A school reform should reintigrate the family
- Caviat: if the family holds harmful beliefs, teh family may not lead the child toward the best place either. Thus i still believe education should be primarily self directed
- Childhood development plays a strong role in the development of mental illness and addiction
- Stress and maternal deprivation in infancy and childhood leads to excess stress chemicals
- The quality of the relationships with childhood caregivers determines the capacity for a healthy stress-response
- A stressful childhood can result in an overactive stress response in later life
- A secure attachment in childhood is necessary for the development of the capacity to be alone
- Being alone in the presence of the mother is necessary for the infant to develop of a separate identity
We need to adopt a means of education which embraces independent study and encourages self-reliance. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.
The “Curriculum of Family” is at the heart of any good life. We’ve gotten away from that curriculum—it’s time to return to it. The way to sanity in education is for our schools to take the lead in releasing the stranglehold of institutions on family life, to promote during schooltime confluences of parent and child that will strengthen family bonds.
Our greatest problem in getting the kind of grassroots thinking going that could reform schooling is that we have large vested interests preempting all the air time and profiting from schooling as it is, despite their rhetoric to the contrary. We have to demand that new voices and new ideas get a hearing: my ideas and yours. We’ve all had a bellyful of authorized voices mediated by television and the press—a decade-long free-for-all debate is what is called for now, not any more “expert” opinions. Experts in education have never been right; their “solutions” are expensive and self-serving and always involve further centralization. We’ve seen the results.
References
- Gatto, T., John. (1992). Dumbing Us Down The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling Chapter 2. The Psychopathic School (p. 45). Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers.