Rethinking School Quotes

“A debt-free bachelor's degree is, as it turns out, priceless: As Jane Austen puts it, it sets you up forever. My friends were still paying off their school loans in their forties. I never had any school debt at all. Because I had no debt, I could choose my life, and choose my adventure.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

“Some children respond to our educational matrix with This is my natural home. But there’s a whole range of mismatches between that matrix and the rest of the actual human beings who are funneled into it. Just past I’m good at school, we find I can do this, it’s just boring, progress through I can do some of this, but other parts of it are a complete mystery to me, continue on to If I grit my teeth I can probably squeak by, and end with I am stupid. I can’t do this. It’s just unending torture that I can’t get out of until I graduate. If your child falls anywhere on this mismatch spectrum, there’s a very good chance that the problem is school, not your child. And this is most definitely not the message that most struggling learners receive. Our current school system, as Sir Ken Robinson explains in his wildly popular TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?,”3 was designed to produce good workers for a capitalistic society. Built inextricably into that model is the assumption that “real intelligence consists [of a] capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning . . . what we come to think of as academic ability.” Deep in “the gene pool of public education,” Sir Ken concludes, is the unquestioned premise that “there are only two types of people—academic and nonacademic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. . . . [T]his model has caused chaos in many people’s lives. It’s been great for some; there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead, they suffer.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

“if a “disability” really only becomes a problem in one setting—our factory-model K–12 system—I’d challenge that label.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

“It is normal for a fifth-grade aged student to be writing at a third-grade level, reading at a fifth-grade level, and doing math at a seventh-grade level. A child who succeeds at two subjects and cries over the third may still be showing immaturity—and the answer may be to drop back to a lower level in only the third subject.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

“Let me offer my own experience. I went to a dreadful college. My bachelor's degree was accredited, but I'm so embarrassed by my undergraduate alma mater that I don't even put it on my resume. (You'd be surprise how few people ask.) I went there because my parents, to the frank, didn't know that I should aim higher; because they were very conservative, and thought it would be a safe place for a sixteen-year-old freshman; because my grandfather loved the school; because we were broke, and the school offered me a full tuition plus room and board scholarship.”
― Susan Wise Bauer, Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education