Public Education is HELL for Aspie children!

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School was hell for this aspie. You might be interested in this guy;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto

He's inspiring. Check out the links. Read some of his papers. You can also download MP3's of his lectures.

My classmates were predominately the children of congress critters and bureaucrats, FBI, Police and Military officers. My school was one of the best elementary schools in the country, but it still wasn't geared toward the needs of aspies, who wouldn't begin to be recognized for another 4 decades.

I was bored, because I was at an intellectual level 6 years ahead of my peers, couldn't relate to "busy work", and like all of us, I related to adults better than my peers.

Here's some teacher's comments and parents response from my third grade (1952 - 1953) report card, which are revealing:

1st quarter

"Johnny shows an ability to do third grade work but seldom does he put forth the effort. He seems interested in our activities and discussions and enjoys participating in them. In the past few weeks he has begun to make an effort to complete his work assignments and to add to our discussions. With encouragement and praise for his efforts, and as he gains in maturity, I believe we shall see Johnny doing the excellent work of which he is capable"

Parent:

" I am surprised Johnny fell so low in his reading. I would appreciate it if you would tell us what we could do to help him."

2nd quarter

"Johnny is trying very hard to finish his assignments on time and has shown some progress along this line. He is a capable pupil and could be doing much more independent work than he has been doing. He accepts suggestions in a fine manner and is always ready to co-operate with the teacher and the class"

3rd quarter

"Johnny seems to enjoy school life but seldom enters wholeheartedly into any phase of our work or play. He does not take his responsibilities seriously or else does not recognize them at all. This show up with the order of his desk [my work bench, or my desk (when employed) are still messy], make up work and things left about our room. Perhaps the best action to take would be praise at times he shows awareness of responsibilities and encouragement to always do the finest quality of work of which he is capable.

Parent:

"We are trying to encourage John to do better work"

4th quarter

"Johnny has made a greater effort to finish his school assignments and contribute to discussions this quarter. He still wastes a great deal of time and does not attempt to complete many assignments. I do hope Johnny will recognize this fault as it may seriously affect his fourth grade work if he continues to take so little interest in work and study;. He has a fine mind and could easily with a little effort, be a leader in his class.

Come on, Johnny, let me see what fine work you can do in the fall, okay?"

Reading 1 [C] 2 [B] 3 [B] 4 [A]
Language 1 [C] 2 [C] 3 [C] 4 [B]
Spelling 1 [B] 2 [A] 3 [A] 4 [A]
Writing 1 [C] 2 [B] 3 [B] 4 [B]
Arithmetic 1 [C] 2 [B] 3 [B] 4 [B]
Social Studies 1 [C] 2 [C] 3 [C] 4 [C]

Phys Ed 1 [S] 2 [S] 3 [S] 4 [S]
Music 1 [S] 2 [S] 3 [S] 4 [S]
Art 1 [S] 2 [S] 3 [S] 4 [S]

No matter how nice, PS is not geared toward children who are too smart, and no one had the slightest clue in those days.

It sure was hell for me. I didn't get help in time to make it all the way through public school, unfortunately.

I found a site called "Taking Children Seriously" with several very interesting articles on education;
here is one about " school phobia":

http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/ ... ool_phobic

It's quite enjoyably indignant about children receiving yet another medical label for perfectly healthy behaviour.

What would a school designed for Aspies be like? The idea that we can create an institution that will fit an Aspie, never mind a whole bunch of us, seems laughable. School is bound to be difficult for there are all sorts of necessary rules and codes in a school, written and unwritten, which must be obeyed. Going to school for an Aspie is like walking into a minefield where everyone else has the map and you do not. Invariably, something blows up which makes the life of the Aspie completely miserable. If it is not the teachers, then it is the students. For me, and I suspect for almost all Aspies, both teachers and students were sources of unpleasantness and pain. There was nothing I could have done to make them feel better about my existence. And I went to the best schools in Singapore where academics are taken seriously the social aspects of school deemphasized.

So many years have passed and I wonder now why did I ever go to school. Aside from fulfilling the statutory requirements, the time spent did nothing to further my hopes of happiness in life. In fact there is a case to be made that in my instance, school had diminished the possibility of happiness.

I learned to read on my own and actually finished War and Peace when I was 16. The only classes that were useful to me were the ones on mathematical logic. The attempts at introducing scientific method were a joke because my teachers were clearly not inclined to partake in scientific inquiry. You need an open mind to claim kinship with science and that was something my teachers did not have. Language and the humanities are all but forgotten in Singapore with anything that approximates liberal humanism treated with a certain dread. What good would it do to teach the people to speak? Should the workers of an industrial society be suffused and then confused with ideals? Question not and be obedient; that is the Singapore creed. Obviously they never intended to educate, only to train.

Still, if I had not gone to school, what would I have done? The bullying was bad but at least there was someone to talk to. And the growing up was hard but growing up is always difficult. I doubt if a special school would have made any difference. The best thing is to go to school only for a short time each day; 3 perhaps no more than 4 hours a day. That way the pain is kept to a minimum and the weirdness of not being a part of some corporate body is avoided and the Aspie kid would still have plenty of time to develop his/her interests. It does not help young Aspie kids to be labeled as different. That is the cross we have to bear but if it is possible at all, children should be spared the torment until they grow old enough to understand the trade-offs and decide for themselves.

I dont think it is true. i go to a private mainstream school (Uk) and always have done. I always have done well accademicly in mainstream scooling and i am just starting to make some friends. i did have lots of friends in junior school but senior school was different.

However i think the thing about creating a school just for aspies is ludicious. Mainstream school is good actually because it teaches people about different kinds of people. It teaches them that people like us can do well and can be accepted into society.

Alot of my classmates are starting to ask me about my As. i didnt exactly tell them the headmaster did when i was being bullied in the hope it would help thing, now my whole year noes. I dont really like talking about it much but is getting better. they ask me stuff like do you wish you didnt have as or what does it feel like to have it. i suppose knowing somebody who has it can only be postive in the long run.

I go to quite a small school at present. However for college next year, there is a college i like that has about 1000 people in just one year. i didnt think i would like it at all but i decided to keep my options open and when i went to the open evening it was so postive. i really liked the college and its atmosphere and found it quite helpfull.

So i do think your ideas are ludicious. For me anyway. but am sure some aspies might benefit from that teaching. However i do think it was like with the jews when they made seperate scooling for the jews. They were not accepted into society. Of course it is entirely different but it does make me think that if they were to competely seperate AS from nts the same sort of thing would happen.

Sorry for rambling on. i tend to do that sometimes.

much love
xx

I think some of the ideas from the Taking Children Seriously movement are good, but I've read that the movement is dominated by right-libertarian types so I am somewhat suspicious of them.

That is exactly what the elites want the American educational system to be like, they want people to to be trained, not educated, because educated people will ask questions the corporate aristocracy don't want asked.

Very few people can be educated and even fewer can be educators. One must have an intelligent, inquiring mind and a philosophical nature to benefit from an education. On top of rare personal attributes, one must also be willing to be subjected to the rigors of learning if one is to seek an education. The vast majority of the people in the world have concerns beyond the questionable but unanswerable why. Even if they were up to it, an education would seem to them a waste of time.

Rarer still is the educator. How many people are there who have traveled down the steep and rocky path of knowledge far enough that they can act as guide to the young'uns who seek?

Do not blame the system. I spent time in both the American and Singaporean educational system and know well the drawbacks and benefits of both. Neither system even attempt to educate because it is hard to find a market for that sort of thing even if you could find the right sort of teachers.

The best thing to do is be an autodidact. Books are cheap these days and often freely available. Sit down and read. The life of the mind, which many Aspies do enjoy, can be had with minimal fuss. Blessed is the Aspie who lives near a good library where he may roam like a butterfly gathering nectar. School is a large scale initiative that cannot meet the needs of the individual. And since we Aspies are are individualists in the truer and more pointed sense, it is best that we give school its due but not ask for too much from it. However difficult it may be, there is a thing to be said of learning how to mix with different people. School is perhaps the best place for the young person to engage in such social interaction. But for real discourse, there is nothing like the written word.

Of course there will always be lot of people who think they have no use for a liberal education, but they are only fooling themselves. It's all well and good to have people to have the proper training to function in the economy, but a healthy society needs a well-rounded citizenry with at least a decent level of liberal education.

And school is not the best place for social interaction, and kids don't need to be forced to socialize anyway, they will develop a circle of friends naturally. The notion of "socialzation" as used by educators is a euphemism for indoctrinated conformism.

I see from the thoughtful responses that we in the overall, have lots of NT conditioning to shed. A lot of attitudes here show how our feelings have been beaten down, and we have come to accept all kinds of negative NT-centric attitudes; they're not natural aspie attitudes.

We can design education that will work; we won't fix the problem by waiting around and just talking about it. Parents are going to have to rebel against the system, if necessary, as the problem is not going to go away.

I've noticed a number of folks are under the delusion that school exists to learn to socialize; it DOES NOT!

The 4, not 3, r's are in desperate need of being taught, in a knowledge based system that benefits everyone, and they are NOT!

When I went to school, I went to the best primary school in the U.S. at the time, and I can tell you from my own school experience and 63 years of life experience, that the quality of American education is inconsistent and variable in a way that threatens our very future.

Messing up young minds, whether aspie or NT, is simply inviting disaster to walk right in the door.

We have an interesting chicken& egg problem in the U.S. To change the system, we need the politico's to act. But, to get the right kind of people into the government, we have to educate children to think!

That's why I suggest that the people may have no choice but to take matters into their own hands if
they really want their children to be able to compete for jobs. American recruiters have repeatedly warned that the schools aren't producing young workers who can deal with ambiguity, the unexpected. The foreign schools are only a little better in teaching the 4th "R"; if American schools were doing this, we wouldn't be losing jobs to asia as Americans can think rings around every old world culture, when we are trained to do so, no matter how good their schools are.

NT's have to be trained, and when we have to go through NT-centric systems, we have to re-train our own thought processes just to keep our minds straight!

A lot of arguments that children should be lumped together in one institution are just the result of democratic delerium of the NT world, think about it!

I think I may make a new post on the issue, from the perspective of practical genomics, which cannot be ignored as a factor in education. We simply have too much to lose, and lot's of people have given in to cynicism, understandable, but disappointing.

Oh, how true. After having taken my turn of primary, secondary and university education, I can now go back and enroll in classes that I choose for enjoyment. Without the stress of class competition, the subject is much easier to master.

School SHOULD just be about learning. I remember eating on the library balcony throughout high school, hanging out with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. That's how I got through my day. I went through high school with 1-2 friends and a lot of people who still know me as 'psycho' etc.

Is this the reason why republicans are other pro-market people seem to be the ones who want to change the education system the most?

To be honest, I think it has less to do with evil corporations than the fact that people aren't open minded. How many people do you think are really that open minded? Certainly not most common folks who only know and understand conventionality. Probably not even intellectual elites who mostly end up having to learn the double-speak of academia but not progressing beyond that. Our society really sees education as a means to an end and that much is obvious throughout and was so for most of our history. Really though, I don't see much to argue that a corporate elite is doing much, especially given all of the freedom of people to write literature claiming corporations are evil. Heck, compared to academic economics it is found that people have a bias against markets and corporations than for them. Really, if corporations were seeking control then at least I would think they would indoctrinate us with better economic thinking so we'd all love trade, property rights and recognize a case existing for laissez-faire rather than mandating that all kids read the Jungle. We can argue that the experts are biased but then who will we consider unbiased, sociologists?

School can't just be about learning as long as it is controlled by other forces. School will always be bent to serve its masters, who will of course suppress knowledge and force kids to learn relatively easy and useless topics and of course do this so inefficiently that for some it would be better to just take some books and get and education by oneself. Heck, I had a very good amount of opportunities at my school but I still did that.

The problem with the American education system is that it is based on EVERY CHILD LEFT BEHIND. We are teaching to tests that are arbitrary and ineffective ways of measuring a child's capabilities at best.
A system designed for Aspies, would teach standards based on their interests and obsessions. A child can learn to write a paper on anything and still learn the same basics in their own context. Unfortuneately the current regime has picked what they feel is important and they are pushing it down the throat of every child in exactly the same way. Since every child is fundamentally different, how do they think this is helpful. I am very frustrated with the school system because they don't give my son what he needs outside of the social input.
I think because of the way that the system is built, that's why so many of us who do actually make it to college, discover that it is an entirely different world.
It seems that currently, the school system is just a convenient place for parents who don't want to deal with their kids in the first place can dump them for 7 hours a day. And then provides a fantastic scapegoat for why their children are so dumb. Statistically American children are coming out of schools much dumber now that they did 20 years ago because of the supposed standards. They took out so much of the rote repetition and memorization, so now children don't learn anything anymore.
I remember being handed a list of places in the world and told to learn them all. Then two children were put in front of two identical maps. The teacher would call out one of the places, and whoever would get there first won. Where you sat in the classroom determined how many of these map drills you won. You could challenge anyone you wanted and move up a seat or two. I now know where lots of places are that most people have prolly never even heard of.
Overall, though, I always felt ahead of my classmates with the school work. It was the social stuff that I was ret*d in. I was reading chapter books and encyclopedias before I even went to kindergarten, so the other stuff was more important than the academic stuff.