Hawaii DOE: Chapter 12, Compulsory Attendance Exceptions Part2

§8-12-13  Notification of intent to home school. (a) The parent shall provide the local public school principal with a notice of intent to home educate the child before initiating home schooling.  The purpose of notification is to allow the department, upon request of the parent, to assist in the educational efforts.  The notice of intent may be submitted on a department developed form (Form 4140) or in a letter containing the following items:
(1) Name, address, and telephone number of the child;
(2) Birthdate and grade level of the child; and
(3) Signature of the parent.

(b) The notice of intent shall be acknowledged by the principal and the district superintendent.  The notice of intent is for record keeping purposes and to protect families from unfounded accusations of educational neglect or truancy.

(c) If a child's annual progress report has been submitted as stated in §8-12-18(b), notification of intent to home school need not be resubmitted annually, except in cases where the child is transferring from one local public school to another, for example, transition from sixth grade to an intermediate school.  Then the parents shall notify the principal of the child's new local public school.

(d) The parent(s) submitting a notice to home school a child shall be responsible for the child's total educational program including athletics and other co-curricular activities. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

§8-12-14  Required statutory services.  All educational and related services statutorily mandated shall be made available at the home public school site to home-schooled children who have been evaluated and certified as needing educational and related services and who request the services. [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

§8-12-15  Record of curriculum.  The parent submitting a notice of intent to home school shall keep a record of the planned curriculum for the child.  The curriculum shall be structured and based on educational objectives as well as the needs of the child, be cumulative and sequential, provide a range of up-to-date knowledge and needed skills, and take into account the interests, needs and abilities of the child. 

 The record of the planned curriculum should include the following:

(1) The commencement date and ending date of the program;
(2) A record of the number of hours per week the child spends in instruction;
(3) The subject areas to be covered in the planned curriculum:
(A) An elementary school curriculum may include the areas of language arts, mathematics, social studies, science, art, music, health and physical education to be offered at the appropriate development stage of the child; 

B) A secondary school curriculum may include the subject areas of social studies, English, mathematics, science, health, physical education and guidance.
 

(4) The method used to determine mastery of materials and subjects in the curriculum; and 

(5) A list of textbooks or other instructional materials which will be used.  The list shall be in standard bibliographical format. For books, the author, title, publisher and date of publication shall be indicated.  For magazines, the author, article title, magazine, date, volume number and pages shall be indicated.  

§8-12-16  Notification of termination of home schooling.  The parent shall notify the principal if home schooling is terminated.  A child shall be re-enrolled in the local public school or licensed private school unless a new alternative educational program is presented within five school days after the termination of home schooling.   

§8-12-17  Educational neglect.  If there is reasonable cause for the principal to believe that there is educational neglect, the department in compliance with §302A-1132, Hawaii Revised Statutes, shall intervene and take appropriate action in accordance with established departmental procedures. Reasonable cause for educational neglect shall not be based on the refusal of parents to comply with any requests which exceed the requirements of this chapter. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132) 

§8-12-18  Testing and progress reports of home-schooled children.   
(a) Test scores shall be required for grades identified in the Statewide Testing Program, grades three, five, eight, and ten.  A child is eligible to participate in the Statewide Testing Program at the local public school.  The parent is responsible for securing necessary details from the principal of the local public school. The parent may elect to arrange for private testing at the parent's own expense. The tests used shall be comparable to the appropriate criterion or norm-referenced tests used by the department in the grades concerned. The parent may request and the principal may approve other means of evaluation to meet the Statewide Testing Program requirements. 

(b) The parent shall submit to the principal an annual report of a child's progress.  One of the following methods shall be used to demonstrate satisfactory progress:

(1) A score on a nationally-normed standardized achievement test which demonstrates grade level achievement appropriate to a child's age;
(2) Progress on a nationally-normed standardized achievement test that is equivalent to one grade level per calendar year, even if the overall achievement falls short of grade level standards; http://www.familylearning.org/  & http://www.baysideschoolservices.com/

(3) A written evaluation by a person certified to teach in the State of Hawaii that a child demonstrates appropriate grade level achievement or significant annual advancement commensurate with a child's abilities; or
 
(4) A written evaluation by the parent which shall include:
(A) A description of the child's progress in each subject area included in the child's curriculum 
(B) Representative samples of the child's work; and
(C) Representative tests and assignments including grades for courses if grades are given.
(c) When tests are administered under the Statewide Testing Program for grades three, five, eight, and ten, the parent may choose to have the child participate in the school's testing program and have the results serve as a means of assessing annual progress for that year.
(d) The principal shall review the adequacy of a child's progress. If progress is not adequate, the principal shall meet with the parent to discuss the problems and help establish a plan for improvement.  In this case, the principal may request and the parents shall share their record of the child's planned curriculum. When standardized test scores are used,

adequate progress shall be considered to be score/stanines in the upper two thirds of the score/stanines. 
• There are nine stanines, 1 though 9. Higher scores mean higher stanine numbers.
• The 4th stanine called for in the legislation is approximately the 24th percentile. This means that if the composite score on a standardized test such as the CAT is at the 24th percentile or better, the score is in the 4th stanine or better. 
Here is a table for converting stanines to percentiles:
Stanine Percentile range
1       1 - 4
2       5 - 11
3       12 - 23
4       24 - 40
5       41 - 59
6       60 – 76
7       77 - 88
8       89 - 95
9       96 – 99

So, what does this mean for homeschoolers? Many school districts
use the 4th stanine as an indication of “adequate” progress. Note that that statute refers to a composite score, not every score. Thus, if your child scores in the 3rd stanine on one part of a particular
test and the 7th on another part, all hope is not lost. What really matters is the composite score. As long as the composite score is in the 4th stanine or higher (i.e., 24th percentile or higher), it should convince the school district that the progress is adequate. 

Unless progress is inadequate for two consecutive semesters, based on a child's scores on a norm-referenced test for that grade level or the written evaluation by a person certified to teach in the State of Hawaii, recommendations to enroll the child in a public or private school or to take legal action for educational neglect shall be prohibited. No recommendations shall be made for a child before the third grade. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00]            (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

§8-12-19  Instructional personnel of home-schooled children.  A parent teaching the parent's child at home shall be deemed a qualified instructor. [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)  Once upon a time, the parent had to be a college grad to homeschool. Research has proven that parents without degrees get excellent results, too, and now any parent is recognized as able to homeschool.

§8-12-20  Credits.  No course credits (Carnegie units) are granted for time spent being home-schooled. [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

§8-12-21  High school diploma for home-schooled children.  (a) A home-schooled child who wants to earn a high school diploma from the local public high school shall attend high school for a minimum of three full years and meet the credit requirements for graduation.

Satisfactory performance on the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC) is also required.

(b) A home-schooled child who wants to earn a high school diploma from the community school for adults shall meet the following requirements:
(1) Be at least sixteen years of age, except in the case of emancipated minors;
(2) Have been home-schooled for at least one semester under Hawaii's home-schooling procedures; and
(3) Take and achieve a satisfactory score on the General Educational Development (GED) test.
The diploma shall be awarded by the community school for adults. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)§8-12-22

§8-12-22  College entrance examination and home-schooled children.  A child who is being home schooled may participate in any college entrance examination which is made available to all other students.  The principal of the local public high school shall, upon request, supply written acknowledgement that a child has been home schooled in compliance with the requirements of this chapter.” [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00]        (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

Hawaii DOE: Chapter 12, Compulsory Attendance Exceptions Part1

§8-12-1  Purpose.  The department has a legitimate interest in and the responsibility for the appropriate education of all school age children in the State of Hawaii. It is the purpose of this chapter to implement the compulsory attendance exceptions of §302A-1132, Hawaii Revised Statutes. Implementing the compulsory attendance law is not intended to violate the rights and convictions of parents to home school or otherwise except their child from compulsory attendance. Finally, home schooling is not considered a school initiated educational alternative and is not to be used by a school as a means for releasing students with behavior or disciplinary problems or students lacking credits to graduate from the local public school. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

§8-12-2  Definitions.  As used in this chapter:
"Alternative educational program" means an educational program, in a non-school setting other than home schooling, which addresses the standards identified in the Hawaii Content and Performance Standards.
"Department" means the department of education.
"Employment" means suitable, lawful full-time employment of a minimum of forty hours per week.
"Home schooling" means a viable educational option where a parent instructs the parent's own child.
"Local public school" means the school the child would be enrolled in if the child was not excepted from compulsory school attendance.
"Parent" means the natural or legal parent, guardian or other legal custodian of child.
"School age child" means a child who will have arrived at the age of at least six years, and who will not have arrived at the age of eighteen years on or before December 31 of any school year.
"Tutoring" means an alternative educational program where an individual other than the parent instructs a child. [Eff. 11/7/91; am and comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)§8-12-5

§8-12-3  Applicability.  The provisions of this chapter apply to all school age children residing in the State of Hawaii. [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §302A-1112) (Imp: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132)§8-12-8

§8-12-4  Conditions for exceptions.  School age children may be excepted from compulsory school attendance in the following cases:

(1) Where a child is physically or mentally unable to attend school, except for deafness and blindness, of which fact the certificate of a duly licensed physician shall be sufficient evidence;
(2) Where any child who has reached the fifteenth anniversary of birth is suitably and lawfully employed;
(3) Where a family court judge has approved withdrawal from school;
(4) Where the superintendent of education or designee has approved an appropriate, alternative educational program, other than home schooling; and
(5) Where the parent of a school age child has provided notification of intent to homeschool the child. [Eff. 11/7/91; comp 5/13/00] (Auth: HRS §§302A-1112, 302A-1132) (Imp: HRS §302A-1132)

Everything We Think About Schooling Is Wrong! An interview with John Taylor Gotto

M: It took you 30 years living inside the system we call school to arrive at the radical conclusion that this massive institution was not designed to develop true potential – but rather to limit, constrain, as you say Dumb Down that potential. Basically you are a whistle blower.

J: It wasn’t my intention but that is what happened.

M: The bell rings in a Pavlovian way and we take our children that we dearly love and we put them on this conveyor belt for twelve or more years and don’t ask any of the basic questions you raise. Why is it so hard for most of us who have been so deeply conditioned by this system to see that the king has no clothes?

J: They may have an intuition, but parents are involved in making a living and mowing the lawn and walking the dog, burping the baby. There’s so many distractions that I think we end up taking what seems to be a perfectly rational gamble because everyone else is taking it.

M: The true content of the television experience is the relationship we have to the box, not what is flickering on the screed. This notion that the form of the system, the structure, is that system’s primary content, is your underlying thesis.

You are not talking about the math, reading or history. You’re talking about the structure being the real content – not learned – but deeply conditioned form is content. We’re learning how to conform and part of this conditioning is to not question the structure.

J: The architects of institutional schooling were completely conscious of this. I’ve encountered some intriguing passages that state openly that habit training and attitude training is imposed by the structure. This is what mass schooling is really all about. These observations were not coming from outsiders or radical sources. They were coming from the very center, Alexander Inglis, around the First World
War, wrote a book, it’s very, very hard to get, called “Principles of Secondary Education”. In one section, he lists the purposes of what we call schooling. There’s six - everyone is illuminating - and hair raising.

• The first is to make people predictable so that the economy can be rationalized.
• You can do that if people are predictable. Yet, history has demonstrated over and over and over again that we’re not. So the very first purpose or goal of institutional schoolings is to make people predictable. Darwin was a big influence, but it’s not the Darwin that is sold in school text books. It’s not the fellow curious about nature. It’s a fellow absolutely certain that animal trainers and plant breeders had discovered the operational truth of human life.  And that they have supplied, I’m citing from Darwin’s “Descent of Man” which is about 12 years after Origins of Species, and made a much bigger impact, thatthe overwhelming majority of human biology is fatally corrupted. It cannot be improved by cross-breeding because it’s so far gone. And if we cross-breed the mass with the evolutionarily advanced this will drag everyone back into the swamp. That book probably has caused more damage than any piece of writing in humanhistory. It was immediately adopted by the managerial classes of the planet. You had to find ways to lock up the evolutionarily retarded, to waste their time and set them against one another. And whatever you did, keep them away from the good stuff! There was no evil intended - quite the reverse. They were taking human improvement into their own hands.  In the United States there was a seminar course taught by the President of Indiana University, David Starr Jordan, a legendary name on the West Coast. Jordan called the course Bionomics. The idea was to take charge of evolution by reducing the breeding propensities of the inferior.
• As Darwin said in Origin of Species, only mankind is stupid enough to allow its
  inferior stock to breed. What Jordan did was to organize a class that would
  politically and intellectually take charge of this. Who was the President of the
  University of Indiana?  He turned out to be the first President of Stanford University, the Harvard of the West, a position he held for 30 years.  
• What we’re really talking about is a deliberate and massive retardation of normal
  human growth processes and the monopolistic assumption of responsibility and
  decision making so the challenge of reducing inferior breeding can be conferred
  on a managerial group.

M: You claim to be an instructor of the English Literature. But that isn’t what you teach. You don’t teach English. You teach school and win awards in doing it. What do you mean when you say you don’t teach the subject?

J: The subject is schooling and all the unexamined assumptions schooling imply, such as - to be removed from your family, your neighborhood, your traditions, your church, whatever other source you have and be placed in the hands of total strangers who, after a while, if you keep your eyes open, you come to see are, all from bottom to the top, flunkies. They’re all interchangeable. None has any original ideas. This qualifies them as guards, to see that the training is imposed as it was designed. But by whom? Who designed the training?

It’s not easy to find out who designed the training. If you’re obsessive and I was obsessive because I was pissed off. I was so furious that I’d spent my life hurting children. That anger, quite hot, lasted for ten years. I’m still not un-angry. During that time, by working seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and with nothing other than this on my mind, I managed to stumble across sources.

For example. In 1915 there was a Congressional Commission called the Walsh Committee that tried to answer the same question. In 1959 there was a second Congressional Committee called the Reese Commission. They discovered that the management of forced institutional schooling was coming from the project offices of a dozen or so private corporate foundations. Now, at least, you have a clue.

The expression common during the Watergate era was ‘follow the money.’ This is still the best way to begin. Who is actually putting out the money to underwrite this? There were key families who were proud enough of their heritage to have left behind a family record. By looking, not only at the immediate architect of a school plan, but looking at the grandparents, the great grandparents, as far back as you can trace, you can follow the continuation of ideas - like the one we went through a few minutes ago - that jumps from Calvin to Spinoza to Fichte to Darwin to Arthur Jensen.

The idea at bottom is that a utopian society is a worthy goal to spend your time on, especially if you have a lot of free time and a lot of money, and that the bedrock of a utopian society is an absolutely stable social order.

What’s being done is a trade of security and stability for liberty. You have to cash in your liberty, your individuality, your freedom to get that. Since people won’t willingly do that stability, all the insights about crowd management that have accumulated throughout human history are now put into play in the form of social structures.

J: We’re taking our real wealth – our children and their potential - and we’re throwing it away. We are burning it. We are smashing it. What the young brain offers in any moment in history is a new way to see things, unquenchable energy that can be beaten down and it will rise back up again. And we’re just pitching it out in exchange for this stable orderly society.

“Craig Ventner, the beach bum surfer who shared the laurels for producing the map of the human genome… cut class often to hit the boogie board and only escaped junior high because a teacher changed of his ‘F’ grades to a ‘D’ – so the school would be rid of him.

George W. Bush had a ‘C’ average in high school and a ‘C’ average in college, but that was a higher ‘C’ average in high school and college that was earned by Massachusetts senator John kerry… Al Gore flunked out of his first college and squeaked through his second with a ‘C’ average.  Dick Cheney flunked out too. Legendary progressive Senator Paul Wellstone scored 800 on his combined SATs.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft – no college degrees. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple – no college degrees.

Michael Dell is another un-degreed immortal of the computer game, as is Larry Ellison of Oracle.

Ted Turner, founder of CNN, dropped out of college. William Faulkner’s high school grades were too horrible to get him into the University of Mississippi. Warren Avis, the man who pioneered auto rental s at airports, decided that college was a waste of time and didn’t even apply.

Edward Hamilton, the nation’s largest independent mail order book dealer, wrote me that the advantage he had was that he hadn’t wasted his capital or time on college. Paul Orfalea, the highly intelligent founderof Kinko’s was not regarded as very bright by his high school. Lew Waserman created modern Hollywood with is colossal MCA; he had no college and virtually no seat time in high school.

Warren Buffet started business at the age of 6, selling iced Coca-Cola. By 18 Buffet had the equivalent of $100,000 in the bank. Then applied to Warton Business School and was turned down.
George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln – someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system. Through most of American history kids generally did not go to high school – and yet the unschooled rose to be admirals like Farragut, inventors like Edison, captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller, writers like Melville and Twain and Conrad and even scholars like Margaret Mead.

Consider what society would look like if 65 million trapped school children learning to be consumers were suddenly set to actively imagining themselves to be producers instead of bored consumers?... Isn’t that exactly what America needs at this sorry, sterile juncture in our history – not more well-schooled zombies on whose backs the few can ride.
                                                                                                  From Weapons of Mass Instruction

M: Imagination is the key. You said that the system prevents individuals from developing the capacity for critical or creative thinking.

J: I can give you a solid rational reason, divorced from the usual demonology, why imagination has to be destroyed. Capitalism is a way of organizing economic activities. It suffers from certain diseases that have been well understood for several hundred years. The most dangerous is something that used to be called over-production, now in the financial markets its called over-capacity. But let’s use the term, over-production.

In capitalism if more is produced that consumers purchase, the price can’t be maintained. Worse, it becomes difficult to assemble pools of capital because investors get spooked. The easiest way to curtail production is to make most people unproductive.

You do this by removing the imagination that can improve productive process.  Do that and you remove the will to have an independent livelihood, by constantly talking, from kindergarten on, about ‘good jobs.’

M: How is the structure we call mass- schooling designed to retard imagination?

J: It was understood, as far back as the Roman Collegian, that if you submerge people in a rule-driven existence their imagination, the creative part of them, will naturally atrophy or vanish. There’s no room for it to be practiced. And those training procedures designed to retard imagination have been used by armies and churches throughout history.

Dr Carol Quigley, in a 1300 or 1400 page book, brilliantly written, and written only for a scholarly readership, says that not a single major event of the 20th Century hadn’t been staged and arranged. The First World War, the Second World War, etc., etc. Staged and arranged by exactly whom? And for what purpose?

It turns out that in the last part of the 19th Century, arising out of Oxford University in England, a small group of very, very influential people decided that the progress of the human race had stopped, and that war and starvation and all these bad things would continue to happen forever unless there was a world
global government.

They drew into their orbit Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, the Rothschild’s in Europe, and in these high level commissions (think of them as the Aspen or the Bilderberg of their day), decided that no one would willingly surrender their national sovereignty. It would have to be taken from them by
trickery.

One of the strategies was to underwrite and subsidize war - everywhere on the planet - because war tends to break down and weaken national sovereignties.  And the schemers knew that to eliminate national allegiance you had to eliminate the allegiance of the population to their own government. War was one of the best strategies to do that.

There are a variety of others but one that John D. Rockefeller proposed (and took charge of) was to infiltrate every subversive organization that they could locate anywhere on the planet. Not to destabilize these organizations, but just the reverse. To feed enough resources into the organization that it could survive and it’s thought, strategies and plans could be studied without the organization being aware.

M: All of this lays behind our deeply conditioned response to compulsory schooling. The bells, confinement, crazy time sequences, age segregation, lack of privacy, and constant surveillance were deliberately designed to prevent critical thinking and promote addiction and dependence.

J: You must have people dependent upon material purchases and consumption to keep a mass production economy running.  Look at the powerful traditions that exist in the human history, the most powerful
of which to me, is the historic tradition that comes most predominately out of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius - that teaches: ‘nothing you can buy or no orders you can give are going to make your life better, or bring you happiness.’  Do you really want to spread that idea around if you’re in business? The dumbing down part is to prevent over-production.

Dumbing down starts with grades and pats on the head. The system is designed to create an unquenchable consumption sequence. Boredom is essential because you don’t want people who buy things that actually produce any satisfaction over a long period. Cars, suits, everything has to be disposed with as quickly as possible. Ideally you want to create a throw away economy and that takes a population that is easily bored and childish.

For example, you buy the newest computer. Read Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a Great Machine”. It won’t be a year before you begin to hear, not in so many words, that you’ve made a big mistake because coming down the production pipeline is a better model. It never ends.

You don’t reach nirvana in purchases because if you did, the whole economy would collapse. You have to become dissatisfied, bored with everything. Now if you learn to be bored with material things, you’ll also be bored soon enough with friends, with mates, with loyalties of any sort. You’ll dispense of them. You’ll
walk away from them. And that’s almost the definition of a Proletariat, a term used to identify members of a lower social class, the working class. The proletariat has no firm ground to stand on.

M: You began Dumbing Us Down with the statement that genius is extremely common and natural. What then is the purpose of schooling? We assume that the purpose of schooling is reading and writing. It only takes a hundred hours to transmit these skills if the person is interested and willing to learn. What do we do with the rest of the twelve plus yeas we spend in the machine, the system? It doesn’t add up.

J: It doesn’t add up for kids but it does for teachers, principals and a superintendents. It adds up for someone who writes school books, who delivers school books, who prints school books, who sells baloney to the cafeteria. It adds up for a lot of people. It only doesn’t add up as a sensible way to add quality to human life.

I won’t live to see this, but the first nation that deliberately sets out to unstandardize its population will end up in two or three decades owning the world.  Ideas will crackle.

M: Imagination - the capacity to create images not present to the sensory systems, is the classic definition. This is the minds capacity to create and invent. Television undermines this capacity The collapse of descriptive language undermines this. If you don’t use it you lose it. Real education is not knowledge based. Real education is the unfolding of this capacity. I would love for you to help me rephrase this idea of the difference between conditioning/schooling and the unfolding of capacity which is education. The difference between those two are enormous.

J: Any number of social observers have said that death is at the center of a good life. It’s only knowing that you’re aging and will die relatively soon, that confers that electricity and magic on each moment. So that you want to draw from it everything that you can.

Back in the sixties an anthropologist, Carlos Castaneda, published a series of best sellers, supposedly about his apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian shaman, Don Juan in Northern Mexico.  The shaman said the key to everything is to always see death sitting on your left shoulder, this hawk or this raven watching you. Then each moment mean something.

If there was a pill tomorrow that would let us live two million years, what would anything mean at all?

I think we need to find what adds value to a community. First to add value to our self, so whatever our circumstances are, including being in a torture chamber, you have the maximum opportunity for satisfaction there. And second, because we’re social animals, we have to add value to the community around us, otherwise we are parasites. You draw value but you don’t reciprocate.

I don’t think any amount of money or fame can make up for the fact you’re not a productive person - not a consuming person - but a productive person. How can you be productive in a world in which everything has been stabilized? What you can do is be recruited by a productive idea. You have to have an imaginative understanding of what people are, what they need, and then you add your own gifts to meet those needs.

I don’t think you can live without imagination because then you’re reduced to the sensual life, to consuming. And we’ve all over-eaten, drunk too much, probably had some narcotics here and there and while it’s great at the moment, all these things wear out very quickly.

I’m in my middle seventies now, I can tell you I finally reached the point where I’m reluctant to travel, not because I don’t want to be amused. But because I have a piece of land, wild land in Upstate New York and I have a big porch in the back of an old barn and I put out hundreds of pounds of deer food and bird food and chipmunk food every week.

I’m surrounded by creatures of different species and they’re no longer intimidated in my presence. It’s just fascinating. I wake up in the morning now at 6:00 a.m., the first thing I see are hummingbirds. And almost immediately afterwards the Goldfinches. And then red-headed Finches come, and the wild turkeys come, and then the chipmunks start to dash in and grab some of the bird food, and a small herd of deer stick their heads out. It’s absolutely magical. I never get tired of it. Some way to be useful is available to everyone.

Buckminster Fuller said, the wealth that graces our lives is everywhere. The conditioning that schooling, television and the corporate-consuming culture creates in our head - that we must have this or that - prevents us from seeing that there is really is enough for everybody. I think we will have to abandon
forced schooling to finally realize this – to experience it deeply.

Link to Original Post: www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf

Pre-School Graduation Speech

This is a re-post (there's a link to the original post at the bottom).  While this isn't a speech I've used or borrowed from, I couldn't help but post it for my own amusement -- encouragement...

Good afternoon friends, families, and graduates. Thank you so much for asking me to come and speak before you on this momentous of days in the lives of these five year olds. We come together today to recognize and honor our preschool graduates. Over the past two years they have come through these doors to play, paint, draw, build, dress-up, read, write, color, and learn. Through the power of play these students have grown socially, emotionally and academically. Through the power of compassionate and love filled teaching, these students are now prepared for elementary school.

Students, as you move into the next phase of your academic lives I have some advice for you. First, forget everything you did here. Especially anything that was fun and playful. You will be entering into a world of testing and strict standards that will dictate your every move. Your play time will be replaced by test preparation and your coloring will be done with a number two pencil in small circles.

My second piece of advice is to hold on to your creativity as long as you can. While you were here in preschool you were creative in the most unfiltered and pure form. You learned new things out of curiosity and a natural love of learning. As you get older your classes will become more rigid, structured and scripted. Do whatever you can to be creative in your work and pursue your natural curiosity.

Another thing to keep in mind is to avoid failing. Yes, when you tried singing your ABC’s and messed up, your teacher gave you as much time as you needed to figure it out and get it right. Even though you failed initially, your teacher did help you learn from it. However, as you move forward, failure is seen as weakness and ultimately will determine your lot in life. Too many failed tasks and you will be labeled a failure with no chance of success in this so called real world.

Now don’t get me wrong, elementary, junior high, and high school will have some great things as well. Those friends that you made in preschool will still be with you. Although as you move on in your schooling, those friends will now be competitors. Instead of playing together you will compete with each other for awards, spots on sports teams, and class ranking. If you are lucky you will come out on top.

My last piece of advice is for you to never lose your hope. If you are fortunate enough you will have a teacher willing to make learning as fun for you as it was here in preschool. This teacher will allow you to think outside the box and allow your natural creativity to flow. They will encourage you to be more than a number on a standardized test or a grade on a report card.

Teachers outside of the preschool world, if you are in the audience I ask you a favor. Look at these bright and enthusiastic faces. They have a love for learning and treasure every day at school. Do whatever is in your power to keep them this way as long as possible. Don’t squash it with test prep, awards competitions, and overly standardized learning.

In closing, my most heartfelt congrats to you and the work you have done in the past two years. Keep the memory of the past two years in your mind and never forget what is possible when you love learning and let your curiosity lead your way.

http://stumpteacher.blogspot.com/2011/05/preschool-graduating-speech.html?m=1