How Children Fail

That is the new book I am reading. Okay I still haven't quite finished Living Simply with Children but I am also most done with it and quite honestly there are parts of it I really like and then others I don't and perhaps it might be written for someone that either has a desire to live more simply than me or for people that already live more complex than I. I find most of the information as a whole to be good and I have been enjoying it but sometimes I feel as if the author is trying to "sell" me just a bit too hard which I don't feel one is truly living simply if they get caught up in trading one set of "rules" for another. Anyway I am way off track since the point of this post is a completely different book.

So a few posts back (one of the home school posts) this book came highly recommended to me by a dear friend whom I have a TON of respect for. So of course I couldn't wait to get it and start reading it which is why once it came in the mail I couldn't wait to finish the book I was kind of over with anyway. Thus I started into How Children Fail last night with the hopes to uncover why my poor little Gage that has since starting school seems to have had his happy go lucky, free, spirit broke like a wild pony. I was 5 pages in... that's right on page 5 which was not even the actually "book" yet, it was the first page of the Preface, there it was in black and white. Quite literally in print was ALL of the reasons Gage has already told us he hates school. Here is page 5 of How Children Fail...

"Most children in school fail.
For many, this failure is avowed and absolute. Close to forty percent of those who begin high school drop out before they finish. For college, the figure is one in three.
Many others fail in fact if not in name. They complete their schooling only because we have agreed to push them up through the grades and out of the schools, whether they know anything or not. There are many more such children than we think. If we 'raise our standards' much higher, as some would have us do, we will find out very soon just how many there are. Our classrooms will bulge with kids who can't pass the test to get into the next class.
But there is a more important sense in which almost all children fail: Except for a handful, who may or may not be good students, they fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.
Why do they fail?
They fail because they are afraid, bored and confused."

They fail because they are afraid, bored and confused. Gage has expressed being bored on MANY occasions, he has spoke of being confused as well and when we have asked him why he doesn't ask for more help he has expressed being afraid. And what is worse is that I believe my children's school with their smaller class sizes and their more attention to each student methods is probably a better example than the average school, certainly not to say there are not some out there on the other end that can actually serve students better than ours as well.

As my eyes began to get heavy last night I only made it to page 28 but in those first few pages I was having flashbacks of my own childhood and how very often I used many of the "tricks" the author spoke of to simply "get by" without bringing too much attention to myself. And then Thank God, my mother rescued me, she pulled me out of school and home schooled me. The only difference I see between Gage and I right now is that I wanted to leave school and Gage is not quite there yet. But I fear where he will be at once he finally does get there, if ever. But at least if he does I think my mind is made up how I will handle it.

I can not wait to finish this book... I can not wait to see what else this teacher/author has discovered in his many years of teaching children... and I can NOT wait to read his other book, How Children Learn, once I finish this one. One thing the first 28 pages has done for me... it has taken away my fear of if I am "able" to teach my own children. I have to say that was and many time still is my biggest fear of home schooling my children. But I have been mislead to think that the reason why Kain is so "bright" and "intelligent" (and I only use quotes not because he isn't but because he really isn't more so than Gage but would appear that way to the average standard) because of all he has learn from going to school. But in reality that is the way Kain has always been, that is simply who and how he is and he was like that before he went to school. Gage on the other hand has a mind that simply works differently and I now realize that school can not make him like, nor should I or anyone expect that, but if school is damaging his willingness to learn, his desire and drive for information, than how can I really "fail" at teaching him?