>>I learned more on my own than all the years I put in in the system.
And not only was my public school experience the greatest impetus in my decision to homeschool my own children, I learned more homeschooling them than all those teachers were able to interest me in leqrning from them.<<
My exact experience. I tell them, I would cut off my right arm before I would send them into Junior High.
(on the 16th, one 12-year-old and one 14-year-old will take the ACT because they were both accepted into “Early College”. Better than I did at their ages!)
My junior high years were hell, and school was largely responsible for that.
I was stuck in a large, experimental classroom situation where they did “team teaching”. It was three teachers; one math, one English, and one Social Studies. I guess the idea was to lighten the workload for the teachers or make it more efficient for the teachers to teach more kids per period. I was in the back of the classroom, where I couldn’t hear a thing and couldn’t see the board, and actually ended up in resource because my grades were so bad.
They ruined me for college during those years.
I finally did graduate from college after putting in a lot of effort on my own and ended up with a 3.3 in meteorology, from the kid for whom school ruined math. I did it all on my own. No thanks to THEM.
At one time, for our Founding Fathers, going to college at the ages of 12 and 13 was **normal**!
Our Founding Fathers wanted an educated public. They would be horrified to see the stupefaction that is misnamed, “public” schooling.