I am reading the above book by Gregory & Martine Millman. Luv the book thus far. Now i'm on the chapter about college applications and all that. I'm going to list the pages and points from the book here. this will cover a vast amount of stuff:
p3 Homeschoolers can do one thing, esp. that schools cannot do: Focus on the distinctive abilities and needs of each child, on each child's level of maturity, on each child's interest, on each teachable moment, and fit the educational system to the child instead of forcing the child to fit into a system. I am afraid that i don't know my children at all to meet their needs. I may be a bit skeptical about the educational system, but dh (being the 1st generation here) would force my babies to fit into the system (not think that we should at all think about the other way around)..
p34 The fact is that our approach to education is radically different from that of the educational system. By radical, I mean at the root. We have a different idea of what education means, a different understanding of its purpose and process. We weren't completely clear about what we thought when we began, but we were already acting on it. The longer we have homeschooled, the clearer it has become that we and the school system use the same word, "education," to mean different things. It made me realize how i want to be clear now in no uncertain terms what education really means to me. I've realized that i have a vague idea of what i think i want my kids to grow up to be like with their education and all. And recently, with dh pushing public school for dd's kg, it's making me realize how easy it is for him to just decide that that is all she needs. She will be another product of the public school system, ready to work and be a rat in the wheels of the corporate world, slave to the herd mentality. How can I put her thru the public system and expect anything else when she'll be spending 8 hrs away from learning life from those who themselves are mostly lost? With all the weaknesses and inadequacies I have, will I be able to provide her the role models who will fill in the gaps?
p34 American schools have, since the late 19th century, demanded various things of children, but never that become subjects responsible for seeking truth..."work right now is clearly the dominant purpose of education" Herbert Kliebard.... Seeking the truth..
p35 AKliebard shows that since the very inception of mass public schooling, control of our schools & curriculum has been the prize in a sor of open contest among various pressure groups & ideologies. I wonder what that means for our kids today. Who sets the curriculum & standards for public schools? & truly, who is shaping the minds of our babies?
p36 The decision to send a child to school is a decision to send a child into an environment with an organization & culture shaped by such seldom articulated assumptions & compromises. It is a decision to entrust a child to an enterprise whose tacit missions & goals may be different from the ones written on the wall. These missions & goals are both political & economic......This contest does not really aim to teach children how to find truth. It is about who will have the power to indoctrinate them...
p37 ...That was what everyone did, wasn't it? ...preschool, then kg, then elementary school. It was easy to keep moving along the line. It didn't take any thought at all. The only question we asked was "which shcool," not "whether school." .....But that was a real abrogation of our parental responsibility &, viewed from our present vantage point, it is shocking & shaming. How could we do such a thing? How could we assume that schools could be trusted? We knew that most institutions couldn't be. ...
p38 ...We had written about business & finance & understood such concepts as agency risk- the notion that the people who manage an organization tend to manage it in their own interest, no the interest of shareholders or other stakeholders. There was absolutely no reason to suppose that the educational system was any different, whether Catholic or public. Yet we made our educational decisions as if we really believed that the educational system was different. Despite the evidence, we trusted. ... Despite the evidence, I am willing to send my children to a place for 8hrs a day (more than 1/3 of their lives, trusting that we will have children who think differently from the herd, who care for humanity, who will strive to be among the momineen....
p39 ...The stronger the polls seemed in support of any point of view, the more apt we were to remember that public opinion is usually a product of careful & costly engineering. We more or less took it for granted that the official & generally accepted version of anything is at best a half-truth, & often enough a lie. We generally tested anything we heard or read against our own experience & our own reasoning. We had defied conventional wisdom by deciding that we would live on one income in order to provide the children with a full-time mother. Yet despite all this, we had sent our children to school. Why?... Conventional wisdom...how am I following it all aspects of my life??
p49 ...For us, education means a kind of growth & development that seems to have no constituency within the school system. When we say "education," we mean a process of growing in truth & freedom. We couldn't find this kind of education by looking in the classroom. We had to look out the window. . Define what education means to me...
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