The Myth of “Getting (Educationally) Behind”.
I decided to put educationally between the ‘getting’ and ‘behind’ because I’d hate for anyone to misread my title and decide that I think behinds are myths. Or that I don’t believe in getting behind something.
No, I’m talking about the idea that people have about education being something that can leave you in the dust.
I hear it all the time…”How are you sure your kids are staying up with what their peers are learning?” This is said with a fair amount of stress and panic. Catherine Zeta Jones and some other celebrity mentioned that after dealing with terminal diseases with themselves or their loved ones, they were thinking about taking their kids out of school and traveling around as a family. Because, you know, when you deal with life and death you tend to get new priorities that don’t involve sending your kid away for 7 hours a day so they can sit at a desk and memorize shit. The public backlash was interesting to see. “You can’t take your kids out of school! They’ll never catch back up!!!!” was the overall reaction.
Guess what. I’m not sure if my kids are keeping up with other kids their age. Or, rather, I’m quite sure that they aren’t.
Guess what else? The idea that kids are “keeping up with” other kids in their grade is bullshit. Yeah. I’m calling it. Because OK, so your kid is top of their class at school. Can you be sure they’d be the top of the other classes in their grade, in their school? What about all the classes in their grade in the school district? In the county? In the state? In the surrounding states? In the country? In the world?!
If this were true, then all you California publicly educated people would be screwed. When I moved from So. Cal. to New Jersey at 12, I spent the last year in California going to a private Episcopalian school to get me up to speed with what my peers were doing back east. And when my parents moved back when my brother was 12, it took his school in So. Cal. two years to get to anything new that he hadn’t already learned back east.
Also screwed would be the entire United States of America. In case you haven’t heard, we don’t do too well keeping up with our foreign counterparts when it comes to education scores.
Going to school is no guarantee that anyone is keeping up with anyone else. Does this doom everyone in the state of California to a life of ignorance and bondage to their educationally superior east coast compatriots? Does this mean that all the students in the United States will remain educationally ‘average’ for all eternity?
Does it mean that my oldest daughter, who didn’t read until she was 12, never ‘caught up’ in literacy with all the kids who started reading at 4 or 5? Does it mean that Sassy, who is most likely dyslexic and who cannot write her name or recognize the alphabet, will never be literate at all? No! That’s totally not true. The bullshit starts when we treat it like that, though. When we mistrust that our kids will find a way to learn what they need to know, and instead put value on a system that does, admitedly, leave kids behind. Naturalist was left waaaay behind. Why else would they even create a “No Child Left Behind” act if kids weren’t being left behind?! But the fault isn’t with the kids who are being left, the fault is with a rigid system that places more value on standardization than individuality.
I have this opinion because my two girls, dyslexic, couldn’t have kept up ‘educationally’ even if they wanted to. Which they both do. They are both bright, driven, smart kids. But they both struggle with letters, words, reading, writing, and doing a whole bunch of academic ‘milestones’ that kids their ages are doing. The best I can do is give them the time to figure stuff out in their own way. I can do this because unlike an unnatural system that leaves people behind, I know that real and true learning is lifelong. It doesn’t rush or expire. Learning is everywhere, and it happens anytime, not just during school hours when school’s in session. I am OK if they aren’t performing on anyone else’s schedule, or keeping up with anyone else, as long as they are staying true to themselves and where they want to be.
This is part of my 2e Tuesday series, where I blog about different learning styles, dyslexia, learning differences, giftedness, and other things that can create a quirky, unique kid!
10 Comments
I don't really remeber anything I learned in public school. Everything of importance I have learned has happened out in the real world. I have only had my kids out of public school for 2 years, we live in CO and the thing that drives me nuts is the standardized testing they have to do every other year. I know you used to live here, how did you handle that? It's my daughters year to test and I feel more anxiety than she does.
For a while I didn't follow the 'rules' so didn't do the tests, the last year we were there we opted to do the in home evaluation. Maybe the evaluation is a better option for you?Sent from my iPhone
Another great post Tiff!
C x
Thanks
Sent from my iPhone
Yet another wonderful post that had me nodding my head in agreement the entire time. Thank you for again reaffirming my family’s choice to honor our children’s individual learning style.
Thank you! we live in Quebec where homeschooling/unsvhooling is just starting to grow…every school has decided to manage the kids as they wish and it scares us to know that we will have to fight every.single.step of the way to be free to unschool our kids.
Your blog and your post help so much to give us the little push in the back to continu on this journey.
You're still my favorite unschooling blogger after all these years!
I think I'm going to forward this to my husband and maybe even my inlaws… Oh, and to my BFF. Her daughter is 6 today, and still doesn't read a word. Her school is freaking out. My friend is trying not to.
Bravo!
Again, I love you, Tiff !! You are saving my sanity with these posts. It's like you can look into my soul and see my deepest fears.
I love how people think learning stops if they're not in school. The list of things I taught myself, outside of schooling in the standard sense, far outweighs the number of things I learned from formal schooling. i.e. PK-12+college. I learned how to talk without a lick of school. How to use a knife & fork. How to walk, jump. Play with play-doh, color coloring books, laugh… I even learned how to read, the kindergarten teacher refused to believe my mom that I could read, but I started at age 3. I learned how to write poetry. Short stories. I augmented that later with formal creative writing classes, but my passion came from within. Riding a bike. American Sign Language. Self-publishing. As part of attempting to convince my son's father that we should homeschool, I actually started making a list of all these things I learned without formal school. I studied herbalism for 10 years, became a Reiki Master/Teacher, studied ministry with correspondence classes, etc.
So much I actually learned — and moreover actually USE — that is not rote memorization and didn't come from a PK-12+ educational system. Come to think of it, given my experiences in school and the things they never intended for me to learn — how to take scapegoating, bullying, name-calling, how to lie, cheat, "school-friends" and "fair-weather friends", and most importantly How to Hate Compulsory Education — it's surprising I actually have such a lifelong learner mindset and didn't become one of the masses who stick their head inside a TV every day to run away from reality. But I'm not biased. Nor bitter.
Since when do we assume that children only learn in school? Fact: Children only learn when they are ready, and motivated. Real learning, not rote memorization. Education is a big big business. It keeps Prentice Hall, Holt, and other big companies in business. Some 80+ BILLION dollars in the United States alone. Every child born is a Ka-Ching in the system's cash register for the (medical) insurance agencies (well child visits + vaccinations), and for the educational system (start the presses, we'll need more textbooks!).
It's not for the good of the children. For the good of the children, we'd have a stay-at-home parent in every household — two or more (grandparents, aunts, uncles…) if possible — teaching them, role modeling for them, working from home if need be, and giving them the nurturing and the oversight they need to be secure and from that security, to learn. Really learn.
Learn like I (a girl of 13 at the time) learned how to put up sheet rock, lay tile, install drop-ceilings with my dad on the job. Learn how to ride horseback. Jump rope. Fishing. Learn how to make rope from fiber, how to milk a cow… I wish they'd stop trying to tell me what schooling has to be.