Pam posted this to the homeschool group so I asked if she'd mind me posting it here too :) Thank you Pam :)
School trains children to be employees and consumers;
teach your own to be leaders and adventurers.
School trains children to obey reflexively;
teach your own to think critically and independently.
Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom;
help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be
bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up
material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics,
theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid.
Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to
enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues.
Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they
seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell
phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly
abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they
can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are:
laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the
habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory
education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to
turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods
extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of
a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could
publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could
apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself
through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today),
there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life,
and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that
genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius... The solution,
I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
- John Taylor Gatto
