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We just started reading John Taylor Gatto’s book, Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling as our Coop Homeschool Book Club, and he brings up the interesting idea of the “bells and confinement” in traditional school models. He says the following in his Preface:

“Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

Wow. So much to unpack and discuss here, but I’m just going to pick one on the list - “bells and confinement.” First, let’s talk lingo.

I first read these two sentences and thought it said, “bells OF confinement.” Because that’s true too. An adult homeschooled friend of mine shared her experience when, for one year, her junior year in high school, she tried traditional school. But she did not like it. She said she did not understand “why bells told us what to do: when to eat lunch, when to go to class, and when to go to the bathroom. Can’t I just look at my watch?”

The bells.

Looking back it never occurred to me in my 13+ years of traditional school that bells had always confined me. They confined all the students. It never mattered that you were in the middle of learning how to spell a word, parsing Greek for the very first time, presenting your scientific discovery, or in the middle of a deep counseling session with a struggling friend, if the bell rang - interrupt everything! You now have 4 minutes to switch to a new subject, walk to a different classroom, rush to the bathroom or locker, or end your school day.

Unless you are planning on working in a factory, prison, or traditional school, when is bell obedience a useful life skill?

Bells do not allow for autonomy, independent planning or scheduling, educational passion and pursuit, or friendship growth. Every part of the traditional school day is segmented, segregated, and parsed out to be most efficient for the masses. I know this because I was a teacher in this setting for two years and a student for 13. And I do not have a solution. The bells maintain order, limit chaos, and cultivate conformity in a place where up to 2,500 minors have few authority figures in a confined space. Training must start early.

Some of us homeschoolers sometimes snub our noses at traditional school - but is there a solution to even just this bell situation that would not reduce our essential and necessary traditional schools to pure chaos? I don’t have the answers to that. But…I do notice that many of us homeschoolers, myself included, do not fall far from the bells’ trees.

So let’s talk homeschool bells. We have them. They are our timers and our schedules. They are our checklists and our extra-curricular activities. Everyone has to live by some kind of bell sometimes. It’s how the world works and it’s how we need to operate…sometimes. But there are many times that we arbitrarily put time limits on diving deeper into interested topics or activities. Many times we schedule 15 or 30 minute intervals for specific subjects or free play. But why? Isn’t learning still learning whether you dive deeper into something or interrupt it and move to a new topic? Studies show that when you can get “absorbed in challenging activities,” you are happier. So why do we keep interrupting our homeschool children?

Since we are still early in this new school year, still planning out our days and working on our routines and schedules, my question or challenge to you fellow homeschoolers, (and to me) is the following:

What are ways that I can emancipate our homeschool selves and cultivate autonomous learning and passionate pursuit?

That is for you to decide.

(For more about this topic, visit our podcast episode 55.)

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