One day my daughter announced she was going to get an 800 on the verbal part of the SAT. This is a young woman who never attended traditional school. Sure, I thought, she's smart, but can she really get an 800? My wife and I hadn't exactly focused on testing as we guided her education — just the opposite, in fact. My daughter must have had some inkling of my thoughts because when her scores came back the look on her face said: "Told you!" Not that she needed the perfect score. The fact is, colleges love kids who show up to class with questions other than "what's gonna be on the test."

The dirty little secret of our educational system is this: you can learn the material you need for the SAT and get into the college of your choice without wasting years grinding through hundreds or thousands of tests. Millions of homeschoolers, unschoolers, selfschoolers, and indieschoolers (independent schoolers; see below for a discussion of the lexicon) have proven this. One test is enough.

What should we call the endless testing that defines a traditional education? Excessive? Wildly overdone? Mass hysteria? My wife and I settled on Not for my children. No way were we going to send them into the testing frenzy. The fact that you might take some tests eventually does not mean you have to spend your childhood drowning in them. By the time our eldest started thinking about the SAT, she was able to understand the costs and benefits of test preparation and make her own decisions. She knew the test was important, but she had not developed the habit of mind that says "tests are everything." We believe she will be far better off with her minimum of test-taking experience even though she will attend a traditional college with mid-terms and finals.

There is no reason to force children to bear up under a constant barrage of tests and grades during their formative years. Our educational system has evolved into something that doesn't serve our children. This is a strange phenomenon and I can't claim to understand it. There are extremists out there who say the system was designed this way on purpose in order to create obedient factory workers. If you ask me, I'll say those people are a bit paranoid and then change the subject. The truth is, I don't want to know.

Maybe the development of the modern educational system was accidental. Maybe it was premeditated. The one thing we know for certain is its power to quash initiative and exterminate independence is nothing short of spectacular. Everyone knows this but no one knows what to do about it. No one wants their children to become entirely dependent on external motivation. But we accept a system that works tirelessly for just this outcome. No one wants to waste a fortune on a son or daughter who grinds his or her way through college with a piece of paper as the holy grail. But we accept this as the norm. Many college professors are frustrated with the attitudes their students bring to class: they like to say, "The students these days . . . " But how can we blame students when they are acting in perfect accord with their training?

It is true that some people who go to traditional school manage to avoid the worst of the damage. But why take the chance? My advice to kids and parents everywhere is simple: just say no.

Do you know what a schoolmarm is? I have my own personal definition. A schoolmarm is someone who thinks the way to get more engineers and technical people is to force kids who hate math to take more math. It's okay to water down the math classes. We don't need to pay attention to the kids who love math because they're doing fine. The kids who hate math become hardened against it and end up hating it forever but that's their fault, those terrible lazy teenagers. When the schoolmarms are through with their pious work, we end up with fewer engineers.

Obviously, the people I'm calling schoolmarms are not the brightest lights in the cosmos. Yet they are the ones who have chosen the official list of classes out of the vastness of human knowledge. You are supposed to spend years and years studying this stuff to the exclusion of what actually interests you. How much right to your time on this planet does a schoolmarm have?

If you decide not play ball with the schoolmarms, you will suddenly have a lot of time on your hands. Maybe you'll spend it staring off into space. The extremists claim you are better off doing absolutely nothing if the alternative is schoolmarm-approved force-feeding. Of course, you also have the option of doing interesting, exciting things (try that at school). If you do find some pretty cool things to do, and if you also study for and ace the SAT, you will have an excellent shot at the very best colleges in the country. Someone who jumps through all the hoops, gets straight A's, and receives a diploma from a traditional school will also have their shot but they will have nothing on you. In fact, when you get to college, you will have the edge.

Traditionally-educated students spend 8-12 hours a day (school + homework) learning basic skills that require more like 2-4 hours a day. All the hoop-jumping leaves them no time to figure out what they are really interested in. As a result, many people matriculate at very expensive colleges without a clue about why they are there. It's not a pretty picture: imagine 100,000 dollar bills soaked in kerosene and lit on fire. Before you drain your parents' bank accounts, take the time to get a solid grounding in a very important subject: yourself.

As a homeschooler, once you decide what it is that really interests you, you'll have the opportunity to pursue those interests to a depth that would be unthinkable at school. Yes, you may turn 18 without knowing the definition of an ionic solid or who Commodore Perry was, but you'll live. You don't need to have this stuff shoved down your throat by a well-meaning schoolmarm. It's all available, if you ever need it, for the proverbial dollar-fifty in library fines (the "library fines scene" in Good Will Hunting is priceless). Here's the bottom line: the ability work independently is everything; the schoolmarms' list of what you "should know" is irrelevant. As a result of the schoolmarms' training regimen, even the best high school graduates would be hard pressed to learn independently and to direct their own education. The truly bizarre part of all of this is that many traditional educators would agree that the schoolmarm's curriculum is terribly short-sighted. Our educational system not only destroys your internal motivation, it also also squashes the best intentions of many wonderful teachers.

And then there's social development. Being part of a clique and getting your teachers to like you may have some limited value but these "social skills" are in fact pretty much useless in the long run. Ask yourself what kind of a person you want to be and just how many schoolmarms and cliques you can tolerate on your way there.

One former inmate of traditional school who walked away when he hit puberty put it this way: "Do you want to learn to deal with people or do you want to be homecoming queen?" Put less colorfully, your community offers many opportunities to pursue social development that are a lot healthier than what the typical school social scene offers. There's nothing wrong with most of the people in a traditional school but the system has managed to create a socialization process that deviates from sanity. It takes effort and luck to avoid being damaged by it. I don't know what people are thinking who cite socialization as an important part of traditional schooling. Maybe they never went to a traditional school. Or maybe they did but they never recovered.

Schoolmarms don't want to hear any of this. They are the cheerleaders for society's "success is the key to happiness" mantra. The schoolmarms endlessly chant their mantra along with the all-important sub-mantra: "traditional education is the key to success." When you hear them chanting remember two things: 1) schoolmarms are naturally interested in inflating their own importance and 2) their mantra is wrong. The truth is, achieving balance and satisfaction in your life is much harder than being successful and where are you going to find the time to even hear yourself think if you are grinding away in an endless cycle of memorizing and forgetting? Even if all you care about is success, you can do just as well being a homeschooler as you can being some schoolmarm's pet. There's only one answer to the schoolmarms: NO.

Use the SAT to avoid the one-size-fits-all-lowest-common-denominator-bottomless-pit that is the modern school system. Take the time to do the things that make up a real education: working out what your real interests are, pursuing those interests with passion and vigor, and becoming truly involved with (as opposed to merely living in) your community. And while you're at it here are a couple of things you can push for if you want to change our educational system. First, ask your state representatives to fund alternative community-created schools the way they do in Oregon. Second, tell your state government to distribute school funds equally on a per-capita basis statewide the way they do in Vermont. The two government mantras that have been operating for decades — "we only fund textbook-based schools" and "we fund them based on local property values" — are two towering obstacles to the development of an educational system that actually serves our children. They must be knocked down.

Good luck. Remember, society needs your creativity.

The Schooling Lexicon

Homeschooler: Anyone who does most of their education at home. A homeschooler might use textbooks and take tests and be coerced just like a regular schooler.

Unschooler: A homeschooler who isn't coerced and who figures out what they want to do as they go along possibly with no long-term plan at all.

Selfschooler: An unschooler who has developed a plan with goals. A selfschooler might attend some formal classes.

Indieschooler: Independent schooler. A selfschooler who has found mentors and peers in the form of a community organization or alternative school or even a traditional school or college.

If you are sufficiently independent in mind and habit, it is possible to make good use of traditional educational structures. In general however, I recommend considering alternative education at every level where it exists. You can go alternative straight through college if you want to. You can easily switch to a traditional school for graduate work.

There is a natural progression. A person might start out as a typical homeschooler who grinds through textbooks, then convince their parents to let them be more of an unschooler, then perhaps get a better idea what they want to do thereby becoming a selfschooler, then maybe find a situation involving more people or more structure or both that works for them and wind up as an indieschooler. It isn't necessarily bad if you don't go through the whole progression.

The key question is this: Where is your motivation coming from? If your motivation is more than 50% external, then you are learning to be a factory worker. To all learners and educators I recommend elevating internal motivation to a sine qua non ("without which nothing") and putting all other considerations on a completely seperate, and subservient, list. I am NOT particularly concerned about the world coming to an end if more people live and learn independently indulging their individuality and seeking happiness on their own terms. Nor am I concerned that children who do not memorize and crunch and grind will be at some sort of disadvantage. In fact, by the time they get to college, I believe such children will be at a distinct advantage. I call unschoolers, selfschoolers, and indieschoolers "trueschoolers" and I identify them by the genuineness of whatever it is they are doing.

Trueschooler: A kid with a life.

Jeremy Williams is a free-lance writer who homeschooled his two children; both are currently attending mainstream colleges. This article first appeared on the web at:
www.crushthetest.com/articles/goodsat.html on 2005-02-22.