soooooo sad!

i just received the link to this article on my local homeschool group and i find it so incredibly sad!!

see now THAT is just the sort of thing i’m going to avoid by homeschooling. its just absolutely insane what they do to little kids in school these days!!

it’s all about the testing and the things they push on kindergarten and 1st graders these days. not just public school but private as well!

and it’s not just the schools…it’s the parents! why is it that parents just don’t see what it is they are doing to their children? that article talks about the push from parents to have highly successful children… what’s happening to childhood?

it’s just so sad… i hear people say all the time how children now are not the same as children from their childhood…they don’t play like they used to…most blame it on tv and video games and absolutely that is a big part of it…and a perceived fear of the world by the parents…maybe the world is more dangerous, maybe it’s not…i don’t know but i do, as a parent, worry a lot about my children’s safety…from child predators and the like. so i can relate. but i think the schools are really adding to this loss of childhood.

when i substituted in our local public schools i did 3rd grade and under…and in the 4 months or so that i subbed, i remember just being so surprised that in nearly every classroom the only things that we did were revolving around reading, writing and math. no music, no science (only a couple teachers, who presumably went above and beyond, squeezed some science in), no art…no real art, that is…just crappy, developmentally INappropriate photocopied crapola.

these kids souls are seriously starving to death! i can’t see how anyone can ever make it right to take away the arts and music out of any early childhood program. it’s integral to a young child’s whole self! i just don’t get how the schools can’t fathom this. and you wonder why so many children do so poorly…besides the fact that many have really crappy home lives…the schools don’t properly educate them, in my mind. i know everyone has their own philosophy on education and there are so many different takes on it…but that is mine…that the classic method of education really isn’t a good one.

i don’t believe in testing…there’s so many flaws in that…i don’t believe in teaching to the test….what are you learning? nothing. its wasted energy. nothing gets internalized.

what is education anyway? is it just learning random things to be able to spew out for a test and then forget them forever? the schools seem to think this. that’s what’s being promoted. if they seriously think that the methods they use are supposed to be teaching children in a way that the info will stick, they are dead wrong. i can’t remember much at all from my education. hell, even in college most of the stuff didn’t stick. i got my degree in child development and i’ll be damned if i can remember much of it. the basics, yes, but not the depth that i dove into through 4.5yrs in college. what was the point in my learning all that stuff just to forget it?

cram as much in as quick as you can and move on…that doesn’t work. but that’s the way most schools do things. i would rather learn something slowly and really get to digest it and chew and maybe even remember a lot of it. (oh i know you can’t ever remember EVERYTHING…i’m not unrealistic…but forgetting most of the stuff isn’t acceptable either).