Forty years ago, when our brain-injured children began to read better than well children across the street, we had to ask the question-Is there an advantage to being brain-injured?
Of course, no one thinks that the severely brain-injured child has any intellectual advantage when compared to the well child. The Gentle Revolution is now more than four decades old and our profoundly and severely brain-injured children are still outperforming their well peers. In fact, the gap between our brain-injured children's performance and their well peers is growing, with the well child very much on the losing end.
While the whole world feels sorry for our brain-injured children, they are becoming speed-readers and superb mathematicians, and they are learning their third or fourth language. They are becoming real renaissance men and women.
It is now very clear that our brain-injured children, regardless of the degree of their injuries, do have a clear advantage over well children.
They do not go to school.
Instead, they learn at home with their mother and father. Whether their parents have a fine education or whether they have never attended high school, our parents have proven beyond a shadow of doubt that they are superb teachers.
Across the United States we now have about one million children who are being home-schooled. In the state of Pennsylvania more than 200,000 children are being schooled at home.
Wealthy people never sent their children to public schools in the first place. Middle income parents started withdrawing their children from public schools a decade ago and, now that children are killing children in our schools, this process is escalating. As everyone knows, little children from low income families are in schools that are a national disgrace. Parents of these children are now demanding vouchers so that they have a fighting chance of finding a real school for their children.
What a mess.
When the first public schools were founded in New England, parents there rioted. They did not like the government deciding what was going to happen to their children. An ominous beginning. Now we have come full circle.
The debate about our public school system has never been noisier than it is right now. Politicians and educators are running around like chickens with their heads chopped off defending and attacking every aspect of the public schools. There are those who propose that the federal government should get out of the school business altogether.
To the left we have those who see education as a kind of cross between day care and school. They want children to leave home and go to school at younger and younger ages. They love the Head Start program, even though its creator said of it after its first year, "All we have done is to teach little children to hate school a year earlier." They want a kind of warm and cuddly education. A lack of self-esteem is viewed as the cause of poor performance. In their desire to build self-esteem they pass students from one grade to the next, whether they have mastered the subjects being taught or not. They make all curriculum, books, materials and tests for the "average child". But they have redefined average to mean incredibly mediocre. Socially, "jocks", "geeks", and "nerds" rule.
To the right we have those who want a tough, aggressive, and competitive education. In their desire to build better test scores they are only too happy to flunk and discard. They want tests, tests, and more tests. They love the notion of pitting one student against another to compete for grades and resources. In their world only the strong should survive. They want the school year to go on forever. (After all, suffering builds character and it keeps those annoying kids off the street and out of the labor force longer.)
A noisy debate to be sure, but not a robust one.
For parents, both of these worlds are scary. It turns out that the radicals in the education debate are not on the right or the left. The real revolutionaries are in the middle-the parents. What they want is a school that is more like their own living room and less like a penitentiary run by the inmates.
To those on the left: There can be no self-esteem without real competence and real ability. When we move students on without giving them mastery of the information and ability to use that information to solve problems, there will be no self-esteem. Self-esteem is a product of ability. The "average child" may be the darling of the educational world, but any teacher worth his or her salt knows the truth.
Even though it is the best-kept secret in education, the truth is that the "average child" does not exist. He is a truant, a "no-show" of very long duration.
It turns out that each and every child is unique. Each child has different likes and dislikes. Each child has different problems and strengths. Each child has different hopes and aspirations. No two are alike.
There are no "average" children.
To those on the right: There is no place in real teaching for competition. There never has been and there never will be. Pitting one student against another does not increase ability to learn or to think-it decreases it. Competition introduces the element of intimidation and failure. There must always be a winner and a loser. True intellectual growth is a solitary pursuit, not a group activity. Learning takes place in a happy, safe environment of mutual respect between the student and the teacher. Testing is the single best way to decrease the child's desire to learn and explore. Learning is taking in information and discovering how to use that information to solve problems. It is not the process of being forced to regurgitate that information repeatedly while being compared (often unfavorably) with your fellow students. The length of time children spend in school is already too long-much too long.
Twelve years is a very long sentence. One could probably rob a bank at high noon and not get a twelve-year sentence (and remember, in school there is no reduced sentence for good behavior).
To both sides: The sheep model just doesn't work. It just doesn't. When we herd our children together like sheep, the most disorganized, dysfunctional youngsters set the social tone. They intimidate and harm those around them. This creates an unstable, unsafe social environment for children. This is not a place where children learn social graces. This is a dog-eat-dog world that does not favor the honest, kind or gentle child.
This is not socialization; it is de-socialization. Every parent in the United States in their heart-of-hearts knows this.
Ten years ago the Presidential Commission on Education completed an extensive review of the public school system in the United States. The critique that the commission wrote was scathing. It concluded by stating: "If a foreign power tried to impose upon us the school system which we presently have, we would go to war to prevent it".
When The Gentle Revolution first began we were often asked, "Are you trying to tear down the school system?" This question always makes my father laugh. Child brain developmentalists are skilled architects and builders. We have no time for demolition. Besides, the school system has been doing such a superb job of destroying itself that it doesn't need any help from us or anyone else.
Who would have believed that one morning we would wake up and find that the Berlin Wall had come down?
Do we need a war on education to save our children?
No.
Just a gentle revolution.
by Janet Doman, Director
