Day 882 of 1000
I am a big fan of Matt Walsh and an even bigger fan of the idea that not everyone should go to college. That being said, this blog post that explains why Matt did not go to college seems very wrong-headed in one of its premises. It is an excellent post worthy of a read. I am in complete agreement with him on his decision not to go to college. I have described my belief that many very capable people would be much better served by apprenticeships, community college training, working in an industry to learn the business, then starting their own, etc., etc. Matt has made quite a cogent case for those who are gifted writers to write rather than matricule. I agree with all that. The part with which I do not agree is this:
I think it was ninth grade, or maybe tenth, and I was sitting in afterschool detention. I’d been sentenced to hard time for being late to class, even though I had a valid excuse. See, I was only late because I hated school with a burning passion. I dreaded every class, every assignment, every test, every worksheet, every mound of busywork, every shallow and forced interaction with peers I couldn’t relate to or connect with or understand; every moment, every second, every part, every inch of every aspect of my public educational experience. I hated it. I hated all of it. I was suffocating.
It had been ten years of public school up to that point and it wasn’t getting better. It never would, and I knew it. I was able to hang on for a long time, managing adequate grades, even an ‘A’ here and there. I was “passing,” at the very least. But in high school that changed. I started failing and failing miserably. We’d take tests, I’d try my hardest, but often I’d still get zero answers correct. ZERO. Fifty questions — all wrong. It was humiliating. Eventually I earned a reputation. I was the kid who “didn’t care” and “didn’t assert himself.” I decided to go with that image — false though it was – because I’d rather be seen as the smart slacker than exposed as the moron who actually tried and still failed.
Wow. To my way of thinking, based on Matt’s very articulate blog, this is more an indictment of the government school education system than of any lack of ability on Matt’s part. We ran into any number of situatons during our homeschool years where we were frustrated our kids were not learning. The kids were frustrated, too. Sometimes we found a way to work around it and sometimes we fought through it just to get to a minimum level of competence that was “good enough.” It seems to me that our society needs to educate our children to a certain level of competence whether they plan to be a PhD rocket surgeon, a millworker, a beautician, or a lawyer before they start into career training. Probably it should only take until about eighth grade, but the government steals an extra four years of our kids lives and still cannot get the material into their heads.
So, I think the answer to students like Matt might be to try a different approach. That is one of the things for which homeschool is better suited than any other learning environment about which I am aware. There are probably others, but I think we are hammering a lot of round kids into square holes these days. I am glad we got our kids out of the system sufficiently early that they did not have to suffer like Matt.
Betty Blonde #48 – 09/22/2008
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