The Clock in the Classroom

I've always found this quote out of Derrick Jensen's Walking on Water; to be mostly true:

"The most important piece of technology in any classroom is the second hand of the clock. The purpose is to teach millions of students the identical prayer: Please God, make it move faster."--Page 15

Kids, Coaching and School

The other day our 12 year old commented that if they made school more interesting kids would pay more attention in class. I thought it was an astute observation. I know that looking back on my schooling experience I was bored out of my skull most of the time (That's one of the primary reasons why we homeschool). But when it came to my response to him, I waffled. My hatred of the schooling system has cooled a bit, I think. And, I think, part of the reason why is because of my experience coaching Little League baseball. I know that as a coach you try like hell to make practices as interesting and fun as possible, and there are just some kids that refuse to quit screwing around and disrupting practice. There is always the child who quips, when are we going to do something fun.

Children and Mythological Thinking

"What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way--but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that. Instead they're overwhelmed with ten million names, dates, and facts they 'should' know, but that vanish from their heads the moment they're no longer needed to pass a test. It's like handing a thousand-page medical text to a four-year old who wants to know where babies come from."--[Daniel Quinn, pg.148, My Ishmael]

Children and School

More on parenting, with some schooling weaved in.

These quotes, and the section that it was pulled from, changed the way I parent and how I percieve my schooling experience. Plainly put it was dull. Of course that was thirty years ago, but from what I see things haven't changed much.

"Children don't need schooling. They need access to what they want to learn--and that means they need access to the world outside the home." [Daniel Quinn, Pg. 166, My Ishmael]

"But, of course, having your children underfoot in the workplace would seriously reduce efficiency and productivity. Even though sending them to educational detention centers is terrible for children, it's unquestionably wonderful for buisness. The system I've outlined here will never be implemented among the people of your culture as long as you value buisness over people." [Daniel Quinn, pg. 165, My Ishmael]

I especially like the part about valuing "buisness over people." I've liked it ever since I read it over a decade ago. It's clear, to me at least, that our current political and economic systems(Which schooling gets us ready for) value products over human and nonhuman life.

Mythology and School

For the past week or so, I've been reading through Daniel Quinn's essays over at the Ishmael Community. Mainly because a friend of mine asked me what essays he should pass on to a friend of his. What usually happens when I go back and read Quinn's work I learn something new. This time a paragraph about mythology from an interview he did in August of 2000 jumped out at me.

Mythology arises among people spontaneously--and only spontaneously. The UFO-invasion mythology of the last half century has sprung up in response to the "invasion" into our lives of sciences and technologies that seem increasingly "alien" to us. In the fifties, the growth of Soviet military power terrified us, and UFO mythology responded with endless stories of combat encounters with militarily superior UFOs. As the Soviet threat faded and health care became increasingly depersonalized and incomprehensible, UFO mythology began to concentrate on abduction stories about people being taken into spaceship hospitals for mysterious and painful tests they didn’t want or understand, administered by medical scientists who were oblivious or indifferent to the suffering of their "patients." As incomprehensible genetic manipulation by human scientists began to loom as a threat, UFO mythology began to assign convoluted genetic motives to UFO abductors. (You ask if we should "do away" with mythology, but you can no more do away with mythology than you can do away with anxiety or hope.)

And you can’t create "new" mythology by fiat. You can, however, expose mythology AS mythology, which is the task I’ve undertaken in my books.

The above paragraph has got me thinking about the mythologies that we use to justify sending our kids to school. Quinn mentions those myths HERE.

The need for schooling is bolstered by two well-entrenched pieces of cultural mythology. The first and most pernicious of these is that children will not learn unless they're compelled to--in school. It is part of the mythology of childhood itself that children hate learning and will avoid it at all costs. Of course, anyone who has had a child knows what an absurd lie this is. From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world. If they grow up in a family in which four languages are spoken, they will be speaking four languages by the time they're three or four years old--without a day of schooling, just by hanging around the members of their family, because they desperately want to be able to do the things they do.

That's the first myth. After reading that paragraph I can't help but think about the fact that I spent the majority of my time as a child sitting in a classroom bored out of my skull. And the crazy thing is that almost all of the adults around me said that I needed school, and if didn't go I would be dumb. But notice that I said almost all of the adults.

My Grandpa didn't believe this, he said most of the teachers were educated idiots. I don't know if I necessarily agreed with him than or now, but his opinions about the idea of schooling and the people that ran it was a lifeline for me. There weren't many adults out there that I knew talking like this, so naturally I had to think about it. And now that I think of it, he threw me a couple of lifelines throughout my life that I would like to write about sometime.

Back to the second myth:

One final argument people advance to support the idea that children need all the schooling we give them is that there is vastly more material to be learned today than there was in prehistoric times or even a century ago. Well, there is of course vastly more material that can be learned, but we all know perfectly well that it isn't being taught in grades K to twelve. Whole vast new fields of knowledge exist today--things no one even heard of a century ago: astrophysics, biochemistry, paleobiology, aeronautics, particle physics, ethology, cytopathology, neurophysiology--I could list them for hours. But are these the things that we have jammed into the K-12 curriculum because everyone needs to know them? Certainly not. The idea is absurd. The idea that children need to be schooled for a long time because there is so much that can be learned is absurd. If the citizen's education were to be extended to include everything that can be learned, it wouldn't run to grade twelve, it would run to grade twelve thousand, and no one would be able to graduate in a single lifetime.

There are the two myths that we use to justify sending our kids off to school for the majority of their childhood.

Right now I'm thinking those two schooling myths were spontaneously created because we live in an industrial society. In the world of work children are capable of doing a lot of the jobs, but the jobs just aren't there for them to do. So the role that school plays in this industrial society is that of a holding pen, for the most part. Those two myths are what we use to keep them there. And over time children actually start to believe those myths themselves, they actually believe they can't learn without school.

System Failure

Sonny comments on my last post:

What I meant was to picture when people worked so many hours they didn't have much time with their children. Those children go through school and think it's what their parents worked for, to give them that. Actually it isn't, their parents' taxes paid for the school, but those who had time to take a civic advisory interest and choose what kind of schools to build and what school laws to have were these industrialists and their social set, as in the citation. Then the children of one generation pass it on to the next, adding some extracurricular activities, trying to build "the American dream" school experience for them. Some of them are forgetting the horrors of school or think they can paper them over with a little more activities. The reason that in a way almost all of us "don't know better" is a cultural rift: industrialization, urbanization, immigration, mass schooling, all acting together, that separated culture that might have been from culture of the television-consumer-driver age.

I think in a way this just another aspect of the Great Forgetting. It's terrible. No wonder we feel alienated.

Here is my response to what the teacher had to say about my first letter:

This letter is a follow up to Zachary Tranmer’s response to my letter titled: “Limited Choices”.

He mentions that his perspective is that of a teacher for the past nine years and as a parent with two children in the Spooner School System (one a recent graduate).

I first of all want to point out that I’m not attacking teachers here; I’m criticizing the effects of the coercive educational system they teach in. I’ve had some really great teachers and some really horrible teachers in the past. Mr. Tranmer may be one of those great ones, I don’t know.

But his perspective may be clouded because he has a lot invested in that coercive system I’m criticizing. If what I sad is true in my last letter (That 12 years of
compulsory schooling breaks the will of many children, it stifles their sense of curiosity and wonder, and teaches them to wish away their time) for the vast majority of students, than Mr. Tranmer is forced to face the fact that he teaches, and his children participate, in that system. By his defensive letter he is obviously not going to allow any criticism of it.

Mr. Tranmer also pointed out that I portrayed a bleak picture of life in my last letter. Well, he missed a very clear distinction that needs to be pointed out here: the educational systems and wage slave systems that I’ve criticized are NOT life. I’m sorry he’s lumped them together as one, but I have not. One can enjoy life immensely and hate their job or school. We are complex beings capable of different emotions.

He than goes on to say “It seems our lot is to have our creativity and wonder stifled at an early age by being placed in an institution where our choices are few and all decisions are made for us. We spend years watching the clock, wishing we were elsewhere only to end up in a dead-end job living a meaningless life. We than die afraid after spending time on life support.”

Mr. Tranmer has just described what most of us experience living in the Modern Era. And fortunately, I’m not alone in saying this. Philosophers like: Lewis Mumford, R.D Laing, Sigmund Freud, Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, and so many others have said basically the same thing. A trip to the local library would reveal all of this. Wasn’t it Henry David Thoreau that said, “ Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”?

The coercive educational and wage slave systems of this culture are actually something quite new in the history of humankind. That gives me good feelings. Because it illustrates that there are other ways to educate and labor, and that is a very important realization when it comes to facing the problems we face.

I will still be voting no to both school referendum options on April 3rd. It’s a statement against the coercive educational system that most of us dreaded waking up for on our school days when we were kids.

More on Schooling

In the last post Sonny commented: "What he said in opposition isn't even fully true, modern school was mostly designed to produce factory workers, and the children of factory workers accepted it and passed it on their children because they didn't know any better."

This is so true. Here is a small section from an essay titled: Against School, that John Taylor Gatto wrote for Harper's Magazine in September of 2003.

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Thank you for your comment, Sonny.

Response to Last Weeks Letter to the Editor.

Here is a response to the letter I wrote to the editor of our local newspaper. Last year I had another teacher respond to one of my letters too. (It's the second letter)Isn't it ironic how the people that are employed by the system seem to be the the most uptight about anyone who criticizes it. Wasn't it Upton Sinclair who said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair

Can do better

I am writing in response to last week’s letter from Curt Hubatch entitled “Limited choices.” My perspective is that of a teacher for the past nine years in the public education system in Webster and as a parent with two children in the Spooner school system (one a recent graduate).

Hubatch certainly portrays a bleak picture of life. It seems our lot is to have our creativity and wonder stifled at an early age by being placed in an institution where our choices are few and all decisions are made for us. We spend years watching the clock, wishing we were elsewhere only to end up in a dead-end job living a meaningless life. We then die afraid after spending time on life support.

And the culprit responsible for this dismal succession of events is our public educational system. So he will be voting “no” on the upcoming referendum as a way to strike back at this sorry state of affairs and to redress his 15-year-old grudge. How sad for him.

Contrary to Hubatch’s belief that our education system was designed to teach us to wish away our precious time, it actually was implemented as a means for society to formally pass on its culture, beliefs, and knowledge to our children.

The role of education in our country has evolved over the years, until now universal mandatory education is considered the norm and a foundation of our democracy.

At all times though, it has been influenced by and has reflected the prevailing attitudes and problems of the larger society rather than being a source of those problems. It is certainly an imperfect system and its outcomes arise directly from the quality of the teachers, students, parents, and resources the local community put into it.

The current building situation in Spooner reflects what occurred in the Webster school district about six years ago. The high school building was old, dilapidated, and increasingly inadequate to meet the current building and education standards. Several failed referendums were finally overturned after an open house brought many members of the community into the building to see what the conditions were. Voters realized that as a community they could do much better, and the referendum passed by an almost two-to-one majority vote. The results have been dramatic.

Morale among the students, staff, and community has increased. Community pride is very evident and really came out when their basketball team made a run in the playoffs that paralleled Spooner’s.

People use the facility for adult education classes, including a licensed practical nurse course and a University of Wisconsin-Extension Master Gardener class using the ITV [interactive television] facilities.

Community members use the weight-lifting room, and in the winter some walk the halls for exercise. There is an annual community talent show that packs the combination cafeteria/auditorium because of the enhanced seating, lighting, and sound facilities.

The drama department has produced several full-scale musicals, including West Side Story and Grease, that provided numerous students an opportunity to succeed in areas outside of the classroom. The new facility has allowed community members to choose to exercise their creativity and wonder in a variety of ways.

My children had and are receiving what my wife and I consider a first-rate high school education in Spooner. The school district offers students a wide variety of opportunities that include academics, athletics, music, drama, technical courses, driver’s ed, and community involvement. And all of this in spite of and not because of the present facilities.

The teachers, board, and the administration have done a marvelous job keeping the district viable in the face of increased state and federal education mandates and a concurrent decrease in revenue.

The present limited financial situation and the need to maintain an increasingly outdated structure is going to force some very hard choices. Future cutbacks are going to have a very negative impact on the ability of the district to carry out its goal of providing a quality education to as many students as possible.

In the April election, my wife and I are going to check “yes” in both boxes [new high school and additional program funds]. We are choosing to pay more money in property taxes and are willing to make the necessary sacrifices to do this. We consider it money well-spent and an investment in the future of our children and community.

If the referendum fails again, the school district will somehow manage to muddle through and do what we as a society require it to do.

But we can and should do better.

117 Months

I suppose you could call this a journal entry.

For 117 months out of my childhood I had to sit in a classroom for close to eight hours a day. I didn’t have a choice about this; it was the law of the State of Wisconsin. And my parents couldn’t home school me because they were wage slaves.

I’m 32 years old now. And now that I’m in my thirties I’m really starting to realize and wake up to the effects of that 13 year process of schooling. Ran Prieur puts this well here:

I think the answer is that power isn't actually being taken but being blocked, in nonhumans by simply killing them and in humans by socialization that begins in infancy, punishing people for having a will of their own, for being aware, for channeling any bottom-up power, until by age 30 most of us are barely alive, almost as Philip K. Dick wrote: "Not a person but a sort of walking, hiding symptom of their way of life."

I’m reading A Language Older Than Words probably for about the fourth time. The book just keeps getting better the more times I read it. These two small sections jumped out at me this time around.

In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided. When we do allow self-evident truths to percolate past our defenses and into our consciousness, they are treated like so many hand grenades rolling across the dance floor of an improbably macabre party. We try to stay out of harm’s way, afraid they will go off, shatter our delusions, and leave us exposed to what we have done to the world and to ourselves, exposed as the hollow people we have become. And so we avoid these truths, these self-evident truths, and continue the dance of world destruction. pg.2

He had a point. Newspapers lying to serve their own interests go back as far as newspapers themselves. The turn-of-the-century historian Henry Adams put it as clearly as possible” The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where the interests are involved.”

Newspapers manifest the culture as a whole. Just as it is true that any father who would crush a child’s will would not be able to speak of it honestly, so, too, a culture that is snuffing out life on the planet would necessarily lie and dissemble to protect itself from the truth. Environmentalists lie, industrialists lie, newspapers lie. Parent’s lie, children lie. We all lie, and we are all afraid. Afraid to not know what is going on, and even more afraid of finding out. The opposite is true as well. Honest discourse is the first and most important step in stopping destruction. Pg.68

This is one of the main reasons I had to sit through all those hours in a classroom being cut off from beautifual and dynamic community of life. It was to perpetuate the lies!

Now I’m going to go sit quietly in the woods and listen to birdsong. Something I should have been doing over twenty years ago, or at least playing out there.

Why oh why wasn’t there someone around in my community to offer something like an Invisible school?

I hate this culture.

Limited Choices

Last week my letter to the editor was published in our local newspaper. I wrote about schooling because on April 3rd the taxpayers in our school district will be voting for a referendum to see if we should spend more money on building a new school. It's been voted down for over ten years now.


Limited Choices

I hate spending money on things that don’t work, simply because I work to hard for money to just throw it away.

You see, now that I’ve had approximately fifteen years to start to shake off the effects of schooling, I’m starting to see why I was forced to go to school. And it wasn’t to foster wonder and curiosity, which is the real meaning of education.

I’ve learned the system of schooling was unintentionally (according to some thinkers it was intentionally), designed to teach us how to wish away the most precious gift we’ve been given: our time. That is why the clock is the most important piece of technology in the classroom. How many times did you, or do you, look at the clock wishing for that bell to ring?

We only have so much time here before we die. And time spent doing one thing is time lost that could’ve been spent on another. That’s the way the economy of time works. You can spend time doing something you love or on something you hate, it’s up to you.

When the tragedy arises is when you don’t get to choose how you spend your time. This is what the system of schooling does so well, it chooses how your SUPPOSE to spend your time. Eventually we become so accustomed to this that we forget we actually have a choice in the matter. Before we know it most of us are then spending our time at jobs we hate to pay the bills. And more sooner than later were looking back on a life that could’ve been lived another way. This is one of the reasons why I think some people are so afraid to die; they haven’t truly lived life to its fullest, so they end up in hospitals being kept alive by machines. It’s a sad story for many.

When any system denies an individual their basic freedom of choice they don’t last long. And I’m not talking about “false choices” here. As philosopher Derrick Jensen writes, “There is an important difference between making a choice and selecting an option from artificially limited alternatives. In order to make a choice, that person must be free not to choose.” In an extreme example, lets say you’re given a choice to choose as to which one of your two best friends should live and which one should die, if you pick neither you die yourself. That’s an example of limited alternatives. The alternative of not participating in some type of schooling doesn’t exist for children.

Why spend money on a system that limits how children spend their time? I will be checking both “NO” boxes on the April, 3rd school referendum vote.

Grades

At the beginning of next month our local school district will be having a referendum vote on increasing spending limits on new programs and a new school building. The building has been used since 1939. And they've been trying to push this plan through for the past ten years, and everytime it has been voted down. I hope it is again.

So I've been thumbing through Walking on Water, by Derrick Jensen looking for quotes to include in my letter to our local newspaper about the vote. I ran across a quote by Jensen himself that has stuck with me since I read it years ago.

As I've written elsewhere, grades are a problem. On the most general level, they're an explicit acknowledgement that what you're doing is insufficiently interesting or rewarding for you to do it on your own. Nobody ever gave you a grade for learning how to play, how to ride a bicycle, or how to kiss. One of the best ways to destroy love for any of these activities would be through the use of grades and the coercion and judgement they represent. Grades are a cudgel to bludgeon the unwilling into doing what they don't want to do, an important instrument in inculcating children into a lifelong pattern of subservience to whatever authority happens to be thrust over them. Pg.71

Advice

I really hate the effects schooling has on most people. And if I had the chance to put together a small booklet or pamphlet explaining why school is what it is I 'd include this advice Ran Prieur gave to a 19 year old college freshman on Feb. 20th.

I really like this part: If you're not going into debt, college isn't so bad. The main thing you're learning is not the content of the classes, but how to think and act like an "educated" person. For that reason, college is much more valuable for lower class people than for higher class people who already know how to act like that.

Responses to my Letter to the Editor

My letter to the editor last week provoked two responses. I wonder if anyone who hates school and percieves the schooling system for what it is will write in? I hope so.

Here are the two responses. And if anyone who reads this wants to respond and publish it in my local newspaper I will send your letter to the editor.

Stereotyping

This letter is written in regards to an article in the Reader Opinion last week titled “Time is Precious.”

I am a sophomore currently enrolled in Spooner High School. When I read this article, it made me sick to think that this is the way certain members in our community support students and school in general.

I disagree with the idea that we students do not want to be in school.
I think that there are many students who enjoy going to school. Our school may not be the best, but we are proud of the education we receive. We are working toward careers that we will be happy doing for a lifetime.

I do not think that it is right to stereotype us saying we are bored with education.
Maybe when you were in high school you should have taken advantage of what was offered instead of spending your time wishing that you were not there. I can name many other students who are enjoying learning and looking forward to a career that they will thoroughly enjoy.

Cutting budgets does not help a school. It makes the feeling of dislike towards a school only grow stronger. Of course there are going to be students who do not want to be there, but there is also a great number of students who like being there.
Letters like yours make us, as students, feel like we are not appreciated in the community. When the hard work we do is not appreciated, what kind of result do you expect from us?

We need more people who are here to help us, not look down on what we are doing.

Bradley Talbert
Trego

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Education reform

I find it very easy to agree with Curt Hubatch’s thoughts [Reader Opinion, “Time is Precious,” March 2]. He wants to enlighten us by pointing out that our society has unmotivated workers and students. It is easy to be a guru like author Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael when your goal is to point out the problem with society or the institutions within society. The difficult task is to provide solutions.

As one of the teachers in Spooner High School, I often wonder why we beat our heads against the wall trying to convince kids that education will somehow benefit them in their future. The public education provides opportunities to learn perseverance, to set goals, and practice competition – all things that we needed to establish an entrepreneurial spirit that makes the United States a great place to live.
Utopia is a dream all humans have had since early humans were knocking rocks together, but thank goodness they kept knocking those rocks together because the result is they survived and made it.

Yes, our public schools have problems, but the education system is a product of societal needs and wants. If society values monetary wealth (as Hubatch alluded to in his letter – $5 million in the bank) then society sets up rules and guidelines to follow in order to achieve that.

Aside from winning the lottery, how is the goal of achieving a comfortable bank account possible without education? With school funding constantly being cut, perhaps society is making the educational reform that Hubatch alluded to.
Reforming education is not the solution to the problem of having unhappy citizens; reforming society is the solution that will eventually lead to the reform of education.

I look forward to Hubatch’s next letter to the editor where he enlightens us with solutions to the problem.

In the mean time, I will continue working on the front line with my fellow teachers in helping students deal with the society they live in and find their place within it
Dan Schullo
Spooner

Ishmael Unschooling Northwest Wisconsin Education