#7 What teachers really want to tell parents

          When a SYSTEM is ill-conceived and harmful, the system cannot merely be tinkered with. There must be sweeping changes. The reason why Laurie's slavery analogy is apt is not because there aren't many caring, giving, exceptional people in the role of teacher, but because, like slavery, the system is bad. Some slave owners were nice and caring, but they were doing their good deeds within a system that was founded on an entirely wrong idea: that people can own other people. The public system is similarly founded on an incorrect idea: that children can and must be made to learn XYZ at a certain age, for their own good. This idea and traditional schooling is so fundamentally flawed that it must be discarded.

          I am not an angry parent of a child who has been hurt by school. My kids never went to school. But I am someone who has been reading and thinking about education from my early teen years, someone who saw that the public education system was harmful even when I was in it, forty years ago, and even when it was stamping me a "winner" with top grades and college scholarships. I am someone who has seen many reforms and reformers come and go, and I am someone who has seen all the "Why Johnny can't read" hand-wringing for decades. I am someone who has seen that, despite all the hand-wringing and "reform," the system is now EVEN worse.

          And the school system is hurting kids.