Breaking Free from 13 Years of Schooling: The Truth About Education and Why It Can Be Different 

In this post I will show you why this is possible to go from kindergarten to graduation in three years by explaining the evil genius of mass, compulsory education and contrasting it with true education. In the next post I will sink the point by sharing stories of individuals who have accomplished great things despite and without schooling. 

If you are new here, I am Sherry Hayes, the “interesting” mom of 15 children, and I’ve been homeschooling for over 36 years. I enjoy sharing things that will benefit mommies just like me.

This is actually part of a series of posts meant to educate mommies, especially as we are considering what course to take with our children in the coming year. We’ve already discussed Charlotte Mason, Ruth Beechick, and Dr. Raymond Moore, as well as an introduction to John Taylor Gatto.  

First, to show you I am not making up the idea that a basic, high school education does not take 13 years, I want to share some quotes which I hope will shed light on the lies we’ve been conditioned to believe: 

Children do not learn in school; they are babysat. It takes maybe 50 hours to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic. After that, students can teach themselves. Mainly what school does is to keep the children off the streets and out of the job market. 

JT Gatto 

When Dr. J. T. Fisher, later “dean” of American psychiatrists, started school at thirteen, unable to read or write, and graduated from a Boston high school at sixteen, he thought he was a genius until he found that any “normal” child could do the same. 

Dr. Raymond Moore 

All of the learning necessary for success in high school can be accomplished in only two or three years of formal skill study. Delaying mandatory instruction in the basic skills until the junior high school years could mean academic success for millions of school children who are doomed to failure under the traditional school system. 

William Rohwer, Piagetian specialist at Berkley 

Now, I know we’ve been conditioned to think we need control by our superiors. We can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t tell us what we should be doing with ourselves. 

And I see it. When we are left to the rule of our own capricious passions things tend to chaos, and all the filth and disease which accompanies it. 

Whatever else it is, top-down control does bring order. I have been told the iron fist of communism or naziism or whatever other type of tyranny put in place, actually decreases most crimes. Draconian laws enforced by draconian means are a great deterrence to thieves and rapists. I’ve also been told directly, by persons who escaped such situations in the 1980’s, that the criminals still exist under such conditions, they simply shift from the general population to the government offices and police stations. 

(A popular joke among the escapees from the Iron Curtain was that in America we say, “Help, Police!” while in their countries they said, “Police, help!”) 

I think this is what irks us when we hear about “unschooling.” In our minds a population without schooling breaks down our entire social structure until we have anarchical pandemonium. 

However, in reality, it doesn’t have to be either/or. 

Amazingly, it is possible to have both freedom and order at the same time; although none of us would believe it if it were not for the American Experiment. 

As you may recall, last podcast we discussed Prussian schooling and its purpose as creating cannon fodder. This is because of the way wars were fought; with opposite factions placing their soldiers in rows facing each other and then each side firing in volleys to see how many soldiers would drop, until both sides rushed upon each other and one side came out on top. 

While many battles were fought in the same manner, America was different. Frontiersmen learned from their native countrymen how to fire from behind trees and other tactics to avoid bullets.  

This difference was made quite clear when George Washing was sent out with General Braddock during the French and Indian war. Washington tried to convince Braddock that European tactics would prove fatal in the frontier forests, but Braddock would have nothing to do with such notions. He had been too well schooled. 

The results were disastrous, but the British did not learn from the experience. They went on with the same tactics in their fight against the Americans in the Revolutionary War. 

They were eventually subdued, and we’re talking some of the best-trained forces of the world at the time, by a body of men who were pulled straight out of corn fields and were reduced to wearing rags on their feet in lieu of boots.  

These men were free to think, but they were also under command. What kept them under that command was not coercion, but the burning desire to preserve their lives and their homes.  

This very idea, the thinking soldier, went contrary to European theory, but it was the very heart of the American spirit. 

This spirit is exactly what schooling, along with the control of the press and the media, has been purposely seeking to destroy. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job of it, too. 

I don’t think I need to list here the horrors of modern public schooling. The headlines of the deterioration of classrooms and hallways are so commonplace they are no longer shocking.  

As I said in my last post, I believe I could make a pretty good case that the breakdown our society has experienced, especially in the last five years, has been due to a methodical steeping in Prussian schooling where individual worth and purpose has been replaced by “obedience training.” 

Think about it; in 2020, the entire population of the “land of the free and home of the brave” imprisoned and muzzled itself. What more clear evidence of a people who have been conditioned to follow blindly could we find? This would not have been possible in the early years of our republic. This could not have occurred without mass compulsory education. 

If John Taylor Gatto had been alive during that time, he would have been making this very point, but he left us in 2018, just two years before this watershed event.  

I think it’s important to iterate my motives here. At the beginning of my posts, I claim to have been homeschooling for 36 years.  

When I began back in 1989, I knew innately there was something terribly wrong with the school system, but I couldn’t articulate it. I honestly thought I could make a change in my children’s lives by bringing them home and following the conventional “scope and sequence” while adding in some Bible learning and prayer.  

As I progressed further and educated myself, I found the evil was not only in the content, but also in the method.  

Those who desire both money and power have moved us from our initial freedoms and reconstructed our nation with a consumer economy. This change made it possible for those at the top to take control via the subjugation of the workers via social conditioning.  

It’s the same mindset as the Prussian dictators, but this time they are not in need of cannon fodder, but cattle who will docilely saunter into the chutes where they will be cleaned, milked, and even slaughtered to feed the machine of mass industry. 

In this brave new world, the pillars of our Republic have been obliterated. More on this in the next video.  

Suffice it to say that children in public schools (as well as their private and home school imitators) are not persons at all, but victims of a number of damaging social manipulations. 

Conventional education perniciously attacks its victims on two fronts simultaneously. It uses a soul-numbing curriculum enforced by soul-numbing tactics. 

So, while we Christian parents are courageously bringing our children home so they can be sheltered from the attacks of the godless worldview, we are unwittingly continuing the oppression of the system via method.  

This is what I consider to be my mission: to bring you, my wonderful reader, full-circle so that you and your family can break free in totality. 

What we really need to understand here is why we have been conditioned to believe basic education takes 13 years to accomplish. This is what Gatto has to say about that: 

In the economy we have allowed to evolve, the real political dilemma everywhere is keeping people occupied. Jobs have to be invented by government agencies and corporations. Both employ millions and millions of people for which they have no real use. It’s an inside secret among top-echelon management that should you need to cause a rise in stock value, this can be engineered by eliminating thousands of “useless” jobs; that is done regularly and, I would presume, cynically. 

Young men and women during their brightest, most energetic years are kept from working or from being a part of the general society. This is done to keep them from aggravating this delicate work situation, either by working too eagerly, as kids are prone to do, or by inventing their own work, which could cause shocks throughout the economy. This violation of the injunction to work, which Western spirituality imposed, has backed us into a corner from which no authority has any idea how to extricate us. We cannot afford to let too many children really learn to work, as Amish children do, for fear they will discover its great secret: work isn’t a curse, but a salvation. 
 

Now I want to explain how this could work out in practicality.  

First of all, schooling, and by that I mean close book work, should be delayed until at least eight or nine years old.  

There is so much empirical evidence to support this. I know this will shock you, but some suggest things should be put off until the age of 12! 

Then there is the “course of study.” First, of all, we would want a student to learn the basics, and Gatto is spot-on with his assessment that this only takes 50 instructional hours. How do I know this? Because of what the US Army did to draftees during WWII. 

At the beginning of the war, a certain amount of draftees were put out of consideration due to illiteracy, but the numbers were low enough that they were not concerning. As the war went on, however, it was realized that every soldier counted, so literacy schools were created. In the span of just six weeks, soldiers, of which 55% could not read or write at all, were brought up to the fourth-grade level.  

During the Korean and Vietnam wars, these schools were honed so that the curriculum became job-specific, and then the effectiveness of the schools rose even higher. 

As for math, an interesting study was done by a man by the name of L.P. Benezet. Here is an exerpt from his book, The Teaching of Arithmetic I: The Story of an experiment (This information thanks to denisegaskins.com) 

In the fall of 1929 I made up my mind to try the experiment of abandoning all formal instruction in arithmetic below the seventh grade and concentrating on teaching the children to read, to reason, and to recite — my new Three R’s. And by reciting I did not mean giving back, verbatim, the words of the teacher or of the textbook. I meant speaking the English language… 

The children in these rooms were encouraged to do a great deal of oral composition. They reported on books that they had read, on incidents which they had seen, on visits that they had made. They told the stories of movies that they had attended and they made up romances on the spur of the moment. It was refreshing to go into one of these rooms.  

A happy and joyous spirit pervaded them. The children were no longer under the restraint of learning multiplication tables or struggling with long division. They were thoroughly enjoying their hours in school.  

… 

One of our high school teachers was working for her master’s degree at Boston University and as part of her work he assigned her the task of giving tests in arithmetic to 200 sixth grade children in the Manchester schools. They were divided fairly evenly, 98 from experimental rooms and 102 from the traditional groups, or something like that. These were all sixth graders. Half of them had had no arithmetic until beginning the sixth grade and the other half had had it throughout the course, beginning with the 3-A.  

In the earlier tests the traditionally trained people excelled, as was to be expected, for the tests involved not reasoning but simply the manipulation of the four fundamental processes. By the middle of April, however, all the classes were practically on a par and when the last test was given in June, it was one of the experimental groups that led the city.  

In other words these children, by avoiding the early drill on combinations, tables, and that sort of thing, had been able, in one year, to attain the level of accomplishment which the traditionally taught children had reached after three and one-half years of arithmetical drill. 

Pretty enlightening information.  

Why haven’t you ever been told about this? Who benefits if you never hear about it?  

I think you know the answer.  

We better stop here, or this post is going to be a run-on and neither you nor I will have time to get to anything else.  

I’ve got plenty more to share, with lots and lots of stories! (I do love a good story, don’t you?).  Sooooo, stay tuned!