Learn in Freedom

[Michael Fisher]

We had another protest in Exeter today!? It's amazing how many people here are supportive of our protests against public schools.? ?

For the record, our signs said:
"Power to the Parents" and
"Learn in Freedom"

People are too busy to care.? Most do not spend the time to read our signs as they drive from place to place.? Those who do read our signs usually drive off with a confused look.? Better signs would be good, but we can't hand out flyers without going to jail or paying permit fees that are probably quite large ($50 per day in Durham).? Protests may be good, but we can rarely get our point across this way.

There are so many people in this state, and this situation is so out of control, that it feels like we're ants trying to stop a semi-truck from going off a cliff.

We aren't lemmings.? I'm willing to hold signs and do the hard work necessary to succeed as long as we have a good plan and general strategies that will lead to significant change.

We need a better plan.? We need ideas.? Creativity is not something lacking from this forum, so I know we can come up with a great strategy if we put our minds to it.

The central question is this:

How do we get people to take their children out of public schools?

School is absolutely unnecessary in a free society.? The more people are forced to learn, the more they hate learning.? The only excuse I hear in support of school is that people are too stupid or too poor to afford the alternatives.? But we know the truth:? No alternatives are necessary.? Stupidity is not the cause of schools, it is the effect.? Forced learning kills curiosity.

The only question is how do we get everyone to realize this?

[Michael Fisher]

Sign ideas:

Forced learning kills curiosity

Forced learning fails

Forced learning is not freedom

Forced learning is communism

School sucks!  Learn in Freedom!   (LOL, okay, maybe not this one!   )

Public schools: invented by dictators

[Michael Fisher]

The central question is this:

How do we get people to take their children out of public schools?

School is absolutely unnecessary in a free society.? The more people are forced to learn, the more they hate learning.? The only excuse I hear in support of school is that people are too stupid or too poor to afford the alternatives.? But we know the truth:? No alternatives are necessary.? Stupidity is not the cause of schools, it is the effect.? Forced learning kills curiosity.

The only question is how do we get everyone to realize this?

Allow me to elaborate on this point.? Today, people asked what we were protesting against and I said "the freedom to educate your children as you see fit."? One said, "but you can already do that, it's called homeschooling," to which I replied, "it's highly regulated."

This is true, but that's a small argument and it's not the main point.

Our main point is that people should pull their children out of schools because schools are unnecessary and harmful.? We do not want to simply demonstrate against homeschooling regulation.? We want to demonstrate that school is unnecessary and harmful.? That is our primary goal.? All else distracts us from this goal!

[AlanM]

I think Mike is on to something. Public schools are designed to break the students spirits and subjugate them. Subjugation is slavery. Education, on the other hand is freedom. So:

Education is Freedom!
Public Schooling is Slavery!

Does this place the focus where it needs to be? vis a vis: Public schools do Not educate, but rather they subjugate. True education is freeing.

[Michael Fisher]

While reading Gatto's book, I've become even more extreme.  At this point, I reject the entire concept of forced learning, whether through public school, private school, homeschool, or some other method.  This is ancient wisdom!

"Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind."
-Plato

[Michael Fisher]

"No trace of slavery ought to mix with the studies of the freeborn man.  No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory."
-Plato

[Michael Fisher]

"The only kind of learning which significantly influences behavior is self-discovered or self-appropriated learning - truth that has been assimilated in experience."
-Carl Rogers

"The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher."
-John Holt

"Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching."
-Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

"The things we know best are the things we haven't been taught."
-Luc Vauvenargues, French moralist. Refl?xions et Maximes, no. 479 (1746).

[Michael Fisher]

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly."
-Albert Einstein

"We learn not in the school, but in life."
-Seneca

"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
-W. Edwards Deming

"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."
-C.S. Lewis

"Learning how to learn is life's most important skill."
-Anonymous

"I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing."
-Neil Gaiman

"Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach."
-Albert Einstein

"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
-George Santayana

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught."
-Oscar Wilde

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.? School-days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, brutal violations of common sense and common decency. It doesn't take a reasonably bright boy long to discover that most of what is rammed into him is nonsense, and that no one really cares very much whether he learns it or not."
-Henry Louis Mencken

"Together we have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."
-Ivan Illich

"My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery."
-Benjamin Disraeli

"In my opinion the prevailing systems of education are all wrong, from the first stage to the last stage. Education begins where it should terminate, and youth, instead of being led to the development of their faculties by the use of their senses, are made to acquire a great quantity of words, expressing the ideas of other men instead of comprehending their own faculties, or becoming acquainted with the words they are taught or the ideas the words should convey."
-William Duane

"Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought."
-Ludwig von Mises

"How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."
-Alexandre Dumas

"Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college."
-Lillian Smith

"Intelligence appears to be the thing that enables a man to get along without education. Education enables a man to get along without the use of his intelligence."
-Albert Edward Wiggam

"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
-Agatha Christie


"Curiosity is spontaneous and must be suppressed. Prohibit spontaneity and regiment learning so that children are taught things when the system decides, not when they want to learn them.

Remove children from the adult world so that they are deprived of role models, and cannot learn by copying adults.

Enact child labor laws so that anyone trying to escape from the illiteracy mill has nowhere else to go. No apprenticeship system means they won't be able to learn a trade by copying adults.

Force children by law to attend, thereby making learning a job, a chore, an obligation; definitely not fun. Supplant curiosity by drudgery. Prison dulls the mind.

Coercing the children also helps wipe out the teacher's desire to teach. It creates massive problems of motivation and discipline. Teachers commonly quit after a few years of attempting to combine the roles of entertainer and enforcer in an effort to get something done.

Last but not least, everyone should be forced to pay for the mill no matter what their mill does to children's minds. And there are no refunds. If a child comes out of the system with his brain turned to mush, the parents should still be forced to pay, every year for the rest of their lives."
-Richard J. Maybury, How you can profit from the school hoax, (World Market Perspective, Nov.'87)

[Michael Fisher]

Here is an amazing anti-school website!   

Taleemnet - A Multiworld Project
Dedicated to the destruction of ?factory schooling? in Asia, Africa & South America
http://www.multiworld.org/taleemnethome.htm

[Michael Fisher]

I was thinking of classes but those would only attract people who already agree with us.? We need the entire general public to re-evaluate whether or not school is right for their children.

We need to get this information directly in front of as many people as possible.

Ideas:
-Take out a full page of a newspaper for a day and put these quotes in it.? VERY expensive.
-Send these quotes out through mass-mailings in a specific area.? Expensive.
-Go door-to-door handing out flyers with this information on it.? Affordable, but time-consuming.

[Michael Fisher]

Ideas:
-Do Keene-style booths in areas with large public foot traffic and only hand out flyers with this information on it.
-Do this in front of schools.
-Somehow get flyers with this information to all families with children in public schools.? This direct mailing will be more affordable, but this list of addresses may be impossible to obtain.

[Dreepa]

Start attending all school board meetings and if they have 'open mike' then say a piece about it.

[Michael Fisher]

The threat to our liberty posed by schools can no longer be ignored.  We must act fast.

Sign Idea:
Public schools, public menace

From this book:
Public schools, public menace

[Michael Fisher]

I'm not trying to focus on fighting homeschool regulations at this time.? That is a separate battle.? For now, I want people to take their children out of public schools, forever.

Is there some sort of event we could hold to gain massive public attention for this cause?

We have failed to even get those who agree with us to remove their children from government schools.  Why?  It's not their fault, it's OUR fault for failing to sell the idea, and failing to try to sell the idea.

We need a very clear message that will not and cannot be ignored, one that will call every parent to action.


Signs:

Take your kids out of government schools
Take your kids out of public school
Take your kids out of school
Remove your children from public schools
Take responsibility for your children
Pull your children out
Responsible parents homeschool
Get your children out, and don't look back
Education:? a parent's responsibility
Abandon government schools

[Michael Fisher]

Interesting fact:
-There are as many homeschooled children in America (1,200,000) as there are people in New Hampshire.