Bringing Up Teenage Boys

Straight Talk to Moms and Dads

by Geoffrey Botkin

According to acclaimed American schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto, school harms boys far more than it helps them because it takes from boys the tools they need for critical thinking in the real world.

Says Gatto in his book Dumbing Us Down (1992; reprinted, New Society Publishers, 2005):

Around the year 1850 all the free-form, casual schooling that made our nation of farmers far and away the best-educated the world had ever seen was done away with in a series of strokes of the legislative pen.

In the 1860s, Herbert Spencer . . . pronounced government schooling a preposterous endeavor doomed to failure. He said that this would happen because it deprived children of raw experience and responsibility precisely at the moment their natural development demanded it, and that this experience and responsibility could not be made up for later.

“I feel ashamed,” states Gatto, “that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free.”

My purpose here is to help us imagine and pursue a better way.

Read the rest here:

http://www.homeschooltoday.com/news/175/23/Bringing-Up-Teenage-Boys.htm

Photo: Homeschooling Today Magazine