Rethinking School
How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education
Editorial Review
Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all-or even most-students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels over differences in learning style. Thousands of educators, policy-makers, and thinkers are at work on school reform. But our school system is so huge that reform movements are equally huge, dispersed, and unfocused. And since school reform isn’t happening soon enough to make a difference to you and your child, you’ll have to take control of the K-12 years yourself and use your ingenuity to bend the system to fit your child.
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Wisdom to Share
Our current school system was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Built inextricably into that model is the assumption that “real intelligence consists of a capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning…what we come to think of as academic ability.”
You’ll have to take control of the K-12 years yourself and use your ingenuity to bend the system to fit your child.
If your child is struggling, there may be an incompatibility between their maturity level and the grade/year of school in which they’re placed.
Remember that the problem is a mismatch between the system and the student, not a deficiency in your child. Diagnose it but then use these strategies to work the system to fit your child.
Research proved that homework only teaches self-discipline if parents, not teachers, systemically structure and supervise homework with that goal in mind—a pattern that many families simply cannot follow.
Children aren’t miniature adults. Requiring them to deal with adult levels of pressure isn’t good teaching or parenting.
The best learning happens when students are working with, not against, their natural wiring. But education too often becomes a long struggle against their inborn inclinations.
There comes a point when you’ve flexed the system as hard as you can—and it still doesn’t fit. If the fit is bad enough, dare to step out.
True appreciation of the value of education only comes with maturity. For many children, something has to click in the brain before they become self-motivated, engaged learners. In the meantime, you need to be a little crafty in how you teach.
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