How Even the Best Schools Harm Our Kids: A Teacher’s Story
by Before I had kids, I taught for seven years. That’s why I know schools from the inside. That’s also why I don’t want to send my kids to any of them.
Teaching is my first love. Even in high school, I knew I wanted to help kids have better lives through education, and I wanted to help the kids who needed it the most. So instead of applying to higher-paying private schools where most of my college batch mates went, I applied in a public school and taught there for seven years.
Then, I got pregnant and quit so I could take care of my baby.
And now, I have two kids who are old enough to go to school. But knowing what I know now about schools, I wish I would never have to sent them there.
What Even The Best Schools Do To Our Kids:
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They Deprive Our Kids of a Basic Need: Attention
Our children want, crave and need attention. Any psychologist can tell you that. And the younger they are, the more they need and want it, and the more they are harmed by the lack of it.
What is the smallest number of kids in one classroom? Twenty-five? Fifteen? Five? And one teacher.
You have enough trouble giving your 3 kids all the attention they need. How much attention can a teacher give your child, with 25 more competing for it?
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They Teach Our Kids to Behave Badly
We all know kids like my child’s cousin: she’s a bully. Every time she and my kid play together, she would grab whatever toy my kid is playing with, even if she doesn’t really want it herself.
If my kid were in a school playground, with no adults watching, he would surely learn to fight. It’s a natural human tendency. This, I do not want. I want him to learn to share. I want him to learn to give. In fact, I want him to learn to turn the other cheek.
Because I am right there watching, I am able to minimize damage and teach him, “Nevermind. Let her have it. You can have it back later. It’s not good to quarrel.”
But in school, this doesn’t happen because while Teacher is refereeing one pair, there are many others behind that she can’t see. Who will minimize damage for those kids that Teacher can’t see?
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They Teach our Kids to go With the Crowd – Good or Bad
In school, when one reads, all read. When one has recess, all have recess. Teacher needs the whole class to act like one person, because it’s so much more “efficient and orderly” that way.
As for your classmates, they expect you to laugh when they laugh, wear what they wear, and cheat when they cheat. Either that, or you get beat up in the playground, or called “loser” in the halls.
Either way, you soon learn that it’s best to do what everyone else is doing, be it reading or doing drugs.
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They Waste our Children’s Time
Remember when you were in school? How much time did you spend waiting in line? Waiting for your turn to recite? Waiting for everyone else to finish the test? Waiting for teacher to arrive? Waiting for everyone to settle down?
Can you remember how much time you spent actually learning, and how much more you spent in just idly waiting?
In fact, everything we learn in 8 hours of school can be taught in 3 hours at home. That’s five hours wasted, every day! You could have been training for the Olympics or learning 2 musical instruments in those five hours.
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They Teach our Children Wrong Socialization Skills.
Contrary to popular opinion, schools do NOT train our children in good socialization, for two big reasons:
First, how much time, really, do schools give our children for socialization? During class hours, children are discouraged from talking, unless they raise their hands to recite. Recess and lunch hours are the only times when they can “socialize” freely, which brings me to the second reason why schools are bad for our kids’ socialization skills:
During recess and lunch, they socialize with very little adult supervision. So, they learn socialization skills from their peers – who are as unskilled and ignorant as they are as to what proper socialization is.
I am all for exposing children to people so they can learn to socialize, but only with my supervision. Beforehand, they should be trained by a knowledgeable, caring adult on what proper socialization is – and this takes years. To send a 7-year-old to school, long before his good manners and good values are firmly ingrained, is as dangerous as giving him your car keys without teaching him first how to drive.
So if I’m not sending my kids to school, where will they get their education? At home! I’m homeschooling them!
I’m now a working mom – in a different industry – who is out of the house ten hours a day. But in the three hours that I am home, I can teach my kids everything that they will learn from eight hours at school. You can do it too!
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Post CommentGloria
On July 31, 2007 at 1:50 am
I commend you wholeheartedly.
Frankly, my own homeschooling days were the best schooling I’ve ever had. Sure, I didn’t get to play with my “friends,” but I had my sister, and two loving parents. Besides, I was no older than 8 years of age, and at that time in my life, do I really need peers that are nothing like me?
Your child[ren] is in a very malleable stage in his lives, and I cannot express the importance of a nurturing, loving parent there to guide him. I am glad there are mothers like you, fighting the cold and distant tutelage of public schools.
francie
On August 6, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Great article
thanks!
Beatrice
On August 12, 2007 at 12:56 am
Just for the record, I don’t mind at all that you disagree with me on the “socialization” part, but the fact that our children are forced to be around people their age MOST OF THE TIME is one of the biggest reasons I disapprove of institutional schooling, but it would take an entirely new article to explain why. I’ll email you when that comes out
As for how to shift children from homeschooling to the high stress real world, or even high school: If we think the world might be stressful for our high schooler, think how stressful it will be for our toddler!
Anyway, homeschooling does not lock the child up in the house. He experiences the world too, but with “parental guidance.” By the time you let him out by himself, he will be quite capable of handling it, and be better educated than his peers in knowing the right way to go through life, because he has been properly trained by his hopefully-wiser parents, NOT by his equally ignorant peers.
SoC
On August 12, 2007 at 5:21 am
I see. I’ll look forward to that next article. But I’m still curious about the stress issue.
School doesn’t teach you what to do about stress, but it helps build an immunity. Homeschooling is done in a relaxed enviroment and when one teaching method doesn’t work, you move onto another, more effective, one. This keeps the enviroment stress free and the child ready and willing to learn. This only becomes a problem at the high school or college level when not only does the teacher not have the time to find a more effective method (unless you convince the school of a mental handicap) and stress builds. Plus it may be an unfamiliar emotion giving it a multiplier on effectiveness.
However, to counter myself (not that it’s about being right), I suppose you could teach your children to meditate or something-like which gives people resilience to negative thought and proclivity towards positive thought.
PS: If these issues will be answered in the next article, I’d be happy to wait.
Crystie
On August 15, 2007 at 4:25 pm
“School doesn’t teach you what to do about stress, but it helps build an immunity.” That sounds an awful lot like people who think a sensitive child needs to “Toughen up”. Realistically, that works sometimes, but most of the time it just a form of mental torture for the child. I agree with Beatrice, *children* who grow up as *children* not a public school captive will be able to handle stress better as an adult, because they are an adult not an adult who responds to stress like a child.
francie
On August 29, 2007 at 12:09 am
Crystie, Thanks much for your input, especially the “Toughen Up” comment, Ohhh, how many times I have heard this…One part of me thinking “Ok, yea, that’s all good and fine,” then after rethinking,I knew it just isn’t everyone’s reality, “it does not work for all children”, Yes, it can very much be a “mental torture” for some. They need a better way to handle stressful situations, one that works for them. It’s taught to them thru understanding, patience and from the people closest to them, usually their Mothers. That works just fine from my perspective. Thank you Beatrice for your articles, and to Crystie who tells it well through additional comments.
Elena H.
On September 8, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Great points to consider. Well written.
Guardian Angel
On May 13, 2008 at 6:12 am
Would you recommend any homeschool makati area?
mari
On October 5, 2008 at 10:19 am
that is a great article coming from soon to be mom… only some questions to post….
until when the home schooling ended? how will you prepare your kids to live in outside world when they are starting to grow up and need other person aside from the parents and siblings…
i just read also same article from pangilinan clan, having her 3 kids doing homeschooling and same with the article that is wrote also gave me an inspiration…
thanks…
Tamara
On October 31, 2008 at 8:43 am
In my somewhat limited experience (my own and that of my older child) the stress of school did not toughen us. It broke us. It destroyed our ability to trust and our confidence in ourselves.
It is too late for me to undo all of the damage that elementary and junior high school did to my ability to form relationships. My eight year old has been hospitalized for what used to be called a nervous breakdown…I can only hope that bringing him home, along with therapy and carefully supervised social interactions can undo some of the damage for him.
Donna
On January 23, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Home schooling is not stressful enough? Are you joking? What could be more stressful than having your mother as your instructor? You want to know what stress is? Think of how stressed out you would be if your mother was your boss at work. If you made a mistake you might not get fired, you would just disappoint the woman that breastfed you as an infant. I’m 15 years old and I’m homeschooled. I live at my school. My teacher fixes me supper at night and has the authority to ground me from the telephone, the television, the computer, my ipod and the stereo. Please don’t misunderstand; I am glad my parents homeschool me. I’ve heard that in public school you are not allowed to the bathroom without first asking permission. Barbaric! What kind of jobs are they training public schooled kids for?
Anyhow, I digress. The most important thing my instructor/mother could have taught me was how to learn things on my own. It is not the instructor’s job to learn, that is the student’s task. The teaching methods of the college instructors become irrelevant. The only thing I need to know is the task. Learning is my responsibility.
Student Teacher
On February 11, 2009 at 10:51 pm
I agree and disagree on some things. Right now, I am a student teacher in a poor elementary school in Washington. I work with 5th graders who are all good, but not trained socially. I do agree that homeschooling is better and lots of time is wasted in the public school arena. Because most of these kids’ parents don’t teach their children consequences, I have to teach them, which stops instruction. As for “wasting time standing in line,” they must learn to be orderly when walking in the hall or they’ll end up running into somebody else and cause a lawsuit (some Welfare parents are well-versed in this). But honestly, I want out because I can’t deal with working with 22 kids, some with behavior issues, some with autism—I can’t be effective for ALL 22 students at any given time. If I’m telling the autistic kid to pick up his pencil and write what is on the board, the genius girl in the class is silent reading when I could be challlenging her even more. I feel like a failure, to tell the truth. I would much rather dodge a school full of kids who need boot camp and work with kids that want to learn, like 1-on-1 tutoring or homeschooling.