Ratings2
Average rating3.8
"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."--Dust jacket.
Reviews with the most likes.
I found this book to be an excellent critique of our nation's philosophy of education as well as a great starting point for thinking outside of the box (with advice both for the parent who wants to work within our current K-12 public education system and for the parent who wants to step outside that system and homeschool).
For me, parts 4 and 5 were the most relevant–part 4 guiding you through rethinking the system and creating a vision for your children's education; and part 5 giving some bare-bones basics of how to get started in homeschooling and what that looks like from the 20,000 foot level.
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