Mary Jo Tate “How did these awful places, these ‘schools’ come about? Well, casual schooling has always been with us in a variety of forms, a mildly useful adjunct to growing up. But ‘modern schooling’ as we no know it is a by-product of the two ‘Red Scares’ of 1848 and 1919, when powerful interests feared a revolution … Read more
John Taylor Gatto says that one of the seven lessons of our current system of compulsory institutional schooling is intellectual dependency: “Good students wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. It is the most important lesson, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of … Read more
“I teach the un-relating of everything, an infinite fragmentation the opposite of cohesion; what I do is more related to television programming than to making a scheme of order” (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down, p. 4).
“We might be able to see that [an alternative to our educational system and the idea of a national curriculum] if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found—in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, … Read more
Dumbing Us Down by former New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto is a no-holds-barred critique of compulsory schooling. In my next few blog posts, I’m going to share interesting passages from this book. I hope they will provoke both thought and discussion, and also serve as a boost to your motivation for … Read more
In the first chapter of The Swiss Family Robinson, I was really struck by this interchange between father and 14-year-old son: “I am afraid, Fritz,” I [the father] said, “that God, for some wise purpose, no doubt, has decided that we must spend our lives here in exile. I see no prospect of ever getting … Read more
We began reading aloud The Swiss Family Robinson tonight as part of our study of resourcefulness. My four boys love the fact that the shipwrecked family has four boys, and each one is identifying with the fictional boy who shares his birth order: Forrest with Ernest, Andrew with Fritz, Perry with Jack, and Thomas with Franz. … Read more
These are the biographies of inventors already in our home library that we’ll be using for our study this semester. Unfortunately, many (most?) of these are out of print. All the more reason to snatch up great books when you find them! Mary Jo BIOGRAPHIES Archimedes and the Door of Science by Jeanne Bendick Archimedes … Read more
We began our new school year this morning. This semester we’re participating in a KONOS co-op with three other families. We’ll be studying the unit on resourcefulness and inventions (not including the frontier life segment). I’ve been collecting books on this subject for quite a while, since my 10yo Andrew is very interested in science. … Read more
Over 140,000 books and other items at one of the oldest and largest library sales in the country. Read about it here: http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_2884214 Sounds like my kind of event! Mary Jo