John Taylor Gatto - review & discussion of his ideas

[nee1]

Here is more from the book ``The Dumbest Generation.’’

KNOWLEDGE DEFICITS
Everybody likes the "Jaywalking" segment on The Tonight Show. With mike in hand and camera ready, host Jay Leno leaves the studio and hits the sidewalks of L.A., grabbing pedestrians for a quick test of their factual knowledge. "How many stars are on the American flag?" he asks. "Where was Jesus born? Who is Tony Blair?" Leno plays his role expertly, slipping into game-show patter and lightly mocking the "contestants." Sometimes he allows them to select the grade level of the questions, offering a choice from eighth-grade, sixth-grade, fourth-grade, and second-grade primers. A few of his best guests reappear on a mock quiz show presented on the Tonight Show stage.

The respondents tend toward the younger ages, a sign that their elders perform better at recall. It's the 20-year-olds who make the comedy, and keep "Jaywalking" a standard set piece on the air. Here are some snippets:
"Do you remember the last book you read?" Leno queries a young man.
"Do magazines count?" he wonders. Moments later, a longhaired guy replies, "Maybe a comic book."
Another:
"Where does the Pope live?" "England."
"Where in England?" Leno follows, keeping a straight face.
"Ummm, Paris."
And:
"Who made the first electric lightbulb?"
"Uh," a college student ponders, "Thomas Edison." Leno congratulates the student until he adds, 'Yeah, with the kite." Leno corrects him, "That's Ben Franklin."
And:
"Do you ever read any of the classics?" Leno inquires. The guest draws a blank. "Anything by Charles Dickens?"Another blank. "A Christmas Carol?"
"I saw the movie," she blurts out. "I liked the one with Scrooge McDuck better."

The ignorance is hard to believe. Before a national audience and beside a celebrity, the camera magnifying their mental labor, interviewees giggle and mumble, throwing out replies with the tentative upward lilt of a question. Stars on the flag: "Fifty-two?"
Tenure of a Supreme Court judge: "I'm guessing four years?" They laugh at themselves, and sometimes, more hilariously, they challenge the content. On the mock-game-show set, Leno quizzes, "What's another name for the War Between the States?" "Are we supposed to know this off the top of our heads?" one contestant protests. "What kind of question is this?"

The comedy runs deeper, though, than the bare display of young people embarrassed not to know a common fact. Something unnerving surfaces in the exchanges, something outside the normal course of conversation. Simply put, it is the astonishing lifeworld of someone who can't answer these simple queries. Think of how many things you must do in order nor to know the year 1776 or the British prime minister or the Fifth Amendment. At the start, you must forget the lessons of school—history class, social studies, government, geography, English, philosophy, and art history. You must care nothing about current events, elections, foreign policy, and war. No newspapers, no political magazines, no NPR or Rush Limbaugh, no CNN, Fox News, network news, or NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. No books on the Cold War or the Founding, no biographies, nothing on Bush or Hillary, terrorism or religion, Europe or the Middle East. No political activity and no community activism. And your friends must act the same way, never letting a historical fact or current affair slip into a cell phone exchange.

It isn't enough to say that these young people are uninterested in world realities. They are actively cut off from them. Or a better way to put it is to say that they are encased in more immediate realities that shut out conditions beyond—friends, work, clothes, cars, pop music, sitcoms, Facebook. Each day, the information they receive and the interactions they have must be so local or superficial that the facts of government, foreign and domestic affairs, the historical past, and the fine arts never slip through. How do they do it? It sounds hard, especially in an age of so much information, so many screens and streams in private and public places, and we might assume that the guests on "Jaywalking" represent but a tiny portion of the rising generation. No doubt The Tonight Show edits the footage and keeps the most  humiliating cases, leaving the smart respondents in the cutting room. Leno's out for laughter, not representative data. In truth, we might ask, what does a cherry-picked interview on Santa Monica Boulevard at 9 P.M. on a Saturday night say about the 60 million Americans in their teens and twenties?

A lot, it turns out. That's the conclusion drawn by a host of experts who in the last 10 years have directed large-scale surveys and studies of teen and young adult knowledge, skills, and intellectual habits. Working for government agencies, professional guilds, private foundations, academic centers, testing services, and polling firms, they have designed and implemented assessments, surveys, and interviews of young people to measure their academic progress, determine their intellectual tastes, and detail their understanding of important facts and ideas. They don't despise American youth, nor do they idealize it. Instead, they conduct objective, ongoing research into the young American mind. Their focus extends from a teen or 20-year-old's familiarity' with liberal arts learning (history, literature, civics . . .) to calculations of how young adults spend their time (watching TV, surfing the Web, reading . . .). They probe a broad range of attitudes and aptitudes, interests and erudition, college and workplace "readiness." Much of the inquiry centers precisely on the kinds of knowledge (under)represented in the "Jaywalking" segments.

The better-known examples of monitoring include the SAT and ACT tests, whose annual results appear in every newspaper as each state in the Union reckons where it stands in the national rankings. Nielsen ratings for television and radio shows provide a familiar index of youth tastes, while every election season raises doubts about the youth vote—where does it fall, will it turn out . . . ? Added to these measures are dozens of lesser-known projects that chart the intellectual traits of young Americans. Some of them excel in the scope and consistency of their coverage [e.g.,]:

1) National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—a regular assessment of student learning in various subjects, mainly reading and math, conducted by the U.S. Department of Education. Nicknamed "the Nation's Report Card," NAEP involves national- and state-level inquiries, with the former gathering a respondent group of 10,000 to 20,000 students, the latter around 3,000 students from each participating jurisdiction (45-55 jurisdictions per assessment).

2) National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)—Housed at Indiana University, NSSE (nicknamed "Nessie") is a national survey administered to college freshmen and seniors each fall semester, the questions bearing upon their demographic traits, campus experiences, and intellectual habits. In 2006, nearly 260,000 students participated.

3) Kaiser Family Foundation Program for the Study of Entertainment Media and Health —a research project funded by Kaiser and concentrating on media and children, with an emphasis on the media's effect on mental and physical health. Important data collections include surveys of media consumption by infants and toddlers and by 8- to 18-year-olds. 

4) American Time Use Survey, Bureau of Labor Statistics (ATUS) —an annual survey with a nationally representative sample of more than 13,000 respondents who chart how they spend their time on weekdays and weekends. ATUS tallies work and school time, and among leisure activities measured are reading, watching TV, playing games, using computers, and socializing.

5) Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (SPPA) —a survey conducted approximately every five years that measures the voluntary participation of adults in different art forms. Respondents numbering up to 17,000 record how many novels and poems they read and how often they visit a museum or a gallery, attend a theater performance, listen to jazz on the radio, etc.

There are many more important ongoing investigations of the young American intellect, such as National Geographic's Geographic Literacy Survey and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's civic literacy surveys, along with one-time reports such as Are They Really Ready to Work? (2006), a study of workplace skills of recent graduates by the Conference Board. One after another, though, they display the same dismal results and troubling implications.

[nee1]

Anyone care to chime in on the idea that school, on its own, extends childhood artificially? I definintely think the idea of extended childhood could use some discussion here. 150 years ago, teens were out working. Now you can't rely on them for much at all, because they're too busy posting to twitter, emulating the latest meme on youtube, or sexting some cute kid in class.

PokerDad, have you read Gatto's ``Underground History of American Education''? Powerful stuff. Here's the link to a free copy on his website: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm. You can download a pdf version here - http://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758. On page 414 (on the pdf version) , he says:

Don’t let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl’s consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.

Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games.

PokerDad, you once said you were raising an adult. You are not far behind the Harding (College by 12) family.  In their book, the children gave their testimonials. Here is part of what one of the daughters, Rossanah, said:

Mom and dad did not regarded age as an excuse for immaturity. They gave us responsibilities to help us grow and taught us to reason like adults. By treating us like adults – and by this I mean with expectation that were capable of a higher level of accountability – we often rose to the occasion and surpassed what would be considered the “norm” for our age. I think in many ways, this prepared us for real world decision making and gave us the confidence to participate with students several years our senior. People always say to my sisters and I that we are so mature for our age. I think this all goes back to building those invaluable skills of communication and measuring consequences. Parents are ultimately raising adults, independent human beings that are capable of living and being a light in this world

.

After rereading Gatto's works (Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Instruction), I humbly submit that I believe school extends childhood. And that was one of the Gatto's pet peeves. He spoke against the extension of childhood and believed children should be integrated into the real world as soon as possible. Real world in the sense of giving children/young people work opportunities (and allowing them lauch their own) to enable them contribute to themselves and to society. According to Weapons of Mass Instruction, the concept of adolescence was phony, a concept introduced in the 1950s by Stanley Hall after the introduction of compulsory schooling. Prior to this time, there was no such thing as adolescence;  you were either a child or a young man/young woman.

Gatto integrated his students into the real world by providing lots of opportunities for volunteering, work opportunities, apprenticeships, and job shadowing. He requested that real-life learning experiences be integrated into academic learning. For example, in Dumbing Us Down, he said:

Right now we are taking from our children all the time that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop. We have to invent school experiences that give a lot of that time back. We need to trust children from a very early age with independent study, perhaps arranged in school, but which takes place away from the institutional setting. We need to invent curricula where each kid has a chance to develop private uniqueness and selfreliance.
 
A short time ago I took $70 and sent a twelve-yearold girl from my class, with her non-English-speaking mother, on a bus down the New Jersey coast to take the police chief of Seabright to lunch and apologize for polluting his beach with a discarded Gatorade bottle. In exchange for this public apology I had arranged with the  police chief for the girl to have a one-day apprenticeship in small-town police procedures. A few days later two more of my twelve-year-old kids traveled alone from Harlem to West Thirty-first street where they began an apprenticeship with a newspaper editor; later three of my kids found themselves in the middle of the Jersey swamps at six in the morning, studying the mind of a trucking company president as he dispatched eighteenwheelers to Dallas, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

I posted thoughts and excerpts from Gatto and Harding books on the artificial extension of childhood and its relationship to teenage rebellion here -  http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-older-child/overall-education-acceleration-vs-depth/msg91736/#msg91736. 

Thoughts?

[Korrale4kq]

I agree with a lot of what Gatto writes about the extension of childhood.
I also think that childhood has been chopped up too much.  I read the terms age or grade appropriate bandied around a lot. And I feel that they box in a child's development and education.
There is also a pet peeve that disturbs me. It is the extension of babyhood. Many, years ago babyhood ended at 1. Or when I child started to walk. But now I know many 3-5 year old "babies".

Here is a breakdown of terms that are used now to describe childhood.

Infant - traditionally up to 12 months but now I think it more like 18-24months.
Toddler - most commonly 24-36 months but it used to be 12-36months.
Preschooler - 3-4 years
Kindergartner - 5 years.
Grade/elementary/primary schooler or just child - 6-9 years.
Tween - 9-12 years.
Teen - 13-19 years

Talking about kids leaving home, I was reading to my husband last night a history of our town, and a local celebrity, Daniel Decatur Emmett. I was reading about how he left home, and town at the age of 13 to work for a newspaper in another town. At 17 he lied about his age to enlist in the army. When he was discharged because of that lie he then joined a circus and travelled the country.
I beleive Laura Ingalls Wilder was teaching in a one room school house by the age of 15.

Yes, it was a different world in many ways. But what made it so that these children, teenagers were able to take on such responsibility? These two examples are not unique for that time period.

And talking about the use of the word teenager... It reminds me of a song written for Judy Galrand in a movie back in 1938. She sings about how she is too old for toys, too young for boys. She is stuck as an inbetween. She is portraying a young teen, she is 15 herself, Teenager wasn't even a coined term back then.
http://youtu.be/O-dsgtkxp_c

[nee1]

I agree with a lot of what Gatto writes about the extension of childhood. I also think that childhood has been chopped up too much.  I read the terms age or grade appropriate bandied around a lot. And I feel that they box in a child's development and education.  There is also a pet peeve that disturbs me. It is the extension of babyhood. Many, years ago babyhood ended at 1. Or when I child started to walk. But now I know many 3-5 year old "babies".

Korrale, I posted a link  for downloading a pdf of  Gatto's ``Underground History'' here - http://archive.org/details/TheUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEducation_758.  In the book, Gatto says on page 19:

During the post-Civil War period, childhood was extended about four years. Later, a special label was created to describe very old children. It was called adolescence, a phenomenon hitherto unknown to the human race. The infantilization of young people didn’t stop at the beginning of the twentieth century; child labor laws were extended to cover more and more kinds of work, the age of school leaving set higher and higher. The greatest victory for this utopian project was making school the only avenue to certain occupations. The intention was ultimately to draw all work into the school net. By the 1950s it wasn’t unusual to find graduate students well into their thirties, running errands, waiting to start their lives.

[Korrale4kq]

Yup.  I have been reading it since you posted that link. I am in a few chapters and although I find his tone inflammatory, I find him right in so many ways.

[TeachingMyToddlers]

If being a typical teenager is a modern day phenomenon and some parents prefer their children ascend directly into the real world of adulthood, then what about getting married at 13-18 years old? My own grandmother dropped out of high school to get married at 16. Might have even been 15 now that I think about it, and started a family shortly after.

If motherhood is no less noble a choice than a worldly career outside the home, then what difference does it make if the goal is to skip adolescence? Doesn't get any more "real world" than providing for or bearing a child.  This is not confrontational as I am not even 100% decided either way for my kids (as far as delaying adulthood/skipping adolescence, most likely a little of this, a little of that), but I am offering some food for thought here. Yes, kids back then were teaching in a one room school house, but they were also getting married off quite young. Something I don't particularly aim for with my own kids (says the girl who was married at barely 19 herself, still considered relatively young by modern standards ).

Also, maybe it was already mentioned on the forum, but are there any differences in the brain scans of a 13 year old versus a 19 year old? or a 16 year old and a 19 year old? I don't think I've ever looked that up but if there are scholars making the argument that adolescence is artifical, then perhaps they have already proved that teens are really adults as shown via brain scan.

[TeachingMyToddlers]

This is semi-related to what we're talking about, raising adults versus kids. I happened to stumble upon it tonight. Coincidentally I tried to read her book a month or two ago and didn't get that far, nothing too memorable about it worth noting but I just couldn't get into it. Regardless, this is a solid approach to teaching your kids about chores and responsibility.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/OzFinaPDAEI&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/OzFinaPDAEI&rel=1</a>

[seastar]

I have been following this thread with interest and it has certainly given me food for thought. I am quite happy to say I am raising a baby and preschooler and, while developing independence is a key goal, I am in no hurry for them to enter the world of work, marriage and children. I hope they will study, travel, explore, and generally have a good time - is this so bad? I don't think so.

Sternberg published some excellent research a few years ago on risk taking in adolescence which highlights the differences in the brains of teenagers. This research has been very influential in sentencing of adolescents for crimes.

Also,  I think it is very important to remember that the life span has greatly increased in line with the apparent extension of childhood.

[Korrale4kq]

I am raising a man. Hopefully a good man. I tell James all the time that I don't care why he does in life just as long as he works hard and is a good happy man. I think growing up and being a stay at home parent is a great goal. I am a stay at home mum raising my son and I don't feel any less accomplished than friends in the career world.

Now that being said, I am not raising him to leave home at 13 or 16. I am trying to make sure that he has the independence and the coping mechanisms to function in the real world once he enters it. Ideally after college, or when he goes off to college, or even when he enters the workforce. I know many young people who are in their early 20s who have a hard time functioning. They are unable to prioritize and pay their bills and rent before their tanning salon fees. They shuffle around from apartment to apartment being evicted. They then move back home with their parents. My husband is dealing with these you kids tattling at his work place. If someone says a naughty word, they run upstairs to the managers. This is a blue collar factory with a lot of colorful language being used daily.

[PokerDad]

Apologies for not responding sooner; time is sparse these days it seems. 

Many great points ITT; My goal was to spawn a discussion, and I think so far we're doing that. The artificial extension of childhood is only one of myriad problems that Gatto points out. I do happen to believe it, alone, is at the crux of his disillusionment with school, and is therefore very worthy of an entire side discussion.

So far, in each generation overall IQ has been raising. I have been reading a lot and in the books written 100 years ago, I get strong feeling of passive attitude towards life. In the newer literature the overall attitude towards personal life is in most books proactive. I believe this is an symptom of cultural change where people are perceived being responsible of their life. That said, I think that even 100 years ago persons who started factories or shops or become presidents were also proactive to be able to succeed.

This post has a lot of salient points, but for brevity purposes, I isolated this paragraph here. IQ has gone up as measured by increasing means for the last 50 years. This is known as the Flynn Effect click here for more. There is evidence that the trend has reversed at around 9 years ago. I find the Flynn Effect to be a fascinating topic in its own right, but also should not be used as a rebuttal for the argument that artificial extension of childhood exists. They are two different things. I happen to agree that there is an undercurrent of taking charge of your life; I can't comment how this compares to yesteryear since I wasn't around then, but I'd guess books such as Think and Grow Rich, were pivotal in re-establishing that YOU are the biggest determinant of success or failure in a capitalist nation as the USA - though it's really the only ingredient you can control and therefore the main ingredient you should focus on. You cannot choose your parents, for example, let alone where you're born or the era you're born. But I digress there, sorry about that.

Kids learn a lot of empathy, than I would think in any other setting. They have to manage the bully, run for that next class just to reach in time, at times ride the public transport, manage their lunch money...lot of skills in exercise. It is debatable how much learning takes place in a school but life skills are definitely learnt, so in a way is unschooling not happening in schools?

I do think Gatto tends to undershoot the benefits of traditional school, but in my own opinion, it doesn't much matter; he's correct so often that it calls into question if these benefits are anywhere near just compensation for what they take away. This argument I highlighted is similar to the classic "socialization" argument. According to it, school is where you learn social skills. I should point out, it was never designed to be an institution for socialization; it is only recently where this default argument has arisen. The social structure of school is perhaps my biggest complaint (and one of Gatto's as well) - it is not reflective of society at large in any noticeable way. For instance, kids are all the same age, and they are kids. The child to adult ratio is widely skewed toward child. While this makes it easier to make friends, the atmosphere itself is very homogenized and leads to a new subculture dictated by children. This subculture has its own norms and values. Further, the importance of that miniature society outweighs the real world of family, household, neighborhood, and community by a significant margin. Gatto doesn't necessarily discuss this in the exact terms I'm describing, but I'm sure he touched on it in Dumbing us Down. There was a reason why I told my wife that skipping high school could be a way to avoid teen rebellion - avoid subjecting your child to the miniature society and force them to interact with the larger world instead - the larger world where the milieu won't undercut your family and community values. In short, what's important in the miniature society - or children led sub-culture - is vastly different than what is important outside of it. For this reason, I find the mini-society to be a waste of time, effort, and most importantly detrimental to success in the later years; not a benefit.

I'm not saying you're wrong; I'm just saying that the benefits of this system are outweighed by its weaknesses. I believe we could perhaps discuss where I might be correct and where I might be wrong - or stated another way (in more poker like mindset) what variables are at work that if changed, would make me either totally correct, or totally wrong. I'm sure if given enough time and thought, I could come up with some variables that would do this.

I'll be lazy but this blog post is similar to how I feel about him. http://gaither.wordpress.com/2009/02/03/gatto-on-the-evils-of-public-education/

I really enjoyed the blog post. One of the things in it was how Gatto talks about physical attractiveness as a main criteria for high status universities. Like Gaither, I found that argument totally lacking. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not going to swallow an argument unless its backed by evidence, or  a posteriori reflection. Most of his arguments I can sit back and reflect upon and either see it for myself, or after some digging, find that he's correct. I was recently listening to a US History lecture series, and sure enough, the professor mentioned the rise of public education and how military style inculcation was and is used. I didn't expect validation from an experienced historian, but there it was in a mainstream lecture series. It's not made up; even if it were, the result is really all you need to focus on. Does said institution produce said results? By enlarge, yes. Gatto is correct. This blog post touches on religious beliefs - this is a side discussion and not really important in the grand scheme of things, BUT - I do find Gatto's allegiance to faith a bit incongruous. It reminds me Robert Kiyosaki's love for Multi-Level Marketing, and that's the best analogy I can come up with. Kiyosaki endorses MLM and I believe the reason why is because he knows who buys his materials in droves (hint, MLMers). Likewise, people that tend to side with Gatto are more faith based and want to eschew the system for those reasons. 

I'll give you another weakness in Gatto's argument, and I do it unsolicited. He points to the eugenic movement as having influence on schools, where schools were to serve as a sifting mechanism so that the unfit would be seen as unfit and lack reproductive opportunities as a result of their failures in the school system. Well - there is TRUTH to this argument even though it's a laughable argument at best. Charles Murray in Coming Apart writes an entire chapter on homogamy, where at the elite universities men and women are meeting, dating, marrying, and having children. They then go on to live in insular neighborhoods and the cycle repeats; this contributes to the US middle ripping apart as it were. I can't argue against Murray here - this is where Gatto's argument holds water. Where it falls short is that if you look at demographic information in the US, public school, on the whole, has a dysgenic effect. The poor and uneducated are able to reproduce at greater rates than the upper societal tiers in part because of the social structure of public school (in addition to other programs providing structural support). In other words, if Gatto thinks public school is designed to produce a stronger genetic future (as misplaced as he thinks that idea is) school falls woefully short, to the point of humorous.

As for whether or not kids are sharper or not (in terms of what they know) now than they were decades ago - not even close. While absolute knowledge is higher for the educated, more people are uneducated even with a so-called education. It is prevalent. Hence why we have so many threads on BK that outline Robinson, et al. FWIW, Robinson says the same thing, the level of education at any given grade has gone down.  The Dumbest Generation was one of the greatest books I ever read on this subject. I highly endorse it.

PokerDad, you once said you were raising an adult. You are not far behind the Harding (College by 12) family.  In their book, the children gave their testimonials. Here is part of what one of the daughters, Rossanah, said:

Parents are ultimately raising adults, independent human beings that are capable of living and being a light in this world

That's mind blowing. I think your insights are impressive. Wish I had more time at the moment.... my view that Cub is his own person just so happened to be my view the day he was born. I'm not sure where it came from exactly except maybe from my own reflections on my life in relation to my parents. I would tell my wife "he is his own person" - and he's this little helpless newborn when I said it. I do find that a bit odd that I think that way, but - perhaps this is the big reason Gatto resonated with me as he did; his entire message has this at the hinge: Your kids are their own person; treat them that way.

I beleive Laura Ingalls Wilder was teaching in a one room school house by the age of 15.

This is true. Last month I put her series into mp3 format for later listening with Cub and remember this factoid from looking up information on her story.

One of Gatto's pet facts is that of David Farragut; aka Admiral Farragut. Wikipedia page here. From that link:
"Farragut was 12 years old when, during the War of 1812, he was given the assignment to bring a ship captured by the USS Essex safely to port."

The point is that teens are capable if they've been brought up correctly. If they aren't capable, then something has gone wrong. In Gatto's view, the mere observation that teens across the country aren't doing extraordinary things as they once were is evidence in itself that school artificially extends childhood, or put another way, cripples them.

He is correct in that assertion. For simplicity, view his argument from an EL stance....
"Waiting until 6 or 7 to teach reading is artificially extending the illiterate years. If you would just teach them sooner, they would be far more capable, on average, at that age than they are now"

Can you argue with my ad hoc statement? I doubt anyone here would argue with it because we all know it to be true on some level. Gatto makes the same argument. Teens would be far more capable if not for a system that holds them back.

Only with that in mind would I dare to venture into the realm of 13 year olds getting married or such. I think for the point of having a greater debate about what younger adults (adult here used in a very primitive sense) are capable of, polarizing arguments are helpful for flushing out consistent logic, but risk losing the greater importance to minutiae.

In pre-history, I have zero doubts that a 13 or 14 year old was treated as an adult and held the responsibilities of an adult. Of course, we do not live in pre-historic times. So much of our world is arbitrary that we accept the lines and rules as fact. 18 and then you can vote. 16 and then you can drive. 21 and then you can drink. 23 and you can rent a car. 25 and then you can get your own health insurance. 30 and then you can finally finish grad school and move out. (and yes, I'm being facetious on those last two) It's just silly to think that age itself is a qualifier for so many things; I feel this is backwards. Skill should be the merit.

I'm not advocating that we throw our kids out when they turn 13, 15, 16, or even 18. I'm just saying that my goal is to ultimately prepare Cub for success in the real world, and that much of school (if not all of it) is maladaptive to those ends. I don't mean to say education - obviously I'm for copious amounts of that! 

I'm also not saying let's marry off our daughters and sons at the ripe age of pubescence. (though this is still practiced today in some regions of the world). Again, see my ultimate goal. I think taking some actions would be counter-productive in the environment we find ourselves in today.

If you want to talk about brain scans - I'll save you some work. Brain size is mostly determined by teen years, though during the teen years/heading into the 20s there is a major shift that occurs. Synaptic pruning comes up again (as it does in early childhood) as the brain makes a final push into full adulthood. In that sense, you can argue that a young teen is not an adult. I'll concede there. But, I will point out that our brain is never fully done devloping until the day we die and that this whole line of reasoning misses the point: it's not about when to declare our children adults, it's about preparing them to be one someday. Gatto argues that traditional school thwarts this process and hinders it. I find the conclusion to be spot on (though I do disagree in many parts to getting to that conclusion)

Now that I've burned Cub's entire nap time  ....

[Kristiina]

IQ has gone up as measured by increasing means for the last 50 years. This is known as the Flynn Effect click here for more. There is evidence that the trend has reversed at around 9 years ago.

Maybe the average IQ has decreased because babies don't get enough tummy time anymore since 1992 SIDS campaign and thus crawl later.   

[TeachingMyToddlers]

I got a few of gatto's books loaded on my ereader now and they are in the queue to be read. 

[nee1]

Here is one of Gatto's videos titled ``Compiled Thoughts on Schooling''. (Thank you, PokerDad)

He talks about attributes taught at elite boarding schools. He also shared how he implemented the entrepreneurship/ job shadowing/apprenticship/mentorship strategies, etc. He said the shadowing/entrepreneurial opportunities did not have to be mutually exclusive to academic curriculum (his almost exact words). He mentioned that lack of responsibility was the reason for the pathologies he saw among his students. In his words, not to be useful is to be useless.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/nK_6aWRqRSw&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/nK_6aWRqRSw&rel=1</a>

[nee1]

Here is another interesting video titled ``John Gatto on Compulsory Education and Permanent Childhood''.

Here, Gatto talks about the epidemic of childishness. He mentions that one only needs to read the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin or Andrew Carnegie to see that the concept of adolescence is a myth. Adolescence was a fantastic lie invented only at the beginning of the 20th century by a fellow named G. Stanley Hall as a pseudo-scientific excuse for extending tutelage. Very worth listening to.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/11gRDAu46v4&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/11gRDAu46v4&rel=1</a>

[Korrale4kq]

Some Neuroscience about teens...


http://youtu.be/6oKsikHollM

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