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

by Susan Wise Bauer

Overview

A best-selling expert on education shows how to make the school system work for your child.

Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all—or even most—students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels over differences in learning style.

Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into “fixing” their children rather than questioning the system.

With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child.

In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to flex the K–12 system, rather than the child. She closely analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from giftedness (not as much of a “gift” as you might think!).

As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work. Her advice here is comprehensive and anecdotal, including material drawn from experience with her own four children and more than twenty years of educational consulting and university teaching.

Rethinking School is a guide to one aspect of sane, humane parenting: negotiating the twelve-grade school system in a way that nurtures and protects your child’s mind, emotions, and spirit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393285963
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/09/2018
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Susan Wise Bauer is an educator and academic who has worked with parents and students for more than twenty years. She taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for fifteen years. Her previous best-selling titles for Norton include The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, Rethinking School, The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, and the History of the World series

Table of Contents

About This Book xiii

Part I The System

Chapter 1 The Way We Do School 3

Chapter 2 The Three Biggest Myths About School 13

Part II Mismatches

Chapter 3 You Can't Make the Earth Go Around the Sun Faster 21

Why Age = Grade (It's Prussia's Fault) 22

Three Questions for Evaluating Maturity 24

Action Plan 28

Chapter 4 Differences, Disabilities, and Disorders 33

The Three Labels 36

Action Plan 53

Chapter 5 The Perils of the Gifted and the Good 63

What Is Giftedness? 64

Four Challenges of Giftedness 66

Action Plan 70

Chapter 6 The Toxic Classroom 78

Uncovering the Problem 79

Action Plan 84

Part III Taking Control

Chapter 7 Basic Principles (Or, How Not to Be "That" Parent) 91

Laying the Foundation 92

The Way Forward 94

Chapter 2 Control the Tests 98

What the Tests Measure 99

The Right to Refuse 101

Types of Tests: What They Are and How to Use Them 104

The Way Forward 113

Chapter 9 Challenge the Homework Monster 117

When Homework Doesn't Work 117

The Way Forward 122

Chapter 10 Accelerate (But Don't Necessarily Skip) 127

Single-Subject Acceleration 128

The Way Forward 130

Chapter 11 Shift the Method 132

Sample Projects Designed for Multiple Intelligences 133

The Way Forward 136

Chapter 12 Teach, Yourself 139

The Way Forward 140

Part IV Rethinking the System

Chapter 13 The End Result 147

Thinking Backward 148

Thought Experiment 1 150

Chapter 14 The Child's Vision 151

The Challenge of Self-Awareness 152

Challenges for Your Child 153

Thought Experiment 2 160

Chapter 14 All the Other Things School Does 162

The Noneducational Tasks 164

Questioning the Agent 166

Thought Experiment 3 170

Chapter 16 Solving for X 171

Why Imagine? 171

Thought Experiment 4 177

Part V Opting Out

Chapter 17 Deciding to Homeschool 181

Homeschooling Styles 184

How to Investigate 186

Chapter 18 Getting Started in Five Steps 188

Chapter 19 Developing Independence 194

The Stages of Independent Work 195

Chapter 20 Out-of-the-Box Teaching Strategies 205

A Caveat 205

The Strategies 206

A Final Caution 211

Chapter 21 Radical Alternatives 213

Different Paths 215

Postscript: About College 223

Appendix A High School and the Transcript 229

Appendix B Skills vs. Content 235

Appendix c A Brief Essential Bibliography 241

Works Cited 249

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2017
Homeschooling advocate Bauer (The Well-Educated Mind) aims to help parents whose children fit imperfectly into what she deems the “artificial” one-size-fits-all American school system in this highly opinionated but eminently practical book. Bauer makes a passionate case for why the K–12 system desperately needs to be rethought, and for why our criteria for judging educational success must change. These arguments serve as springboards for Bauer to discuss her suggestions of how parents should make the educational system work for them. Bauer describes guiding families to use the options available to their kids within the educational system, such as pursuing single-subject acceleration, opting out of stressful processes such as state testing, and working with teachers to find alternative arrangements for kids during class time, such as independent study. She also details hybrid home-school approaches such as after-school programs, independent study during class time, and gap years. Finally, Bauer pushes parents toward “having the courage to step out” with a homeschooling quick guide, and with discussions of—though not unqualified support for—even more radical approaches such as apprenticeships and “unschooling.” Bauer’s guide to the various options available to struggling kids, inside and outside the educational system, will be both comforting and instructive to their parents. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

03/01/2018
Bauer, coauthor of The Well-Trained Mind and an advocate for aclassical education through homeschooling, offers a detailed look at how modern schooling can be a mismatch for student's needs. For those with a disability, a developmental delay, or giftedness, the structure of age-based classes focused on a single way of understanding and behaving may not work. Bauer breaks down ways in which this system is failing these students and offers advice on how to work around it to find better options for students. While Bauer does advocate for ways to help the system accommodate individuals, including having frank discussions with principals and teachers, she also advocates for getting out of it entirely. This bias toward homeschooling influences everything Bauer presents; however, even with this partiality, the balance of firsthand stories of school failure combined with the author's own experiences and practical tips make this book very straightforward and informative. VERDICT For parents seeking support and advice for ways to address their discontent with their children's schooling.—Rachel Wadham, Brigham Young University Libraries, Provo, UT

School Library Journal

2017-10-17
A manifesto with a lesson plan: home-schooling champion Bauer (The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, 2015, etc.) continues her case for educating outside the system."When an artificial system classifies and segregates people (as opposed to cell phones, say, or sewage), some people will inevitably fit into the system better than others." So observes the author, who goes on to say that she was one who didn't—and managed to get through a doctorate without the high school diploma that we all supposedly require, having gotten into college in the first place with a "mom-generated transcript." Some children need the K-12 system, writes Bauer. Other's don't and can actually be harmed by what is, after all, something geared to "a Platonic child, one who doesn't suddenly melt down, or get overwhelmed by a tidal wave of hormones, or unexpectedly need fourteen hours of sleep." In any event, Bauer urges, the parent has to take charge: if a child remains in school but has problems, then it's up to the parent to figure out why Johnny can't read or Jenny is bored. The possibilities are manifold when it comes to why: autism may be at work, or giftedness, or otherness that the system isn't able to accommodate. Bauer writes in a steadily reassuring tone before really broaching the subject of home schooling, which, she notes, is not for everyone—but then, she adds, if you're battling the system because your child is lost, bored, buried, or bullied, "then you're already spending tremendous amounts of energy fighting to change those things" and might as well take on the task of teacher yourself. On that point, Bauer offers much of practical value, urging, for instance, that we misinterpret the Common Core to mean that certain courses be part of the curriculum when it's really certain skills that need to be mastered.A welcome operator's manual for parents of school-age children, inside or outside the K-12 paradigm.

Kirkus Reviews

"Should be on the nightstand of every parent, every teacher, and anyone invested in the education of our children.… Bauer’s down-to-earth approach and talent for describing complex ideas in simple, easy-to-understand terms makes for a comforting and accessible read.… This book offers hope to many who are desperately searching for it and empowers parents to finally take charge of their children’s education."

Epoch Times