"There are only two places in the world
where time takes precedence
over the job to be done.
School and prison."
—William Glasser

Excerpts (somewhat edited) from
"State Education Fails the Test"
by William Trench

The most important and complex thing that children learn to do is to speak, and virtually everyone can do it very well, better in most cases than they can read or write. And yet children learn to speak from their parents, siblings, and friends, while reading and writing is taught by "education experts." In fact it has been shown that about 50% of everything a person learns in life is learned before age five. Doesn't this fact alone make you question the efficacy of our education system?

Most teachers are well-meaning, dedicated, hard-working people, but they work in a massive bureaucracy which stifles creativity and initiative and makes "following the rules" more important than the education of children. In addition, they have to spend an inordinate amount of time attending to antisocial behavior.

Most independent experiments have shown that children educated at home learn up to six times faster than those attending school. Do you realize what this means? It means it is possible for children to cover the grades 1 to 12 curriculum in about two nine-month school years or in twelve six- week school "years."

Well, you may ask, if that is so, what are the kids doing at school the rest of the time? I can make a good guess. They're changing classes, settling down, not paying attention, going to the washroom, discussing extracurricular activities, doing things not related to the curriculum, arguing, being the class clown, taking drugs, having food fights in the cafeteria, making out, stabbing the teacher—in short, doing things other than learning, things that they have no opportunity to do when they are at home.

But most of all, they are having their natural desire to learn totally eliminated.

The school system is perfectly designed to make children hate to learn, teachers hate to teach, and the public be forced to pay twice the real cost of a product that is not only of no use but downright destructive.

Another.

"Why Education Reform Never Works"

Who benefits from school testing programs?

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