The Purpose Of Public Schooling
Victoria Hardy
May 16, 2008
For those awakening to the world these days, it´s a difficult to task to accept many things we have known since childhood and trusted as truth, are simply not truth. And it´s disconcerting to realize that those years spent in public school, forced into conforming to the whims of our peers, may have had a different agenda lurking under the surface. The discussions about public schooling seem to center around money and security of late, how to keep the warehouse-like buildings funded and safe, but little is said about what our children are actually being taught.
I´ve said it before, I didn´t like school as a child and that first day of being pushed into a room full of children was quite disturbing to me as I had never spent time in kindergarten or daycare. My first 5 ½ years were spent playing, exploring and discovering the world of make believe and the only television I recall watching was Captain Kangaroo as I ate my breakfast. Even as a very young child, I enjoyed being alone, so I still remember the trauma of being forced into daily competition with 20 plus kids. My first day of school I came home and declared I was never going back, but soon learned that I had no choice, so over the years I invested a lot of time attempting to get out of school.
I couldn´t explain how I felt about school, I couldn´t describe how oppressive it felt, how I feared the bullies and their followers, how I had very little in common with my peers and how I could not fit in. My grades were decent with little effort or thought and I spent a lot of time attempting to be invisible and avoiding attention. The work seemed boring and rote and rarely did a teacher or subject come along that truly inspired and enthralled my imagination. And it felt as though we were all exposed, everyone knew who were the good kids, the bad kids, the rich kids, the poor kids, the troubled kids and the nothings, almost as though we wore labels on our heads.
Some believe that our children are being deliberately dumbed down and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration and author of
I´ve said it before, I didn´t like school as a child and that first day of being pushed into a room full of children was quite disturbing to me as I had never spent time in kindergarten or daycare. My first 5 ½ years were spent playing, exploring and discovering the world of make believe and the only television I recall watching was Captain Kangaroo as I ate my breakfast. Even as a very young child, I enjoyed being alone, so I still remember the trauma of being forced into daily competition with 20 plus kids. My first day of school I came home and declared I was never going back, but soon learned that I had no choice, so over the years I invested a lot of time attempting to get out of school.
I couldn´t explain how I felt about school, I couldn´t describe how oppressive it felt, how I feared the bullies and their followers, how I had very little in common with my peers and how I could not fit in. My grades were decent with little effort or thought and I spent a lot of time attempting to be invisible and avoiding attention. The work seemed boring and rote and rarely did a teacher or subject come along that truly inspired and enthralled my imagination. And it felt as though we were all exposed, everyone knew who were the good kids, the bad kids, the rich kids, the poor kids, the troubled kids and the nothings, almost as though we wore labels on our heads.
Some believe that our children are being deliberately dumbed down and Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI), U.S. Department of Education, during the first Reagan Administration and author of
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