Freedomship Education: Notes & Thoughts

You asked for them. Here they are: my notes from Andrew Pudewa's talk on Freedomship Education.

Disclaimer #1: I wasn't going to post these because I have a feeling they will ruffle feathers I'd rather not ruffle.
Disclaimer #2: I am non-confrontational by nature, and I don't generally ruffle the feathers of kind folks as a matter of course.
Disclaimer #3: I cry easily. I'm just sayin'. Don't send me unkind emails for kicks. I don't take them well.

I'm not even adding any pretty pictures to soften this puppy up. It's just a heck of a lotta words. There's your forewarning. This isn't my usual blog fare. ;)

My notes ended up being a compilation of both Mr. Pudewa's thoughts and my own response to those ideas. I was going to try and sort out his ideas versus my responses, but it became messy and difficult to read. Some of it's his, some of it's mine. I'm not separating the two, so keep that in mind.

Okay, so one pretty picture. I couldn't help myself! :)

Ready, then?

Public Schools: How They Started & Why They Work Just Fine

Pudewa started the evening with a very enlightening synopsis of how American Public Education came to be. This was eye-opening to say the least (The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto is now officially on my to-read list).

The basic summary is this: public schools were started with a very clear agenda to, in the words of those at the helm of the movement, "control human behavior." Indeed, government-run schools were instituted to teach children to think a certain way (not to learn how to think, which was the goal that Classical education worked toward for thousands of years).

In fact, Pudewa made the audacious statement that the public school system is not at all broken. The schools are, in fact, doing exactly what they set out to do: provide a conveyor-belt style education that turns out people who will think a certain way, support the country's economy, and become avid consumers. When the public school system was founded (not so long ago, in fact), it aimed to teach poor people enough so that they could enter the work force. Not an ignoble goal, considering the circumstances of that time and era. But certainly outdated. And yet the standard has never changed.

Our public schools still operate on the conveyor-belt, grades-based education system that was put into place to support the Industrial Revolution. No wonder we aren't graduating students who can think independently, read well, and articulate/communicate thoughts effectively! The role that big coal companies and German psychologists played in how our schools came to be and how they continue to be run is certainly worth knowing, and it is chronicled in Gatto's Underground History.

Now, before you think that Pudewa was on a tirade against the public school system and all those who run it, let me assure you that he emphasized this important point: the vast majority of American schoolteachers are hard-working and altruistic. They love children enormously-- that is why they go into teaching. The problem with our educational system is not the teachers. It is the basic system.

But you can't fix a system that isn't broken. And it's not. The system is doing what it was put in place to do. The whole idea of taking mass quantities of children and passing them through a standardized set of lessons so that they will come out thinking a certain way is how our public education system was founded. Pudewa says, the next time you hear a politician saying we need "educational reform" because the public education system is "broken", you might consider this: a system that's doing what it was put into place to do is not in fact broken. It's actually rather effective.

If, on the other hand, it rubs you the wrong way to think that we graduate masses of students who cannot think independently (or think well at all), then you might consider that we are expecting the public schools to do something they weren't created to do.

I will take a moment here to note that I do believe children learn all kinds of things in a public school. They just aren't the things we want  them to learn. But John Taylor Gatto can explain that better than I can, and you can read it rather quickly in his excellent and succinct Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.

The Aims of Childhood
There are three basic questions that cannot be asked or addressed in a public school. They are:

1. Who am I?
2. Why am I here?
3. What am I supposed to do with my life?

Asking these questions and seeking their answers is the crux of childhood formation. These are the questions we, as creatures made in the image of God, are created to ask. But the public schools cannot even begin to address these, because every one of them infers an absolute truth. Public schools are,  Pudewa says, "temples of relativism."

You can choose what you want to believe.
You have your own truth.
Your truth is not better than my truth, and my truth is not better than hers.
There is not really any "truth" at all.
There is no such thing as bad music, or good music.
There is just music, and everyone has their own valid response to it.
There is no such thing as good literature.
There is just literature, and as long as you're reading something, you are reading literature.

I worked for several years in a large public library system, and I can assure you that the high school reading lists I saw while working there horrified me. Classics? Who needs classics? Chronicles of teenage angst, graphic novels, steampunk zombie stories, and stories of confused and exploratory same-sex relationships-- these have taken the place of Harper Lee and Shakespeare. If you don't believe me, go to your school district and ask to see their 11th and 12th grade reading lists. When the selections aren't outlandishly modernistic and immoral, they're absolutely stupid. The expectations set for our high school graduates is so abysmal it's embarrassing.

The Damage
A typical child spends upwards of 14,000 hours in a public school classroom. Now tell me, if my child is spending 14,000 of their most formative hours in a place where relativism is the basic model, how on earth can I expect her to hold on to her faith?

Pudewa says: you can go to church on Sundays,  you can take your kids to Awanas on Wednesday nights, you can have lively and meaningful dinnertime conversations, but you cannot undo 14,000 hours of relativism that has been the basis for your children's formation in public school. No wonder, then, that the vast majority of Christian families see their kids walk away from their faith within the first year of college. Sure, their parents tried to give them a strong foundation - a good many even did a darn good job of it! But 14,000 hours of indoctrination in direct opposition to the faith is almost impossible to surmount. Indeed, for many families, it is impossible.

Even when our children's teachers are well-meaning folks with high moral standards, they are still operating within the framework of a system of ideas that are in direct opposition to the values of the family as part of the mandatory, ordinary curriculum. Even the best teachers have to follow protocol, and some of that protocol is getting wildly out of hand (gay history in the kindergarten curriculum, anyone?).

To think we can combat this at the dinner table is perhaps a little optimistic. The social and moral temperature in our schools today is truly frightening, and even if you have a good school run by faithful, moral teachers- it still operates on the guide rails of a public government system that aims to teach your children to think a certain way. And probably not in the way you want them to. That's worth considering.

Aside from the moral failures in our school is the astonishing fact that our students are not even being well educated in the basic subjects. Many schools, Pudewa says, don't require students to memorize math facts. History dates? Meh. The modernistic view in education is: you don't need to know it if you can find it out. Teach them how to FIND information, and then what they KNOW is not really that important. But this flies in the face of what thousands of years of educated people have believed; it's a modern idea that atrophies the brain.

Are you really educated if you know how to google something, but can't even tell me the year in which our country was founded? Is it really acceptable to us that our students spend their best waking hours in a classroom, but less than 35% of high schoolers read proficiently? Have we become so culturally illiterate that this doesn't alarm us?

True Education
Pudewa states, "It would be better to be illiterate and love God with all your heart than to be an atheist with a PhD. The last thing this world needs is another atheist with a PhD. The world doesn't need more clever people! It doesn't need more innovative technology! It needs people who are good, true, and beautiful."

True excellent teaching is, he says, is "the overflow of the soul's goodness, truth, and beauty." And such overflow cannot take place in a system where truth itself is not even acknowledged.

So what do we want for our children? Free men and women study the liberal arts so that they can remain free. We want, in essence, freedomship education. An education that teaches one how to think. Thinking can be done poorly or done well, but we can teach children how to do it well, and then they can think for themselves. That is what we desire for our children- so that they can hear the misconstrued arguments of people (who don't think well or rationally) and figure out why such logic is flawed. So that they can discern for themselves the wrongness or rightness of a given situation, argument, or piece of work using a logical and reasonable mind.

In order to become a passionate pursuer of knowledge, one has to go deep into the subjects. This is the kind of education we ought to offer our children- the opportunity to cover less bases, but to cover the ones they do well and deeply. To come out on the other side of their childhood learning experience with deep-seated knowledge about a few important things, instead of knowing very little about everything. So we provide for our children the opportunity to dig in to their learning- to go deep, to plunge in.

We teach them, when they are young, to master the basic skills so that they can use those skills to really learn in their later years. In this way, regardless of what bases we didn't really "cover", our children can confidently go forth into their adult lives with the ability to learn anything they want. Because we have produced children who know how to think, who are passionate pursuers of knowledge, and who have a basic idea of who they are, why they are here, and what they are to do with their life, we have given them a good, true, and beautiful education.

We do this in part by teaching them to ask questions-  this is indeed teaching a child how to think. Consider: there is no time for classrooms of children to ask their own questions. Instead, a teacher tells the children what to think. The children go home and study it. They come back the next day, and the teacher asks questions (so you see that the teacher has done the thinking for the student). If the student gives the teacher the answers she wants, he gets an A. (This is how I graduated with nearly a 4.0 in both high school and college. I was very good at parroting back what teachers wanted to hear. I wasn't so good, unfortunately, at thinking for myself.) If the student gives the teacher the wrong answer, he fails. And so this kind of non-thinking guides the way our students are supposedly "learning" in schools. This is precisely why John Taylor Gatto argues that most of what we call education is not actually education at all, but mere "schooling."

An Excellent High School Education
Pudewa made an outrageous statement about high school: You can probably require your homeschooled child to do nothing for four years, he says, and they will still come out with a better education than the typical public high school graduate.

How can he state such things?

I recently read that the average homeschooled 8th grader performs about four grade levels ahead of her public school counterpart. So there you go! Even if she does nothing, she's probably still going to be on par with the public schoolers who have spent four solid years at the local high school.

But Pudewa wasn't advocating an unschooling approach to high school (a cursory look through the Institute for Excellence in Writing's high school offerings should prove this). What he was saying, I think, is that there are better uses for our high schoolers' time than what they otherwise get in a public school.

If they have become good strong thinkers with a strong foundation in basic skills, then our students are ready to tackle much meatier subject matter than the typical high school offers. They will be able to get an academically superior education in less time than they will in a classroom each day. This allows them to pursue their interests and abilities in ways that public schoolers could only dream of.

To become really good at something, you have to spend time on it! Homeschooling through high school allows this to become a reality, and Pudewa shared several stories of homeschoolers who have truly become great within their fields even before reaching adulthood. Indeed, great leaders throughout history became great leaders in part because they had time to do what was important them. We can support our own students with this gift of a truly excellent education paired with unscheduled time, and allow them to far surpass our expectations.

The perpetuation of adolescence is a relatively new invention- it's only in recent years that we consider an 18-year-old not really "grown up" yet. How many 25-year-olds do you know who are still exploring their options? Growing into themselves? Thinking about what they want to be when they grow up? You've heard the saying right? "30 Is The New 20!" And yet this idea would have been outlandish even 75 years ago.

We give our teenagers adult privileges without any adult responsibilities, and then we wonder why our 27-year-olds are just finally graduating with bachelors' degrees, can't hold down jobs, and still aren't ready to commit to a relationship of any kind. By keeping our kids in high school and having them spend their precious adolescent years taking classes where many of them learn quite little, we rob them of the opportunity to get a really great academic education, prepare for adulthood, learn valuable life skills, and pursue their interests to find out who they really are what they are meant to do with their lives.

All said, homeschooling is a great gift we can offer our children- not just as a way to do school better, but as a way to do better things than school. I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Pudewa's seminar and I hope to see him speak again soon. I encourage you to check out his webpage to find out if he's coming to your area!

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