Teaching children skills that are really important

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Instead of worrying whether we should give gold stars for participating or for being the best we should involve children in real world activities where the end result of the activity itself is the reward.

Teaching them gardening, woodworking, repair skills, fiber arts, sewing, leatherwork, cooking, and so on. Those are important skills that are useful. I am not saying that reading and writing and being able to do sums and such are not. Those are essential for self-directed learning but so very many subjects and things that are taught in public schools today are not necessary, let alone essential, for later life. Those subjects are just taught because they are used for the passing of tests and many are as useful in later life as the proverbial bits on a hog.

Getting them out hiking somewhere with gorgeous views. Teach them to raise animals and care something other than themselves. Have the help out an elderly relative or elderly neighbor. Give them age appropriate chores to do in the home, garden, etc. and making them feel important when they have done so.

When they help you in the garden (I know that to begin with such help can be more a hindrance than help) don't give them plastic or cheap “tin” gardening tools but invest in the small version of the real thing. They can be had. Or, with a little ingenuity, make the bigger tools smaller, and suitable for them.

The same goes for woodworking and such like activities. Years ago one could get real woodworking toolboxes, for instance, for children with real, small, saws, planes,, chisels, hammers, etc. Today, alas, they no longer seem to exist. The fear that kids could hurt themselves with those has done away with this, it would appear.

Our society has lost what is truly important in life. It is time to find it again. It teaches the young ones things – in school – that are more or less unimportant and those things that are important for life and in life it tends to neglect. In fact, often the school system makes those things that are not part of the “curriculum” out as unimportant and actively discourages the pursuit of those despite the fact that those are the things that are important in and for life.

The school system, and no doubt not just in Britain, “teaches” children to pass tests rather than teaches them things for life. Good test results put schools in front in the league tables but it does nothing for the students. The only way to change that is if we either demand the system to change, are able to change it ourselves – and I do not think that those two will happen – or take maters into our own hands, as many people do already, and homeschool or even unschool our kids.

© 2017

Why unschool and homeschool?

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

It is not coincidence that governments everywhere want to educate children and that they want to, ideally, have the monopoly in doing so. Government education, in turn, is supposed to be evidence of the state's goodness and its concern for our well-being.

The real explanation is, however, much less flattering. It is all done to that the government's propaganda can take root in the young minds as children grow up. Those kids will then be no threat to the state apparatus and in fact they will fasten their chains to their own ankles.

And that the UN wants to mandate government education for children all around the world is also no surprise for it has the very same ideas. When children are educated according to the doctrine of the UN's agenda they will, as adults, accept everything that the UN will present as to a global government and all that jazz.

The Prussian school system and the German law that mandates compulsory for all children from six to sixteen/eighteen had and has but one aim. Not to create an educated people but people who know their station in life and to create obedient (wage) slaves.

It was, literally, thus in public schools in Germany but also in those in Britain in the Victorian age, that children were taught that their place in life was to be no more than what their fathers and mothers were and they were told so in no uncertain terms when they had wishes to become something like a doctor, a lawyer, etc. and this was especially thus in the schools for the working and laboring classes.

A child who even as much as mentioned that his aim was to become a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, and such like would not just be ridiculed by peers and teachers. No, he or she would be flogged in class for having ideas above his or her station.

While this, maybe, no longer happens in this selfsame way the aims are still the same as far as creating obedient slaves of the state who will do as they are told because they have been taught to do so in schools.

Schools do not teach children to think. They teach them what to think and that what is whatever the powers that be degree it to be. Children in government schools (and also most private schools who follow official curricula) are also not taught to question everything they hear and read but to accept everything as it is presented.

Any parent or guardian who wishes his child or children to become free thinking people rather than government robots has, in my opinion, but one option, and that is to unschool them and educate them at home.

While homeschooling is possible and easy in most of the USA and also in the UK (despite what the authorities may claim) in other countries it is not that easy or even impossible in the current situation such as, for example, in Germany where homeschooling is against the law and any attempt is being suppressed with the full power of the law, including the placing of children in care and jailing parents.

Why should the state have any right to tell any parent or guarding how the child or children are educated and by who? And this brings us to a question, which I will not elaborate on here today, as to who owns your children, even though no one can, theoretically, own a child. However, the state thinks that it does own your children.

Get them out of the system and save their spirits...

© 2012