A treatise on advancing real education by rising above the outdated, coercive schooling model of centuries past by Blake Boles (originally published in Tipping Points Magazine May 2017)
“How strange and self-defeating that a supposedly free country should train its young for life in totalitarianism.”
“Teachers spend half their time shouting themselves hoarse, and young adults are infantilized. Their lives are absurdly regimented. Every minute is accounted for. They sit in one hot room after another and wait for each class to end. Time thickens. It becomes like saltwater taffy — it becomes viscous and sticky, and it stretches out and it folds back on itself through endless repetition.”
“You need to get a job, but you also need to get a life. What’s the return on investment in college? What’s the return on investment of having children, spending time with friends, listening to music, reading a book? The things that are most worth doing are worth doing for their own sake. Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state.”
“Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.”
an education is the capacity to author your own life instead of merely accepting the one handed to you.
But authoring your own life doesn’t necessarily mean choosing a radically different path from that of your family, religion, or culture. It simply demands an examined, informed choice rather than a blind or coerced one.
When you choose your own path, you are free to choose from one of life’s many established routes. There’s nothing wrong with becoming an accountant, plumber, or stay-at-home parent. But if you take one of these paths as an educated person, it means that you’re not just doing it because someone told you so. You’re doing it because you understand your commitment, you’re aware of your alternatives, and you genuinely believe that you are making this choice for yourself.
Intrinsic motivation is what we need more of in this world. History is one long bloody record of wars, slavery, servitude, religious persecution, and other forms of extrinsic motivation — with one brief, bright window in the last 200 or 100 or 50 years (depending on who we’re talking about) where common people actually had the chance to do their own thing.
Yet extrinsic motivation is so clearly the lifeblood of schooling, with its elaborate system of grades, gold stars, class rankings, detentions, and low-level threats. This makes sense in light of self-determination theory, because school does little to fulfill students’ basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Competence cannot develop in school because students are forced to learn a little about everything and deeply about nothing. And if your interests lie outside the traditional academic subjects — if, let’s say, you want to design video games — you stand almost zero chance of developing mastery while at school.
Relatedness, which means having high-quality personal relationships and a sense of belonging, is perhaps the young person’s most pressing need. But how can relatedness develop in the tightly regulated sphere of the classroom and the fleeting moments of lunch and recess? The social environment of school more closely resembles The Lord of the Flies than any actual community.
Whatever an education is, it must empower you to lead your own life. It must minimize your chances of being manipulated, of being made a pawn, of being an actor in someone else’s play. Any place that claims to “educate” must give young people actual autonomy, help them develop actual competencies, and facilitate actual social connections. It must produce self-aware and self-motivated humans, not anxiety-riddled worker bees awaiting their next orders. Places of education must lift people up and bring them together — as we envision the ideal of school — not crush their spirits and isolate them — as too often is the reality of school. But do such places exist? Can they exist?
Grace Llewellyn observed in the nineties that homeschooling, which had recently become legal in all fifty United States, was the quickest path to educational freedom for young people. Llewellyn made it her mission to promote homeschooling, but not in its traditional, religiously-affiliated form; she advocated for unschooling — the more radical, self-directed version of homeschooling — and started a summer camp for teenage unschoolers called Not Back to School Camp (where I’ve worked for more than a decade). Today in the United States, you can leave school early and be supported by countless local groups, online communities, and conferences. Homeschool “graduates” experience few barriers to entering college and the workplace. And you don’t have to just choose between homeschooling and unschooling: families are now experimenting with micro-schooling, worldschooling, and other novel variations of homeschooling that offer varying levels of structure, freedom, and formal academics.
Democratic free schools are places where all members of the school have an equal vote on all matters of substance, including the hiring and firing of staff. (Yes, even the 5 year olds get to vote on who to hire!) Such schools were very popular in the late sixties and early seventies and then dropped off the map — but one of them, the Sudbury Valley School, has doggedly persisted since 1968. Largely thanks to the Sudbury’s leadership, the nineties and early 2000s saw a boom in Sudbury-model schools and other democratic schools, both in the U.S. and around the world.
If public school is a sinking ship that does very little actual educating, then I don’t think we help ourselves by rallying around it. I think that privileged families can do more good by experimenting with radical educational alternatives, some of which will fizzle, but some of which will have potential for widespread application. This is how innovations happen: early adopters pave the way for mainstream users. We are not lacking for resources in education, we are lacking for good ideas. These good ideas will not arise from dogged fidelity to the broken old system, but rather from countless little educational experiments, both public and private, combined with novel mechanisms for vaulting the best ideas into stardom, like the recent XQ Super School Project which awarded $50 million to innovative new high school models. John Taylor Gatto’s prescription for fixing the system hits the nail on the head: “only the fresh air from millions upon millions of freely made choices will create the educational climate we need to realize a better destiny.”
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