Episode 62: Dumbing Us Down - Chapter 2

Reviewing Gatto’s book, Dumbing Us Down, always adds a bit of spice to our discussions. This episode’s chapter is another speech of his, about segregation of ages, detachment from community, growing up absurd, television mentors, and more. We also answer your question about how to help your community together as a family. Check out our other book club episodes in this series on episodes 55 and 57.

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Show Notes

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Scoop on the Coop

Big Life Journal (BLJ) has a number of enriching resources for teaching your child life skills. Mandi discusses one BLJ resource that she is using currently, the Emotional Intelligence downloadable workbook for children. This short workbook helps parents walk their children through learning about the spectrum of feelings and growing from challenges that they face.

Dumbing Us Down

While Gatto talks about the detriments of the institutionalized school, we want to remember his concerns and how the same detrimental principles may be rearing their heads in our own homeschool practices. Some questions you may want to ask yourself are the following:

  1. How is your child involved in community? How can you connect your child with various communities?

  2. How much self-directed time does your child have?

  3. How can I help my child gain perspective and learn compassion?

  4. Who are your kids’ mentors? Do they have TV mentors (or social media mentors)? If you want to dive in further, read. our blog post Modern Day Mentors: When Media Mentors our Children

  5. When teaching a subject or a new topic, ask why am I teaching this content? Why does my child need to know this?

  6. What can you do to encourage independent study?

Coop Q & A

We offer a number of ideas for helping your community together as a family. Also, check out podcast episodes 22 and 23 which give a number of ways you can be thankful and give back together as a family.

For more discussion about topics from this book, check out episodes 55 and 57 and our blog posts Bells of Confinement and School Rules: The Hidden Curriculum in Institutionalized Schools.

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