Dumbing down America

In an attempt to explore what a small sample of average high school students know about the world and history, three students produced a video documentary. There are some errors in the clip but I think those errors underscore the problems in compulsory education. It caught my full attention immediately after I heard them open with a quote from John Taylor Gatto, a home schooling advocate and one time NY Teacher of the Year Award recipient:

We live in a time of great school crisis. Our children rank at the bottom of nineteen industrial nations in reading, writing and arithmetic. At the very bottom.

This is a subject that’s been on my mind much lately. Last summer our family made the decision to allow our 16 year old leave high school to attend college full time. My older daughter and her husband have blessed our lives with a grandchild and I encourage them to think about home schooling. Last week, I emailed much Gatto information to a girlfriend with 4 year old twins while encouraging her to consider home schooling or private instruction. My sister is considering a private alternative school for her toddlers. And just yesterday, I was talking to a girlfriend about a point mentioned in this short film clip.

My friend (who went to college at 16 and law school at 19) and I discussed at length this infantilization of young people. It seems that there is a purposeful effort to saddle our children with debt and keep them dependent on parent or government. We discussed our jobs as young teens and I shared the difficulties of Little Bit’s job hunts. Today you have to be 18 to be a checker at Wal-Mart or Target, you have to be 18 to serve drinks at a restaurant, you can’t drive a vehicle in the course of your work until you’re 17 and then it’s limited, and you can’t work with materials or machinery considered dangerous until 18. Do they just expect that teen brains and limbs will just flick on like a switch on the 18th anniversary of birth?

Then consider the greater than $48,000 average cost (four years) of state college tuition and the fact that many students (I’ve seen figures as high as 78.7%) require remediation once they are there. Consider that in 2005, starting salary averages for college grads were between $29,733 and $53,279. Add to it all the idea that you need be degreed before you can answer a phone and it becomes clear that our education system has been set up to weigh students down in debt before they make a dime.

As parents, we have a moral duty to protect our children’s futures until they are able to do so themselves. Parents, not governments, need to decide when that time is. In my house it was decided that Ashlyn, at the age of 17, was old enough to live on her own as an emancipated young adult. She’s made her own way since then and with the exception of Christmas and birthday gifts of cash, has never asked me to bail her out. Little Bit lives just shy of the freedom college freshmen generally experience but at 16, we thought it best for her to spend her first year of college under our roof. She will transfer to university in the fall, just after her 17th birthday.

I understand that my house is likely different than yours but freedom with regard to parental choice is the only one size fits all solution adequate for educating and preparing children for a life of liberty. Watching that video makes it no wonder that our country’s in such a downward spiral. It’s hard to know how to fight back if you don’t know the names and positions of your opponents. While I don’t agree with everything stated in the video clip, I think the young filmmakers featured here have taken a very important first step in evening out the fight. This country would do well to remember that when they hear government officials talk of children left behind.

~ by Miche on January 30, 2008.