OK, I’m now officially done trying to understand how the American secondary education system works. Here is an article in The New Republic that tells of a school for children of rich folks. This is a school with no teachers or classes and where students are expected somehow to educate themselves. And then comes this:
So anybody can pay $8,200 per year and just buy a high school diploma? There are no requirements as long as you can pay? This article makes it seem like a completely illiterate person could get the diploma with ease. Can that be true or is this simply due to the traditionally shitty quality of mainstream reporting?
I don’t get this at all.
P.S. What I find especially cute in this article is the journalist’s sincere astonishment that the school’s 16-year-old student has no idea who Martin Luther King is. Well, of course, he doesn’t know. People of this social class need to believe that the civil rights movement didn’t happen at all.
Clarissa's Blog 
On the plus side, it sounds like this model schooling will help to even out educational disparities between the rich and poor!
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A brilliant comment!!
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I read the article and all I can say is WOW. There are some good things about the school–no obsessive testing, and self directed learning has some merit. But that school is insane. An 18 year running the school? No teachers? If a bunch of kids decide recycling is for the birds, they cancel the recycling program? And they really can’t see the merit of separating children out by grade? Really? Child development means nothing to them? The whole thing was bananas. It had me fuming.
In reality, this is just another form of “unschooling.” And I would rather have students in a school–any school–than at home doing “unschooling.” So this is better than homeschooling. But, to my mind, this movement in general is missing something very fundamental about child/adolescent development…..sometimes young people (and even adults) assume they won’t like something and then love it. I have a personal example of this. When I was an undergraduate English major we had certain requirements to fulfill–one of which was a Chaucer class. I fumed and stomped about taking that class. In my infinite 19 year old wisdom, I wanted to take “modern” literature. If I had my way, my entire undergraduate career would have been American short stories and Russian fiction in translation. But I took Chaucer–since it was required–and LOVED it. It changed my entire school trajectory. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Chaucer, decided to go to graduate school, became a passionate fan of British literature, and am now a professor myself. I am not a medievalist (I switched emphases in graduate school) but I really credit that Chaucer class with inspiring something deep inside me. And I never would have taken that class if it wasn’t required.
Sometimes students need gentle nudges from people who have learned more. I’m not sure why requirements have become such a bad word in education circles. Perhaps it has to do with the country wide mistrust of teachers and formal education.
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I can’t tell you how much I agree with every word of this post!
Forget 7 and 17, I was 27 when I fumed about the obligatory Latin courses in my graduate programs. And today I thank the universe for those courses because they serve me on a regular basis.
The problem is that you cannot decide which areas of a subject are worthy of learning before you have mastered the subject. I can’t let my students decide whether to learn, say, “the passive se” or the reflexive verbs first or second or not at all simply because, in order to make this decision, they would need to understand these concepts. Which means I need to teach them.
“I’m not sure why requirements have become such a bad word in education circles. Perhaps it has to do with the country wide mistrust of teachers and formal education.”
– That and the profoundly immature way of being that informs the American Libertarianism. Any authority reminds people of their strict Daddy and they freak.
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“That and the profoundly immature way of being that informs the American Libertarianism. Any authority reminds people of their strict Daddy and they freak.” I agree with your analysis. Unless it’s dealing with birth control or abortion. Women’s bodies are totally fair game for governmental control in the mind of the American Libertarian. Ugh.
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Required courses, however, have to be good ones or they do not serve their purpose, and I have noticed that if there is a choice of ways in which to fulfill the said requirement, you get a lot more investment from the students.
My “unschooling” friend claims that schools are “just ways to warehouse children.” I really don’t see this, except perhaps in the case of parents who send their kids to boarding school just to get rid of them.
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According to this logic, companies, stores, supermarkets, highways, streets, cinemas, theaters, universities, air-planes, etc. are “just ways to warehouse people.” 🙂 🙂
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I see enough problems with a bunch of 20somethings at my university trying to run the student society by themselves, let alone having a bunch of teenagers try to run a school.
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This is a nifty business model: charge them a packet and then tell them to teach and govern themselves while you snooze in the corner.
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Poor things that suffer from affluenza. They only recourse they have now is to start killing people.
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There can be a happy medium. Require students to acquire core knowledge, and then allow them to choose topics within the discipline and write essays. Using the example above, English literature first semester, require students to read Beowulf, a few Canterbury Tales (Wife of Bath for a start), two or three Shakespeare plays, and let the students explore. It is nice to know that anonymous Gawain author, Spenser, Jonson, Milton, various Restoration poets, etc exist, but not as useful as learning how to read and put into context a few major works from very alien times past.
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This is Bennington for the pre-collegiate set. The parents who send their child to this kind of school are wealthy hippies of the class that doesn’t need to follow “rules” or doesn’t need to know “basic things” because they can always find out and they will not suffer penalties for not knowing.
So no:
People who get the “how to behave around police” talk ever.
People on work visas of any sort.
Kids who have been bullied or otherwise have terrible problems with groups.
People who absolutely need graduate degrees to stay in the middle class.
People who are going to have any kind of boss at any point in time.
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Biting my tongue not to respond to this, from the above friend:
I’ve been teaching Plato this term and ran across this gem:
“No compulsory instruction remains in the soul.” Socrates
How about that my homeschool friends?
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I’d say that I would really need to see how Socrates and his soul do in the contemporary workplace before I give credence to his opinion. 🙂
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