Adolescence Abroad

Is adolescence in Canada or the US the same as adolescence in Burma, or Ghana?
If not how does it differ? What are the effects of western style adolescence on non western communities?
The third chapter of Robert Epstein's Book The Case Against Adolescence examines these questions in detail and concludes that our type of adolescence is an anomaly. It isn't like this everywhere.
And while our kids are arguing with us to buy them lap-tops and the latest designer jeans, kids over in China or Indonesia are manufacturing these items. Are they (kids abroad) hard done by?

"In pre-industrial nations where young people are rapidly integrated into adult society at an early age,teen turmoil is largely absent. A recent study of 186 preindustrial societies indicates that 60% of such societies don't even have a word for adolescence and that antisocial behaviour in young males is completely asent in more than half of them. When teen problems are beginning to emerge in various countries around the world, they can be traced to the increasing isolation of teens from adults brought about by Western education practices, labor restrictions and media."

Epstein asks a disturbing question: Is it possible that many teens feel empty, frustrated, and angry because their lives lack real meaning? (As compared to the busy work that we keep kids doing at school?)

Freedom to Learn

Peter Gray has a blog at Psychology Today called Freedom to Learn. There's a a blog post up that includes some thoughts on unschooling. Go to http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn
and look for Trustful Parenting May Require an Alternative to Conventional Schooling
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200908/trustful-parenting-may-require-alternative-conventional-schooling

The article is pretty good but the comments are even more interesting.

The Creation of Adolescence?

That turbulent, hormone driven,'devil may care' period of human development is something people made up?
Hard to believe, right? But Epstein presents a convincing case as to how adolescence and the artificial extension of childhood came about since the mid 1800s in western culture at least:

*Nurturing tendencies by women (and some men) to protect the millions of young people toiling long hours in the new factories or getting into trouble on the streets
*The elevated status of women, which gave them a powerful new voice in policy making
*The widespread adoption of the new view that young people are tender, helpless and incompetent (reminds me of how people thought of women in the Victorian era!)
*Determined efforts by the new labour unions to protect the jobs and wages of older workers by pushing young people out of the work force
*The desire of leading industrialists to sweep the streets free of troublesome youths and to prepare new generations of skilled laborers through mass education
*The desire of leaders in the upper and middle classes to impose their moral standards on poor and working class youths
The emergence of new businesses and industries that catered to the young and helped to create a "youth culture."

Says Epstein,"Before these forces emerged, the troubled teen was a rarity in human history. With these forces in play, teens rapidly became isolated from adults and increasingly unhappy about their peculiar place in society;adults in body and mind, toddlers in status."

Here's what John Taylor Gatto says,in an interview with Jerry Brown about the lively America before the industrialists took hold of it: "Independent livelihood was where it was at! You know, back in the 1840's - 1850's it was impossible to assemble an American work force over 40, because people would only work for you long enough to get a little stake, and then cut off and go off on their own. When we look at the history of New England factories, that they're going to concerts, and dances and libraries for the young girls who worked there for just a couple of years until they could bring a little stake to their marriage. That was the American dream, that you could write the script to your own life! And very , very gradually, that dream was converted, and this is quite easy to track, not by evil people, but by people who understood that wealth depends on your ability to command labor. And unless you can assemble large groups of labor, you were never going to be wealthy as the Europeans reckoned wealth, or the English reckoned wealth."

Taylor Gatto places a strong emphasis on the individual, on the entrepreneur in control of himself and his livelihood. Gatto details the lives of archetypal Americans like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Edison, who were independent, free-thinking leaders, none of whom spent more than two years in any kind of school, and yet all were leading productive, fulfilled lives by the time they were in their teens.

Write in and tell us what you think!

Children no longer

Teens have a champion!

The Case Against Adolescence-Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by Robert Epstein is a must read for anyone with young people in their lives. Adolescence exists mainly because of ignorance on the part of adults-according to the author. Crazy teens, badly behaved youth, are a result of artificially extending childhood.

I am so impressed by the book that I will be writing a short series covering some of its chapters.
I understand from the author that the new addition of the book comes out in a couple of months at amazon.com so stay tuned!
Now to the series:
why am excited about the book? Well as you know I follow an unschool philosophy as much as I can with the goal of raising competent, creative, self directed, useful young people. As they grow older and they start entering into their teens, I want my daughters to have opportunities to expand on what I've helped establish. But I can see that society is not ready for this.
For example,my 13 year old is as competent as most adults in many ways and yet the only job available to her right now is babysitting. Kids her age are not allowed to work more challenging fields- they are basically held back.
Can we find ways to create more meaningful opportunities for young people?

You might be surprised to hear that rather than tightening restrictions on young people we need to be loosening them. Teens as a group have more restrictions that prisoners or the mentally sick according to Epstein's research. In an interview with Psychology Today (Trashing Teens), Epstein reports,"in recent surveys I've found that American teens are subjected to more than 10 times as many restrictions as mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many as incarcerated felons. Psychologist Diane Dumas and I also found a correlation between infantilization and psychological dysfunction. The more young people are infantilized, the more psychopathology they show."
Can this explains some of the brutality and violence we're witnessing in public schools across North America?

Next blog posting: The Creation of Adolescence

Tell us what you think about us!

Hi Readers!
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Tell us;
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We look forward to hearing from you!
RFS

Jonas Brothers Are Homeschooled. Who knew?

My Son’s a Latin Lover,
Says Jonas Brothers’ Mom

The Jonas Brothers may all wear purity rings, but at least one of them is a veritable Latin lover!
Interviewed on Homeschool.com Radio, the superstars’ mom, Denise Jonas, reveals what her home-schooled sons’ favorite subjects are.
“Kevin loves literature and he loves Shakespeare. He also loves etymology, which is amazing. And he loved and he studied Latin,” she says of her eldest boy, now 21. “My husband and I disagreed on if he should take Latin or Spanish. And I said, ‘He has a passion to want to do Latin. Let him do that.’

“Frankie [8], our little one, is in love with science. Nicholas [16] loves English. And Joseph [19] – I don’t know that he has any favorite,” Denise tells host, and Homeschool.com senior editor, Rebecca Kochenderfer.

She also discusses the home-school curriculum she favors for her musical prodigies. “That would be Accelerated Christian Education. It works because of our travel schedule. And for my older boys, online stuff is just fabulous,” says Denise.

But her chat about home-schooling doesn’t end there. Denise also discusses what she likes most about it. “Everything’s an advantage. For instance, it’s great that we can take our kids to a midnight screening of Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience because we home-school – and we can sleep in ‘til 10 o’clock!”

The Child is RIght

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Changing Ways

On the car drive up to Lake Simcoe the winds chase the clouds until my daughter exclaims in wonder at their rapid speed,"Oh Mummy, I've never seen the clouds could move so fast!"
Out the window,the sun,a ball of fiery gold flashes through the branches of the forest, gleaming brilliantly through the leaves of the trees, racing by our side to be first.

This morning, all is calm and beautiful on the lake. In the evening, I watch the sunset and before my very eyes,the sky turns from pink to deep red and the clouds transform from an old traveler with a broken staff to a phoenix broad and strong of wing.

By night time, the lake is a turbulent,brooding mass of water the wind whipping and blowing wildly at its surface.

And so it is with us all. We change.
Today's unruly child is the calm and collected youth of tomorrow.
The raging little boy has evolved into a tolerant and empathetic young man, capable of dealing with disappointment.
The mother now sees that her worries and concerns were pointless;it was just a passing stage, nothing to fret about at all.

Nothing is permanent. We forget that in our worry to do what we think is right for the people we are responsible for. All too soon, they have grown up, passed away, left us behind.
Wouldn't we be better off if we loosened up, went instead into the mystery of things, had faith that this too will pass?

Free Schooling

Here's a bunch of cool video clips from the EducationRevolution.org site starting with Nellie Dick and the Modern School-a preview of a two-hour interview with a 96-year-old pioneer in the alternative education movement. Born in the Ukraine of Jewish, anarchist parents in 1893, she started anarchist schools in England back in 1908, went to the US in 1917 to teach at the Modern School in New Jersey. The Modern school movement was founded on the ideas of the Spanish anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer.

Research

There are men charged with the duty of examining the construction of the plants, animals, and soils which are the instruments of the great orchestra. These men are called professors. Each selects one instrument and spends his life taking it apart and describing its strings and sounding boards. This process of dismemberment is called research.

The place of dismemberment is called a university.

A professor may pluck the strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for music he must never admit it to his fellows of to his students. For all are restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the domain of poets.

Professors serve science and science serves progress. It serves progress so well that many of the more intricate instruments are stepped upon and broken in the rush to spread progress to all backward lands. One by one the parts are thus stricken from the song of songs. If the professor is able to classify each instrument before it is broken, he is well content.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Mentoring: the old hanging out with the young

I was at a meeting and the talk was about a church summer camp and the kids that attended. One elderly gentlemen described a little girl who was very keen to be in the kitchen with him-he is a baker and they were baking cookies.
"She stayed by my side the entire day," he exclaimed. "It was a wonderful day. A great day!"
After a thoughtful pause he said, "well-she ought to have been playing with her peers, getting along with them."
"Why?" I asked. "She was happy hanging with you-you had a great day. What is so wrong about that?"
"It was the best of days," he said reluctantly. For some reason he couldn't reconcile with himself that it was a natural and wonderful thing for the little girl to prefer his company to the company of her peers.
"She must have learned so much from you," I told him encouragingly.
"It's true," he acknowledged in amazement. Companionship,friendship,baking skills,a job well done!
This is the kind of scenario that we need more of. Kids need peers but they need the company of caring,knowledgeable elders maybe even more. She was happy to do a real-life, meaningful and USEFUL activity rather than the contrived 'craft' that had been prepared for them. Self-directed kid? I think so.

time to explore

The sun shines, waves lift the canoe, our paddles gently stir the lily pads. We see the stillness of the Blue Heron on the shore, the diving Caspian Tern, the soaring (was it a bald eagle?) raptor beneath the white clouds.

We eat our lunch as the breeze brushes past, eastward bound, and the fishermen cast their lines from the shore.

Our schedule: be ready for a soccer game at 6pm. Hours to explore...

You gotta go to school! Musical Satire

A "Schoolhouse Rock"-inspired look at the origins of the American education system. Originally recorded with a live audience for "In The Loop" at Minnesota Public Radio in May, 2007. Music and lyrics by Jeff Horwich. More info at http://www.mpr.org/intheloop

Community vs Networks -2

I'm responding to a comment made in response to the post,'Communities Vs Networks.' I agree with the reader that schools are organizations but even more so,they are institutions.
And we know that what institutions have as goal is self-perpetuation.
In the final analysis, an institution has its own best interest at heart no matter the original well-intentioned vision.
I think that the way we use the word community can be misleading. 'The cycling community,''the faith community,''the health community.' If you follow the definition of community as Taylor Gatto explains it in his address "We Need Less School, Not More," these are actually networks,not communities.
"It is a fact generally ignored when considering the communal nature of institutional families like schools,large corporations,colleges,armies,hospitals and government agencies that they are not real communities at all, but networks. Unlike communities, networks - as I reminded you - have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate, and that way is always across a short spectrum of one, or at most a few, specific uniformities.

"In spite of ritual moments like the Christmas Party or the office softball game, when individual human components in the network "go home," they go home alone. And in spite of humanitarian support from fellow workers that eases emergencies. when people in networks suffer they suffer alone unless they have a family or community to suffer with them.

Even with college dorm "communities," those most engaging and intimate simulations of community imaginable, who among us has not experienced an awful realization after graduation that we cannot remember our friends' names or faces very well? Or who, if he can remember, feels much desire to renew those associations?"

I think that last part cinched it for me!
To read the entire essay click here.

The War on Kids

THE WAR ON KIDS is a 99 minute documentary that shows how American public schools continue to become more dangerously authoritarian. Be warned,the message here is hard core;schools are bad places for kids. In addition to failing in their mission to provide education, they erode the country’s democratic foundation and often resemble prisons.
Note *It won Best Documentary on Education at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival. The movie's website is http://www.thewaronkids.com/MAIN.html

Institutionalized Education; Is this the best we can do?

I hear it said that what we have in place is "the best education available to many."

Is that really true? Can we honestly say that what passes as education, i.e. compulsory, state-controlled, mass schooling, is education?

The confusion stems from a misunderstanding of the definition of education as contrasted with schooling.

Schooling is imposed on a person; education is self achieved. Education is not given, but taken. With this understanding, can we honestly say that the best place to gain an education is between the four walls of a school room? For any body, rich or poor?

School worked for a while: 150 years during the time of rapid industrial growth, but does it still? Is mass, curriculum-driven schooling the best we can offer?

School is not flawless my friend, it is miles away from flawless. It can never be flawless because it is an idea that has had it's day.

Still, criticizing mass schooling is tantamount to insulting the Queen or country or God. Like an old tyrant, you can't say a word against it without fear of being persecuted, but like crumbling regimes of tyrants' progeny, it's time to retire or be torn down.

Just because the slaves have shoes and eat seven days a week doesn't make them free men and women.

As John Holt, one of the greatest thinkers on eduction of the 20th century said, "most slaves could not escape from slavery,yet no one suggested or would suggest that because all the slaves could not be freed, none should be." (Instead of Education).

So the weary and wearisome argument that school is our best hope for the children of the poor and disadvantaged, I just cannot buy. Instead, use the enormous amount of money spent on 'schooling' to let people manage their own education.

Pinot Vert

Unschooling wonders

This is a neat piece in the New Yorker about a look at a very creative, unschooling family.
Home Run by Rebecca Mead


Central to the actor’s craft is the ability to imagine oneself into the unimaginable; consider Meryl Streep choosing between her children in “Sophie’s Choice,” or Marlon Brando roaring in the jungle in “Apocalypse Now.” For Mary Albert, who recently appeared in a musical production of “Snoopy!!!” as Sally Brown, Charlie Brown’s little sister, the challenge lay in embodying her character’s notoriously ambivalent relationship to the classroom, since Mary, who is twelve, has never actually been to school. “When in rehearsal the director would say, ‘How do you think, at this moment, you’d be responding to your teacher?’ I would say, ‘I have no idea,’ ” Mary, who has long dark hair and a wide smile, the dazzle of which is only partly obscured by braces, explained the other evening, at a party following the first performance, which took place at the West End Theatre, on Eighty-sixth Street.

Mary, like her three siblings—Lucy, fifteen, John, ten, and Jane, eight, all of whom were in the production—has been homeschooled her entire life. “We were part of a parent-run playgroup, and at some point everyone started testing to get into the right school, and I thought it was insane,” their mother, Erynn Albert, said. (As it turns out, all four Albert offspring have got into the most insanely competitive gifted-and-talented program of them all, the Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus; the two middle ones will appear in “Tosca” this fall.)

Lucy Albert, who played Snoopy—she wore white pants and a white long-sleeved T-shirt with a black spot sewn on the back, and had her long dark hair looped up into floppy ears—explained that she was about to drop out of homeschool: she just won a coveted spot at the LaGuardia high school for the performing arts. In the show, Snoopy grumbles that he isn’t allowed to attend school on account of his species; but Lucy said that she thought Snoopy represented the best of the homeschooled individual. “He teaches himself everything, and he has so many sides, and he has time to do all the things he wants to do, and he’s not ashamed of it,” she said. “It’s kind of like me, except I’m not a dog. Maybe a bitch.”

As she spoke, Lucy leaned her head fondly on the shoulder of Briar Montana, fourteen, who played Linus. Briar has been a leading light of the homeschool musical scene for the past several years but is obliged to retire, since he is about to enroll in his first academic institution: the High School for Dual Language and Asian Studies, in Chinatown. Briar, who has wavy hair and delicate features, sounded dubious about the prospect. When you’re homeschooled, he said, “everyone you meet is your teacher, and you have more freedom to pick what you want to learn.”

“Like, I did chemistry when I was nine or ten,” Lucy said.

“That wasn’t real chemistry,” Briar replied.

“Yes, it was,” Lucy insisted.

Ben Goldstein, who is also fourteen, and who played Charlie Brown in the show, actually did a year at school, in the sixth grade. “The fun part is messing around, and interacting with people who aren’t very nice,” he said. “Probably the main reason I left is I found myself being mean.” He did not think that he was missing out on anything educationally by not being in school. “If you’re talking about facts that you’re never going to use, like when they changed the American flag—well, then, yes,” he said. “But I think I can solve problems more creatively than kids who go to school can.” (One problem Ben plans to solve creatively: homeschooling his own future kids without sacrificing the career—as yet undetermined, but definitely intellectually rewarding and lucrative—to which he also aspires. “I want to get rich and then have kids, and then I can have them do all kinds of cool things,” he said.) Regular school, Ben reflected, “can be kind of a dirty pleasure. It’s like watching ‘America’s Next Top Model.’ ”

As the end of their homeschool careers approached, none of the cast intended to go so far as to home-college. Not having a high-school diploma might take a little explaining to admissions staffs. Cole Houston, the show’s eighteen-year-old lighting designer and stage manager, who spent last year doing college applications, said, “You don’t have the transcript, so it’s hard for them to measure what you were doing, and to see that you weren’t playing video games all day.” Not to worry: in the fall, Cole will be heading off to M.I.T. on a full scholarship. ♦

Community vs Networks

John Taylor Gatto's We need less school not more:Families, Communities, Networks and the Proposed Enlargement of Schooling (1991) is a very useful read because he helps people understand the difference between networks and communities.

"Net works-even good ones take their vitality from communities and families," he says.
"What is gained from consulting a specialist and surrendering all judgment is often more than outweighed by a permanent loss of a piece of your volition."

Compulsory schools masquerade as communities; they are in fact networks.

"Networks--don't need or want the whole person, but only a narrow piece of him; if you function in a network it asks you to suppress all the parts of yourself except the network-interest-part, a highly unnatural act though one you can get used to doing.

It's this fragmentation of the whole person that hurts communities-diminishing humanity-"networks, unlike communities, have a very narrow way of allowing people to associate..."

Gatto continues, "Networks like schools are not communities in the same way that school training is not education. By preempting 50 percent of the total time of the young, by locking young people up with young people exactly their own age, by ringing bells to start and stop work, by asking people to think about the same thing at the same time in the same way, by grading people the way we grade vegetables- and in a dozen other vile and stupid ways- network schools steal the vitality of communities and replace it with an ugly piece of mechanism."

"Nobody survives these places with his humanity intact, not kids, not teachers, not administrators, and not parents."

Community on the other hand is a place "that faces people at each other over time in all their human variety, good parts, bad parts, and all the rest. Such places promote the highest quality of life possible, lives of engagement and participation. This happens in unexpected ways but it never happens when you've spent more than a decade listening to other people talk-and trying to do what they tell you to do, trying to please them after the fashion of schools."

It's a pretty long address but worth continuing;

"I belong to networks myself," Gatto continues, "but the only ones I consider completely safe are the ones that reject their communitarian facade, acknowledge their limits, and concentrate solely on helping me do a specific and necessary task. But a vampire network like a school, which tears off chunks of time and energy needed for building community and family- and always asks for more- needs to have a stake driven through it's heart and nailed into it's coffin. The feeding frenzy of formal schooling has already wounded us seriously in our ability to form families and communities by bleeding away time we need with our children and our children need with us. That's why I say we need less school, not more."


If the goosebumps are not sprouting on your arms by now, I don't know if they ever will.