Ban on homeschooling
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Explosion of new form of learning
Throughout this book I paint a picture of efficient learning methods that underlie sparkling creativity. This enticing picture is largely irrelevant for most kids on this planet. Large swathes of this globe are limited by poverty, and/or by corrupt or underdeveloped political systems. However, the entire industrial world isn't much friendlier to the kids. Prussian system of schooling has become a default and dominates the years of youth. This system is inefficient and entirely incompatible with the natural creativity cycle or the needs of the learn drive. There is a beacon of hope though. That beacon was born in the cultural melting pot of the United States of America. America gave birth to many early pioneers of new educational approaches, which are basically a return to the old and tried method of elite education from the pre-industrial era: homeschooling and unschooling, as well as a modern variant of the latter: democratic schooling. Now that new the learning has taken root, it is bound to become more and more popular around the world. This process, however, is slowed down by various forces of evil, including evil that comes from a good heart or good intent mixed up with ignorance.
What and who sets back the progress in education?
Amazingly, all evil begins at family home. In this dog-eat-dog world, parents are busy with earning a living. Sometimes they focus on their personal achievements, or material goods, but more often than not, they simply have little choice. Work is a matter of survival. This status quo entails institutionalization of kids. The whole culture is now refocused and biased by thinking that kids should spend their days away from parents at school and that school is a good thing.
All my grand suggestions of learning reforms for the young generation have little chance of taking root in a culture that already has a pre-designed plan for the first 2-3 decades of the child's life: daycare, preschool, K-12, and college. Support from enlightened educators and psychologists does not matter much. They all face an army of parents, teachers, politicians, and scholars who think using the old cultural paradigm.
I regret to put Sweden and Germany at the front of my hall of shame. Those seemingly most enlightened countries in Europe lead the way in reinforcing the old rigid system of schooling. Both Sweden and Germany have made homeschooling illegal. This makes my prescription for glorious learning unworkable. In Sweden and Germany, my prescription would violate the law! This is so anachronistic that I struggled to understand the reasons behind the ban. It is hard to believe, but there might be kids or parents who read this text and can only dream of implementing my suggestions in their own beloved home country.
To understand the mechanics behind the ban on homeschooling, one needs to dig deep into political systems, history, culture, and demographics of countries involved. Those who dismiss it as just another socialist, communist, or totalitarian whim of history need to re-examine the causes in more detail. There are many well-educated minds who believe mandatory schooling is essential for social cohesion and sheer survival of societies! This is false, but for many, the error in thinking is not as obvious as it is for me.
Who opposes homeschooling?
There are opponents of homeschooling in all walks of life and in all social strata. There are opponents among liberals, socialists, conservatives, or evangelicals alike. However, it is liberals and socialists that seem most active in the name of the betterment of society. Socialists, in particular, fear radical religious indoctrination. Fears of indoctrination become less and less relevant when it becomes earlier and easier to expose kids to all information of the modern world (esp. via the web). This is a touchy subject though as we cannot object parental efforts to limit access to violence, pornography, and the like.
Interestingly, we let people kill themselves with tobacco or carry guns while, at the same time, putting little trust in caring parents and their ability to bring up their children as if parental indoctrination was more dangerous than guns. I think it is a matter of social development and experimentation. We have not yet experienced the full extent of the woes of true prohibition (on free learning) and a true prohibition backlash. Where homeschooling is not legal, the society has not yet matured to the point where it could cause problems similar to the prohibition of 1920-1933. It is a matter of time, however.
Freedom can hurt. Freedom can hurt children too. However, transportation kills, disfigures, and hurts many more kids than the worst varieties of homeschooling ever could. The difference between transportation and homeschooling is that most of society has little idea of the benefits of homeschooling, let alone unschooling. There are dozens of myths in circulation. In Poland, it is harder to find a homeschooler than a rare species of birds in their habitat. There are supposedly 12,000 of them, however, they tend to stay under the radar. One of the reasons: social pressure!
Many homeschooling parents are psychologists, educators, or teachers. At the same time, teachers also form a strong group of opponents of homeschooling. If this is all about keeping one's job, we should stress that private tutoring could also provide many teaching opportunities except I do not see your average school teacher doing a good job in one-on-one interaction. Many of my teachers had authoritarian tendencies. They seemed to love to rule their herd. As if it all had been about their power, not child's education. In part, this is a result of conditioning which is an inherent mainstay of the old system. Poor pay adds to the problem. I have seen many great teachers go to better paid, and more satisfactory pursuits. Those include private tutoring. It does not imply that good pay is a solution. The high attrition rate among good teachers comes from their realization that they are part of the system that does a lot of damage to kids and is inherently unworkable. This is how radical genius of John Taylor Gatto was born (see: I refuse to hurt children).
Arguments against homeschooling
Opponents of homeschooling most often quote inadequate standards of education, poor socialization, and the potential for extreme attitudes and parallel societies. They also base their superficial views on easily falsified myths such as: "homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christians" or "homeschoolers come from families with (too) many children". Opponents do not see or understand how schooling suppresses the learn drive, or how it conflicts with the creativity cycle. As the Prussian education system keeps churning out a number of reasonably educated and innately smart graduates, the fact that it hurts mental health, creativity, and life-long learning of nearly all kids remains unnoticed, overlooked, or misunderstood. The ignorance of brain science is so widespread that the view that homeschooling is harmful is pretty popular with some seemingly smart individuals taking a radical condemnatory stance.
Academic quality
All education systems will deliver some geniuses, some model citizens, some poorly adapted individuals, and some criminal element. Variety is part of social reality. Educational outcomes are in large part determined by family environment and upbringing. Schools and teachers can hardly remedy bad trajectories. All teachers work with a strong belief they can change kids, but in the end, teacher's life is inevitably filled with a frustrating realization about how difficult the change is. This article shows that family education has the best potential to bring up the best learning standards. Naturally, it all needs to begin in a healthy home environment. Almost by definition, pathological families are not interested in homeschooling. Unschooling, by definition, is the best form of learning. It is most compliant with the fundamental law of learning. Parental intervention within the push zone is also acceptable in homeschooling. Academic outcomes are usually fantastic.
Socialization
Socialization via schooling is inefficient and may be harmful. Democratic schools provide a good example of efficient socialization. Again, homeschooling can bring a spectrum of good and bad outcomes. Its biggest advantage is freedom from compulsory social interaction which helps filter out the negative aspects of socialization at school. Its biggest drawback is the easy path towards socialization neglect. Those who claim poor socialization in homeschooling are simply unaware of statistics, research, and reality. There is a truckload of materials on the web. Homeschoolers call it "socialization myth". Naturally, this is highly individual. Some kids may be more vulnerable, some parents might be less capable, but socialization is largely a non-issue in homeschooling.
Social contract
Opponents of homeschooling imagine isolated households under the influence of some kind of Koresh-type guru. Those could allegedly lead to isolated violent groups, religious rebels, or even parallel societies. Rebels, revolutionaries, and terrorists can be born in all circumstances. Limits on freedom are actually the biggest spark for rebellion. Here, Indoctrination, I try to explain why religions thrive under fire, and schools are a poor way to put limits on (dangerous) free thinking. In the modern world, where kids are bombarded with attractive stimuli from all directions, compulsory schooling may actually be one of the chief factors of youth rebellion. This is not the type of rebellion that brings a new better world. The rebellion is angry and those who want to quell it with more schooling and tighter rules will only spark the ultimate fire that will end the old system.
Old well-schooled generation
One of my colleagues who agrees with the general line of my reasoning urged me to drop that last sentence, which he called propaganda: "The rebellion is angry and those who want to quell it with more schooling and tighter rules will only spark the ultimate fire that will end the old system".
I refused on the grounds that the sentence was prompted by my recent conversations with kids, incl. very young kids. What a well-schooled generation may call "propaganda", I see as my own advance to a new level of understanding of the magnitude of the problem. Perhaps despite all my efforts, the gap of knowledge and understanding is still growing? With my research into young mindsets, I depart further and further from the conventional line of thinking about school and development.
Myth: No teacher, no progress
The myth that good learning requires a good teacher is widespread, pervasive, and harmful. The good teacher can make a world of difference but is not a sine qua non of good learning. Just the opposite, good learning achieved without assistance often carries additional qualities that cannot easily be imparted by teaching alone.
When Polish pioneer Marek Budajczak struggled to keep his kids out of a local school in Poniec, he met with scorn of a local teacher and a school vice-principal one Irena Krawiec who complained "I have been teaching since 1967 and I am still learning. I can teach a class on a few subjects, but it is way too hard to teach all subjects". She wondered how Ms Budajczak with "mere high school education" could possibly cope. This would be sub-par learning. In the end, Budajczak kids came out excellent and all worries about education and socialization turned out to be just a result of their courage to step away from a "social norm".
The belief that a teacher must be smarter or more knowledgeable than the student is harmful. It insidiously implies that the kid is unlikely to overtake the teacher, while, in the ideal case, future generations should always advance ahead.
Teacher's most noble goal is to get all his students surpass his own knowledge and skills.
It can be argued that a teacher's strength is his specialization in a narrow field. It can equally well be a weakness as knowledge gap undermines empathy and makes it harder to employ student's learn drive. One of the greatest ills of education is that adults cannot truly get into the heads of kids. Not only do kid brains differ. Knowledge gap makes the distance ever harder to traverse. The worst teachers in the world recruit from the ranks of those who poorly tolerate the immense knowledge gap. Those teachers simply cannot stand or comprehend the ignorance of the young folks. The intolerance of the overwise good teacher is one of the roots of school hate why kids hate school?
Homeschooling as a school extension
One of the first walls in combating the anti-homeschooling superstition is the claim that all "extra teaching" parents want to do (e.g. in the area of ethics) can be done in addition to normal schooling. In other words, home might be supplementing the education kids get from a public school.
This thinking could only make matters worse for kids. One of the biggest sins of schooling is cognitive overload. Claims of the value of "extra teaching" come from ignorance of the principles of the natural creativity cycle. The idea of extra home education is oblivious of the fact that school totally eats up the useful part of the natural creativity cycle leaving "brain scraps" that should be left alone in peace for rest. Piling up extra learning in addition to schooling is the exact opposite of what best homeschooling should strive at. We need to begin with the hygiene of learning!
Parents with moral or strong religious motivations will also add that no ethical training can undo the damage done by schools. They may claim, falsely, that "once you teach a kid evolution, the genie is out of the bottle". In reality, the opposite can happen in a coercive system. The kid who is forced to think one way will naturally oppose and seek intellectual liberation in philosophies that schooling attempts to root out.
Conformity destroys creativity
Morton Deutsch and Harold Gerard noticed that we have two basic needs that lead to conformity: the need to be right (informational influence) and the need to be liked (normative influence). Homogeneous education, based on compulsory curriculum, enhances those influences and leads to an increase in conformity.
In a society educated uniformly, there is less room for the departures from the norm. The uniform force pushes everyone towards the average truth, and the average social norm. This implies lesser space for creative thinking, creative solutions, and novel behaviors. Tolerance for all forms of innovation is reduced.
A 5-year-old able to drive a car should be a badge of honor for his dad. An appearance on a prime-time TV show should be the acme of young man's affirmation. Instead, it meets with negative comments "soon he will kill someone", "when he is ten, he will steal his dad's car keys", "he already dislikes the kindergarten and school, he will be a good for nothing," and "the dad got a screw loose".
With homogeneous schooling, we create a boring homogeneous society, which is a form of intellectual bondage. Creativity is suppressed. It is hard to be different. This can translate to horrible experience for gays, religious or ethnic minorities, for the disabled, or even those who just think differently.
Ban on self-learning
I love to learn, but I hate to be taught. This feeling is universal unless it is undermined by schooling. After many years of being subject to teaching, students often do not know any better. Then they can say "I hate to be taught, but I have to. At least I do not have to learn".
All attacks on homeschooling and unschooling come from ignorance. Ignorance affects everyone. University professors can also be ignorant. If they do not specialize in brain science, they can be as ignorant about the brain as most people with or without titles.
Amazingly, when I look at the characteristics of those who attack homeschooling, they seem to remind me the younger, the more arrogant, and more ignorant myself. However, I have always loved self-learning. For decades now, I have been sympathetic to the cause of homeschoolers, esp. in my own country where it has for long been under serious social pressure and stigmatism. I have seen homeschoolers grow to be highly creative adults.
Martha Albertson Fineman
To promote healthy self-learning, we need to combat a great degree of mythology. To illustrate the problem, I picked a longer analysis from Professor Martha Albertson Fineman. Fineman, Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, is a prominent, widely cited, and respected award-winning legal scholar with a long list of accomplishments in her field. Fineman believes homeschooling should be banned. If you do not care to go into details, here is my rude summary of Fineman's thesis in my own words: "many parents are backward and their rights to transfer their backwardness onto their kids should be overruled by the right of children to get enlightened education; hence education by the state should be mandatory".
The thesis comes from a just concern and is well intended. However, it is based on the ignorance of brain science. However intellectually elaborate and analytical Fineman's attack is, it is rendered impotent as it starts from a wrong underlying assumption. Fineman assumes "school is good", while this entire book explains in detail why schools are NOT grounds for efficient learning! For Fineman, schooling is like vaccination, however, she definitely picked a wrong vaccine.
In this short chapter, in abstraction of brain science, I will only focus on a subset of the problem: not only is schooling inefficient, it is even inefficient in rooting out backwardness and ignorance. The net result of the approach suggested by Fineman is societal harm of slower learning and slower progress. The main casualty of mandatory education are most gifted kids and kids with most nourishing home environments. Slowing down their development will only slow down societies and slow down cultural transformations. Despite all the good intents, and all the years of good education and wisdom, a scholar proposes a solution that is monumentally ignorant and harmful to society.
It is a bit unfair to single out Professor Fineman for attack. She represents a bigger army. My reason for the criticism is her well-documented line of reasoning. Many bright minds are far from seeing the light which I am trying to shed with this text. In my own circle of closest and smartest friends, I have minds that think like Fineman. The only good thing is that I see an evolution in thinking. I may not cause a paradigm shift. There were greater minds that failed at this effort. However, I am inducing noticeable changes. The revolution in education is slow but it is underway and it is largely unstoppable. It is cultural and based on knowledge that spreads via free access to information on the web.
When I speak of evil in reference to blocking the change, I mean some evil undercurrents of ideology and inner anger that permeate many a heart. Those who promote mandatory education, in private, may utter unspeakable phrases like "we need to stop all that religious drivel". Fineman herself uses societal ignorance of biological evolution as one of the prime examples of what mandatory schooling is supposed to remedy: teach the superiority of sciences over the teachings of the Bible.
In this chapter, I will try to show that not only is mandatory schooling inefficient in accomplishing that goal, it can actually backfire and bring results opposite to the ones intended.
Choosing Parental Rights Over Children's Interests
Martha Albertson Fineman wrote: Homeschooling: Choosing Parental Rights Over Children's Interests.
Fineman's work might not be the best case against homeschooling. It is totally free of considerations in the area of educational methodology. It assumes axiomatically that public schooling is good. However, it is a piece of scholarly work. It is a piece produced by a brisk and respected mind that fears no controversy. As such, it is blunt and representative of a great deal of prejudice directed against homeschooling. In this chapter, when speaking of homeschooling, I will have in mind free home education as a form of unschooling rather than structured homeschooling based on a curriculum. Elsewhere I try to show that forcing a structure on kids may also be harmful. For Fineman though, the problem with homeschooling is mostly that it happens at home and is out of state control.
Even the title of the thesis carries a false assumption derived from the axiom of beneficial schooling. Homeschooling is important not for parental rights or control. Homeschooling is important for children. Homeschooling is about child interest, child freedom, and about the most efficient forms of learning. This leaves most of Fineman's legal argument moot. I am in agreement with Fineman: children are not parental property.
Fineman's analysis is based on a good intent. She wants to fight ignorance, promote secularism, and social coherence. Unfortunately, she picked wrong weapons on the assumption they are efficient.
Most of all, she mentions global good over and over again. She mentions state interest. She mentions parental rights. Her whole text is missing one vital ingredient though: the true love of children! This legal text is coldly totalitarian and kids are spoken about as objects that are supposed to be shaped via coercive education.
Fineman speaks of common good, common benefit, and the role of the state. When societies agree democratically to introduce taxes, they agree to provide some common benefit in return. When they agree on mandatory education they impose a burden on children who do not have a vote and the benefit is illusory. Good research can easily prove the inefficiency of the system and its benefits exist only in the heads of those who have little idea what constitutes efficient learning. Usually, they assume schooling somehow worked for them and therefore it would probably work for everyone else. Had I not spent the last three decades studying efficient learning, I might easily say that 22 years of schooling gave me some education and a job. If I was a lawyer, I might be equally blind to the immense waste of youth and young potential that comes with mandatory schooling.
Fineman begins with a motto from Thurgood Marshall: "[U]nless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together". The problem is that the motto comes from different times and a different context. Marshall's prime concern was segregation. He fought for kids to have the right to learn together independent of their race, social status, religion, and the like. Fineman perverts those ideas by claiming we should force kids to learn under the same roof. Learning and socialization should be optimized independently. Kids should be free to make optimum choices.
Fineman undermines my chief idea for systemic solutions: choice in education. She says "competition in the market for education leads to market failure". We all need to start thinking of education as the market of ideas, not just an economic market. Ironically, she quotes Milton Friedman on the "neighborhood effect" of education. Friedman was one of the strongest proponents of school choice and disavowed public schools on the grounds of basic economic inefficiency. Friedman was a proponent of individual responsibility and individual liberty, which Fineman questions in her legal writings to the benefit of what Friedman is skeptical of: social responsibility.
Using Fineman's false logic and her vulnerability theory we could go even further: if schooling is good and brings common good, we should make adult education mandatory as well. This could help root out racism, homophobia, religion, and other forms of "backwardness" to the greater common benefit. Here I wrote a text that is supposed to expose the evil of the idea with a dose of irony: Introduce Mandatory Adult Education!. Perhaps Fineman assumes that good learning ends in youth? Or knows that no adult would ever agree to have his freedom trampled, while kids simply have no vote in democracy? Or are kids just more "vulnerable"? As kids get no relief and no exception, I am sympathetic to the idea for Professor Fineman to be sent back to school to learn a thing or two about brain science, psychology, technology, math, and few other areas that would instantly quash her medieval thinking for the sake of the greater common good.
Whichever mathematical formula Fineman uses for the optimum time spent on mandatory schooling in youth, the same formula must bring a number greater than zero for an average adult. This math should make adult education mandatory (see: Introduce Mandatory Adult Education!). The only true reason her formula brings up zero is the conditional clause that rests on the fact that kids have limited rights and need to be somehow dispensed off while adults focus on work.
Ray on Fineman
Dr Brian D. Ray is a relentless researcher, homeschool advocate, and a founder of National Home Education Research Institute. Having spent years on proving the excellence of homeschool education, Ray dismissed Fineman's text with just a short review in which he remarked: "It is not a good day for scholarship when an author like Fineman uses neither empirical evidence nor a clearly presented theoretical framework to support her claims and recommendations. Such should not be tolerated when discussing State-run public schooling nor should it be tolerated when discussing private home-based education".
While Ray may rejoice the explosion in homeschooling and unschooling in America, the case is less clear in Europe incl. seemingly modern confederation like the European Union. For that reason, we need to pay attention to voices like Fineman to better understand the mindset of those who see "parental control" as a threat, and justification for state control and limits on freedom. There are still seemingly enlightened forces that would like to see a return of regimens reminiscent of Nazi Reichsschulpflichtgesetz, or perhaps even ancient Sparta.
The making of Martha
Born in 1943, Fineman was first in her family to graduate from high school. This type of achievement usually elevates the importance of school in anyone's mind. In high school, Martha says, she was labelled as lacking intellectual ability to try for college. In the 1950s, this label would probably affect most girls. Even today, there is a degree of discrimination against girls. Labelling kids early is highly detrimental. It affects self-esteem and long-term prospects. For Martha though, it was the opposite. She showed determination, proved skeptics wrong, graduated, and became an eminent scholar. This battle probably fortified the inner feminist and added to the status of schooling in Martha's hierarchy of value. It would not matter that for most kids mis-labelled by schooling, things do not turn out that well, independent of their true intellectual capacity.
Martha married at 17, had her first baby at 18, then another, and was divorced by 21. Fineman's experience made her rethink the legal status of marriage.
With two more kids (twins) in her late twenties, Martha entered a law school and became one of the most vocal feminist advocates in legal scholarship. She was inspired by great teachers. That inspiration from college years must have colored her thinking about school as well. Her reasoning moved from redefining dependency, legal status of marriage, to the concept of vulnerability. As a pioneer and an extreme outlier, she has not changed the legal world, but her writing inspired many, and she became one of the most cited scholars in her field.
Despite all her fantastic credentials, Fineman came to a disastrously wrong conclusion that homeschooling should be banned. Here I sense the echoes of feminist thought where all reasons and forces that force women to stay at home should be minimized or abolished. Moreover, feminists never forget that women had to struggle harder for admission to schools while being largely relegated to home education, which was deemed inferior in 17-18th centuries.
That's not what Fineman admits. Her primary concern, she says, is the good of the child where education, perhaps, in a longer term leads to more equitable and rational society. Where we agree on goals, we totally diverge on the means and the method.
Success of homeschooling
Fineman is clearly unaware of the positive transformation homeschooling can do to kid's life. She asks
"how was it possible that homeschooling, which can fairly be characterized as a truly radical alternative to traditional public school education, took root so quickly and firmly, and flourished?"
The answer to that question is simple and obvious to anyone who knows the subject. Homeschooling works! Radical or not, parents care about outcomes and they get the right outcomes as long as the school does not stand in the way. Their success spreads by word of mouth and, these days, via social media. America is ahead of the rest of the world in educational freedoms. Other countries will inevitably move in the same direction unless fears of immigrants, fears of other nations, cultures, and religions prevail in a short term. Setbacks in the type of Sweden and Germany are doomed to be reversed. The good forces are powerful and unidirectional: good example set by homeschoolers, good example set by democratic schools, better understanding of the learning process, progress in neuroscience, psychology, educational technologies, smarter populations, better dissemination of information, etc. Education is its own best ally and helps ignorance fade away.
Unequal treatment of public and home education
While being surprised with the success of homeschooling, Fineman clearly gives public schools preferential treatment. A legal mind should be sensitive to fair and symmetric approach. She defends ineffective public schooling: "existing failure in public schools is not a sufficient argument for the public in general to abandon them". While she criticizes homeschooling as ineffective and proposes an outright ban, in reference to ineffective public schools she proposes a fix with "funding, ideas and energy".
Harm to the student
The chief argument in Fineman's thesis is the harm inflicted on children by homeschooling. That part of the text is particularly weak, poorly researched, and verging on amateurish.
This book extols the virtues of self-directed learning, and homeschooling can be made into a perfect environment for highly efficient learning. Fineman entirely skirts around that powerful reason for homeschooling, and, as a result, produces a false picture of home education. There is no mention of methodology or brain science. That part of Fineman's argument seems to be driven entirely by ideology: the ideology of secular education that eradicates religious superstition via coercive indoctrination.
Fineman takes a tacit assumption that homeschooling is like schooling except it is delivered by incompetent teachers (i.e. parents). In reality, ideal homeschooling works as a student-friendly environment for self-directed learning. Ideal homeschooling should rather be named self-directed unschooling.
Fineman wants to prevent backwardness with education for global benefit. She asks:
"What societal response is appropriate when the parental values and morals that homeschoolers teach conflict with contemporary secular standards? What if parents adhere to the value and morality of white supremacy or teach the necessity of armed resistance to the "jackbooted" officials of a federal or international government poised to take over and enslave free people?"
Her solution is to imprison all kids for potential criminal offences of their parents in the form of occasional parental indoctrination. Thus a legal scholar proposes an equivalent of jailing people before a crime is committed. Just in case. This is exactly the type of attitude that raises hatred and fears of "jackbooted officials".
Judging by used references, most of Fineman's attack seems to be inspired by a single article from the American Prospect: "The Homeschool Apostates" by Kathryn Joyce. The article describes cases of kids abused in homeschooling households of fundamentalist Christians. Ironically, the text is based on cases of kids who rebelled against religious indoctrination and limits of freedom as much as an ordinary pupil might rebel against an authoritarian teacher or the restrictions imposed by mandatory schooling.
The abuse stories from fundamentalist families are an obvious call to action except they paint a fractional picture and can never be a basis of a generalization that determines government policy. However outrageous the outcomes, we can never even be truly sure all cases of child abuse in such families are abuse indeed. Sometimes it is just a disastrous outcome of a kid rebellion against an authoritarian regime imposed by otherwise well-intended, perhaps even moral parenting. Ignorance is the root of the problem in those families as much as it is in our analysis of individual cases.
The correct conclusion coming from the quoted article should be the exact opposite. Homeschooler's Anonymous mentioned in the article is one example of healthy prevention initiatives. The article by Joyce shows how indoctrination sparks rebellion and how kids turn against their own parents if their freedom is limited, esp. in the areas of free speech, free thinking, and access to information. We obviously need good mechanisms for preventing child abuse as much as we need mechanisms to prevent crime in general.
Taking cases of abuse as the rationale for a ban would be tantamount to a ban on marriage because some bad people beat up their spouses. Calls for tighter oversight would not be much different from calls for marriage oversight in the name of preventing spousal abuse. Equally well, we might aim at closing schools because of school shootings, or suicide sparked by bullying, or child abuse happening on school grounds. All freedoms can be abused, which does not mean they should be taken away.
If we look at homeschooling as a whole, an entirely different picture emerges. Higher academic standards are only a small fraction of what is good about homeschooling. Happy and free kids are the best part of the phenomenon. Fineman dismisses rich research in the field as based on "convenient sample" while relying mostly on a few pre-selected stories from a journal. This is why Brian Ray, annoyed with lack of data references, was so brief in his dismissive analysis.
While dismissing actual research, Fineman mentions that homeschoolers have "difficulty writing research papers", which I could not confirm in the references quoted. This contradicts my own knowledge that shows that few kids show as much creative initiative as those who have been unschooled or homeschooled. In the homeschooled kids I know, the opposite is true. Poor writing or research skills could only be an outcome of seriously botched homeschooling in the authoritarian setting. Most homeschooling parents quickly discover that "schooling" does not work and gravitate towards "unschooling", which is just a form of self-directed learning. That self-directed and creative component is the most essential part of "writing research papers". This cannot be learned in a classroom. It can only be coerced via homework, which would be fractionally as efficient as it is the case in self-learning.
Even though it has been shown again and again that homeschoolers do great, Fineman dismissed the fact with a short note: "one study was designed to support the homeschool experience in the public view and unsurprisingly found former homeschoolers to be "better educated than national averages, to vote at high rates, to have a positive view of their homeschooling experiences, and to be generally well adjusted, productive members of society.""
Then Fineman says those kids are "far less inclined to change their religious or political viewpoints" as if having a firm opinion was a bad thing. Fineman most certainly keeps indoctrinated zealots in mind. To me, having a strong point of view based on a solid model should be a merit. Kids and conformists are malleable. Wise thinkers are open to new ideas but do not change their views as easily. Lack of flexibility may come from indoctrination or from rich knowledge. We should rather value people with firm values and be skeptical of eager flip-floppers.
Unschooling
For Fineman, unschooling is not the best expression of free self-directed learning, but a formula for occasional educational neglect.
She bemourns lack of parental accountability. However, instead of suggesting any accountability formula, she prefers to ban parents outright, and let the state take over. This begs the question about public school accountability. Incompetent teachers cannot be fired. Schools with disastrous results cannot be closed. What Fineman likes in public schools is state control and the illusion that schools might be fixed one day with "funding, ideas and energy". Apparently, parenting is beyond repair.
Intellectual isolation
Bill Maher believes that homeschooling is equivalent to intellectual isolation. So does Fineman. She writes:
A prohibition of homeschooling and other means of intellectual isolation of children will appropriately balance the interests of parents with the responsibility of the state to ensure access to resilience-building institutions.
Intellectual isolation is hardly possible in the era of the Internet. It is only possible in conditions of actual imprisonment, incl. home imprisonment.
Fineman wants to balance interests of parents and the state, while kids are most important in the equation. They should be paramount, on the assumption that a well-nourished kid is as good for the state as a well-nourished business. We rarely balance the interest of businesses and the state. We provide a law for businesses to flourish in their own best interest.
What does parent-led mean?
Fineman says:
The phrase many homeschoolers use to describe their educational efforts is "parent-led home-based education," in which parents direct all aspects of education: what, when, how, and with whom their children are taught.
Fineman corrupts the meaning of "parent-led", which was probably chosen as a way of explaining homeschooling to authorities. The correct interpretation of "parent-led" is that the "parent is the leader" (from time to time). This is far less authoritarian interpretation than "parent is the decider". Fineman's conjecture about what homeschooling actually is, i.e. "parent-imposed education" has very little reflection in reality.
Many parents may envisage the authoritarian approach to education at the beginning of their homeschooling adventure. This comes from ignorance, is natural, and is entirely excusable, esp. in someone who suffered years of "teacher-led" education at school. Parents often begin with great fears and great plans. Gradually their fears dimish as they discover the power of the learn drive. Their plans get curtailed as kids generally refuse to be directed, unless in the authoritarian home setting, which can be more harmful than schooling. Most parents quickly discover coercion does not work. What Fineman imagines as standard homeschooling does not survive more than a few months or even weeks in a typical household. Self-directed learning does its wonders. Human will and the learn drive prevail. Some parents will persist with their authoritarian approach, but those form a minority. Fineman is arguing with a straw man. She shows ignorance of the psychology of learning and ignorance of the reality of homeschooling! Kids need serious coercion to submit to parental decisions! Most homeschoolers choose homeschooling for its freedoms, not to coerce and indoctrinate. Shielding is possible and easy (e.g. Christians may shield kids from corrupting influences of society), however, the authoritarian imposition of learning is hard in healthy/undamaged kids.
Parents should ease control
Fineman says that
a child who attends public school is there for only 23% of her waking hours. The parent controls the remaining 77%. The European Court of Human Rights made this point in its decision to prohibit religious-based homeschooling in Germany.
Majority of the population shows no understanding of the circadian cycle. Professor Fineman also shows that ignorance in the above calculation. Only highly productive individuals truly understand the natural creativity cycle. Waking hours differ dramatically in terms of brain performance at different times of the day. The correct calculation is a galaxy apart from Fineman's reasoning: school takes 99% of child's creative time on a school day, assuming there are any creative hours left in conditions of sleep deprivation. Parents should not control the scraps of mental powers left. Parental schooling is as bad as homework. It should be the kid who economizes his time to the best of his abilities and for the purpose of satisfying its own developmental needs. If parents and schools control all waking day, there is no self in the kid and the path to greatness is obliterated.
How to command parental resources?
Instead of celebrating, Fineman bemourns the healthy processes occurring in the wake of the popularization of free learning! She would love to make a totalitarian grab of "political, social and financial resources parents command"! She condemns the help from public funding to private education.
Fortunately, as far as the US is concerned, Fineman is a voice crying in wilderness. The revolution is irreversible and those voices have now become inaudible beyond occasional analysis like this one.
Shaping the kid
Fineman's prime motivation seems to be the wish to influence the mind of a child. This inevitably means less space for self-development and self-determination, esp. in cases where kids come to school with an unorthodox set of core beliefs!
Kids should develop their own system of beliefs. This is the best formula for avoiding all forms of prejudice!
Fineman notes that parents are still the prime influence in shaping children. However, even that parental molding seems undesirable! Fineman does not say "despite a ban on homeschooling parents would remain the prime influence", or "parents would remain the prime influence". Here are the exact words:
because of the harms homeschooling causes to children and society, it should be prohibited. We reach this conclusion recognizing that even if homeschooling is prohibited, parents would still be the primary influences on children.
The unfortunate use of the word "recognize" here hints to me that Fineman still considers parental influence as possibly harmful.
It is clear that if Fineman had her way, she would design children on a computer to her own perfect model and exclude parental influence entirely. I see here a legal mind at work where an ideal framework is formed in abstraction of actual biology or social context. This utopian idea has an essential problem: designing a perfect child in abstraction of its environmental and social context is impossible. If all information about the past and the future of the system in which a child is immersed was available, the task would still be computationally intractable. However, there exists a simple algorithm that beats all modern AI. This algorithm has been perfected by evolution over the course of millions of years. It is called self-directed learning based on the learn drive. This form of self-organizing design is not computationally complex and is the best design available. See: Tree metaphor. This is a natural neurobiological tool that Fineman would have gladly suppressed with a legal straight-jacket.
Abolish the Amish?
The Amish are a fascinating community. They provide a great inspiration for research. I consider myself rather progressive, and I am surprised that some progressives cannot stand the Amish. For some, this is a backward community that is a waste of planetary oxygen. Such opinions are an expression of extreme ignorance. Such opinions are dangerous and verging on genocidal. We do cherish rare species of plants in the middle of a rainforest. This appreciation is part of human spirit and enlightenment. In the same way, we should cherish the existence of isolated harmless peaceful communities like the Amish. As much as rare plants, the Amish are a part of a larger socio-evolutionary process that should be an infinite source of inspiration for further progress of mankind. They are part of the human cultural ecosystem. We can learn a lot from Amish about work ethic, entrepreneurship, family, community and more. We can learn that in the rush to modernity we lose a lot of values that are worth preserving. John Taylor Gatto actually uses the Amish to illustrate how schooling destroys self-dependence and entrepreneurial creativity, the characteristics that the Amish are particularly proud of.
As much as the evolutionary progress thrives in separated populations, so does social progress where it can benefit from state by state "experimentations" in a federal or worldwide setting.
I am sympathetic to Fineman's position that children should have a chance to make their own choices, however, this cannot be done at the cost of breaking up families, and forcing a group of people to adapt their lifestyle or philosophy to the preferred state-imposed solution. Using the same reasoning we might destroy all existing hunter-gatherer communities and sever the link with our evolutionary origins that infinitely inspired our own progress. Our knowledge of efficient learning is also informed to a large degree by inspiration coming from isolated communities and tribes. Once we lose that diversity, our global ignorance may be on the rise.
Superstition in combat against superstition
Ironically, to eradicate superstition, Fineman wants to use the toolset first developed for the maintenance of superstition. It was the Roman Catholic church that first developed structures and procedures to maintain the hierarchical system of power used to exert control and disseminate "the only truth". That system was later perfected in the Prussian Education System and finally monopolized the methods used in public schools around the world. Fineman's ban on homeschooling is a modern proposition of book burning. It is a quest to assert control. Its prime victims would be future Gallileos and societies as a whole.
As I seem to worship the same religion as Fineman, i.e. science, I am less concerned about the truths disseminated, and more concerned about the methodology. Public school monopoly on education would suppress the most creative forces in society. Best creativity comes from associating remote ideas backed up by strong models, which can but do not have to be correct. Models considered wrong are strong by being internally consistent and possibly weak by failing at the edges to match the allegedly correct reality as delineated by the scientific consensus. Those who we deem superstitious are inspirers of new ideas too. It is only hard to see for those who either stay within their own circle of adoration in world modelling, or those who never truly considered the nature and mechanisms of creativity. Wrong models contribute value to science. The geocentric model was religiously inspired, but it provided valuable reference needed for the falsification of its central premise. In the creative evolutionary process of modelling, all models considered wrong will naturally be deemed inferior, and costly in terms of human wasted brain processing power. This changes on a dime during a paradigm shift that is only possible with a never-ending supply of new models, which should always be considered new value, as all new species, memes, fashions, philosophies, or cultures that are subject to an evolutionary process (see: Value of diversity). The emergence, competition, and death of models is an essential part of human swarm intelligence that underlies the survivability of mankind.
In the never-ending process of generalization, a brain will build a model that is largely consistent with the rest of that particular brain's knowledge. This is why it is healthy to devote a brain to a model, while having many models in many brains. This is also why the confirmation bias is of tremendous value in building models (see: How brains protect wrong models).
Novelist Ian McEwan put it best:
There are ways of being wrong that help others to be right
My favorite example of a wrong model is: Memory overload hypothesis of Alzheimer's. It is a fantastic inspiration in the quest for the hygiene of learning.
Naturally, the conceptual value of a wrong model is of little consolation when a wrong model is translated into immeasurable harm to humanity. A wrong model can easily be taken as the basis of action that may cost lives of millions. For that reason, we should always pay attention to the probabilistic estimates of validity that stand behind any model. All models can be used in theoretical reasoning. At worst, the conclusion will be as feeble in probabilistic terms as the underlying premises. However, when investing billions or risking human lives, we need to apply much stricter probabilistic standards.
State paternalism
What Fineman proposes is a form of unhealthy paternalism. There is a very short path from good-hearted progressivism to totalitarian thinking with a temptation to design human life and thus, willy-nilly, deprive individuals of choice. These are totalitarian regimes that attempt to regulate every aspect of social life, including education and educational choice. Fineman challenges human autonomy and does so through sheer ignorance of sciences other than her own field of legal interest. When Polish communist government attempted atheisation, it laid the foundations for its own collapse (see: Polish indoctrination see-saw).
Fostering the respect for authority
For centuries philosophers pondered effective ways of organizing a society and making sure social order is sturdy and unshakable. Over the last two centuries, schooling has grown to be a chief tool of enlightenment. It also played an important role of correcting deviant philosophies children might be bringing from home.
Infected with moral poison, the young 'citizen' goes to the primary school. With difficulty he barely learns to read and write. There is no possibility of learning any lessons at home. The father and mother themselves talk before the children in the most disparaging way about the teacher and the school and they are much more inclined to insult the teachers than to put their offspring across the knee and knock sound reason into him. What the little fellow hears at home does not tend to increase respect for his human surroundings. Here nothing good is said of human nature as a whole, and every institution, from the school to the government, is reviled. Whether religion and morals are concerned or the State and the social order, it is all the same; they are all scoffed at. This child of three has got into the habit of reviling all authority by the time he is fifteen.
This piece did not come from Fineman or any other respected philosopher. However, it accurately expresses the undertones that can be found in the thinking of those who believe schools are a great place for ensuring respect for authority, law and order.
When Michael Pearl says "Train up a child" or Fineman says "teach evolution to prevent religious superstition", they all have the same old idea. They all want your mind. Get inside and change it to their own design. They want to block opposition with learned helplessness.
Strong law does exactly the same. It employs learned helplessness. It makes you conform to democratic rules or be punished beyond a wish to oppose again. Naturally, it is rather easy to follow the law, and rather hard to devote 12 best years of youth to mandatory schooling. Few people get depressed because of the need to obey the law. At the same time, depression at school is rampant and it only gets worse when helpless kids are sent out to fight for survival in the world with no more teachers around to provide instructions.
With this book, I also want to get into your head. However, I use no coercion and I rely on no learned helplessness. I will hopefully induce no depression. You will not even need to regret spending $9 on this book. It is free.
Instead, I am trying to get to you on my side with the best weaponry of argument I can find. If I am not convincing, you will just close this browser with a click and return to your happy life as if little changed.
Kids whipped at home, coerced at school, or drafted to an army have no such freedoms.
The source of the excerpt presented above is Mein Kempf.
Schools and social diversity
Fineman says:
public education has lost sight of its other main purpose: the goal of bringing diverse students together to learn to understand each other and live well together.
This makes sense except it is probably only Fineman's imprecise wording. If this is the main purpose of schools, why do we have lectures, why coercion, why homework?. Why not let kids play computer games together, or chess? If the school did not run kids down in terms of mental energy, it could actually bring more benefit than regular schooling. Instead, the entire focus seems to be on grades and test performance. The inflow of actual knowledge in a real school is so dramatically slow that it could easily be remedied by a simple interaction with adults, TV news, books at home, surfing the net, and even Facebook socializing.
If self-learning is the key to efficient learning, putting kids together under one roof might serve only two functions (1) socialization and (2) safe keeping.
If so, it should be easy to organize small learning centers for similar purposes: smaller groups, closer to home, bigger flow of students (e.g. to avoid places polluted by bullies), lesser impact of drugs, and other vices. This is actually already happening in Poland. Such safe-keeping centers are very popular with parents and, most importantly, with kids! This is similar to democratic schooling except the rules of operation, stuffing, and investments are not determined democratically. However, this is a step in the right direction. Those centers are cheap and popular.
Unfortunately, this is all happening in addition to the burden of schooling. In that, it will never be effective as a form of education. After many hours spent in a boring and tiring school, kids need to detox from books and will rather play computer games tired of teacher's droning and commands. Homework is not happening in those centers either. For true learning to happen there, the center would need to be used instead of school at times of day when kids are most hungry for learning, with no mandatory waking time, and the like (i.e. along the rules of the natural creativity cycle).
Evening mandatory socialization
In an ideal case, schools should be used for socialization and integration. When Singapore engineered mixed-ethnicity neighborhoods, they delivered in improved ethnic harmony. The same is supposed to be accomplished in desegregated schools.
Fineman says:
When entire demographic groups use choice to abandon public schools, it undermines the goals of diversity both for the students abandoning the public school system and for those left behind.
However, this social goal should not be accomplished at the cost of learning. It would make far more sense to let kids learn on their own, and use their best brain time for the purpose. In the ideal case, along the natural creativity cycle, this would mean kids would get enough sleep, and spend morning learning at home. I oppose coercion, but if Fineman wants to see integration, it would make more sense to force kids to interact throughout their evening, with fewer academic goals and more actual social interaction. This naturally sounds preposterous and unacceptable. Academic learning would suffer less, however, the solution would not be too convenient to parents. Those who believe in education at school might question if the whole system for the mere sake of socialization is worth a while.
Like we developed cultural acceptance for forced learning, we have never developed tolerance for forced socialization. Socialization should also be a matter of free choice.
Fineman's goals are good. Tools are awful.
By extending that integration reasoning, adults could also benefit from forced integration. However, we do not have mandatory adult socialization programs. Few adults would agree to limit their freedoms and attend compulsory evening socialization classes. Instead, we do it to our own kids just because they have less power to strike back and complain. We push them to accept the status quo via learned helplessness with awful long-term impact on self-reliance, self-discipline, and creativity.
Feminism that hurts children
Fineman does not express it in her article, but we know that she is a prominent feminist. She even got an honorary doctorate from Swedish Lund University (2013). Lund is known for early admission of women (1880). Ruth Ginsburg studied there in the 1960s.
Fineman says: "family is the most gendered institution". As much as atheists would love to root out religion via mandatory schooling, so do feminists often work hard to level all reasons for women to stay at home. In addition, feminists are aware that religious beliefs are a rich source of anti-feminist sentiments. Here I see some parallels between Fineman's thinking and Swedish social engineering (see later). A bigger picture emerges in which women are more inclined to support social engineering solutions. The arrival of universal sufferage (1919, 19th amendment) coincided with the enactment of prohibition in the US (1919, 18th amendment).
I totally support gender equality. However, it cannot mutate into an obsession that hurts children. With feminist reasons or not, Fineman would have destroyed the best avenue towards the true qualitative revolution in education!
Incidentally, men are as good as women in providing for homeschooled kids. After weaning, all roots of inequality are gone. Homeschooling is gender neutral and should never feature on the feminist agenda.
Side effects of competition
Fineman claims that competition is bad for public schooling and makes it deteriorate further. This may be the case, however, in my model, public schooling is the lowest denominator default. If other forms of education take over and the default falls even lower, we will depart from the utopian egalitarian model and face the reality. Some kids will lag behind. Some parents may be unable to help. The system can only try its best, but some kids will be left behind one way or another. A brilliant society is less likely to let the weak minority suffer as a result of poor education. Marginal improvements to learning can be replaced with major leaps of social and economic advancement.
Fineman's reform: funding, ideas, and energy
Fineman wants to ban effective learning methods, and, while admitting public schools are a failure, proposes her own plan instead: "funding, ideas, and energy". All practitioners of economic system reforms know that funding of badly designed systems is tantamount to throwing good money after bad. Funding does not work if it goes into bad projects. Fineman simply proposes an increase in the waste of taxpayer's money. Energy is a filler word. We all want kids to do well, so it is hard to muster more energy, esp. in proposed conditions of limited freedom. As for ideas, many come in this book. However, they are all rejected offhand by a proposed ban on educational freedoms. How can education be reformed if the most efficient forms of learning are made illegal? It is like a health reform combined with a ban on doctors. Like democracy without free speech. Or population growth sparked by a ban on sex.
Ideas limited to a classroom will have a limited impact but should be tried too. The only necessary condition is that all experiments should be made on a voluntary basis.
Professorial type
I recall many professors of Fineman's type from my college years. They are all super-smart and carry an aura of being omniscient. Their lectures are always formal, intellectual, dry, and delivered from a perfectly crafted script. They hardly ever listen to, or perhaps even care, about student opinion. That's the quintessence of rigid conformist schooling.
Despite all my criticism of schooling, I have never tried to discourage any kid from going to college. Just the opposite. I consider academic environments largely conducive to growth. One of the pillars of college brain-friendliness in the 1980s was that lectures were not compulsory. I never attended lectures of the omniscient professors who want to impose their way of thinking on you. This is just too painful to bear.
In the end, I am happy with my 10 years in college. In addition to relative freedom spoilt partly by the threat of conscription, the best part of college in communist Poland was that it was free! There was no added pressure to learn with the thought: if I am getting deep into debt, I better make some good use of it. For me, learning was done for its own sake most of the time. This is how it should work for everyone.
Democratic content
Fineman mentions "democratically determined content" of the curriculum with the suggestion that this is how all core learning should be determined for all kids. There are three main issues with this thinking:
- while democratic knowledge items may be useful, democratic curricula can have disastrous effects (see below),
- the wisdom of crowds needs to be extended by the wisdom of individuals (see below), and
- democratic content should rather be a guidance than a mandatory dish.
Democratic knowledge items
For an average individual in conditions of average urgency for knowledge of average importance, it makes sense to save time and go with the wisdom of the crowds. It makes sense to pick a democratically voted for item of knowledge and assume it is true. For example, an average student may learn that "the extinction of dodo was caused by humans", and leave that knowledge unexamined. The same student may change the approach if the suggested item is "the government can help protect natural environment". That item may require further examination, and it is not healthy to just cram it at school in hope of leaving a permanent imprint on behavior.
Democratic curriculum, understood as the curriculum determined by the party in power, is a totalitarian tool. This can be a Christian curriculum, or a secular curriculum, or an isolationist curriculum, depending on current political contingencies. This is exactly the problem with the current Polish reform. If she lived in Poland, Fineman might be horrified to find out that her kids will need to learn Christian dogma at school, i.e. exactly the knowledge she would like to see eradicated with the help of schooling. Democracy is ruthless in that respect. Schools show no respect to the minority view. Schools are totalitarian in imposing democratically elected content.
Democratic wisdom
The wisdom of crowds works great for Wikipedia. But Wikipedia is no oracle, and can only be used as a starting point when investigating an area of knowledge. This wiki was born from my inability to sustain the attack from the crowd. For me, the wisdom of crowds was not empowering. It was overpowering. Only at this site, I can freely present my point of view without being flattened out by the power of averages.
Wikipedia is just an appetizer. All actual learning should proceed from there. It is the individual wisdom, individual models of reality and individual investigations that need to guide learning. Without knowledge differentiators, humanity will always be weak at thinking out of the box. This is a formula for getting stuck in a local optimum, which in the end may result in a premature end of civilization. If you think I am kidding, you may have already been lulled into self-complacency. Heterogeneity of knowledge is the best safety valve protecting mankind in the long run.
Mandatory democratic content
For a kid looking for its ways, "democratically determined content" could form valuable guidance. For those who are not sure of the future, this could provide some light at the early stages of the journey. However, mandatory learning always implies inferior learning. All citizens are subject to the law, and, in some sense, knowledge of the law is mandatory. Ignorance can be costly. For drivers, the knowledge of traffic regulations is mandatory, but I opted out from the driving school. I do not see the need to drive a car today or in the future. Making the knowledge of traffic regulations mandatory would be a waste of my time and a waste of human resources in general.
Metaphors
One of my smart colleagues said: "why learn about bullfinches, nobody needs it, no adult knows it". That colleague has been brainwashed by the school system into a default instinctive thinking that only things that "most adults know" are worth knowing. Naturally, only a bit of reflection is needed to figure out that this approach would result in no interest in bullfinches whatsoever. With "no adult knows it" attitude, we would have no Darwin. If a 5-year-old learns about bullfinches, he should be encouraged. He might be on his way to becoming a future Darwin or Copernicus.
Democratic homogeneity leads to deadlocks or the elimination of outlier creativity. Every democracy, however mature, faces the risks of deadlocks and stagnation. Checks and balances are essential, but an occasional disruptor, like Trump, may appear beneficial. We do not factor in such disruptions because they could equally well end in a nuclear war. Similarly, peer review in science is notorious for the elimination of all departures from the mainstream. Many a great theory struggled to break through or failed to surface because of the peer review practice. Today we celebrate the freedom of unrestricted free speech on the web. All the reader needs is a bit of skepticism and solid knowledge as a form of armour against fallacy.
Price of scholarly specialization
It is amazing how a scholar who thinks of maximizing common global benefit can depart that far from humanity, and to remain ignorant of millions of families who employ natural learning capacity of the brain to build fantastic knowledge, amazing passions, and wonderful family relationships. To ban homeschooling is to make the best expressions of love and learning impossible. It is to deprive millions of people of the dignity of choice.
Indoctrination
Book burning does not work
Many thinkers have a mission civilisatrice in mind. Civilizing missions often misfire or even backfire. The negative outcomes can span centuries.
Those who want to burn books subscribe to the same myth as Nicholas Carr in Freedom of education when he complains about fake news and distractions coming from the net.
Book burning, compulsory schooling, propaganda, and indoctrination have this in common: they all attempt to exterminate ideas and they all fail. As much as we want to separate the state from religion, we need to separate education from the state. Funding is good. Interference and handcrafted design are not. The best tool for the job of shaping kids and exterminating superstition is knowledge itself. Enlightenment is slow but it comes!
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr explained that free thought is "not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate" (1929).
I believe in no hate, and in no book burning. Those who do shouldn't be muzzled either.
Efficient learning trumps indoctrination
The fundamental problem of epistemology is that knowledge always introduces a bias, while bias may impede further acquisition of knowledge. This provides a temptation for forming perfect unbiased models of reality that might be promulgated and might facilitate education.
However, the history of humanity shows that exchange of information and freedom of speech carry far more benefit than harm. I speak of goodness of knowledge here, and convergence of knowledge in the direction of a true model here. Both require freedom of thought and, consequently, freedom of speech.
As I keep insisting that acquisition of knowledge leads to convergent models[link] and, statistically, increasing speed of acquisition leads to faster convergence. We should then pay less attention to how we indoctrinate kids, and more attention to the efficiency of the learning process. Part of that efficiency includes the methods in which children seek and acquire knowledge and how well they develop their ability to think critically and approach sources with skepticism. Kids that learn fast and learn well are far better protected from superstition than kids who get indoctrinated in the right system of thought from the cradle.
Parental values vs. indoctrination
Parents often want to act as filters. They want to present to their kids a world that differs from the real one. They want to shield kids from violence, stress, or bad influence. Some may want to avoid pornography, non-Christian attitudes, non-Muslim attitudes, "bad" peer example, etc. I personally think that filtering information is rather counter-productive. I believe that honesty is the best policy. Instead of filtering bad influence, I would rather try to explain the truth with two provisos: (1) loving adult provides a commentary, and (2) the kid is in the peak of her reasonable mind as determined by the natural creativity cycle. The commentary should not indoctrinate. It should rather provide a psychologically healthy interpretation. The peak of mental performance may be necessary to avoid emotional interpretations that may indeed turn out to be stressful or unhealthy.
For example, I do not think we should hide death from children. Just the opposite, the earlier the natural interpretation of death is presented to the kid, the less traumatic the realization. I am strongly influenced by my own development here. I was discovering a great deal of existential dilemmas only in my teens. My early childhood was shielded with the help of religion, which pushed all philosophical topics off the mental agenda for many years. This is why one of my early teen goals in science was to make people immortal. Some psychologists argue that my honest approach to upbringing results in de-sensitization. I agree, and I claim this might actually be healthy. We do not want kids to lose empathy. We only want them to have a cool-minded interpretation of the world. Hence the need for "peak brain" and the adult commentary.
I oppose filtering and indoctrination, however, I would never deny a parent such an option. Families need to run their lives congruent with their own system of values. This is necessary for the mental health of society.
For comfort, I insist that some basic core values are the same in all religions and philosophies. For example, with minor exceptions, this commandment is pretty universal: "you should not kill other human beings". Natural values and behaviors coexist in harmony with reason, biology, and/or culture. Values and behaviors that do not arise naturally may require a degree of convincing (education or indoctrination). For example, some people disagree with the assertion: "we should pay taxes".
Fineman and others worry about superstition. I say that all values with a staying power are welcome. All forms of superstition are not, but they will clash with reality sooner in later. For a vast majority of kids, superstitious influences will get corrected. We should mostly focus on making sure indoctrination does not become abuse.
(to be continued)
This text is incomplete. It is being worked on incrementally. Please come back in a few days, or see other texts at SuperMemo Guru