DIY Schooling

So we live in a city (Austin, Texas) with a terrible school system. In particular, the middle schools, or junior highs as they are sometimes called, are disastrous. Whether a student manages to muddle through a poor-quality elementary school and amass a fairly good set of basic skills or is fortunate enough to attend one of the handful of decent elementary schools in the district, s/he will be funneled into an overcrowded, poorly performing, dispiriting and even scary school where behavior problems set the agenda.

So, when our son reached the fourth grade and we started looking at the middle school options ahead of him, what we found had us on the verge of panic. We have a bright, sweet, sensitive, well-behaved boy whose interests range from deejaying to golf to cooking to soccer and who still believes, albeit it with some scepticism, in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy. No way were we sending this child into the psychological war zone that is the public middle schools of our city and, I suspect, most.

I talked about it to other parents, expecting that they would share my horror and join me in trying to think of solutions. But you know what I heard most often? " I know, I know middle school was horrible but we survived it." Wow. We survive war and disease, too, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do everything we can to stand between our children and those experiences. Or that's what I thought, anyway.

Not finding any allies among the parents of my son's friends and schoolmates, I decided to branch out on my own...in my mind. I remembered an article I had read a few years before in Harper's Magazine entitled "Against School" that I had found persuasive on the point that, rather than failing at their mission, schools were failing kids by doing exactly what they were designed to do. I dug it up. I found it even more persuasive the second time around, so went online to research its author, John Taylor Gotto. Jackpot! Googling his name was a portal to a world of alternative education so foreign to me it was like walking from Kansas into the land of Oz. Nothing was as expected, much of it was beautiful, some of it was dark, even scary, all of it was fascinating and it stirred in me deep, powerful longings. What to do now?

Join the DIY Schooling movement! And thus was born the idea for a home-school hybrid called Community Middle and the birth of The Austin Free School project. Our first parent-organizer-student meeting is tomorrow so stay tuned!

Smart in our time,

Martine