By Douglas Marolla
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
High School teachers rarely ask to teach the ninth-grade classes. 14-year-olds are the least mature people in the building, especially the boys, and getting them focused is a pain. There is a ton of energy in the ninth-grade classroom, much of it hormone driven. Redirecting that energy in the proper direction takes patience and a firm disposition. Ninth-grade boys are often unaware that deodorant is necessary after gym class, and they are often negligent in fulfilling their – ahem – hygienic obligations. Ninth-grade class is a high energy, chaotic, loud, immature human laboratory for a good part of the school year.
With all of that said, I purposely ask for the freshmen because I get to cover the material I want. In the Testing Industrial Complex also known as New York public high schools, teachers are shoehorned into “teaching to the test.” A New York high schooler cannot get a New York State Regents diploma unless he passes the English Regents exam. The exam is given at the end of the 11th grade and is “high stakes.” The pressure is intense on the students and the teachers. For this reason, I avoid teaching 11th-grade English. The school’s success rates, the English department’s success rates, and the school report card use the passing rate of the English Regents as a large part of their formula.
Imagine the stakes: if the students do poorly on the English exam, the dominos of failure begin to fall. The bad percentages come in, and the pain starts. To combat this, teachers, well, teach to the test. Much of the year is spent covering the reading comprehension section and how to answer multiple choice questions. The two writing parts are formulaic and boring, and the teacher has to get poorly trained 16-year-olds to repeatedly write the “essay” according to the mandates of New York State. It’s paint by numbers, but instead of colors, you are writing about potential ways to solve “climate change” or how to reclaim the territory of the speckled newt.
Teachers avoid this rote style of learning by not teaching 11th-grade English. It’s what I do. But you can separate your children from this style of learning altogether by stepping away from the teacher’s desk, walking to the front of the building, and leaving. Unlike Germany, homeschooling in the United States is legal. The Home School Legal Defense Fund has seen to it that state governments are afraid to even try to ban it. The HSLDA is a rabid defender of homeschooling. They are hard core.
Students would rather learn at their own pace in a safe environment with subjects they’re interested in. Why subject your child to the drugs, porn, violence and low energy nonsense that’s prevalent in most public high schools? In every town in the United States there’s a section where you can buy drugs, and everyone knows where it is. The same thing exists in schools.
The idea that school is necessary for “socialization” is absurd as well. Only in schools are you grouped by age. And what type of “socialization” are you looking for? The kind that is obsessed with TikTok clownishness and time wasting? If your 7th grade daughter knows the lyrics to City Girls’ “Throat Baby,” maybe the socialization she’s getting is sending her in the wrong direction.
For centuries, everybody was home schooled. One of the guys who mapped the human genome was homeschooled on a goat farm until middle school. The other got C’s and D’s throughout his schooling career, barely graduated, then became an army medic. There are examples throughout recent history showing that the idea of taxpayer-funded mandatory public school is simply not optimal for huge swaths of the population.
The factory school model was started to create a class of people to perform specific menial tasks. The Elite used school as a way to not only keep people in their economic class levels (almost like a caste system), but also give the illusion that they were doing something to help the downtrodden. It’s an old bait-and-switch formula. If you’re going to take a child from his family for 12 years, you have to have a good sounding reason to do it. The current version of this is that schools, like the one where I work, offer free breakfast and lunch. Who can argue against free food? If you’re into processed, starch-laden food-like substances, we’ve got what you need.
Luckily, you don’t have to listen to the reasons anymore. You can step away and break free. There are so many places to visit, so many online resources, and so many exciting things in this world that subjecting your young children to assembly line education, often by people who detest old school values, is both ridiculous and unnecessary. You can get your child out of the School Industrial Complex and the Testing Industrial Complex and enter him or her into a freer, more dynamic world. The choice is yours.Subscribe to get early access to podcasts, events, and more!
