Who are we to refuse free schooling?

Radical Mothering No. 21

I recently got a message from someone who was considering home educating their child, but was also stuck on something that felt super big for them, and that I will paraphrase here: Who are we to decide that homeschooling is better than the education system in the US, one of the most successful countries in the world? Why would humanitarian organizations have such a focus on providing the education that we can access for free, if not because that education is important for children’s future? How do we step out of a system that seems to be backed by research?

Oh Gosh.

Ok I’ll admit my first reaction was Oh Goodness, Where Do I Begin. But then I took a step back and read this comment again, and decided that it was something that needed to be broken down. Because it’s a legitimate question that people might ask themselves!! It’s a question about cultural assumptions, about trust in institutions, about capitalism and globalization, about educational research, and so much more.

First off, I’d like to strongly disagree with the assessment that the USA is one of the most successful countries in the world. Successful at what? Let me rattle off a few fun stats for you! I’ll try to keep them relevant to education and schooling, even though there would be room to go super wide on this one!

Recent data shows that 21% of US adults have difficulty completing basic literacy tasks. That’s one adult in every five. The OECD Adult Skills survey in 2003, found that “despite universal basic education in advanced countries, some adults have slipped through the net, leaving them with very weak literacy and numeracy.” You don’t say.

There’s more. 9.4% of children aged 3 to 17 were diagnosed with anxiety in 2016-2019, and 4.4% of same age children were found to be depressed in the same time period. And this was BEFORE the Covid pandemic. These are US statistics, according to the CDC.

In a 2020 survey of children’s wellbeing and happiness, there was no correlation found between economic wealth and overall happiness of children. In fact, some of the most “educated”, industrialized countries scored towards the bottom end, including the UK and South Korea. The 3 countries to score highest in overall wellbeing were Albania, Romania and Croatia.

Ok I could keep going, like endlessly. But I’ll stop because ultimately I think we need to talk about what we mean when/if we say the US is one of the most successful countries. Successful at what? Clearly not at teaching literacy or numeracy, and clearly not at ensuring mental health. If we actually look at the data, and also listen to children and adult’s lived experiences of the past 20 or so years, we will see that school is actually not doing what many of us think it should be doing. It is not teaching all children to read and write. It is not creating a space where children can be happy, healthy and safe.

It is not even following evidence-based teaching practice, if we care about that at all. There is SO much research and evidence about how children learn best, and mainstream schooling routinely ignores it. There is in fact a huge disconnect between the academic research around learning, and how children are taught in schools. We also have lots of research about how socio-economic status is a huge factor in successful outcomes as adults. We know it is one of the major factors that determines future success. There is much research on how gender, race, ethnic background, and disability influence outcomes of preschool children. Mainstream school is woefully NOT backed by research. It was never founded on research to begin with, and it has continued to mostly ignore the research around how children actually exist in the world, how they develop (guess what? not all in the same way at the same time!), and how they learn.

So the US can be seen as only moderately successful at education, if I were to make a generous statement.

Do we perhaps mean that the US is successful as a nation? According to the IMF, the US has the highest GDP of all countries. But in practice, does this mean that your individual family or your child will also benefit economically? Err, no. If you are in the bottom 50% of US families, economically speaking, you will own a mere 1% of the total wealth in the US. 1%!! I bet you many of these people went to school, and yet they are not sharing in the “success” of the country. I think we need to stop perpetuating the narrative that the US is successful, unless we are basing success on TOTAL wealth generated by the country. And if we are, then perhaps what we mean is that the country as a whole is successful, but that the people living in it are mostly not (remember the 50% who own 1% of wealth?).

And what is the point of a country’s success if it does not share its generated wealth with half its population? It would be like living in a family with one wage-earner, who kept and spent all their earnings on themselves, and then claimed we were a successful family and we shouldn’t want to change the way we live. Because it’s successful. O-kay.

There are a bunch of other stats I could go into - adult mental health, adult physical health, maternal mortality, access to healthcare, access to food, drug use, racism, and so on. But I won’t. Because ultimately, it’s about what matters to you as a person and as a family. Is wealth important? Is joy valuable? Is literacy crucial? And is the US managing to create a society of people who can access their most important thing?

Ok I could go on, but I’ll move on to the question of the humanitarian push for education.

I would recommend the book Escaping Education - it’s basically a recap of why an increasingly globalized system of education, spearheaded by the US and international organizations such as the UN and the OECD, is not about educating children at all, but about political and economic agendas. Education as a human right is perhaps one of the biggest cons of our time. I recommend watching Schooling the World by Carol Black, and reading some of the academic research around how neoliberal economic interests are becoming the main driving force behind the push for universal standards of education. It is truly eye-opening.

Some of you might also enjoy reading anything by John Taylor Gatto, and Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich. Carol Black’s essays explain so elegantly why our education system is not built with a view of what humans are actually like. It is not based on the evidence, and it does not make evolutionary sense.

We have strayed so far from understanding that learning is simply a part of life, that there are multiple ways to do it, and that the ways we do it are often relevant to the place, people and culture they exist in. There is no one “education,” and pretending there is is frankly dangerous. There are many grassroots movements that are challenging the increasingly uniform, standardized, global view of education and taking childhood and learning into their own hands.

Here’s an alternative view: mainstream schooling in the US is a one-size-fits-all, coercive model that yes, is free to access, but is not in any way superior to other institutionalized systems of education, compared to other wealthy, industrialized countries. In fact, literacy and numeracy are higher in many other countries (see above!).

And the US education system is in fact inferior, if we take a look at smaller grassroots models of living around the world. We will see that our education system makes no sense from an evolutionary perspective, because it raises children who are detached from their culture, from local knowledge, from a connection with people and place. And this has had huge repercussions in so-called developed countries.

I understand that many of us need a place for our children to go; I reject that that place HAS to be school. It may need to be school because there are currently few alternatives - but that doesn’t mean school is beneficial. It simply means that it is a forced choice, a “dictatorship of no alternatives” (Roberto Unger). And our so-called developed countries are spreading this dictatorship far and wide in the name of children’s right to education, as if children were simply not learning or developing before Western countries “invented” education.

So to go back to the original comment: homeschool your child if that’s what you feel is best for them, if they are happier that way. The education system is not a success. It is not the only way or even the best way - and definitely not the research-backed way! - for your child to live the life they have a right to live.

They will probably be okay if they go to school; if you have generational wealth, or any other privilege, your child will in all likelihood be okay in terms of future success, if not in terms of future happiness and health. If you do not hold a huge amount of privilege - then just know that school was not designed by and for you, or your child. They might get lucky, or they might come to actual harm. That is the reality of a system that is built for the purpose of essentially maintaining the political, social and economic status quo.

If you take your child out of school, you are not ignoring the experts or the research, you are not dismissing centuries of evidence-based practice, you are not blindly opting out from an education system that works.

You are doing the exact opposite of all of that.