There are fine and intelligent people who do not think homeschooling is a good idea. And there is a ferocious defensiveness of The Old System. I see why. The Old System is very convenient. Being free and compulsory, no one ever need question it. Here we have a place to put the children. How can you feel guilty about it, if it is considered compulsory? But fantastically great minds have questioned the veracity of, The System As Wise, for a long time.

Charles Dickens was not critical once. Would it be fair to say that he wrote primarily to illuminate the plight of children? It would, at least, be fair to say that he managed to criticise The Old System in nearly every book he wrote. Fourmother points out that Dickens was critical of The Old System. She begins her most recent post, "pointless lessons, raggedy books and mind numbing boredom are not merely inventions of the modern classroom" and then gives us an excerpt of "Great Expectations." I would love to see a catalog of Dickensian criticisms of, The Old System, here in our collective homeschooling blogs. And what Fourmother has started. I'll continue:

"'Now, if Mr. M'Choakumchild,' said the gentleman, 'will proceed to give his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode of procedure.' Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged. 'Mr. M'Choakumchild, we only wait for you.'

So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of head-breaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, M'Choakumchild. If he had only learnt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more! ~Charles Dickens excerpted from Hard Times

Oh, I forgot to tell you the name of the chapter this is taken from: "Murdering the Innocents." Fourmother is correct, as far as I am concerned, that these passages written in the 1850s set a frighteningly familiar scene. They could describe many modern schools.