I want to give you a yardstick, a gold standard, by which to measure good schooling. The Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine will teach you how to build a three thousand square-foot, multi-level Cape Cod home in three weeks' time, whatever your age. If you stay another week, it will show you how to make your own posts and beams; you'll actually cut them out and set them up. You'll learn wiring, plumbing, insulation, the works. Twenty thousand people have learned how to build a house there for about the cost of one month's tuition in public school. (Call Patsy Hennon at 207/442-7938, and she'll get you started on building your own home.) For just about the same money you can walk down the street in Bath to the Apprentice Shop at the Maine Maritime Museum [now in Rockport - ed.] and sign on for a one-year course (no vacations, forty hours a week) in traditional wooden boat building. The whole tuition is eight hundred dollars, but there's a catch: they won't accept you as a student until you volunteer for two weeks, so they can get to know you and you can judge what it is you're getting into. Now you've invested thirteen months and fifteen hundred dollars and you have a house and a boat. What else would you like to know? How to grow food, make clothes, repair a car, build furni-ture, sing? Those of you with a historical imagination will recognize Thomas Jefferson's prayer for schooling - that it would teach useful knowledge. Some places do: the best schooling in the United States today is coming out of museums, libraries, and private institutes. If anyone wants to school your kids, hold them to the standard of the Shelter Institute and you'll do fine.
http://www.spinninglobe.net/condunces.htmhttp://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htmhttp://www.ascentofhumanity.com/chapter5-6.phpPink Floyd - got it right. Few escape unharmed from school.
Einstein, yes, the great lord, master, emperor, king of science (not of school). He ran away from school at 15, so he could have time to write his first paper:
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
"But he is an exception!" you may say. No, he is the rule. Just - not all children have the same interests he had. They need 12 years of prison time, else, if they don't own some land, no food for them on the prison planet.
Don't know about you people, but I remember - at age 13-14, I was very interested, and read stuff on my own. Read the manuals before they were taught to us. But - I was then forced to memorize, for "exams". Soon - I got bored. I could read - and I did read, a lot of stuff. But - when I knew I had to learn for an "exam" - suddenly I could not read. See above. This is true for all children. The ones that do well in school - are - very strong and motivated, or - easy to mold, and they are trained like pets - "learn that, here's the reward" - and they learn like machines.
I recognize - I was defeated. My curiosity was gone. Learned - what they asked me to "learn" - just to pass, the day after I forgot everything. The only things you remember - are the ones you yourself were interested in.
Search for John Taylor Gatto.
