Here are two resources that I think can be useful to homeschoolers of all ages and interests. The first is from Lisa Cottrell-Bentley, an unschooling mom from Arizona. She writes:
I wanted to let you know that my publishing company is actively seeking submissions for children's and Young Adult fiction about realistic homeschoolers of today—something that is lacking in the world. I'd love for you to send anyone my way if they mention they've written something like that to you. Send them to: http://www.facebook.com/l/c1c22heOgk9EqeLbsrxl9G33-zA;www.doliferightinc.com
I've started a KickStarter crowdfunding campaign to raise money so that I can publish even more books than the ones I currently have lined up. My company has three published books so far, with five more in the works (two of which should come out this year). I'd like to publish at least 12 books in 2011 and 24 in 2012.
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The second resource is a PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Marion Brady. I met Marion a few years ago in MI where I learned about his work in flexible, learner-centered curricula. Though his ideas are based on working with children in schools, any homeschooler can adapt them as they see fit, as well as use Marion’s conceptual structure as a way to describe their own reasons for not following conventional curricula and what they are doing instead.
In 2008, in an earlier version of this blog, I wrote about the research of Sugata Mitra whose "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown, “in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity.” Dr. Mitra has a new TED video (see below) where he explores this concept in more detail by conducting further experiments using children, computers, and the Internet.
Mitra interviewed Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author, who says to Mitra in the video, “When you have interest, you have education.” This pretty much sums up Mitra's position about learning.
Naturally all of this sounds incredibly familiar to unschoolers and others who support self-directed learning, but Dr. Mitra and the audience he reaches seem genuinely surprised and delighted by these findings. Indeed, I felt as if I were watching a parallel universe emerge as Mitra discussed his concept of creating SOLEs, self-organized learning environments and enlisting British grandmothers to read and speak English with school children in other countries by using an Internet connection. Echoes from the work of Paul Goodman, John Holt, and Ivan Illich abound in Mitra's findings, but the connections are not drawn in either of these videos.
Mitra's work is focused on technology and children, but as unschoolers and alternative educators such as A.S. Neil have shown for generations, children can teach themselves and others far more than we believe they can, if provided with access, time, and kind, not overbearing, adult support. I really like Mitra's attitude about how the adults need to get out of the way and let the kids have ample time and equipment to self-organize their learning.
As can be seen in these videos, the technology Mitra uses is not the sort of expensive computer learning labs our schools would insist on building before implementing any such program. The consumer off-the-shelf products Mitra provides the students with in these videos contain as much involvement and content as any custom-designed, age-appropriate, aligned-to-standardized-testing computer program. In fact, since the tools the kids are using are the same that adults use—Google, common Internet browsers—they probably have even more appeal to children than programs designed just for use in the classroom.
At the very least, Mitra's work can be cited by unschoolers as further support for the self-directed learning their children do. I hope at some point Dr. Mitra will expand his inquiries to consider other places and ways that children self-organize their learning besides using technology to do so. For instance, in addition to those authors mentioned earlier, examination of the work of Bill Ellis, who was inspired by E.F. Shumacher; Ron Miller's work about alternative schools, particularly The Self-Organizing Revolution: Common Principles of the Educational Alternatives Movement (Psychology Press, 2008); Roland Meighan's The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers are trailblazers (Education Heretics Press, 1997), and the growing literature from unschoolers about how their children learn from and about the world without formal instruction all support Mitra's ideas about teaching and learning. There are other books and studies that can be cited, such as Letter to a Teacher from the Schoolboys of Barbiana, wherein Italian children who were flunked out of school in sixth grade banded together and taught themselves what they needed and wanted to learn, but I'll stop here.
Mitra ends his talk with a slide that displays these words:
Speculation: Education is a self organizing system (sic), where learning is an emergent phenomenon… It will take five years and under a million dollars to prove this experimentally.
Mitra seeks to prove, experimentally, something that some parents, teachers, and children have long known and leveraged: that children have much greater abilities to learn and grow than our current conception of schooling can even dream of or allow. I wish him well in his experiment, but there is no reason for anyone to wait for him to "prove" this before it can be used by people.
As homeschoolers and unschoolers we know that no matter how much research is shown to support our position, the conventional wisdom of the day usually trumps it. So even if Mitra can prove his speculation we are not going to see school officials stop harrassing parents and teachers who aren't using conventional school techniques. But that's no reason for us to stop helping our children learn in their own ways; indeed, Mitra's work, even without such proof, is an inspiration for us to continue doing what we've been doing and saying for years.
For decades I've been carrying a message from John Holt that has really come home to roost now that my children are college age: Our oldest has graduated college; our middle child hated college, left, and is working instead; our youngest starts college this fall. Plus I've been advising and consulting parents about how to get their nontraditionally educated children into college since the eighties. A popular speech of mine that we turned into booklet in the early nineties was titled: "Teenage Homeschoolers: College or Not?" wherein I argued against going to college just because you are 18 and can do so. I argued there must be better reasons for going than "because I can." But the message of John's that echoes more today than ever for me is this: college is among the chief enslaving institutions of America.
When Holt said this I believe he was thinking about graduates who spent time and money on degrees to work in fields they no longer enjoy but are now trapped by their mortgages and loans into staying. Now this critique is gaining traction outside the circle of alternative schooling, probably because the cost of higher education is so out of alignment with its benefits. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom is we must send our kids to college so they can make more money than high school graduates do. James Altucher, a Wall Street Journal writer, claims: "in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now." Here are two of the seven reasons not to go to college that Altucher makes that take the money argument on directly:
3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on).
4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case.
A month ago I spoke at the AERO conference in Albany, NY and I spent some of my time with my friend John Gatto. It is always stimulating to hear John's thoughts however, despite John's fame and following, I often get the feeling at events like this that we're preaching to the choir and that those who are in a position to make, or at least serioiusly support, the changes being presented at alternative education events never attend or simply dismiss such educators as nuisance outliers. For instance, I met a superintendent from Michigan who not only sponsored a talk by Gatto at his school, but tried to implement some of John's ideas in his district. The superintendent nearly lost his job in the ensuing brouhaha, as Gatto's comments and ideas upset more parents, teachers and administrators than excited them about making changes to their school.
So I was pretty amazed to read the following in a high school valedictory speech, given by Erica Goldson at the Coxsackie-Athens High School (NY) graduation ceremony. Ms. Goldson is clearly influenced by the work of Gatto and other education outliers, giving me hope that the message of self-determination and social consciousness that is embedded in those writings are actually being heard beyond the small alternative schooling community. As John Holt noted in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine (August, 1977): "We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it without much coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that... This does not trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing." Ms. Goldson provides evidence that our numbers are slowly growing beyond our homeschooling/alternative schooling enclaves. Here is an excerpt from her speech that I hope you'll enjoy.
Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.
I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.
John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts, "We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that." Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt. H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that "the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States." (Gatto)
Sir Ken Robinson gave a popular talk at the TED conference in 2006 titled “Schools kill creativity.” He has just released his latest TED talk, “Bring on the learning revolution!”, and I have embedded it below for you to enjoy.
Sir Ken, an expert on creativity and the author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, is championing ideas that unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers have been acting upon for decades (I’ll refer to all these groups as “homeschoolers” for the rest of the article), as this summary indicates:
It’s not about scaling a new solution. It’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum… technologies combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education and I urge you to get involved in it. Because it is vital not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from an Industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow; that’s where children experience life or at home if that’s where children choose to be educated with their family and their friends.
It is refreshing to hear someone with influence support homeschooling, even if ever so delicately, but this support is inevitable given Sir Ken’s thesis that personalized education is the coming revolution. After all, what can be a more personalized education than homeschooling? Every day, for decades now, many homeschoolers have developed their own solutions to create personalized curricula, often using external support; this external support is typically not a public school, but rather a fellow homeschooler, private business or for-profit school.
It is easy for me to be jaded about Sir Ken’s ideas: after all Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and many others I read or have known have said similar things in their works decades ago, and look how much more intense and unfulfilling school has become for children since they wrote. Indeed, I recall that the agricultural versus industrial metaphor was also used by Holt and others long ago, so why am I enthusiastic about Sir Ken’s version of this argument?
Because he is talking to a very influential and international audience of “thinkers and doers” who actually applaud his comments, rather than react with calls to further support conventional school by outlawing alternatives, such as homeschooling (see my posts about Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden to read how some countries are responding to “the learning revolution” in a negative fashion). As these ideas gain acceptance by elite social groups and businesses not only will homeschooling become a mainstream option for more families, but the entire concept of learning as something people willingly do throughout their lives, instead of learning as something we must compel young people to do, will also begin to take root for more people.