Mencken on public education.
"The aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States and that is its aim everywhere else."
I intend to devote a section of my Resources page to homeschooling, which will include links to resources demonstrating why Mencken was right. First among these will be links to articles by John Taylor Gatto: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/ . Perhaps more than anyone else, Gatto has laid bare the cultural and intellectual bankruptcy of the American public school system.
Caedmon
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"Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?
"We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted."
I love that.
I bought his most recent book, _The Underground History of American Education_, at that conference. He had a table set up at the book fair with a basket and a sign-up sheet...and nothing else. Nobody to answer questions or anything. You signed your name and address if you wanted to buy a book (which at that time were still in the process of being published) and you left your money in the basket. Checks, $10's, $5's, $20's were in there, all unsupervised, and all most likely perfectly safe. It was, after all, a homeschool convention. I have his book _Dumbing Us Down_ too, but no others.
After I heard his lectures I bought recordings of them all so I could go back and hear them again. To this day my kids have never once told me they were bored.