Guest Post by John Stossel
There must be a better way to keep kids interested in school than drugging them.
Today, 1 in 5 school-age boys is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many are given drugs that are supposed to help them pay attention.
“I was the rowdy kid, the bad kid,” says Cade Summers in my latest video. “They really pressured my parents to put me on ADHD medication… Adderall, Ritalin. It was like I had been lobotomized. My parents said, ‘This is not our son.'”
They sent him to different schools; he hated them all.
Then he heard about the Academy of Thought and Industry, a private school in Austin, Texas, that has a different way of teaching.
To raise the $20,000 tuition, Summers got a job at a coffee shop. He had to get up at 3 a.m. every day to open the shop. “I would get the bacon frying, get the breakfast items ready.”
That’s a lot of work for a kid who hated school, but his drive doesn’t surprise the man who started Thought and Industry, Michael Strong. He tells parents that kids learn better by doing actual work.
“Teens need responsibility. Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison started their careers at the age of 12 or 13,” he says.
I pointed out that today people would call that “abusive child labor.” Strong answered: “I worked as a teen. I loved it. Teens very often want to work.”
At his school, students get Fridays off to work on their own projects. There are no lectures. Instead students read things and then discuss them.
It’s different from schools Strong attended — and hated.
Too often, says Strong, “school is 13 years of how to be passive, dependent. … Sit still, read, listen to your elders, repeat… aim, aim, aim, and never get stuff done.”
By contrast, at Strong’s schools (there are now two, with more on the way) teachers tell students, “Try to start a business in one day.”
Most of those businesses fail, of course, but Strong says: “I want students to go out there and get stuff done, fail, get up, try again. That’s how we become creators, entrepreneurs. We want them to do what they love, now.”
Cade Summers says the possibility of making money made him much more interested in school. He tried to start a marketing business. “We got to create a project and immediately start feeling the rewards of it,” says Summers.
Other students we interviewed were into things like music festivals, costume design and computer programming. They got to study the fields they were passionate about.
A few of the student businesses succeed. Dorian Domi started a music business at the Academy. Today, his music festival, Austin Terror Fest, brings in tens of thousands of dollars.
Other students launched a website for an “American Idol” finalist. The finalist used the students’ work “for about nine months,” says Strong. “Then he fired the team — a high school team — and got a better team. That was a great experience for my students — to get fired by a client… Do that several times and that’s how you get better at getting stuff done.”
So companies are eager to hire Strong’s students. Summers got a marketing job right after he graduated.
Strong is proud of students like Summers who flourish at Thought and Industry after struggling at regular schools. He described one who, in New Jersey’s public schools, “needed a full-time aide. He was costing the state an enormous amount of money. He came to our school, he did not need an aide.”
It’s true. We interviewed that student. He told us: “In middle school, elementary school, I was incredibly socially isolated… Coming here is just healing.”
The key for him, and many, was following his own interests, rather than following orders.
That’s what motivated Cade Summers to get up at 3 a.m. to work in that coffee shop.
“It was me choosing my life,” he says.
John Stossel is author of “No They Can’t! Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed.”
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Many years ago,
Boys used to get a paper route. Girls set up lemonade stands and sold girl scout cookies.
Boys scouting taught skills, until the homos were allowed to supervise. Now girls invaded the wisdom of letting boys be boys, tainting a program that let them learn things that make them fine young men.
Organized sports that still honored winners grew teamwork skills and working toward a goal to excel and achieve victory. Now: a participation medal for all, so junior doesn’t get the Sadz.
Pampered sissies.
Shop class in H.S. held interest.
Auto repair shop has been supplanted with robotics work team competition successfully.
Machine tools are interesting.
And, offers both white collar engineer jobs, + blue collar shop jobs.
Trade schools and creative work schools for needed, viable professions will usually produce more qualified, stable graduates than bookworms force fed all the PC doctrines of public Ed.
And yet, the degreed bookworm later ends up bitching about the plumber, or HVAC Tech’s labor charges, while looking down at them as inferior worker bees.
Good article John.
There are alternatives out there, for those searching outside the box.
“school is 13 years of how to be passive, dependent. … Sit still…” or you will get drugged. After all, how are you ever going to graduate, go to college and get a ____ degree to be a teacher or adminis-traitor.
Skool is also a money fleecing operation, redistributing taxpayer wealth to the teacher/administraitor workers collective.
Indeed.
Boys are boundless energy. We used to have PT and shop class every day. We played with friends for hours after school and usually got some type of employment by 14. That drained a bit of that energy. Today’s kids exercise their thumbs and that’s about it. And we wonder why 1 in 5 is dosed with God knows what.
Some things are right in front of our faces if we could only use our brains.
Schools are glorified babysitting services to keep the offspring corralled so the herd can either produce or consume, depending upon their role in the system.
Since schools are government run for the most part, it follows that they take from productive members via property taxes and give to the consumptive class.
In the 1990s, there was a big government gimmick called school choice that made a few of us believe things could indeed get improved. Many ideas were tossed out there; some showed signs of success. All got cast by the wayside except those which could closely mirror and imitate the bureaucratic nature of the existing structure of public run schools and the diktats which make them go.
School Choice is another one of those odd pairing of words, which mean something else altogether once paired and used in context.
School Choice is synonymous for White Flight. Duh. Any discussion of making schools better is just whitespeak for keeping the black man out.
Just a couple of turds flung for no reason but because I can.
There is no “one size fits all” approach to education. That is just ONE of thousands of reasons why government monopoly schools are abject failures. Everyone learns in a different manner, and the goal of education is to teach kids HOW TO LEARN, so they then can learn everything else they need to learn, on their own or with some guidance. It is great that this school worked for this kid. It may not work for others. That is why there MUST be a completely free and competitive market in education, free of ALL government influence, especially in force-based funding, and curricula requirements. We cannot even fathom the creativity that will be applied to education once it is turned loose on the market. We cannot even fathom the creative ways that those with lower financial means will be able to gain a great, quality, education, despite their situations – all without government force.
As for working, I started mowing lawns at 10 when an elderly neighbor came over and asked my mom if she thought I would like to do that for her. Her husband, who I knew well, had recently passed away. I took on the task, got the next door neighbor’s yards too, and kept myself quite busy. At 14, I lied about my age and got a job as a “scab” during a supermarket strike. I managed a paper route at the same time (riding my bike 2 1/2 miles home during my “lunch” break to do my 5 mile paper route, and then returned to finish my shift. I generally worked overtime, got tons of money working double time on the 4th of July (all at union wages of course), and made lots of money that summer. The manager had to let me go as he knew I was underage and the union was pressuring him to make me join. I worked after school all through high school and during breaks all through college. I enjoyed working, saw it as having real value, and always wanted more.
I can’t imagine what kids must go through today (and employers) in trying to make an employment agreement work for them both. I often comment that the one thing that enabled everyone to get through the first Great Depression was that there were virtually no labor laws, no minimum wage bullshit that was really enforced, no withholding or other crap, and just a handshake between men (or women) was enough to make both sides of the transaction happy. When this one finally gets really bad, we are going to be screwed if all of these regulations are in any way enforced.
My kids went to public, and then private schools. The difference between private and public is this – kids that misbehave in private schools are not tolerated and are ejected immediately. As a result, teachers can spend 100% of their time teaching, and students are not interrupted in their studies. They are tolerated in public schools forever.
Misbehaving students should be expelled from public schools. Children have a right to be educated. They are being denied that right by misbehaving students. That should simply not be tolerated, but it is.
The educational system is easily fixed, and it comes down to that singular issue. If misbehaving children are eliminated, the system would be fixed immediately.
In my day in our spare time we boys built forts, played baseball, played cowboys and indians, played tag, played basketball, played football, played frisbee, made things with sticks and odds and ends, built ramps and jumped bikes off of them, threw rocks, climbed trees, did a butt load of chores, fished, hiked and explored, played what we called soccer but was kind of a cross between rugby and bloodsport, made stuff, broke stuff and fixed stuff. We got hurt sometimes and occassionally we got in trouble. What we didn’t do was waste time indoors playing video games and destroying our sleep cycles by overstimulating the adrenal receptors in our brains. None of us had ADD and none of us were misprescribed ritalin for the sin of being boys.