All homeschoolers would qualify for asylum

The Christian Science Monitor printed their story about the German homeschooling family who received political asylum in the US yesterday and it contained two rather interesting nuggets of information. The first is the decision, if upheld on appeal, will grant asylum to any sincere homeschooler. From the article: “Homeschoolers are a movement of sorts,” says Peter Spiro, an expert on international immigration law at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. “The immigration judge looking at this claim said there is a coherence to this group ... and that denying the rights of this group [to homeschool] is persecution.”

The article claims Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has already been contacted by other German homeschoolers who want political asylum. Here is where the second interesting nugget turns up, when Mike Donnelly, an attorney for the HSLDA, is paraphrased:

"Donnelly says his group is not directly affiliated with a Christian church, but his website mentions staff members’ faith. He also said the homeschooling movement in the US was not just Christian – the National Center for Education Statistics says only 36 percent of homeschooled students are kept home for religious reasons."

It has been well noted that as homeschooling has surged in growth—74% in less than a decade—it has also significantly diversified, thereby diminishing the influence of evangelical homeschooling leaders. However, to read that HSLDA is downplaying its religious orientation a bit, or at least downplaying it for this article, makes me feel even more that we are entering a stage where inclusive and global homeschooling associations are the next stage of development we face.

Update On Political Asylum for Homeschoolers

The New York Times, in an article titled, “Granted Asylum To Learn At Home” (3/1/10. P. A15), provides some analysis and quotes from Judge Lawrence O. Burman’s decision that shed new and surprising light on his decision to grant political asylum to the Romeike family, who were German homeschoolers. Judge Burman writes that Germany’s ban on and strong punishment of homeschoolers is “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans.”

Burman also writes that homeschoolers are a group who have “principled opposition to government policy” and are “members of a particular social group.” When coupled with the issue of the Romeike’s also being persecuted because of their religious beliefs Judge Burman found the family qualified for asylum. The article then notes:

“It is definitely new,” said Prof. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown Law School’s asylum program, who added that he had never heard of such a case. “What’s novel about the argument is the nature of the social group.

But, he said, given the severity of the penalties that German home-schoolers potentially face, the judge’s decision “does not seem far outside the margin.”

The US government is appealing the decision so this case can be precedent setting and therefore something to watch. It’s still not clear to me how or if this decision would apply to secular German homeschoolers seeking asylum but, as reported in the Times, the breadth of the decision surprises me; I look forward to reading the complete decision.



New Research Supports John Holt's Views About Learning

One of the core ideas of John Holt’s approach to education is that children are good at learning. John asserted in the early sixties, often and clearly, that children are natural learners and that adult interference in their attempts to learn, often through uninvited teaching, inhibits children’s learning. This idea continues to be met with skepticism as most adults believe not much is going on with babies and young children; they are considered to be silly giggle machines incapable of clear, deep thought. Indeed, I must admit my dismay as I read more and more from both homeschoolers and schoolteachers that they worry how children aren’t ready for kindergarten or that they must formally teach children how to talk and walk. Why is it that the more educated we become as a society, the less we trust our innate abilities to learn? Further, with so much emphasis being placed on getting children “ready for school” at ever-younger ages—preschool playgroup consultants could become a new market—I applaud every parent who decides to let their children play instead being plugged into an early enrichment program.

An article in The NY Times (Aug. 16, 2009) about current research done on how babies learn confirms what John wrote nearly fifty years ago and should give heart to parents and teachers who want to help children learn in their own ways.

Alison Gopnick, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of The Philosophical Baby, writes, “The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.

New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.”

Gopnick cites her own and others’ research that demonstrate that babies and children up to five years old have “capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic [that] allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them. Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet.”

The important thing Gopnick points out, as Holt did, is that babies and young children learn best from the people, places, and things that surround them, not from formal lessons. She writes, “The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cell phones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)

But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

A very important aspect of this research is that preschool-age children have developing, flexible brains that can’t focus on just one thing to the exclusion of all else around them—the opposite of what school expects from kids—and that this openness and curiosity are what feed their brains. Gopnick writes, “Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But… children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative. …Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.”

It is refreshing to know that even more research backs up the idea of giving children free-range in thought and action, though it seems this information never gets a fair hearing in schools or politics since we keep making policies in those areas that lock and track children into specific learning at younger and younger ages. Research and theories that confirm the “babies are smart” idea existed before John wrote of course, but, like Holt’s ideas, they never get serious attention from educators. One of John’s favorites was a wonderful book by Millicent Shinn, The Biography of a Baby, written in 1900.

If you’re interested in reading Holt’s perspective on this issue, I suggest reading the chapter “Learning Without Teaching” in Teach Your Own, and John’s books How Children Learn and Learning All the Time. In fact, John wrote Learning All the Time, his last book, to be, in his own words, “a demonstration that children, without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in exotic, specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will, and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we call the Basics.”

Homeschooling and PDD: A Success Story

Matt Savage is described on the front cover of the Boston Globe Living Section (Feb. 9, 2010) with this headline: “The Improviser. Is this autistic 17-year-old from Sudbury the next great jazz pianist?”

Savage, who has a type of autism called Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), displayed much musical promise by the time he was seven but his behavior was so erratic that even three years ago his parents didn’t think he could find the self-control to become a top-tier jazz pianist. The article notes, “Today, after years of specialized therapies and dietary changes, Savage navigates a daily maze of classes, practice sessions, homework assignments and dorm life at Berklee.” Berklee is a music college in Boston that focuses on jazz, an art form Matt Savage is mastering before he’s old enough to vote. Until this article came out very few of Matt’s teachers and fellow students were even aware that he is disabled by PDD.

I’m struck by the fact that his parents homeschooled him and continue to homeschool his sister. The Savage family took matters into their own hands at a time when other parents would throw in the towel and they were able to help their son flourish by homeschooling him. Speaking to the reporter, Matt “describes his autism now as “almost a gimmick” used to get his young talents noticed.

‘There’s still the issue of communicating with friends,” he says guardedly. “I really don’t have much of it anymore, though, thanks for the therapies my mom put me through.’”

Later in this article we learn that the Savages moved in 2002 from Massachusetts to a farm in New Hampshire. His mother mentions how music and travel helped her son a lot too, so there are a lot of factors at play in making Matt connect with the world in addition to his unique therapies and diets, which, unfortunately, we get no details of in the article.

One of my favorite La Leche League sayings is that the proper course of child development is for children to move from dependence on their parents for everything to independence from their parents: “Baby the baby so you won’t have to baby the man.” Of course, this isn’t easy, but the payoff is worth it. Diane Savage says, “…the more he’s shown he could solve problems on his own, the more we’ve been able to pull back. It’s really been harder for me than him, though, because Matt’s early years were so intense, his behavioral issues so extreme.” Now Matt is not only attending college, jam sessions and playing in bands, he is donating proceeds from his concerts and CD sales to groups that support autism research and outreach.

It is important to remember that sending such a child into the care of others is no guarantee they will come out whole; professionals struggle with these children too! In fact, as many homeschooling parents of special needs children have noted, sending such a child to school can be counterproductive to the child’s emotional and social development. But parents of special needs children are often so worn out by their responsibilities that the thought of homeschooling in addition to all else they do for their children seems impossible. However, there are stories like Matt Savage’s that let us know that parents can work with their children to seek and secure the help they need while homeschooling them, which is why having the homeschooling option, even if you don’t use it, is important.



German Homeschoolers Get Political Asylum in US

Homeschooling is illegal in Germany and families that can’t afford or don’t want private schooling there have no other options. The Romeike family, citing what they perceive to be an anti-Christian curriculum in the schools, nonetheless decided to homeschool their children. The family was heavily fined for homeschooling by German authorities and forced, under police escort, to send their children to school. Previous homeschooling cases from Germany that I’m aware of resulted in the families relocating or finding refuge in an alternative school there. Now an immigration judge in Tennessee has granted political asylum to the Romeikes. As noted in The Washington Post, the Romeikes moved to Tennessee in 2008 but by seeking political asylum now the Romeike’s are making a public statement they hope will be used to sway German public opinion. The Home School Legal Defense Association claims this is part of the reason they offered to represent the Romeikes in immigration court, so it seems the motion for political asylum is more a public relations move than a serious legal maneuver. According to the article in The Guardian, “The case does not create a legal precedent unless the US government appeals and a higher immigration court hears the case.”

It is unlikely there will be a rush of homeschoolers from countries where homeschooling is illegal seeking asylum in the US. For instance, The Post writes, “Romeike said in an interview that when his oldest children were in public schools they had problems with violence, bullying and peer pressure.” It is not clear at all that other German parents whose children also suffer violence, bullying and peer pressure in school, but who homeschool for secular or different religious reasons, such as Islam, would be granted political asylum in the US. It appears this case is more about the freedom to practice Christianity as one wishes rather than about the freedom to homeschool, however, until the judge’s opinion in this case is made available we won’t know his full reasoning for granting the Romeike’s asylum.

The reasons Germany used to ban homeschooling were upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2006, namely that parents can choose from existing private schools if public ones aren’t to their liking and that only education delivered by schools guarantees a high standard of learning for all children. Most importantly, the Court upheld Germany’s argument that “Schools represented society, and it was in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents’ right to education did not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience.” Critics of homeschooling are airing all these reasons in the United States too, so we need to be thinking well beyond narrow religious exceptions for homeschooling and continue to make the case that all children can learn well in places other than school.

The academic argument seems to me to be losing ground, as more and more homeschoolers enter the work force or University and do as well or better than their conventionally schooled peers. The choice argument is disingenuous at best, since a mandatory selection from a list of schools provided by the state is hardly a genuine choice. The social integration argument, though there is ample evidence that schools create and solidify class distinctions among students rather than provide social integration and mobility for them, still resonates with people for a variety of reasons. First, our suspicion of “others” in our current climate of national fear and xenophobia makes us less likely to support freethinkers and other non-conformists. Second, the “melting pot” democratic theory of public schools, despite more than a century of alienated students, dropouts and school violence, as well as the creation of a citizenry that is less civically engaged than earlier generations, nonetheless continues to hold sway in public discussions about social integration.  I propose that true, lasting social integration among diverse groups of people occurs when they share common goals and experiences throughout their lives, not just when they are children in school. Cutting the arts, sports, and free play at recess for schoolchildren eliminate activities that actually encourage groups of children to socially integrate and reveals our true priorities for schooling. Pitting children against each other for grades and social rank in school is hardly social integration, but it does teach children a deep social lesson about what is really important to adults.

Corrections and additions to my previous blog:

1) Graham Badman is not a Member of Parliament; he is a former director of Children’s Services in Kent who was asked to head a review of homeschooling regulations for Parliament.

2) Erwin Fabian Garcia Lopez also made a presentation at the conference in Bogota. He compared and contrasted homeschooling with conventional schooling and in doing so he reminded me how no matter what country we live in, the school bell tolls the same for all. Schools everywhere use behavior modification techniques to create a standard good student, but with homeschooling we have the chance to work with, not on, children to help them grow.