The blogosphere is an amazing place. I posted a quote by Perry Marshall yesterday and asked if anyone knew who was Perry Marshall. I got two replies!
Karen, of Let's Play Restaurant!, found an interview of Perry Marshall. Perry sounds like a good guy. He got an engineering degree and now has his own marketing business.
And then another reader, Angela Gross, pointed me to Perry's company, and specificially a column he had written about American Education. (Here is the PDF version.)
Perry has a number of good lines. He builds on John Gatto's point that the purpose of public schools is not to give children an education:
"The teachers’ job is to keep them kids sitting at their desks, not quite killing each other for 13 years, such that mom and dad will be content to be somewhere else while everyone collects their paychecks. Your teachers’ job was to permanently condition you that before you get up from your desk, or choose a major, or get a promotion, or read a book, or eat lunch, or urinate, you must secure permission from a higher authority."
As my older two daughters continue to spend hours each day reading I liked his thoughts about reading:
"Avid readers are quirky and hard to control. They don’t mindlessly follow the herd. They don’t swallow every whim of political correctness that comes over the transom. They question things. They make discoveries. And they make you really mad when you argue with them because they actually know what they’re talking about."
And here is where he makes his point about homeschooling and socialization:
"Because of this experience, I was positively inclined towards home-schooling my own kids many years before I had kids. So yes, we do home school our kids now and I think it’s a much better way to go. They get plenty of time to play with other kids because of field trips and friends coming over and all the rest; Tannah goes to China with daddy, instead of going to the Field Museum with 125 third graders.
"But more importantly, they’re not immersed in a corrosive, disrespectful environment where they learn bad habits from other kids and become conditioned to think that learning new stuff is boring. Accusing a home school kid of missing out on 'socialization' is like accusing a work-at-home entrepreneur of missing out on corporate politics."
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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, education, public school, Perry Marshall
2 comments:
Henry,
I love you blog. Thank you. You are a wonderful homeschooling resource. You do all the work for me so I can just check out the links on your page rather than having to look for them myself ;)
We live in Qatar and are homeschoolers. I would never put my child in one of the schools here. They're atrocious, including the American and British Schools.
I loved Perry Marshall's comment about his daughter going to China with him rather than the field museum with 125 third graders. This is one of the great things about homeschooling overseas. What better way to learn than to actually go to stonehenge, on a safari etc? We'll be traveling to Paris for a week this summer on the way back to Qatar from visiting family in the states, field trips my kids actually remember! Thank you so much, I thoroughly enjoy reading your blog each day! Keep it up!
I remember getting trouble in the first grade for reading from a book I had hidden on my lap under the desk. The teacher to this day remembers it -- she went to our church -- and how she constantly had to correct me to listen to her instead of reading. What she does not remember (and I do) is that the books I had under the desk were usually 4th or 5th grade books. Yes, we readers are quite subversive!
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