Friday, March 2, 2012 at 2:11PM I'll be hosting a free screening of Cevin Soling's documentary The War on Kids this coming Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 7PM.
The free screening is at the Harvard Science Center - Hall D, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA.
There will be Q&A with the director after the screening.
If you're in the area, drop in, enjoy the show, and join in the discussion. It is sure to be lively!
Wednesday, February 29, 2012 at 9:45AM Dr. Peter Gray has published the first installment of the results of his research study about unschooling; it explores how the benefits of unschooling are perceived by unschoolers and provides a neat window into our world.
Dr. Gray views unschooling broadly and then classifies unschoolers into three categories based on their responses. Here is his thinking behind this:
In my earlier post, in which I announced the survey, I defined unschooling simply as not schooling. I elaborated by saying: "Unschoolers do not send their children to school and they do not do at home the kinds of things that are done at school. More specifically, they do not establish a curriculum for their children, they do not require their children to do particular assignments for the purpose of education, and they do not test their children to measure progress. Instead, they allow their children freedom to pursue their own interests and to learn, in their own ways, what they need to know to follow those interests. They also, in various ways, provide an environmental context and environmental support for the child's learning. Life and learning do not occur in a vacuum; they occur in the context of a cultural environment, and unschooling parents help define and bring the child into contact with that environment."
In the survey, one of our items was: "Please describe briefly how your family defines unschooling. What if any responsibility do you, as parent(s), assume for the education of your children? [I am asking only for generalities here. I may ask for more details in a subsequent survey.]"
Not surprisingly, we found a range of responses here, ranging from what some have called "radical unschooling" at one end on to gradations at the other end that overlap with what some have called "relaxed homeschooling." We coded the responses into three categories—radical unschoolers, moderate unschoolers, and relaxed homeschoolers—according to the degree to which the parents seemed to play some sort of deliberate, guiding role in their children's education.
I like how Dr. Gray used parent's own descriptions of their roles to place them within the unschooling continuum, and their responses indicate a joyful, if self-selected, group of families who, regardless of why and how they unschool, support their children's individualized learning in ways that school can not, or will not. I look forward to the future installments of this work and how it will line up with some of the other existing research about children who learn without schooling.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 10:47AM Cevin Soling is a guest columnist on Forbes magazine's education blog today, and his essay is timely and provocative. The title of the piece is "Santorum and Harvard Anarchist Agree: Public Schools Must Be Abolished." Cevin is the director of the movie The War on Kids, and he pulls no punches in his moral stance against forcing children to attend a place that denies them their civil rights.
Mr. Crotty's introduction to Cevin's piece explains the headline Crotty gave to the piece:
A homophobic, global-warming-denying, Intelligent Design-believing conservative calling public schools “factories”? Santorum’s semi-Marxist rant is proof of my adage that if you push hard enough in one ideological direction you end up in the other camp. In the above quote and in other recent instances, Santorum has unwittingly outlined a case for creative, customized, progressive education.
John Holt often observed that the way to move past the school reform impasse is to create mixed allies, and homeschooling was the movement he worked with to embody this idea. I think this is the reality that is embedded in the paradox above.
Further, while working with Holt's unpublished writing I came across sections of a discarded manuscript of his from the early seventies entitled, "Living Free Among the Slaves: A Handbook for the Young." I am working to piece it together and Cevin's article inspires me to move even faster on it!
Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 4:35PM Slate published this inflammatory article against homeschooing, entitled "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids. Why Teaching at Home Violates Progressive Values."
It follows standard critiques of homeschooling without offering any perspectives as to why some of the famous liberal educators of the sixties, such as John Holt and George Dennison, came to support homeschooling after years of trying to make schools better for kids. So much to say, so little time to do so! Here's my brief attempt at a comment to this article.
There are so many assumptions about the value of compulsory school attendance and biases against children’s abilities to learn built into this article that it is difficult to rebut in a comments section. As an unschooling family we always offered our girls the choice of attending school and all three of them moved in and out of public school as they wanted to throughout their years of learning at home and in our community (as does Astra Taylor, though the author neglects to mention this). We, and the many homeschooling families we know, never pretend to be our “child’s everything” nor have we ever thought of unschooling as a go-it-alone ideology. Do-it-Yourself-With-Others is the ethos I see most often in the home- and unschooling communities. Further, studies indicate that many homeschooling families only homeschool for about three years, so homeschooled children are moving in and of school, mixing with others, etc. without causing school or society great distress, and have been doing so for decades.
Schooling is directly correlated to income, and schooling creates economic class differences, as a recent Stanford study about the growing education gap between rich and poor indicates. Ivan Illich and John Holt, in particular, wrote about this in the 1970s and eventually concluded it was better to create a new way to help children learn and grow than to try to reform schools, something they and many others before and since have tried to do.
John Holt saw the culture of testing and the distrust of children prevalent in schools then, feared it would get worse, and decided to help those who wanted to try something different with their children to do so. As Holt wrote, homeschooling provides schools with all sorts of valuable information about how children learn and how parents can be involved in their educations. But, as this author indicates, school must be able to control and predict everyone’s learning or else, somehow, civil society will devolve into the haves and have nots—but isn’t that what has already happened?
Holt and Illich offer many other reasons for people to embrace the idea that learning is natural and schooling is optional. Illich wrote how the school delivery system—whether liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist, or communist—is essentially the same in all those countries, only the content changes. Indeed, educationists who insist we need compulsory schooling for democracy to work ignore the fact that our country was founded and grew without any form of compulsory education until the mid nineteenth century. In the 1970s the white Rhodesian government prevented black Africans from voting because of their lack of education—schooling is not a neutral force. Americans have more years of schooling and degrees than at any time in our history, but our problems keep growing, and some of them are caused, not erased, by increased schooling.
Must our humanity and our participation in our government be linked to our ability to consume education in state-approved settings? Must only school-approved reforms be allowed? Should children have a say in the matter of where and how they want to learn? Homeschooling is an answer to these questions that any liberal should consider. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t for everyone, but it does show us another way that we can live and learn as individuals and communities, instead of just being graded products of alma mater.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012 at 9:54AM Today I have a guest blogger, Mariana Ashley, who writes about how you can turn life experiences into college credit. Though she addresses an adult audience, anyone who needs college credit or a degree in order to accomplish their goals can benefit from this option. I’m familiar with homeschoolers, typically teenagers, who turn their life experience into college credit because of how they used their time through volunteering, work, or serious involvement in some study, thereby cutting costs and time spent on college. I also know a couple of parents who, once their unschooled children left home, were able to turn some of their learning-at-home years into college credit towards education degrees. —PF
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Imagine this scenario: you're not certified nor do you have a degree, but somehow you worked your way up the ladder and made something of yourself—you're a manager of mid-size luxurious retail store, a title you've held for the past two years. But the deteriorating economy forces owners to close down shop, leaving you without a job. While there's an opening at the high-end retail store across the street, there's only one small problem: a bachelor's degree in fashion and merchandise and or management is required. You have tons of relative experience, but whoops! No official degree. It seems unfair that you would be forced to spend time and money attending a traditional college just so you can listen to a professor lecture about concepts that life has naturally taught you already. Thankfully there are some programs tailored just for you: we're talking about participating in a "Life Experience" program.
What Is a Life Experience Program Exactly? A Life Experience program, which is sometimes referred to as a Work Experience program, awards credits to students who properly showcase their "expertise" in a particular field. A student's prior knowledge about his or her industry—whether he or she obtained that knowledge through life, work, personal hobbies, vocational learning, or professional training—is assessed through a variety of different ways, including essays. If the professor feels as though the student's knowledge is on par and he or she knows both theoretical and practical knowledge about a particular field, he or she will grant the student credit(s) that can be applied toward his or her degree—which means a student can save time by skipping a few classes entirely. It's important to note that the set-up is totally "experimental learning" and there are no traditional textbooks or exams involved. The program is also offered online through various distance education institutions, so those with families and jobs have a bit of flexibility. This can save time and cost, but like when earning a traditional degree, you still need to pay for tuition. Assessment can also vary from a few weeks to a few months, so it may take a while to get your credits.
Who Could You Benefit from One? Simply put those who want to switch careers or want a promotion in their field.
That said, below are the top 3 online schools/programs that offer life experience credit:
1. Empire State University
Empire State University, whose brick-and-mortar institution is based in New York, offers more than 300 accredited online degree programs—one of which is Life Experience. Students are able to design their own special program with an instructor tailored to fit his or her individual's needs, but assessments for life experience credit are typically earned the same way: students are required to create a portfolio which consists of a series of essays explaining what he or she knows as well as ace an interview about his or her "experience." The assessment fee for each credit is $300, whatever the outcome.
2. Inver Hills Community College
Inver Hills Community College offers 75 online courses, most of which accept life experience credit. However, it's required to take at least two courses before an assessment of life experience can be completed. The good thing is that assessment is free. However, Inver Hills only allows students to earn up to 15 credits in life experience—about a full semester's worth. Similar to other programs, Inver Hills requires students to write narratives about their experiences to earn credit.
3. Linfield College
Lastly, this four year online university offers prior learning assessment credits through its accelerated adult education program. Like the other programs, students at Linfield are required to create a portfolio that thoroughly explains their career goals and addresses what they "know." The online college states that students typically earn 8 to 12 life experience credits, although the maximum is 31. The assessment fees are as follows (whatever the outcome): 15 or fewer semester hours $275; 16-25 semester hours $375; and 26 or more semester hours $475.
While it may benefit those that don't know very much about a particular field to just go ahead and take a few traditional classes, those who have been in the biz for quite some time can definitely benefit from a earning a few prior life experience credits online to expedite the process and achieve their career goals.
By-line:
Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.
