Unschooling Math

Susannah Sheffer edited Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine longer than any of her previous or subsequent colleagues did, including John Holt himself. During her time at GWS Susannah created several small packets and booklets on specific topics that used material exclusively from GWS. I’ve been going through all my GWS documents seeking material that hasn’t been used before for the creation of some new books, articles and materials I have in mind. However, when I rediscovered this little pamphlet by Susannah I thought it could be immediately useful to people who are uncertain if math can be learned by children without formal textbooks, lessons, and wheedling and needling by parents to finish their homework.

I scanned the original booklet and am providing it as a free download in Portable Document Format (PDF), so you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it. If you would like to read it and comment on it, please visit my download page and click on “Unschooling Math.” I would appreciate your comments and thoughts about it, particularly if you would like to see or share more material on the subject of unschooling math.

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Letter to the Swedish Parliament regarding Homeschooling

At the request of homeschoolers in Sweden, who are facing an outright ban on homeschooling in their country, I sent the following letter of support on Monday, 5/10/10.

To the Swedish Parliament regarding proposed changes to homeschooling legislation.

I have been asked by my fellow homeschoolers in Sweden to write to you as a concerned educator who has studied, written about and participated in homeschooling for over 29 years as a father of three daughters and as publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine.

The one-size-fits-all model of education that is delivered through government schools is quickly becoming a thing of the past as free market education options, such as vouchers, for-profit schools, distance learning and, especially, home schools continue to gain ground worldwide as citizens seek more individualized educations for their children.[i] Indeed, Per Unckel, a Governor of Stockholm and former Minister of Education, explained the need for allowing educational options for Swedish citizens to an American reporter in 2009: "Education is so important that you can’t just leave it to one producer. Because we know from monopoly systems that they do not fulfill all wishes."[ii] The legislation you are considering, Chapter 24 Paragraph 23 of the proposed new Swedish school law, will create such a monopoly by outlawing homeschooling except under “exceptional circumstances.” I urge you to vote against this change to Swedish law in order to preserve a family’s right to choose from a variety of educational offerings, including private and home schools. The state should not have a monopoly on education, either of schools or methods. To reduce educational choice for Swedish citizens to a mandatory selection of pre-packaged commodities presented by the government is hardly a real choice.

Not all children flourish in state schools, which is one reason why Sweden became a world-leader in free market education by introducing education vouchers in 1992. This decision raised controversy due to concerns that educational choice might result in increased social segregation, particularly regarding homeschoolers. However, research and history has shown that allowing different social groups to control the education of their children does not necessarily result in increased segregation and that tolerance for pluralism is a necessary component of democratic societies.

Dr. Christian Beck has studied homeschooling and social integration in Norway and concludes:

 “…among home educators who are registered and monitored, home-based education also appears to produce well-socialized students. The greatest difficulties with regard to social integration have to do with unregistered home educators.”[iii]

Making homeschooling illegal, or extremely difficult to do, will result in more families becoming unregistered home educators in Sweden or, as is currently happening in Germany, it will result in families seeking political asylum in countries that permit homeschooling. The bad publicity, complex court cases, and educational rigidity that will flow from banning homeschooling in Sweden can easily be overcome if the government and schools cooperate with families in their efforts to be involved in their children’s education rather than prosecute them for doing so.

The homeschooling movement is quite small in Sweden and it is likely to remain small. Indeed, even in countries such as the United States, that has seen considerable growth in homeschooling in recent years, it only represents 3% of the total school-age population. Homeschooling is also not a permanent condition for many families; one researcher claims that only 15% of secular homeschoolers and 48% of religious homeschoolers continue to homeschool in the United States after 6 years, and there have been no serious difficulties with homeschooled students who matriculate into schools.[iv]

 There are many more pressing educational matters before Swedish schools than homeschooling. For instance, on any given day in Sweden there are far more students who are truant from school than there are homeschoolers being educated. Wouldn’t the energy and money being spent to restrict families who want to help their children learn at home and in their communities be put to better use by focusing those efforts on truant students who are literally running away from school? 

The examples of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Spain, Australia, and other western democracies that have growing homeschooling populations prove that the state does not need a universal curriculum administered through state schools to create good citizens. It is widely noted that homeschooled citizens who enter into adult work or college are equally or more engaged in political, sports, entertainment, scientific, and social endeavors when compared to their schooled counterparts.[v]

The popular American author and teacher John Holt, who supported homeschooling after many years as a teacher in private schools and universities, addressed the Minnesota State Legislature when they were considering restricting homeschooling in 1980; the legislature decided not to pass the law. Holt ended his testimony with words that also apply to Swedish homeschooling:

The legislature can affirm the right of parents to teach their own children, while continuing to exercise its constitutional right to assure that all children are being taught… There are and will remain large and legitimate differences of opinion, among experts and nonexperts alike, on the subjects that should be taught to children, on the materials to be used, and on the ways in which this teaching and learning are to be evaluated. Only by allowing and supporting a wide range of education practices can we encourage the diversity of experience from which we can learn to educate our children more effectively, and it is the intent of this legislature to allow and encourage such variety.^[vi]

Please vote against the law to change Chapter 24 Paragraph 23. It will not only ban homeschooling, but also severely restrict educational opportunities and personal freedoms for anyone who does not flourish in the conventional education system.

Sincerely,

Patrick Farenga
President, Holt Associates Inc.

Author, Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus, 2003)

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[i] Brian Ray, Worldwide Guide to Homeschooling, Broadman and Holman, TN, 2002

[ii] http://www.examiner.com/x-1393-Education-Improvement-Examiner~y2009m3d20-Should-Obama-look-to-Swedens-successful-school-voucher-program

[iii] Home Education and Social Integration by Dr. Christian Beck. Critical Social Studies, No. 2, 2008. Retrieved on May 5, 2010 from 

http://ojs.statsbiblioteket.dk/index.php/outlines/article/view/1973/1763

[iv] Isenberg, E.J. (2007) “What have we learned about homeschooling?” Peabody Journal of Education 82, 387-409.

[v] Scholarly articles on the topic include Home Schooling for Individuals' Gain and Society's Common Good. Brian D. Ray, Peabody Journal of Education, 1532-7930, Volume 75, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 272 – 293; Knowles, J. Gary, & Muchmore, James A. (1995). Yep! We're grown-up home-school kids—and we’re doing just fine, thank you. Journal of Research on Christian Education, 4(1), 35-56; Jones, Paul and Gloeckner, Gene (2004). A study of admission officers’ perceptions of and attitudes towards homeschool students. Journal of College Admission, Special Homeschool Issue 185, 12 -21.

[vi] Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling (Perseus, 2003), p. 221

Make Math Illegal

John Holt wrote, “I suspect that many children would learn arithmetic, and learn it better, if it were illegal.” As an adult who has come to enjoy math after a youth filled with hatred and shame about the subject, I see the wisdom in Holt’s words. I probably would have arrived at this place sooner in my life if I hadn’t had to spend so much time pretending to comprehend math for my classes, so much time memorizing “math facts” that were meaningless to me, and so much time avoiding math during my years after high school because I thought I couldn’t do it. In my twenties I was fine with basic arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping, but anything beyond that, such as number lines and exponents, and I would run away as quickly as possible from them.

Now I enjoy math, because I see how it works in things that interest me. This is not something a teacher in school showed me but something I realized as I grew older and learned more about math through my interests in literature, science, puzzles and magic. However, the long, non-linear path to learning I took for math does not fit in the curricular model of conventional schooling, and so we force our children into the same curricular charade of learning I, and many others, endured. Somehow I managed to pass my courses with, I think, only one bout of summer school for math during my school years, but I promptly forgot about all mathematics since I had no reason to remember or use any of it other than the threat of failure. Once that threat passed, all the algebra, geometry and other math I studied passed out of my head too.  This is a pretty common occurrence among schooled people, but society is in complete denial about it. Instead we reason, “If we teach it, they will learn it, and passing a test proves they learned it and we’re good teachers.” We hold onto this belief despite evidence in all our lives to the contrary. All one has to do is look at the large numbers of high school and college graduates in the United States who have successfully completed three or more mandatory years of a foreign language and compare them to those who well-remember or use any of the languages they studied once they’ve graduated school.

While thinking about unshooling math, I was pleased to read Peter Gray’s recent Freedom to Learn blog about math, When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools. In it, in addition to some good resources, he tells the story of L. P. Benezet, a superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire. In1929 Benezet dropped teaching arithmetic until after fifth grade. According to Gray, “Benezet went on to argue that the time spent on arithmetic in the early grades was wasted effort, or worse. In fact, he wrote: "For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning facilities." All that drill, he claimed, had divorced the whole realm of numbers and arithmetic, in the children's minds, from common sense, with the result that they could do the calculations as taught to them, but didn't understand what they were doing and couldn't apply the calculations to real life problems. He believed that if arithmetic were not taught until later on—preferably not until seventh grade—the kids would learn it with far less effort and greater understanding…. In sum, Benezet showed that kids who received just one year of arithmetic, in sixth grade, performed at least as well on standard calculations and much better on story problems than kids who had received several years of arithmetic training. This was all the more remarkable because of the fact that those who received just one year of training were from the poorest neighborhoods—the neighborhoods that had previously produced the poorest test results.”

Unschoolers have long noted that having a longer scope for learning, even years, as this case demonstrates, is not a hindrance to children and actually confers many benefits. I think it is interesting that the children who were not taught math had teachers who were directed to spend time on “recitation,” a practice many parents use without knowing this label. According to Gray, this meant “The children would be asked to talk about topics that interested them—experiences they had had, movies they had seen, or anything that would lead to genuine, lively communication and discussion. This, he [Benezet] thought, would improve their abilities to reason and communicate logically. He also asked the teachers to give their pupils some practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers.”

There are many ways to approach learning math, we do not have to all use the standard drill. As the above shows, you can even more or less ignore math for years and not harm a child’s ability to calculate or learn higher math concepts. But, for some reason, many unschoolers worry about whether or not their children will learn math properly. There is some idea that the math curriculum is so logical, so necessarily step-by-step, and so demanding that it must be approached piece by piece in the most carefully orchestrated manner or the student will become helplessly lost. This is conventional wisdom that just isn’t true.

A teacher, Alison Blank, has created a neat type of online presentation called a prezi, posted below. Her prezi is entitled Math is not linear and I hope it will give you inspiration to consider other ways to think and learn about math. Blank writes from the perspective of a conventional school teacher (“To be clear, I am not advocating that students get to choose what they study any more than I would let five year olds [sic] choose what they eat. You still direct the class, but when possible, do it from behind the scenes by providing strategic problems.”) but her ideas can easily be adapted for use by homeschoolers, unschoolers, alternative schoolers, or autodidacts everywhere.

There are many scopes and sequences for learning math, many different entryways, and I look forward to sharing more in my next blog. I hope you’ll share some of your stories with me too!



Math is not linear on Prezi

Swedish homeschoolers ask for our help

Homeschooling in Sweden has always been legal, but it is a little-used option there. However I've been contacted by individual Swedish homeschoolers and a Swedish homeschooling group in recent days because there is now serious legislation that will make homeschooling illegal in all but "extraordinary circumstances." Swedish officials have refused to publicly define what those circumstances may be. Further,  the law also affects alternative schools by forcing them to teach the national curriculum as the primary focus of their efforts, making their philosophical and methodological differences with standarized curricula inconsequential with the stroke of a pen.

To sign their petition and learn more about how you can help preserve Swedish homeschooling freedom visit:

The Swedish Association for Home Education

To read more about the situation in Sweden, there are links on the above site. You can also read this good background article about the situation in this free article from the Spring, 2009 issue Secular Homeschooling.

Unschoolers Will Not Learn To Do Things They Don't Want To Do

I think the unschooling segment I appeared on with the Yablonski/Biegler family on The Good Morning America TV show probably caused more heat than light today. There were so many important points to make—schooling is not the same as education, lack of curriculum is not lack of instruction, how and why different scopes and sequences for learning work—but, in the total 4 minute segment, it was all I could do to mention that children are natural learners from birth. As you can see, today’s interview didn’t have the negative edge of yesterday’s presentation, so at least that’s an improvement.

But yesterday's damage is done; unschooling is just a version of hookey that produces uneducated kids to those viewers, not a genuine way to help children learn and, as the host kept implying, it should be more regulated. If only we could have spoken about how kids can do serious work without being coerced into doing so, how learning can be rich and non-linear when it occurs outside school, how unschooled kids fare in college and the world of work. There are plenty of books and videos and studies we could have discussed, but instead it all got bogged down in the refrain, "Isn't it the job of the parent to teach the child to do things that they don't want to do?" What a negative way to think about learning and work: "I have to do things I don't want to do only because someone with power over me tells me I should." So much for self-starters, questioners, think-out-of-the-box employees; no, according to this concept we want to primarily educate our children to become adults who Obey. The world is full of opportunities that teach us how we must sometimes do things we don't want to do in order to accomplish something we do, so I don't think that's a lesson parents, or schools, need to endlessly drill into kids. I think the job of parents is to show how joy for life and love of learning can be sources of discipline and hard work, not fear, bribery and misery. Children do help out with chores around the house, cooking, and more without bullying them into it. In fact, I read about a study that shows altruism is inherent in children as young as 18 months; kids really want to join in and help and we can work with that ability instead of quashing it so they'll only help when we command them to do so. There's much more to say on this topic, but I'll get off my soap-box now.

On another note:

I recently listened to a podcast entitled John Holt: Libertarian Outsider, by Jeff Riggenbach. It is an interesting portrayal of Holt’s work, with some excellent quotes from John’s books, particularly Freedom and Beyond. Sponsored by the Mises Institute, the 20-minute presentation often makes John seem like Captain Ahab, pursuing the education whale with monomaniacal intensity. As a result, Riggenbach neglects to mention Holt’s other causes and interests, such as music, fiction and ecology, but this is a minor matter. If you want to learn more about John’s work and speculate about why Holt didn’t become a “capital L Libertarian,” as John used to say or, as Riggenbach notes, a “Movement Libertarian,” this is a good place to start.