allow the child to progress at a rate that is appropriate for him or her, and not one that is dictated for everyone; to immerse the child in a wider world that is not artificially limited to other children of his or her own age group; to better model values that will enable the child to lead a fulfilling life; and to reach their educational goals more efficiently, with less of the child’s time wasted. In those respects, even a relatively authoritarian homeschooling environment is more humane and child-centered than an authoritarian conventional school.

When people look across the street and see that their neighbor’s kids are somehow becoming functioning adults with only a fraction of the coercion and dehumanization that their own kids are experiencing in conventional schools, won’t they start to wonder what the added value of all that coercion and dehumanization is? Even if people remain skeptical of homeschooling itself, they may begin to look for ways to incorporate some of the positive aspects of homeschooling into their kids’ existing schools. In that way, homeschoolers may be doing conventional schools a favor in the same way that third parties have historically done the major parties a favor: the practice itself may remain marginal, but the existing institutions may be forced to address some of the underlying concerns that motivate it. One can hope, anyway.

A Radical Unschooler

I grew up reading the works of Gerald Durrell, beginning with My Family and Other Animals. This is an account of the 5 years the young Gerald Durrell spent with his family on the island of Corfu. (There's a nice BBC adaptation which is available on Netflix.)

Louisa Durrell occasionally worried about young Gerald's schooling, and employed various tutors to transmit the basics, but she also gave her son enormous freedom to explore the island's wildlife. His years on Corfu launched his later career as a naturalist and writer. Gerald Durrell treats his mother as a comic figure in his books, but it's clear that she was an adventurous and unconventional spirit who gave her children a wonderful start on life.

I've always admired those, like Durrell, who, rather than climbing up some prefabricated career ladder, invented their own career to suit their passions and abilities. In our times of rapid social change and economic uncertainty, more and more people will be called on to do this. How can a lockstep, authoritarian school system help our children find their own way in a constantly changing world?

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

I was appalled by the following letter to the editor, printed in today's NY times:

To the Editor:

Richard D. Kahlenberg is proposing a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist: the “legacy admission.” Rather than viewing the acceptance of a child to a parent’s alma mater as “affirmative action,” consider it the successful result of generations pursuing the American dream.

For example, Granddad is the first in his family to go to college and gets a good job with a salary able to sustain a middle-class life. Then Dad gets into an “elite” college and gets a job with a salary able to sustain an upper-middle-class life, so Junior lives in the best school district in the state, has an SAT/ACT tutor, has time for music lessons, participates in sports and volunteers for community service rather than being forced into a part-time job to help pay grocery bills. Hence, Junior is a qualified and attractive applicant to Dad’s alma mater.

Rich kids don’t get into the Ivies because their parents went to the Ivies. Rich kids get into the Ivies because their parents are rich and have provided these students with the opportunities to build résumés making them attractive applicants.

Melisa W. Lai Becker
Somerville, Mass., Sept. 30, 2010

The writer is a former undergraduate admissions officer for Brown University.

The system works! Rich people buy resume-building activities for their kids, so the kids get into an exclusive college! Why would anyone have a problem with that?

Well, I, for one, have a lot of problems with that. In 2007, the wealthiest 1% of the population of the USA took in 23.5% of the total national income (compare this to the late 1970s, when the wealthiest 1% took in 9% of the total national income). We have reached an extremely toxic overload of the rich getting richer, and the nation's elite colleges have become part of the cycle.

P.S. The above figures come from Aftershock, the new book by Robert Reich. I'll have more to say about the book after I finish it.

Would You Go This Far?

The NY Times today ran an article about the Manhattan Free School.

Readers, would you send your kid(s) to a school like this? Why or why not?

My answer is no. Now, it could be that the article was badly written (it wouldn't be the first time), but it's really not clear what the kids gain from attending this school. What do they know at the end of the year that they didn't know at the beginning? What experiences have they had? It could be a long year of nothing in particular.

Guest Post: Junk Lunch

from northTOmom at Parenting is Political:

I've had this post sitting in my drafts file since last spring. I hadn't worked on it much, but I'd thought about it often, and I had a lot to say. I was planning to make some pointed observations about school lunches. I also hoped to raise a few seldom-asked questions about the importance schools place—or do not place—on children's health and nutrition. More specifically, I wanted to write about: why lunch periods in elementary schools have been reduced in length from an hour and a half, when I was a kid, to one hour or less today; how and why kids are rushed out of unappealing lunch rooms (overseen by authoritarian "Lunch Ladies") after 10-15 minutes; why the one lunch program that is a given in almost all Toronto District School Board schools—the Pizza Lunch fundraiser—is a junk lunch. But then I was alerted to this report from CBS on school lunches in France, and I realized that not only does it tie into my previous post on the French Paradox, but that it speaks for itself, and for me. There's nothing more to say. (Thanks to Corey Mintz for the link.)

What we Teach Kids about Family Life

The Paper Bag Princess is a modern retelling of the old "damsel in distress gets rescued by handsome prince followed by marriage and happily ever after" fairy tale. In the Paper Bag version, the prince and princess are about to be married when a dragon shows up, burns up the princess' clothes so that she has to wear a paper bag (hence the title), and kidnaps the prince. The princess then tracks down the dragon, wears him out, and rescues the prince. The prince, though, complains that the princess doesn't look pretty any more. The princess tells him he's a jerk and they don't get married.

This book is very popular among left-wing types, and I just noticed that it's listed in the handouts from my younger daughter's school. It was also presented as a play in the school.

I don't like the Paper Bag Princess, and I don't think it's "empowering", as advertised, for several reasons.

1.) It's a parody of a fairy tale that most kids today haven't heard in the first place. We're not living in a culture that encourages young girls to think they'll be rescued by marriage, and we don't need to go out of our way to teach little girls that marriage doesn't mean "happily ever after". Our kids know that already. If their own parents haven't divorced, they've seen divorce in their friends' families.

2.) In a sense, the book is too true to modern life. The princess does everything a man can do; she outwits the dragon and rescues the prince. But at the end of the tale she has no marriage to show for it. This is sadly reminiscent of the choice many women today are faced with -- career or family? Pick one. That's not empowering, either.

3.) The story downplays the importance of marriage as a life choice. For most people, the decisions of whom, or whether, to marry, and when, or whether, or how, to bring children into the family, are enormously important, but, at least in the circles I move in, they are consistently disparaged in favor of "career" choices. When I was a kid, I was often asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I knew that "mother" was not an approved choice. "Lawyer" would have been good, though.

The underlying message is "don't even think about a happy marriage; it doesn't happen."

The Paper Bag Princess reminds me of a project that used to be inflicted on kids in an attempt to discourage teen pregnancy. Kids would be given an egg, or a bag of flour, and told to look after it as if it was a baby. They had to cart it around wherever they went; if they had to leave it, they would need a "babysitter". If I recall correctly, the bag of flour might even be rigged with an alarm clock that would go off at unpredictable times.

The underlying message here is "Babies ruin your life. Whatever you do, don't have one." Is this really what we want to tell our kids? They were very recently babies themselves.

My younger daughter, aged 7, loves to speculate about whether she'll marry (currently she's against it because she thinks it would be disgusting to kiss a boy), and whether she'll have kids, and whether she should give birth or adopt (she herself was adopted.) I like having these discussions, and I'm quick to tell her that I look forward to being a grandmother. I'm not going to tell her, "don't have a baby until you're ready for that kind of responsibility!" Is anyone ever really ready for a baby? You become ready by having one. And I've never heard of a parent who says, "don't get a job until you're ready for that kind of responsibility!"

We've got a culture that valorizes work and denigrates family, beginning at a very young age. It's time for a rethink.