The Happiness Factor

The Editor’s Slate
The Happiness Factor
By Genevieve Sage

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     In a study involving over 7000 adults who had been home educated for an average of 11 years, 59% reported they were “very happy” with life compared with 27.6% of the general population.1   The disparity in these self reports on personal life happiness is so great that it is screaming for attention!   What is the happiness factor that accounts for these differences? ...Or is it rather a composite factor to be found in the numerous advantages that home-schoolers enjoy?   In this issue of Schooled at Home, we will explore several of these benefits, among them is the authoritative role one takes in one’s own life.  
    For example, according to Paulo Freire, a system of education may be oppressive rather than liberating.   In an oppressive system he refers to as the “banking system,” a student’s role is passive, confined to receiving and filing that information a teacher has deemed essential.   The student body is effectively prepared for their place in life, not as transformers of the world, but as adaptors that accept the roles defined for them!
   

    Similarily, former New York State and City Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, decries a system that schools rather than educates students.   He critically asserts that the goal of public education is “to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”   He reveals six functions of such schooling that include preparing students to adapt to authority with the absence of critical judgement, a conformity function, one which labels and another that sorts humans like grades of beef, and quite naturally following the first five oppressive functions is one that maintains hierarchy.   With such a system in place the leaders may rest peacefully with the knowledge that the...