Gallup Poll and CNN Story: Schooling Down, Unschooling Up

These two news stories, one a Gallup poll report and the other from CNN, show us how hard change is to make, but also how it gradually occurs despite institutional resistance.

"Near record-low confidence in public schools" is the headline for the Gallup report. From the report:
"Public schools currently rank in the middle of the pack of institutions tested -- 8^th out of 16 -- in the general range of the presidency, U.S. Supreme Court, and medical system. The current rating is down significantly when compared with confidence levels seen throughout the 1970s and at points in the late 1980s, when about half or more Americans expressed confidence in U.S. public schools." Since 2005 only 34% of those polled "say they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in public schools."

It is no surprise that people are losing their faith in our institutions, which increasingly seem to benefit themselves and their benefactors more than the people they are supposed to serve. What is surprising, to me, is how the common remedy for schools goes unquestioned: do more of the same, only do it more intensely. More tests, more school days, more teacher testing, more bureaucratic hoops disguised as educational needs. It makes me wonder if any of the "small is beautiful," people-centered reforms that have been ignored for decades will ever stand a chance of being tried by institutional education.

However, I'm heartened, as always, by the growth of homeschooling, alternative schooling, and, most important, of unschooling. This recent story by CNN reports the growth of these alternatives; perhaps the 66% of citizens who do not have confidence in public schools will stop waiting for someone to give them an option and demand access to what over 2 million homeschooled children have: authentic learning in the real world, with support as needed from adults.

Homeschooling Uncategorically

Homeschoolers often divide themselves into categories by making people sign statements of faith or affirm other qualifiers before they can join certain groups, and this self-selection makes some sense for groups that want to maintain uniformity among their ranks. However, researchers also love to categorize homeschoolers. One of the first distinctions I encountered in 1981 was “secular” versus “religious” homeschoolers, but these labels do not begin to cover the range of people and reasons for homeschoolers. Dr. Paula Rothermel, a British researcher who also homeschooled her children, has a brilliant paper in the latest issue of The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning that examines the use of these labels and “how viewing home educators as ‘types’ is useful only to those local authorities aiming to integrate children into school.”

I couldn’t agree more with Rothermel; after all, when homeschoolers are divided into just two camps, such as ideologues and pedagogues as one researcher did, how do you identify yourself? Isn’t any believer in compulsory education a type of ideologue as well as a pedagogue? Then you get even more types of homeschoolers as researchers try to fit us into other neat little boxes of needs and motivations:

Rebels

Competitors

Compensators

Earth-based

Heaven-based

Natural

Social

Last resort

The reality of the situation, as I’ve encountered it in my own family and with the thousands of families I’ve met and worked with over the years, is that all these labels can fit any homeschooler at a particular time. Rothermel suggests that instead of using categories that researchers use strata to define homeschoolers: “ . . . first, as a superficially homogenous group, second, as diverse groups, third, as families, and fourth, as individuals. This stratum approach provides insight into the increasing numbers of families who are choosing to home-educate and their growing appearance as a movement. Further, it allows for the way families adapt, both over time and concurrently, as they learn, produce more children and tailor their different approaches to different children within the family.”

Families adapt their homeschooling practices over time to adjust to all sorts of new inputs and variables; this is borne-out by Rothermel’s research of 100 home educators in the United Kingdom. She found this group to be “ . . . fluid and transient at all levels of process. Families begin home education for a reason that very quickly changes, even that initial rationale is likely to be a response to many unconnected and innocuous events; they continually alter their approach according to the philosophical and physical changes within the family, the changing needs of the children, and the changing ages of the children. Physical changes can relate to changes in family size, divorce, changes in partners, partner gender, location and parental age. Schools do not have to continually adapt to the level of change that is integral to the home educator and his family. Home education is an unavoidably dynamic process, unique in UK education. A school teaches the same curriculum day after day, regardless of the families whose children they enroll.”

Another great reason to read the latest issue of JUAL are the articles about the inappropriateness of comparing A.S. Neill to Rousseau (it brought back memories of an article I wrote about the inappropriateness of comparing John Holt to Rousseau), and Canadian research on how students view their success in school and what factors keep them engaged or hinder their success in high school.

Home Education Unites People Around the World

There are two homeschooling events of particular interest to those who speak or are Spanish. One is a scholarly conference to be held in Navarro, Spain on November 25–26, 2011. There is an English version of the site available, too; look for the link on the menu on the left side of your screen.

The National and International Conference on Family Education Homeschooling

The fact that Spain is hosting such a conference while at the same the country is debating whether homeschooling should be permitted is very interesting to me. I look forward to hearing how this event turns out.

The other event is a continuation of the International Home Education conference I addressed in Bogotá, Colombia in 2009. Educación sin Escuela features families as well as academics who reflect on their learning without schooling, as well as learning with flexischooling.

Educación Sin Escuela

Flexischooling is a word invented by Roland Meighan, whose work on behalf of autodidacts everywhere deserves wider recognition. Roland has for many years published The Journal of Personalised Education Now and the latest issue, No. 14, is fascinating. It is a special edition about Edmond Holmes, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, who wrote several books after he retired, including What Is And What Might Be (London: Constable, 1911). Holmes is a deep critic of standardized curriculum, testing, and emphasizing the role of the teacher over the role of student in the educational process. This is from the article by Michael Foot that opens the issue:

According to Holmes, teachers need to realize that it is not they but the children who “play the leading part in the drama of learning.” Teachers need “to help them to develop all their expansive instincts, so that their growth may be many-sided and therefore as healthy and harmonious as possible.” And that healthy and harmonious growth will be its own reward, thus rendering unnecessary “the false and demoralizing stimulus of external rewards and punishment.”

Not only does Holmes sound like a precursor to John Holt, in this quote, also from What Is And What Might Be, he almost sounds exactly like Holt:

In nine schools out of ten, on nine days out of ten, in nine lessons out of ten, the teacher is engaged in laying thin films of information on the surface of the child’s mind, and then, after a brief interval, he is skimming these off in order to satisfy himself that they have been duly laid.

It is always refreshing to me to find like-minded people from other cultures, times, and societies who not only question conventional education but who also do something about it. Though homeschooling does not have well-paid lobbyists, consultants, research programs, and business interests to support it as conventional education does, we do have people-power. Right now, in the United States, there are more children being taught at home (2 million plus) than there are in publicly funded charter schools (1.4 million), which have had far more money, publicity, and institutional support than homeschooling has over the years. Homeschooling is gaining adherents around the world, primarily through word-of-mouth and example; compulsory schooling needs laws, officers, special buildings, television shows, advertisements, and all sorts of social enticements to gain and keep adherents. Somewhere between the words of Edmond Holmes (and others like him) and the actions of home educators around the world, a new form of education is being created around the entrenched institution of conventional schooling.

Unschooling in the News

While homeschooling generates a lot of media stories, there is definitely an increase in the number of stories devoted to unschooling in recent time. Here are a couple you might want to know about.

1) National Public Radio did a feature on unschooling, written by a 16 year old. It begins:

I didn't have a reason to read until I was 10, so I didn't. Eventually, when I did learn, it wasn't because of a book, test, a teacher — or even because I was embarrassed I didn't know how. I learned to read because of a card game I wanted to play called Magic the Gathering.

In order to play this new and exciting game, I had to be able to read about the different characters on the cards. I'm 16 now and I learn what I want to learn, when I want to learn it, and not always in the conventional ways.

You can read or listen to Sam Fuller’s complete segment on NPR's site.

2) Dr. Carlo Ricci, publisher of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Studies, is interviewed on Canadian television. The interviewer asks many of the usual questions that both homeschoolers and unschoolers typcially get ("What about socialization? What about getting into a well-known college?") and Dr. Ricci responds to these inquiries with clear, authoritative responses.

Varieties of Unschooling Experience

Unschooling is not just for secular, white people with alternative lifestyle demographics. The ideas about learning that John Holt developed over the years speak to people in school and out, to children and adults, to conservatives and liberals; Holt’s work is translated into more than 14 languages now.

However, when we speak about unschooling we are speaking about an idea, not a program, and people need to incorporate ideas into their lives to make them real. Here is an example of what I’m talking about. I recently read A Little Way of Homeschooling: Thirteen Families Discover Catholic Unschooling by Suzie Andres. She writes:

“Unschooling has been the easiest and most comfortable fit for my family. I knew it was right for us, because it was the educational approach that chased away my fear and spoke to me of love. I could really appreciate St. Theresa’s words when she wrote to her older sister in Story of a Soul, ‘No word of reproach touched touched me as much as did one of your caresses. My nature was such that fear made me recoil; with love not only did I advance, I actually flew.’

“Then I heard an echo of her words when I read John Holt. John, like Therese, is articulate, sure, and passionate. He concludes the revised edition of How Children Learn:

‘Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning. Can we bring ourselves to let children learn and grow through that love?’

“He wrote, too, of fear in education, and how ineffective a tool it was. I thought of my own education and agreed. He wrote of children’s natural love of learning and desire to master the world around them. Again, I knew from experience he was right . . . when I read John Holt I felt the same deep peace I felt when I read St. Therese. Their message to me has been essentially one and the same: Replace fear with trust. Since this is exactly what Jesus taught, I knew it was good advice.”

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 While speaking in Chicago I learned about Finding Joy: A Christian’s Journey to an Unschooled Life by Julie Polanco (it is available from lulu.com). Polanco ends her short book with questions and answers; here’s her reply to a criticism unschoolers often get:

Q: This sounds like all you do is have fun all the time. Life isn’t about having fun. How do kids learn that life is rough?

A: Why shouldn’t life be fun? Why shouldn’t people make money doing something that they find and fulfilling? Sure, all of us experience hardship and tragedy at some point in our lives and our children often experience those things in the course of their lives, too. Their best friends move away or begin to exclude them from the group. The family dog dies. Grandma gets sick and is hospitalized. Dad loses his job. If your children don’t experience any of these things, they will feel the pain through someone they know.

Doing service together often exposes them to the realities of life. When they visit a widow or bring a meal to a new mother, when they make Christmas boxes for Samaritan’s Purse, when they bring new clothers and food to the neighbor whose basement flooded, or when the befriend the immigrant family down the street, they will experience all the ups and downs that life has to offer. Learning should not be among those things that are difficult and unpleasant for children. Learning should be joyous, wonderful, and anticipated with fervor and zest.