Compulsory Schooling Age to 18?

This editorial appeared in USA Today on February 18 in response to some states possibly raising the compulsory school attendance age to 18 . It was written by Jerry Mintz, founder and director of AERO-Alternative Education Resource Organization. He states the case against it simply and brilliantly.

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States considering raising the compulsory school age are making a mistake. The way to fight dropping out is to make better schools, not force students to stay in bad ones!

Conventional schooling assumes that children are naturally lazy and need to be forced to learn through incentives such as grades and competition with other students. They need to be kept busy with homework and forced to run an endless gauntlet of standardized tests.

In contrast, many of us involved with educational alternatives such as democratic schools and homeschooling believe that children are natural learners, and that the best education is learner centered. The main job of the educator is to listen to the student, maintain a good environment for learning, and help them find the resources to pursue their interests.

Historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Agatha Christie, Louisa May Alcott, and more recently, such celebrities as Elijah Woods and Venus and Serena Williams have learned this way.

Children are natural learners. If they say they hate school SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THEIR SCHOOL!
Until the mid 1800s schooling was not compulsory. Yet research shows that there was a high degree of literacy. People became educated because they wanted and needed to do so.

Something IS wrong with our public school system. Everyone knows it. Bureaucrats in the system have no idea how to fix it except by more of the same failing practices: More homework, longer days, longer school years, more years, more testing, more teaching to the test. And they only know how to test the most mundane and least important things, facts that can be memorized (and then easily forgotten after the test because they are learned out of context).

It is far more important for students to learn how to learn, how to find the answers and resources that they seek. If public schools provided this kind of education, as we do in numerous alternatives, young people would find learning meaningful and have far less reason to drop out. Students in schools with a learner-centered approach are truly excited about learning and rarely drop out.

Jerome Alan Mintz, Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization
www.educationrevolution.org