The school choice movement is a sad story in failure — by now we should’ve have universal school choice in this country. Here is 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.”
Read more: Townhall.com
Image credit: www.townhall.com.
