An Article by ASFAR

The following is an article on educational freedom from a youth rights organization called Americans for a Society Free from Age Restrictions.

"Educational Freedom Position Paper

The guarantee of education is essential in a civilized society. All Americans should benefit from the opportunity to prepare for a successful future. But many do not. For many students, their years of schooling amount to little more than a waste of time and energy. For some, the experience is even worse, degrading, demoralizing, destructive.

The damage wrought by our school system is largely due to three misconceptions:

That all students of normal intelligence are capable of mastering all of the concepts and facts in the public school curriculum, at the time they are presented. Adults who have achieved a level of security in life may find it easy to recognize and accept their own limitations, brushing them off with a ready confession, "I have no head for math" or "I could never understand poetry." But for a child whose entire sense of self-worth is tied to the school grades which will determine his or her future, such failings are not trifles. Today more than ever, when a high school diploma is considered an essential requirement even for minimum wage employment, failure to grasp a required school subject can understandably make a student feel as if the door to a prosperous future is closed forever.

It is well known that readiness to understand and appreciate certain subjects depends on life experience, motivation, and psychological development, which vary from student to student. In the Republic, Plato advised postponing most academic study until the age of at least thirty. For how can a person who has never earned, spent or invested money, paid taxes, or voted in an election be expected to fully appreciate the value of mathematics, economics, political science or history? Many of our most admired and accomplished individuals of the 20th century did poorly in school as children, among them Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Will Rogers, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein. Samuel Clemens quit school at the age of eleven, the same age at which Woodrow Wilson learned to read. Clearly, these individuals learned what they needed to succeed somewhere, at some time, but it was not in school.

That in order to be well-rounded and successful citizens, all adults need to have mastered, at least well enough to earn a passing grade, all of the concepts and facts in the public school curriculum. Most adults today manage their everyday lives quite competently having never understood or long forgotten much of their public school curriculum. It is a rare occasion when one finds oneself trying to remember a concept or fact taught in school because it is actually needed, and in such rare cases, there are plenty of resources to which one can turn which will provide the needed information on the spot. Aside from basic reading and math, most of the necessary skills for work or other areas of life are learned at the time they will be used, when they are most relevant.

Diplomas, advanced degrees and respectable grades are important for future success mainly because employers too readily accept them as predictors of workplace competence. They have little choice. Faced with a pool of applicants with no work or life experience, they have no other way to distinguish between them. Most supervisors know that some of the best employees are the ones with the most undistinguished academic records, but they generally view these individuals as exceptions. In fact, some studies have indicated that there is no significant relationship between academic achievement and job performance.

Because the importance of one's school record is so heavily stressed by parents, teachers and counselors (not to mention politicians and other community leaders), children who experience early failure in school may come to the conclusion that they can never compete in the world of "respectable" citizens, and look around for other options. Gangs and criminal organizations have no academic admission requirements, and often operate quite successfully in spite of it!

That people other than the students themselves are best equipped to determine the curriculum of public schools. Since the establishment of mandatory school attendance laws in America in the early 1800s, concerned parents, educators, business leaders and politicians have criticized the inadequacy of public education. Some complain that tax dollars are being wasted on teaching methods that don't work; some object to subject matter that does not conform to their belief systems; some simply feel that students are not learning what they need to know. Parents who are dissatisfied with the public school system may be able to place their children in private or parochial schools, but although the atmosphere and quality of teaching may differ, the curriculum is usually very similar, since all schools must meet certain criteria for accreditation. For the majority of families that cannot afford tutors and cannot manage to home-school their children, there are simply not many choices, below the college level, in education.

If public schools are failing our children, they are doing so under the direction of professional educators and educational administrators, with a fair amount of input from parents and community groups. To the extent that our high school graduates are illiterate or ill-prepared, they have become that way because of the incompetence or lack of foresight of the adults who oversee their schooling. In such a massive bureaucracy as the public school system, with administrators who often have little awareness of the world outside of their own communities, and teachers with too little time to address the individual needs of students, truly valuable and forward-looking changes are hard to implement.

In other American institutions, the free market reveals what products and services are desired by the public. If a product does not sell, it disappears. If no one uses a service, its providers stop offering it. But since students, as consumers of education, have no choice but to accept what is available, educational institutions have little need to evaluate whether their product is useful or valuable. They are assured of a captive audience and continued funding no matter how poor their product really is.

We believe that the American education system:

Fails to level the playing field for all. By branding as failures students whose backgrounds, personalities, or talents do not conform with the established curriculum, schools hamper those students' chances of making successful use of the talents they do possess.

Fails to prepare students. By teaching irrelevant information, or teaching relevant information at a time when the information cannot be practiced and used in "real life", graduates emerge with no clear understanding of what knowledge will be important or useful to them in the future.

Creates a society of non-readers and non-learners. Because primary and secondary education is compulsory, it is seen as undesirable, something which one must be forced to endure. In the public school experience, students learn to do the least amount of work which will earn an acceptable grade. This attitude often lasts a lifetime.

Discourages creative or alternative intelligence. Because of grading systems, examination of students is generally confined to the most easily measurable kinds of testing. School teaches students to develop a "multiple choice mentality," which may handicap their ability to think "outside the box" and explore new options in decision-making.

Deprives students of the opportunity to explore their own preferences, values and options. In our school system, students are passive recipients of what others have decided to teach them. Too often, they graduate with no confidence, self-motivation or self-worth, for they have almost never been permitted to exercise their own judgment, even in deciding their own futures. It is not uncommon for recent graduates to refuse to make necessary decisions in their lives because they think they are not supposed to!

Possible solutions.

Stop age segregation. If students must be grouped, group by ability levels in specific subjects. This will alleviate the boredom of students who are more advanced in certain areas, who feel that they are wasting their time with insultingly basic material. It will also send the message that everyone has strengths and weakness, and that school is there to help students find their strengths and capitalize on them, rather than to punish them for their failures.

Make public education available to people of all ages. Instead of cramming all of the education into a person's first eighteen years of life, and expecting that knowledge to be sufficient for a lifetime, does it not make more sense to spread out the educational experience? Allowing adults to enroll in public school classes would eliminate the permanence of early decisions, which may later be regretted. With public education open to all ages, the adult who wishes he had studied calculus, or French, or auto repair, still can. The state may still limit the amount of public education a person can receive for free, without prescribing the ages at which a person may take advantage of it.

Repeal regulations regarding the educational experience of homeschoolers and private schools. Many students who try to break free of the homogenized form of learning public education provides find themselves running into bureaucratic brick walls when they attempt to homeschool or attend an alternative private school which does not conform to the traditional models. Homeschoolers in some states are faced with onerous form-filling and time-keeping requirements which place great burdens on students and parents attempting to home-school, while alternative schools in some states are faced with state regulations that, while perhaps suitable for cookie-cutter traditional schools, interfere with their new educational paradigms. It's time to do away with this unnecessary interference.

Provide more varied educational opportunities, including apprenticeships. It is time for us to recognize that not all people have the same educational needs. Many people need the experience of work before they can appreciate all that school has to offer. Many children in poverty simply cannot benefit from a program that does not immediately improve their family's welfare, and their own. Creative and artistic children would also benefit from alternative types of education, which foster the capabilities that traditional schools tend to discourage.

Change from the report card system to a system of skill certification. By emphasizing achievements, schools would provide more positive reinforcements. This system would also allow employers to have a better under-standing of the competencies of prospective employees, and permit job-seekers to capitalize on their proven skills and abilities.

Allow students to design their own educational experiences. Educators, parents, and counselors will surely play a role in these decisions, but since the student's own future is at stake, it should be the student who chooses what to study. Of course, a student may choose unwisely (just as many educational experts have), but if the door is open for future educational opportunities, the mistakes need not be disastrous. Designing their own education will help students to discover their own talents and capabilities, and increase their motivation to succeed in their own chosen paths.

Abolish compulsory education. Education is a precious commodity, and before it was made compulsory, students recognized its value. Children of ages past would gladly undergo great hardships in order to gain an education. It is only since it has been forced upon unwilling or unready children that it has become a daily grind, something to be endured or avoided. Even children who want to attend may find school is not a good environment for learning because of the many angry, disruptive, and sometimes violent kids who simply do not want to be there. We bemoan the fact that, even having grown up with compulsory schooling, many young adults still cannot read and do not possess the basic knowledge we expect all of our citizens to have. If school attendance is no longer required, perhaps many children will not learn to read and write quite as early as they would have otherwise, but they will surely, of their own choosing, take advantage of the great opportunities that are offered to them. And they will gain all the more for having chosen it themselves."