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Independent Study

There's an interesting excerpt from Chris Whittle's new book, Crash Course, in this week's TIME Magazine—interesting because it captures what I think I found so frustrating about my K-12 school experience, and why if I could change one thing about the course of my life, it would have been to go to college at 16 rather than 17.

By the sixth grade, let's assume only half of a student's time was spent in what we now think of as a classroom. Finally, by high school, imagine that one-third of a student's time was in a traditional classroom setting. (If you think this is overly radical, consider that many college students are in class fewer than 15 hours a week. They are only a few months older than high school seniors. Did something magically occur to make them more capable of independence?)

[For me the answer to that would be "no"; if independence were the only thing college offered, I would wish I'd gone at age 5. I only wish I'd gone at 16 because I feel like at that age I could have handled all the other stuff that comes with college as well as benefitted from the freedom to choose my classes and how often I attended them.]

The excerpt also underlined for me some of the reasons I'm considering home-schooling Austen. (At the moment it's just an idea; we'll see what he needs—and what I'm capable of—four years from now.) I worry that public schooling these days is all about regulated curricula and standardized testing (or worse, that it will be like it was when I was a kid—not much unsupervised learning, but plenty of unsupervised bullying). Better than home-schooling, I'm thinking (and the excerpt seemed to support) might be something that Val and I were discussing this weekend: namely, a one-room schoolhouse or equivalent, which might provide a way for students of different ages to learn from each other.

Anyway, as you can see, I don't have a clear picture of what the ideal educational system would look like for Austen or any other kid... but this excerpt got me thinking. I'm not super keen on Whittle's writing style, but his ideas are interesting—enough that I'll probably end up picking up his book when it becomes available.