Class Dismissed Fundraiser

This film is still being made, but everything I’ve read and seen about it so far makes it seem worth supporting. Here is what the director wrote to me:

 

About Class Dismissed:
 
All across America, parents are becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the state of public education, and a growing number are choosing to pull their children out of school and seek alternative ways to educate them.
 
The current state of our educational system requires us to assess the purpose of schooling, confront long-standing assumptions about education and seek out developments that will better serve the future. We live in a time where education is under siege from every angle; under-staffing, teacher layoffs, overcrowded classrooms, budget cuts, over-testing and failing grades.
 
Class Dismissed will focus on the topic of education, specifically the validity of home education as an alternative to the industrial school model. The film will examine the numerous approaches to home learning, exploring both its history and recent growth. There are many choices when it comes to teaching our children, and Class Dismissed will ask some big questions:
 
·      What does it mean to be educated?
·      Is it possible to get a great education without attending school?
·      What happens to children who never go to traditional school?
·      Can learning outside of a traditional classroom really provide a nurturing and   educationally rich ground for children to grow and blossom?

Class Dismissed will challenge its viewers to take a fresh look at what it means to be educated, and offer up a radical new way of thinking about the process of education.
 
To learn more and to find out how you can be involved, visit our website at www.homeschoolfilm.com.
 
Many thanks,
Jeremy Stuart and the Class Dismissed Team

Nancy Plent: An 'A' in Life

What a crazy Thanksgiving holiday this was for my family and me. At the last minute I was asked to appear on national TV to talk about unschooling on the Dr. Drew Pinsky show. As you can see, it is a strange interview/discussion. I sat in a room, alone, facing two lights and a video camera and participated via remote hookup with the other participants. All I could do was listen to the other people on the show; I couldn’t see any faces or video that they were showing. As I was listening and waiting for a moment to speak a director or producer said into my ear, “Just jump in”; I did, and it was a free for all. However, they cleaned the tape up and edited it for airing the next day so it seems much more organized and focused than the actual taping was. I wish I had a better closing statement, but I had no idea I was going to be given the last word. 

After taping that show and watching it the next night, we cooked a Thanksgiving meal to bring to New York for my family, since my mom was too sick to come to Boston for Thanksgiving at our house. I also learned, about a week earlier, that my old friend Nancy Plent, the founder of the Unschoolers Network of New Jersey, was in hospice care. Unfortunately, I learned over this weekend that Nancy actually died on Thanksgiving Day.

I’ve been thinking about Nancy, Mac, and Eric Plent a lot since then. I stayed at their house a few times, and I worked with Nancy on many homeschooling issues and events from the early 1980s until 2001. Indeed, a quick search through the back issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine notes 85 instances of Nancy Plent appearing in GWS. Nancy ran an organic food store for many years, in addition to operating the Unschoolers Network, and she was always interested in learning and trying new things, which is how she came across John Holt’s work (more on that below).

In addition to her advocacy for homeschooling and unschooling in the New Jersey legislature and at the local district level, Nancy pioneered two concepts for homeschooling books that have been imitated many times: her book “An ‘A’ in Life: Famous Homeschoolers” (we sold this title for many years in the John Holt Bookstore catalog) and her “Living is Learning Curriculum Guides” for unschoolers. Both of these were first composed in the 1980s and were handmade by Nancy and Mac. Many imitators, some quite slick, have followed.

Oddly, as I looked over Nancy’s writing in GWS, it is Nancy Plent’s words about John Holt when he died that made me smile and remember Nancy herself vividly. Nancy enjoyed going to a particular restaurant after she did a conference at Brookdale Community College (we did conferences elsewhere together, but this was her preferred venue), and I know I always looked forward to our post-conference meal. We would break down how the event went, which workshops worked well, who were good vendors to work with, etc. Nancy’s knees would be bothering her, she’d be exhausted from the event, and she would inevitably say, “This is probably the last conference I do . . . “ Of course, Nancy always seemed to find the energy to “put on just one more conference.” We are all glad she did!

Nancy’s husband, Mac, told me the back-story to what you are about to read. Nancy was always a fan of John Holt’s work, but she had never contacted John. Knowing this, Mac called John, introduced himself and his family as homeschoolers-to-be, and asked if John would do him a favor and speak with Nancy on her birthday. Nancy mentions this in her appreciation of John Holt:

... I first "met" John Holt through a phone call on my birthday in 1977. We had just learned that GWS #1 had been published, and were very excited . . . My awe soon vanished as John chatted pleasantly with me for several minutes. When I asked him what he could tell me about the legalities of homeschooling in New Jersey, he replied, "Why, nothing. We were hoping you folks would tell us'" It was my first inkling that we were going to have a colleague in John, rather than a guru feeding us directives.

. . . His observations cut to the heart of things, one of the reasons why his opinions were so valued. In the early days, we had carefully (and nervously) cultivated a dignified, serious image with the press. Then we came across some families handling things in what we considered a flamboyant manner, almost gleefully daring the school to give them a hard time so they could "go public" and show them up . We felt sure they would come across in TV or news stories as irresponsible, and therefore would get a lot of media attention. While we were concerned, we also felt we couldn't tell others what to do. John's answer was simple. "You can't pretend to the media that there are no nuts in this thing, because there before their eyes IS one. Just trust in your own good works to speak for themselves and don't worry about what others do."

Another time when John asked how a particular workshop had gone, I moaned that some people had let us down, failing to get things ready that they had promised. I sighed and guessed that next time I'd just have to do it all myself if I wanted to see it done. John listened carefully to my woes and launched into a story about Gandhi, the gist of which was that you have to trust people "until they become trustworthy."

But the time that defines the man most clearly to me is a walk we took to the top of a hill one year at the Homesteaders Festival. John was a great walking companion. I usually drive people crazy once in a woods or meadow, pointing out things I notice. John was right in there with me, and we interrupted each other a dozen times to point out wildflowers or small creatures darting past. When we reached the top and turned to look out over the view, John scanned the hills and murmured "A thousand shades of green" as his eyes swept the trees on the hills beyond us. He said it again before we walked down, an almost involuntary expression of wonder at the magnificence and complexity of nature's midsummer show. He stopped often to feel the warm sun or admire the scene below us. I noticed later that he did this often in other settings, too, particularly where little children played nearby. He never missed a word of conversation he was in, but his eyes followed children as they played, and he smiled a lot. His enjoyment of the world was quite contagious. I thought about him daily this fall, and tried to make time often to enjoy the lovely days, wishing, in the way we do when someone we love dies, that I could enjoy it twice as much to make up for him not being able to . . .

John Gatto, who Nancy often used as a conference speaker, is recovering from a stroke as I write this, and I’m really struck by the feeling that a chapter I am part of is ending in the homeschooling movement as we continue to lose folks, publications, and their memories and associations. However, I’m excited that a new chapter is being written, too, and that I am a part of it. I hope, like Nancy, that I will enjoy every day twice as much to make up for her no longer being able to do so.

Tiger Mom versus Unschooling Dad!

Such is the sensational premise of tonight's episode of Extreme Parenting on the Dr. Drew Pinsky Show.

A TV producer called me at 1:15 PM yesterday and asked if I could be a guest on the Dr. Drew Pinsky Show at 5:15 PM to discuss unschooling. It turns out that the segment is titled Extreme Parenting and juxtaposes a “Tiger Mom” family with an unschooling family. I taped my short bit last night via a remote hookup. I couldn't see anyone I was addressing; I just had an earphone to let me know what the panel was saying and I looked into two white lights, a camera, and a sound booth. It was a very shallow "conversation" and I had to be encouraged by a director's voice in my ear to "jump right in" and start talking since the others were talking over me and I was being polite and listening. The panelists were pretty clueless about unschooling and uninterested in learning more about it. Of course, that didn’t stop them from expressing strong opinions against unschooling.

Lisa Cottrell-Bentley and her family were the subjects of a video that is shown during the segment, but it isn't clear to me if the entire video will play on the show or just the short bit I heard through my earpiece last night (about a minute long). From what I heard, at least this video segment is objective. It will be interesting to see how much of the video is shown.

The producer also asked me for family photos, and I sent some I had on my computer ASAP. Now I'm wondering how they'll be used during the segment. My family may carve me up for Thanksgiving tomorrow if they feel the photos and show put them in a bad light!

I have over thirty years of helping people unschool and unschooling our family, yet unschooling is still being presented by the media as a recent "crazy" idea where the children rule the roost and hapless parents do nothing but provide benign neglect. Not one question about John Holt, the educational basis for unschooling, or about other data about unschooling. As I learned again last night, TV is more interested in generating heat than light on a subject.

The Dr. Drew Pinsky Show airs tonight, 11/23/11, at 9PM EST on the HLN network

Nothing in the World but Youth

The Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate, Kent, UK is curating an interesting art exhibit about young people and how they and others view their role in modern society, particularly, as noted in the exhibit catalog's Foreword, youth's "sense of non-conformity and experimentation." The show is entitled "Nothing in the World but Youth." I learned about this show when I was contacted by a curator for permission to reprint an essay of John Holt's, "The Problem of Childhood," from his book Escape from Childhood. Turner has kindly sent me a copy of the catalog and I'm impressed, not just by the fascinating images, but also by the significant selections of text they used.

The exhibit starts with works that JMW Turner painted when he was a teenager and ends with modern works commissioned just for the exhibit. Included with all this are some amazing insights into what it means to be young in a society where school dominates their time and choices and the real world is all too often off limits to youth. The curators capture some significant moments in both art and literature about what it means to be a teenager in the past and present. If you're in Britain I hope you'll be able to visit the exhibit. If not, here are some thought-provoking excerpts from essays in the catalog.

On the creation of adolescence as a stage of development by G. Stanley Hall in 1904 in Kent Baxter's essay (Re)inventing Adolescence:

It [adolescence—PF] was invented for rehabilitative purposes and spoke so well to American society and was so influential that we continue to accept it almost verbatim as truth. If we can very broadly describe ageism as 'discrimination based on age,' then many past and current attitudes toward teens would unequivocally stand guilty as charged. When an overwhelming majority of people persistetly characterizes a group as delinquent in the face of data that indicate otherwise, and when such characterizations become so commonplace as to be accepted without question, clearly there is a problem.

From "Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life by Danah Boyd:

While we can talk about changes that are taking place, the long-term implications of being socialized in a culture rooted in networked publics are unknown. Perhaps today's youth will be far better equipped to handle gossip as adults. Perhaps not. What we do know is that today's teens live in a society whose public life is  changing rapidly. Teens need access to these publics—both mediated and unmediated—to mature, but their access is regularly restricted. Yet, this technology and networked publics are not going away. As a society, we need to figure out how to educate teens to navigate social structures that are quite unfamiliar to us because they will be faced with these publics as adults, even if we try to limit their access now. Social network sites have complicated our lives because they have made this rapid shift in public life very visibile. Perhaps instead of trying to stop them or regulate usage, we should learn from what teens are experiencing? They are learning to navigate networked publics; it is in our better interest to figure out how to help them.

"The Problem of Childhood" from Escape from Childhood (1974) by John Holt:

. . . By now I have come to feel that the fact of being a 'child,' or being wholly subservient and dependent, of being seen by older people as a mixture of expensive nuisance, slave, and super-pet, does most young people more harm than good.

I propose instead that the rights, privileges, duties, responsibilities of adult citizens be made available to any young person, of whatever age, who wants to make use of them . . .

. . . Those who are skeptical about these change may ask, 'Even if we were to admit that the change you propose would bring about a better reality, can you prove it would stay better? Might it not create problems and dangers and evils of its own?' The answer is yes, it would. No state of affairs is permanently perfect. Cures for old evils sooner or later create new ones. The most and best we can do is to try to change and cure what we know is wrong right now and deal with new evils as they come up. Of course, we have to try to use in the future as much of what we have learned in the past as we can. But though we can learn much from experience, we cannot learn everything. We can foresee and perhaps forestall some but not all of the problems that will arise in the future we make.

Education is scarce, but learning is abundant

The paradox in the headline is one that is made by humans, not nature. Education—namely, what goes on in schools and is certified by them—is made scarce by defining only those who have school degrees as being educated; this means the more degrees one has the more educated you are supposed to be. Those who can pay for the most expensive (scarcest) degrees—or if they are poor receive an even scarcer scholarship—are thought to be more educated than those who attend schools in less tony zip codes. This mentality leads most parents to fret that their schools are shortchanging their children, and the current call for teacher accountability to be tied to student achievement is one example. Costly studies, programs, and additional teacher certifications are all being done to make sure that if a teacher teaches, the student will learn it and prove it by getting a higher score on a test than they did before the teacher taught the material.

Since homeschooling throws this paradigm out the window it is ignored by policy makers, educators, and most parents who feel their children won’t learn anything worthwhile on their own or from their community. However, homeschooling has much to add to this discussion, particularly in times of economic contraction and tuition increases. Homeschoolers have been finding people and places for their children to learn with and from for decades, but they are not necessarily certified teachers, though some are. Indeed, many of them are local businesspeople, other homeschoolers, and people who are willing to share their interests with others.

The fact is, if you know how to do something you can help someone else learn it. You may not be a good teacher at first, but it is possible to learn how to be a good teacher on the job, especially if you are able to get honest feedback from your students. Most important, learning is a journey and you don’t need to have a master teacher who holds your hand every step of the way. Teachers, like guides, change depending where you are in your journey. Few people are exploring where and how teachers and learners can find one another since it is assumed this process can, or should, only happen in school according to bureaucratic formulas. However, John McKnight and his colleagues have been learning otherwise for many years.

John McKnight is a pioneer for encouraging people to get more involved in their local communities and develop local resources that aren’t controlled by distant institutions, and his work has inspired me over the years. His website, www.abundantcommunity.com, is a great place to learn about his work. This blog entry was particularly striking because it deals directly with low-cost ways to learn. He writes: 

Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed.

This grim prospect depends upon whether we have the novel belief that it takes a school to educate a child. Historically, the primary source of education was the knowledge and wisdom of the villagers. However, as the power of schooling grew, the neighborhood knowledge got devalued and unused. And so it is that local people often feel cornered as schooling recedes.

In one African-American, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, they’re finding out what their neighbors believe they know well enough to teach the local young people. When they interviewed 19 adults living on 3 blocks, they found that they were prepared to teach 37 different topics.

To see the list of topics and learn more about this, read John’s essay “It Takes A Village to Educate a Child.”