How Even the Best Schools Harm Our Kids: A Teacher’s Story

My Story

Teaching is my first love. Even in high school, I knew I wanted to help kids have better lives through education, and I wanted to help the kids who needed it the most. So instead of applying to higher-paying private schools where most of my college batch mates went, I applied in a public school and taught there for seven years.

Then, I got pregnant and quit so I could take care of my baby.

And now, I have two kids who are old enough to go to school. But knowing what I know now about schools - all schools - it will be a cold day in hell before I send them there.

What Even The Best Schools Do To Our Kids:

1. They Deprive Our Kids of a Basic Need: Attention

   Our children want, crave and need attention. Any psychologist can tell you that. And the younger they are, the more they need and want it, and the more they are harmed by the lack of it.
   
   What is the smallest number of kids in one classroom? Twenty-five? Fifteen? Five? And one teacher.
   
   You have enough trouble giving your 3 kids all the attention they need. How much attention can a teacher give your child, with 25 more competing for it?

2. They Teach Our Kids to Behave Badly

   We all know kids like my child's cousin: she's a bully. Every time she and my kid play together, she would grab whatever toy my kid is playing with, even if she doesn't really want it herself.
   
   If my kid were in a school playground, with no adults watching, he would surely learn to fight. It's a natural human tendency. This, I do not want. I want him to learn to share. I want him to learn to give. In fact, I want him to learn to turn the other cheek.
   
   Because I am right there watching, I am able to minimize damage and teach him, “Nevermind. Let her have it. You can have it back later. It's not good to quarrel.”
   
   But in school, this doesn't happen because while Teacher is refereeing one pair, there are many others behind that she can't see. Who will minimize damage for those kids that Teacher can't see?

3. They Teach our Kids to go With the Crowd - Good or Bad

   In school, when one reads, all read. When one has recess, all have recess. Teacher needs the whole class to act like one person, because it's so much more “efficient and orderly” that way.
   
   As for your classmates, they expect you to laugh when they laugh, wear what they wear, and cheat when they cheat. Either that, or you get beat up in the playground, or called “loser” in the halls.
   
   Either way, you soon learn that it's best to do what everyone else is doing, be it reading or doing drugs.

4. They Waste our Children's Time

   Remember when you were in school? How much time did you spend waiting in line? Waiting for your turn to recite? Waiting for everyone else to finish the test? Waiting for teacher to arrive? Waiting for everyone to settle down?
   
   Can you remember how much time you spent actually learning, and how much more you spent in just idly waiting?
   
   In fact, everything we learn in 8 hours of school can be taught in 3 hours at home. That's five hours wasted, every day! You could have been training for the Olympics or learning 2 musical instruments in those five hours.

5. They Teach our Children Wrong Socialization Skills.

   Contrary to popular opinion, schools do NOT train our children in good socialization, for two big reasons:
   
   
   First, how much time, really, do schools give our children for socialization? During class hours, children are discouraged from talking, unless they raise their hands to recite. Recess and lunch hours are the only times when they can “socialize” freely, which brings me to the second reason why schools are bad for our kids' socialization skills:
   
   During recess and lunch, they socialize with very little adult supervision. So, they learn socialization skills from their peers - who are as unskilled and ignorant as they are as to what proper socialization is.

I am all for exposing children to people so they can learn to socialize, but only with my supervision. Beforehand, they should be trained by a knowledgeable, caring adult on what proper socialization is - and this takes years. To send a 7-year-old to school, long before his good manners and good values are firmly ingrained, is as dangerous as giving him your car keys without teaching him first how to drive.

So if I'm not sending my kids to school, where will they get their education? At home! I'm homeschooling them!

I'm now a working mom - in a different industry - who is out of the house ten hours a day, but in three hours that I am home, I can teach my kids everything that they will learn from eight hours at school. You can do it too!