Posted by: Wilma Bennett

(I must have missed the blog on homeschooling. This is the closest topic I could find to post this.)

Factory Schooling vs Homeschooling

For almost five years I worked as a specialist for the largest charter school in California (New Horizons in Lincoln, CA). It was dedicated to homeschoolers, and we had over 3,000 students.

Every month I visited students to officially track their progress. My observation? Homeschooling parents do an outstanding job, far surpassing that of our public schools! To see how I came to this conclusion, let me compare my experiences in the public school system versus my experiences with homeschoolers.

The public school model, in which students sit all day at desks, and progress in lock-step fashion from one grade to the next, was designed in the late 1800’s. It was purposely designed to be boring, so that graduates would be prepared to sit all day at repetitive and boring tasks in the factories that were sprouting up all over the country due to the industrial revolution.

Today’s students are still crammed into that outmoded model, designed for a time when there were few options for learning about the world. If they act bored in this purposely-designed boring situation, they are labeled troublemakers. They are given drugs for their attention-deficiencies. They are dumbed down.

This model is so sacrosanct that I watched a first grade teacher tell her own daughter that she wouldn’t answer a particular question, because the child would learn the answer the following year in the next grade. This teacher/parent didn’t want to make next year’s teacher mad by teaching something ahead of time. So, she trashed her own child’s desire to learn.

Compare this to homeschooling, where teaching is individualized to the student. I learned the word gibbous (the rounded shape of the moon between half and full) by watching a parent teach it to her kindergartener. The child was interested in astronomy, and the parent taught him everything he wanted to know.

Amazing things happen when you individualize instruction. My homeschooled students were spending long weekends on tall ships, learning to sail, tie knots, count bells, etc. Parents discovered that if a child was having trouble learning to read, give him/her horseback riding lessons. Something about those lessons re-programs the child’s brain, and he/she often makes spurts in other areas of learning. Children have so many ways to learn now, that our charter school had over six hundred sources for learning materials to which we could point homeschooling parents.

When Sesame Street came in, the old factory model of teaching should have been thrown out. All of a sudden, children arrived at school knowing as much about the world as the teachers of fifty years earlier. I know how children today must feel, trapped in a classroom. As a young child, I lived in a bus and traveled with a carnival all over California. Suddenly having to sit at a desk all day was excruciating.

Spending all day in a classroom with others as immature as you are is no way for a child to grow in maturity. When I temporarily returned to classroom teaching after being away for a number of years, I was shocked to learn how much of a teacher’s time is now spent on classroom management. Even I, the teacher, was not immune to the negative role-modeling. I found myself saying, “Who stole my pencil!!?” rather than, “Did anyone see what I did with my pencil?”

Public schools of today resemble prisons more than anything else: surrounded by high fences, run by bells, full of miscreants, and seldom offering anything stimulating to the mind. In fact the schools of today are achieving the goals of that outdated 1800’s model, but just in a way that was never anticipated. What our schools do best is teach our youth how to be prisoners. The success of this outdated model is verified by our overcrowded prison system.

It is sad that the public schools of today are so afraid of competition that they want to eliminate the most successful schooling currently offered. It is so drilled into their mind that individualized teaching is impossible, that the public school system never looks for ways to achieve it.

We forget that before the industrial revolution, most learning was individualized. Some of our founding fathers were homeschooled. Where are the genius Mozarts of today, who could write music at the age of eight that is still loved and admired? If the public school system is better than home teaching, we should have many of them. But under our factory-learning system they have all but disappeared. I played in a 100-piece orchestra in middle school. Try to even find a music class in today’s elementary and middle schools.

It’s time for public schools to retire the factory model of schooling and create a new system of inspiring our youth to their best potential. The idea of a free education for everyone is still a noble idea. Let’s return it to its nobility by allowing the competition of homeschooling to polish it to a high shine.

Wilma Bennett has a Ph.D. in Instructional Development and Technology from Michigan State University.

I feel that our governor did not make as good a deal, regarding the casinos, as he would like for us to believe. It was voted upon to accept his agreement. We could have done better and come out with our schools more financially secure. I find it hard to believe that he thinks our children will thrive in such a poor state.