When I say 'homeschooled,' I was homeschooled for, like, two years, and then we just stopped. It was me and my parents, and they'd give me homework and stuff like that, but then one day, they just stopped.
It sometimes seems as though we were trying to combine the ideal of no schools at all with the democratic ideal of schools for everybody by having schools without education.
I was in public school until third or fourth grade, and after that, I was homeschooled. I was homeschooled until I was 14, and then when I was 14, I began attending college. Mom was not playing about that education.
As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.
I started working at a really young age, so I didn't even go to traditional high school.
I didn't really have a normal high school experience. I was home-schooled and went to a co-op, so basically a school with about maybe 200 other home-schooled kids that would come together for classes.
Slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.
I think a lot of people were like, "Oh, you're 13, you're gonna rebel." But I was never in public school and I was never really forced to do much of anything, as a kid.
The focus on creativity and independence exists in pockets of resistance in the educational system, which, to thrive, should be integrated with the needs and concerns of the great majority of the population. One finds them everywhere.
I was getting in trouble at school. I wasn't happy. The school was very much a school that created people for commerce and it wasn't an arty school.
I was home-schooled for my entire high school experience, so I never went to prom.
I wonder how many parents realize that by the so-called education they are giving their children, they are only driving them into the commonplace, and depriving them of any chance of doing anything beautiful or original.
