We decided to nurture our children’s education from home for several reasons. Each child learns at their own level and pace. Sometimes they are interested in a topic that, if explored when interested, blooms into an education that is retained and useful. When forced to study a subject reluctantly, not only do they fight against learning, they most likely don’t retain it for the future.
From personal experience as an adult I’ve seen that I study and investigate subjects that I’m interested in. I retain that information and can recall it easily. I build my own opinions and convictions for my beliefs in what I’ve learned. I remember sitting in school, irritated at a subject, frustrated that I was being forced to learn about it, especially since I would never use it in life. Why was I being forced to learn something so irrelevant?
Not only do public/private schools not allow children to learn at their own pace, they strive to limit their abilities. The school system is designed to dumb down our children. To limit their potential and keep them from being top of their industry. In fact the reason that schooling lasts until you are 21 is so that by the time you figure out what you want to be the fire of youth is gone. The youthful fire that was the drive for historical men like George Washington, Thomas Edison, and . Standardized tests have become less and less complicated. And yet the scores of American graduates have continually declined. The literacy rates in America have drastically declined since the first world war. Schools are meant to keep the working class in a mentality to continue being the working class. So make sure that industry has the workers needed for huge corporate America. The free democrat society that we think we have is actually controlled by a limited elite that train us as employees from kindergarten to bachelors.
Kevin and I are entrepreneurs. We are paving the way in our own lives. It’s hard work and we make mistakes. But we know that we control our own destiny. We hope to give our children that freedom. To allow them to choose any path, and know that they can be the best at whatever they choose. This blog is to help keep record of our daily activities and experiences. To watch as our children grow and learn each day.
Suggested Reading: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto
Did the Underground History of American Education state that literacy rates have declined since the first world war? From all the articles I’ve read this just isn’t the case…just curious where you got this info from..
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp
and
http://education-portal.com/articles/Illiteracy_The_Downfall_of_American_Society.html
…and remember you can’t compare the 21 and 24 percent in the second article with the war era since assessments aren’t comparable…
You’re right the assessments aren’t comparable in the links you listed. Below is an excerpt of John Taylor Gatto’s. Basically if you look at it logically most modern people can’t read and comprehend classical literature. That in itself is very telling to me. Below you will see the test results correlating to different wars. It will be interesting to see the results of the next draft. Currently only every 1 of 4 applicants passes the military entrance exam.
HISTORICAL LITERACY RATES IN THE UNITED STATES
(from “Eyeless in Gaza” by John Taylor Gatto)
1840, General Population – 93% to 100% (Census Data)
1941-1945, World War II, Soldiers – 96% (Army Tests)
1950-1953 Korean War, Soldiers – 81% (Army Tests)
1964-1973 Vietnamese War, Soldiers – 73% (Army Tests)
Abundant data exist from states like Connecticut and Massachusetts to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent. According to the Connecticut census of 1840, only one citizen out of every 579 was illiterate and it’s embarrassing to know what people in those days considered literate. Popular novels of the period give a clue: Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826, sold an equivalent of 10 million copies today. If you pick up an uncut version you find yourself in a dense thicket of philosophy, history, culture, manners, politics, geography, analysis of human motives and actions, all conveyed in data-rich periodic sentences so formidable only a determined and well-educated reader can handle it nowadays. Yet we were a small-farm nation without colleges or universities to speak of. Could those simple folk have had more complex minds than our own?
In the draft and volunteer enlistments of WWII 18 million men were tested and 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Most of these men were schooled in the late 1920’s and 1930’s.
Six years later during the Korean War literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. This group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
During the Vietnamese War, in the 1960’s and early 1970’s the number of men unacceptable to the military by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. These young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a large part of those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.
Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.
The National Adult Literacy Survey represents 190 million U.S. adults over age sixteen with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. The survey is conducted by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey. It ranks adult Americans into five levels. Here is its 1993 analysis:
1. Forty-two million Americans over the age of sixteen can’t read. Some of this group can write their names on Social Security cards and fill in height, weight, and birth spaces on application forms.
2. Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.
3. Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade reading. A majority of this group could not figure out the price per ounce of peanut butter in a 20-ounce jar costing $1.99 when told they could round the answer off to a whole number.
4. Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified written explanation of the procedures
5. About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today. This last fact alone should warn you how misleading comparisons drawn from international student competitions really are, since the samples each country sends are small elite ones, unrepresentative of the entire student population. But behind the bogus superiority a real one is concealed.
6. Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us.
Thank you for leaving that…I guess it’s just what an individual wants to believe…I choose to believe the article from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy that I posted and you choose to believe Mr Gatto…who is definitely disillusioned with education in our country. I do find it interesting that the NAAL article excludes military in their overall data and Mr Gatto excludes the overall population from his data… Agree to disagree I guess…
I quoted Gatto because he listed his sources:
~Connecticut census of 1840
~draft and volunteer enlistments of WWII
~Korean War literacy in the draft pool
~The National Adult Literacy Survey represents 190 million U.S. adults over age sixteen with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. The survey is conducted by the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey.
Have you read Mr. Gatto’s book? He is constantly siting his sources and backing up his claims.
And when I read the articles you sent they also referred to a dumbed down society:
“The more recent focus on illiteracy has centered on functional literacy, which addresses the issue of whether a person’s educational level is sufficient to function in a modern society.”
Functioning in modern society is completely inconsistent. The military exams I believe are going to be the most reliable testing as people really do need to be literate to function in the military. Military results are going to be less bias than government results, which are trying to get you to believe their government schools are working.
Also in the link you sent:
“The earlier surveys of illiteracy examined a very fundamental level of reading and writing.”
And the books that sold at the time….the reading that they were doing at that time… is far superior to the dumbed down simplistic text that are best sellers today.
From the second link you posted:
“As the above statistics show, illiteracy can be closely correlated with low earnings and high incarceration rates. Individuals who cannot read struggle to function in society, which can cripple their lives and increase the burden on state prisons and economic support systems. ”
Absolutely! And that is why I homeschool! Schools are not teaching children to read. If they were, it wouldn’t matter how much income your household made. When I had my son in a private school, and they started teaching him site reading, a red flag went off. My son’s soccer team mates are being taught site reading in public school. The parent’s that step up to make sure their children can read DESPITE the public school system will turn out readers. The children without involved parents will have a VERY limited vocabulary and be without the tools they need to decipher words they don’t have memorized. My children are being taught phonetics and will have a foundation in Latin for a complete understanding of language. Interesting how our heroes like George Washington and Ben Franklin had minimal schooling but were eloquently literate.
“Compared to the rest of the world, the U.S. is doing well.”
Yay! Let’s pat ourselves on the back! We’re doing as well as socialists, communists, and impoverished nations. Yipee! I don’t care what the rest of the world’s reading capability is. I care what the US literacy is. And it’s far inferior to our fore fathers. Pick up some classical literature, see how far you get before you need a dictionary. Trust me the upper class, the leaders of the world, are NOT teaching their children site reading.
Susan all my remarks are not necessarily directed at you. I’m merely responding to the articles that you linked. I appreciate your post and sparking a conversation on the topic. 😀