Rethinking School: How to Take Charge of Your Child's Education

The single most important lesson that this amazing book teaches is this: as a parent, you are not an employee of the school system, or of the school. Your child does not work for the school system. You are a contributor to it, through your taxes and participation, but it is ultimately there to provide a service, and you have every right and ability to use the full spectrum of options in that system to do what's best for your child. Your job is not to make the school "look good" or increase its funding or national standings. Your options are wider and greater than you might think. This book isn't about learning to "exploit loopholes" or "game" the system, it's about understanding how the system actually works, the and how to get the most out of it for your child(ren)'s optimal growth and development.The second most important lesson this book teaches, through analysis and research-backed discussions of the peculiar origins and history of mass schooling in the US, is expectation management. The author helps the reader discover, perhaps for the first time, realistic assessments of what our system can and can't do. And maybe, just maybe, what to do when your child/children are just incompatible with that system, due to gifts, disabilities, age, maturity, psychological development and other factors. While not a direct advertisement for homeschooling, at least in the 2/3rds of the book, the author sets the reader with a "if all else fails, consider this" methodology if homeschooling is a viable or even preferred option.

I was excited to get my copy of Rethinking School as I am a fan of Susan Wise Bauer’s other work. I just finished, and, unfortunately, I was disappointed.The most persistent problem with the book is that it is clear that the author has stepped out of her realm of expertise. The text is riddled with factual errors, some minor, some not so minor. An example of the latter would be where the author claims that a high school diploma is utterly unnecessary, and for the most part this is true, if a person ends up getting a college degree. However, many jobs that don’t require a college degree do require a high school diploma, and some employers can be quite inflexible about it. What’s interesting here is that later in the book the author strenuously recommends that kids whose talents lie in areas other than the academic realm not attend college—and these are the very kids who are most likely to need a high school diploma. But the deeper issue with regard to the author’s expertise is that she makes claims about schools, what happens inside them, and how to deal with them having never attended a school herself and never being the parent of a child who has attended school. This discrepancy between the author’s expertise and her subject matter is painfully obvious particularly in the first two sections.While the book on its surface claims to be about reimagining school, it is really an argument for homeschooling. The author’s ideas for how to work with teachers and the “system” are not unique. In addition, she doesn’t give enough attention to the very real issues involved in “reimagining school” for high school students. Yes, you can be as free-form as you want in K-8, declining homework, tests, and so forth, but once kids hit high school, the game changes.Finally, the quotations that are liberally sprinkled throughout the book are interesting, but readers should be aware that most, if not all, of them were obtained from the forums the author hosts that target homeschoolers, and as such, were coming from that perspective.All of that said, the book raises some important issues about the purpose of education and where it fits in the work of helping our children grow into themselves.

Many parts of this book delighted me, but a few parts frustrated me. I have been a member of the Well Trained Mind forum community for many years, and am long familiar with the author and her philosophy. It was refreshing to see that she has changed how she views many things about what and in what way kids should learn. Experience is a good teacher and kids do not all learn the same way. It’s good that she realized this; it is something I also had to reckon with in my own decade-and-a-half homeschooling three kids with different learning styles, strengths, gifts, goals.The part that frustrates me -and this may be more a weakness of mine than of the book - is that it is all well and good to recommend your differently-learning students have tailored learning activities, but it is quite another to actually make that happen and fit it in. It takes tons of time to do non-traditional methods of learning, which is the most obvious reason why schools can’t do them much.Also that bit about the steps and stages for helping children move into much less dependent homeschooling frustrates me because for two of my kids, this simply has not worked. They need explicit instruction, unlike the one child who learns well implicitly. So, I currently have a seventh grader who is still mostly in the Parent-at-Elbow or Hovering Parent stage for every subject. *sigh*

This book is a great first step for parents who have concerns about certain aspects of the K-12 school realm, who question the necessities of certain "traditions"- testing, loads of homework, etc.- or have a struggling child. It doesn't have all of the answers, but it provides much to think about and gives some great starting tactics for parents struggling with how to address an overpowering and intimidating administrative school system. It is definitely not trying to sell homeschooling as the be all end all solution, but rather provides parents with a starting point to advocate for their child within the system. I would consider it a very valuable resource, particularly for parents who do not have the options of simply switching schools, moving to a private school, or homeschooling. If you need advice for working (at least initially) within the system, yet being a strong advocate for your child, Rethinking School is a great starting place, and provides lists of further resource recommendations for specific issues.