The Competence of Children

Here is another example of how homeschooling helps children find work worth doing and lives worth living. This  11-year-old boy, Birke Baehr, has the confidence to stand before a large crowd alone on-stage, address what sounds like a large audience, and deliver a very persuasive argument in favor of using locally-grown food. So as critics decry the lack of social skills and social concern among homeschoolers, despite evidence like this (and I know of at least 30 years of additional evidence, both research-based and anecdotal, that I can add to this), I hope that those interested in what homeschoolers are actually doing in the world are inspired by this. Birke also makes a very strong point early in his talk, about how marketing to kids is so insidious and prevalent; I'm very glad to know that there are children like Birke who, at 11, know when they are being sold a bunch of crap and are willing to say so.

Leaving Sweden in Order to Homeschool Their Children

The situation in Sweden is a stark reminder to homeschoolers everywhere about the power of the state and professional organizations to stamp out family-based teaching and learning situations with the justification that only Big Schooling can provide all children with a proper education.

According to this logic, professionally licensed and operated education is a right that should not be denied children; apparently it is also a right unlike other rights, since children MUST exercise it in one way: to attend school. Unlike the right to voting or free speech, which you can choose to use or not use based on your personal needs and opinions, this right does not allow children or families any right to refuse it.

The fact that meaningful teaching and learning take place outside of school for children and adults every day, and has been this way well before compulsory schools were invented about 150 years ago, is ignored by Big Schooling proponents who feel that family life must conform to Big Shooling's demands. Flexischooling and other blends of school and family life, as well as learning how people can learn and do things totally on their own, are totally wiped-out and ignored with this brutish approach to standardized education. Most importantly, as Jenny and her son make clear in their comments, choosing to learn at home is not necessarily a rejection of school; it can also be a desire for more connection and deeper relationships with family and community, human needs that are often not met for all people in school systems.

Jenny Lantz, a Swedish homeschooler I've been in touch with during the Swedish government's persecution of homeschooling, has written this report about how her family, and others in Sweden, are becoming expatriates in order to continue living and learning with their children. The Swedish media outlet Rapport ran a story about this and Jenny and her friend, Mary Jack, have translated the video and news report into English; the original Swedish versions appear in the link to Rapport.

22 May 2011 Rapport

The new school law which comes into effect this summer means that it will be nearly impossible to [obtain permission to] homeschool. Several families are against the changes [in the law] and are now leaving Sweden.

Rapport has met with the Lantz family who are now house hunting on Åland in order to be able to continue homeschooling.

• "We wish to be together. We like to have the children with us and the children likes to be at home. Both they and we have an incredible freedom in such a lifestyle," says Jenny Lantz.

Children's Right

But the Minister of Education offers no hope for change.

• "I think this is unfortunate. I believe that all children in Sweden have the right to go to school and it is the child that has this right. Parents should not be able to deny their children this right," says Jan Björklund.

He receives a reprise from Nicklas Lantz.

• The Lantz family consists of two adults and three children. Nicklas and Jenny have their own business and Nicklas works part time as a plumber, professions that they could take with them to Åland where they now live in a camper while awaiting their own house.

• "I like to be able to be with my family all the time. I feel happier that way, having friends and close family," says their son Lukas.

Limited

Approximately 100 children are homeschooled in Sweden, but as of autumn 2011 only parents of severly ill children will receive permission to (continue to) homeschool.

• "In the upper grades (grade 7-9) we have sixteen different subjects. Many highly trained teachers with expertise in the various subjects are required to educate a student in the higher grades. There is no chance that parents can completely replace this teaching," says Minister of Education Jan Björklund.
• "Should we find that we cannot teach ourselves the subject, or lack the time or the opportunity to do so, we can find someone who is knowledgeable and can help the kids," says Jenny Lantz.

So far, three Swedish families have settled on Åland because they wish to homeschool. And they are not alone.

• "More (of us) will leave Sweden. We know of families who are planning to move here, and we know of families who are planning to move to England, the US and Canada," says Jenny Lantz.

On Åland, the requirement is learning, not school.

• Families meet regularly with the school personnel in order to ensure that the children are learning, and through testing the children can earn the right to higher education.

 "It´s not about us being angry with school, or school being poor. That´s not the reason for us to homeschool. It´s a form of education that suits us. We enjoy being close to the children," says Jenny Lantz.

Homeschoolers and Radical Unschoolers Making News—in a Good Way

One of the great pleasures I've had while traveling and speaking recently has been reconnecting with some old friends. I had a great time in Chicago at the InHome Conference, where I spent time with David Albert. Besides the usual interesting insights into homeschooling that David shares, he also described his work with the group Friendly Water for the World. They note:

Right now 900 million people around the world drink, cook, and wash in untreated water full of harmful viruses, bacteria, worms, and parasites.  

* 3.5 million people die of water-related diseases every year.

* A child dies of a waterborne disease every 20 seconds.

* In the past decade, more people have died of water-related causes than from all wars combined.

This group is not just about providing clean water, but about teaching people how to build, and train others how to build, eco-friendly, low-cost biosand water filters. This filter, currently in use in India, Kenya, Burundi, and Mexico, removes 99% of bacteria and viruses, as well as metals, from contaminated water.

David notes that despite lots of development aid, fresh water and proper sanitation are often overlooked. For instance, David says the schools built by Greg Mortenson's group in Afghanistan do not have clean water for washing hands nor do they have sanitary toilet facilities. Rather than wait for a major water pipeline and purification facility, these biosand water filters are built with common, low-cost household technology and can be put into use very quickly. A training session will be held on July 2 - 6, 2011 at Olympia Friends Meeting House, 3201 Boston Harbor Road, Olympia, WA 98501. You can request more information by emailing:

info@friendlywaterfortheworld.com.

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Homeschooler Hannah Newsom, is a finalist in the 2011 Google 4 Doodle. Here is her impressive entry, titled Illustration.

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I had a blast at the Unschoolers Waterpark Gathering in Sandusky, OH earlier this week. The biggest indoor waterpark in N. America is truly something unique, especially if you enjoy water as much as I do. Among the many interesting people I met for the first time was Zoe Bentley, now 14, and her family. In 2010 Zoe was the second place winner of the 2010 USA Today/NASA "No Boundaries" National Competition for her website Exogeology ROCKS!

Here is a television feature about Zoe and her family.

School as Behavior Modification Center: Mission Accomplished!

Professor Dennis Rader does some interesting work with right-brained learners and helping teachers and students find the gumption to fight for change in our schools, as well as supporting homeschooling and other activities that foster learning outside school settings. He created this satirical poster promoting factory-style learning and teaching for the 21st century.

 Thorndike/Skinner Public School Mission Statment

Reading the Tea Leaves in School's Cups

Schooling The World: The White Man's Last Burden is a fascinating blog and this entry summarizes well the critiques of mass education made by Goodman, Holt, and Illich from the sixties forward. Homeschoolers, unschoolers, and anyone interested in knowing more about the debilitating nature of unasked-for, or misguided, help in both education and foreign policy will be rewarded by reading the complete essay. Here are a few excerpts to help move you toward reading it.

The recent revelation that Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea is based on fictionalized accounts of his experiences in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that his charity’s funds were misspent and its books were cooked, and that there was little or no followup or support for many of his schools once they were built – if they were built at all – has drawn a lot of media attention.  But the larger fiction which goes unquestioned is Mortenson’s romanticized portrayal of education as a panacea for all the world’s ills, a silver bullet that in one clean shot can end poverty, terrorism, and the oppression of girls and women around the world.

...

Don’t get me wrong – I would never deny that there are individuals who benefit when money is spent on education, and I would never want to come between those individuals and that money.  If a girl from rural Pakistan wants to go to school and has a knack for academics, she deserves support and I hope she gets it.  But the idea that building schools and getting every kid on the planet inside them is a solution to the problem of global poverty, for example, is a real whopper.

Why?  Well, for starters  –  and everybody knows this –  a huge percentage of the children in those schools will fail.

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When we put children from traditional rural areas into school, what we’re doing is transitioning them from a non-cash agricultural economy where nobody gets rich but nobody starves into a hierarchical system of success and failure in which some lives may get “better,” but others will get much, much worse.  Guess which club has more members?  Welcome, boys and girls, to the global economy.

The reality is that there are few better ways to condemn a child to a life of poverty than to confine her in a bad school, and a very high percentage of schools in low-income areas are and will remain bad schools.  Many NGO’s as well as international programs like “Education for All” are focused on the body count, on getting more and more children into classrooms.  What happens to those kids in those classrooms is harder to quantify or to track.  One thing that seems clear is that an awful lot of them learn very little. A Brookings Institution study of education in Pakistan by Rebecca Winthrop and Corinne Graff reports that “the education system produces many unemployable youths with few skills for economic survival…..In a recent survey of Pakistani youth, half the students say that they believe they lack the skills necessary to compete in today’s labor market.”  A World Bank Policy Research working paper indicates that, contrary to popular belief, money spent on education often increases inequality in a country. This is partly because those who already have substantial assets are better positioned to take advantage of educational resources than those who have their hands full trying to get food on the table.  But it’s also because from its inception school was designed as a sorting mechanism, a rigged competition where only one form of intelligence is valued, only one way of learning is permitted, and one child’s success means another child’s failure.  We forget that the structure of schools as we know them today was developed during a time when people believed in racist eugenics and Social Darwinism; modern schools were structurally designed to perpetuate a hierarchical class system, and – despite the best efforts of many dedicated teachers – that’s exactly what they still do, through the non-democratic, hierarchical ranking of children which is hard-wired into our entire system of grading, testing, and one-size-fits-all standards.  Until we change that – at home as well as abroad –  education will continue to perpetuate and justify poverty, not to ameliorate it.

Read the entire blog entry: Three Cups of Fiction.