Slate Magazine Dumps on Homeschooling

Slate published this inflammatory article against homeschooing, entitled "Liberals, Don't Homeschool Your Kids. Why Teaching at Home Violates Progressive Values."

It follows standard critiques of homeschooling without offering any perspectives as to why some of the famous liberal educators of the sixties, such as John Holt and George Dennison, came to support homeschooling after years of trying to make schools better for kids. So much to say, so little time to do so! Here's my brief attempt at a comment to this article.

There are so many assumptions about the value of compulsory school attendance and biases against children’s abilities to learn built into this article that it is difficult to rebut in a comments section. As an unschooling family we always offered our girls the choice of attending school and all three of them moved in and out of public school as they wanted to throughout their years of learning at home and in our community (as does Astra Taylor, though the author neglects to mention this). We, and the many homeschooling families we know, never pretend to be our “child’s everything” nor have we ever thought of unschooling as a go-it-alone ideology. Do-it-Yourself-With-Others is the ethos I see most often in the home- and unschooling communities. Further, studies indicate that many homeschooling families only homeschool for about three years, so homeschooled children are moving in and of school, mixing with others, etc. without causing school or society great distress, and have been doing so for decades.

Schooling is directly correlated to income, and schooling creates economic class differences, as a recent Stanford study about the growing education gap between rich and poor indicates. Ivan Illich and John Holt, in particular, wrote about this in the 1970s and eventually concluded it was better to create a new way to help children learn and grow than to try to reform schools, something they and many others before and since have tried to do.

John Holt saw the culture of testing and the distrust of children prevalent in schools then, feared it would get worse, and decided to help those who wanted to try something different with their children to do so. As Holt wrote, homeschooling provides schools with all sorts of valuable information about how children learn and how parents can be involved in their educations. But, as this author indicates, school must be able to control and predict everyone’s learning or else, somehow, civil society will devolve into the haves and have nots—but isn’t that what has already happened?

Holt and Illich offer many other reasons for people to embrace the idea that learning is natural and schooling is optional. Illich wrote how the school delivery system—whether liberal, conservative, socialist, capitalist, or communist—is essentially the same in all those countries, only the content changes. Indeed, educationists who insist we need compulsory schooling for democracy to work ignore the fact that our country was founded and grew without any form of compulsory education until the mid nineteenth century. In the 1970s the white Rhodesian government prevented black Africans from voting because of their lack of education—schooling is not a neutral force. Americans have more years of schooling and degrees than at any time in our history, but our problems keep growing, and some of them are caused, not erased, by increased schooling.

Must our humanity and our participation in our government be linked to our ability to consume education in state-approved settings? Must only school-approved reforms be allowed? Should children have a say in the matter of where and how they want to learn? Homeschooling is an answer to these questions that any liberal should consider. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t for everyone, but it does show us another way that we can live and learn as individuals and communities, instead of just being graded products of alma mater.

Homeschooling's Past Informs the Present

Peter Bergson founded and operates one of the oldest learning centers for homeschoolers/unschoolers in the US, Open Connections in Newtown Square, PA. Peter also worked as a management and creativity consultant for many years, as well as being the author of books about children, learning, and parenting, so he brings a unique perspective to discussions of how education can change. He was interviewed recently about how and why he and his wife unschooled their kids (who are now adults), the history and context of how Open Connections started, and the influence of John Holt on his work.

Peter Bergson talks about homeschooling on VoiceAmerica.

Peter also wrote about the US education establishment’s current fascination with Finland’s education system and I thought his ideas are worth sharing.

I well remember when, in the early ‘70s, I joined the boatloads of Americans who flocked to the midlands of England to observe firsthand the Leicestershire method in action. The “integrated day school” model featured a basically hands-on pedagogy (learning by doing, including lots of “play”), multiple-aged classrooms (at least three years’ difference in ages), a high student to teacher ratio (often 40 to one) made possible by the high level of engagement of the young people (and thus little need for supervision). A number of American school reformers touted it as the solution to the boredom and lack of initiative in America’s schools, while the British were warning us that it was not directly transferable to the US because our society did not reflect the same level of respect for teachers. The result of our adopting such “open classrooms,” they warned, would be chaos and then backlash—and they were absolutely right.

Then we fell in love with the Japanese model (although we never adopted it).

Then, for some, Reggio Emilia.

Now, the Finnish.

Yawn.

Some other thoughts: International test score comparisons, such as PISA, reflect the selectivity of the test-takers more than anything else. On a similar note, I have read that, if you eliminate the bottom 10% (as I recall) of the US’s test scores, which are almost all from the “disadvantaged” school population, America’s average test scores put us near the top in the world! In other words, the reason that we are around 23 or 24 out of 26 is because, unlike every other country in the pool, we include our “worst” students. Other countries don’t include the bottom of their heaps because that part of their population isn’t even in school, let alone taking the same test.

Now, all of this is merely to debunk the implications drawn from the reported test scores that suggest that America’s schools are getting worse each year.  At the same time, I really couldn’t care less about our test scores, or anyone else’s for that matter. I am much more concerned with the degree of self-direction in the Finnish system, for the teachers as well as students. I don’t see that much value in any system that is dedicated to producing people who are merely better at regurgitation, which is generally what standardized tests measure. As has been said many times by many others, we need to support the growth of logical and creative thinking, the kind that comes so naturally to toddlers. As John Holt wrote, "The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do but how we behave when we don’t know what to do."

What I like about the attention being paid to the Finnish model is that there is no real way to ignore the bigger picture component, which is a belief in (financial) equity, or at least a truer sense of equality of opportunity than what we have in the US. They make the same point as the Occupiers of Wall Street—that the school system reinforces the philosophy of the culture at large with regard to economic justice. The US system reinforces the status quo (or worse, is widening the gap), whereas the Finnish seem to be trying to reduce the variation between rich and poor—not by lowering the bar but by giving more people the resources needed to get up and over it. Only when we Americans truly recognize how our system, with or without standardized testing, keeps the poor in their place will we ever be willing to give any type of genuine reform a real chance at succeeding—whether it’s democratic education, integrated day, or anything else.

The Willed Curriculum

Dr. Carlo Ricci, founder of the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, has written a thoughtful book about the deeper issues of learning entitled, The Willed Curriculum, Unschooling, and Self-Direction: What Do Love, Trust, Respect, Care, and Compassion Have To Do With Learning. Rather than focus on the technocratic decisions about learning that obsess school people today, Carlo focuses on the emotional, human decisions involved in learning and how they affect real individuals, not generic students. Carlo writes,

The willed curriculum is not a call for something new but a call to be more mindful and make more use of something we are already using. We know that interest and internal motivation are critical for deep learning. Loving what we are learning, interest, and internal motivation are at the very core of the willed curriculum.

The Willed Curriculum is available in print and in Kindle.

Educación Sin Escuela and Other News

UN MUNDO POR APRENDER: Educación sin Escuela (ESE), Autoaprendizaje Colaborativo (AC) y Educación en Familia (EF). Edited by Erwin Fabián García López.

For those who understand Spanish and want to know more about homeschooling, this new book is for you. The National University of Colombia, in Bogota, has held three conferences about learning without schools, autodidactic and collaborative learning models, education in family settings, and flexi-schooling models. The articles are based on presentations given at the first two conferences, including my keynote speech for the first conference in 2009, The Challenges Homeschooling Presents to Social Science Research (revised for the new book; I’ll add the updated version to my website soon).

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The Alternative Education Resource Organization has given its website a facelift, adding many new articles, especially from homeschooling sources.

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Libertarians have supported homeschooling part of their platform for individual freedom for a long time and this new article, In Praise of Homeschools, from the Ludwig von Mises Institute is another solid example.

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Michelle Barone is a professional counselor whose work I’ve enjoyed at several homeschooling and unschooling conferences. She is presenting a free workshop via teleconference, Finding Your Way: Unlimited Possibilities in Your Unschooling Life, that may interest you.

The Dark Side of Government Schooling in Sweden

In 2011 Sweden banned homeschooling "except under exceptional circumstances," forcing some families to immediately leave the country in order to continue homeschooling and others to stay and see what would happen. Those who stayed have faced very stiff fines for every day they homeschool their children, though to date no one has been taken to court for payment. But it appears this will soon change. Swedish educationists want to be sure that children have the right to go to school, but not the reciprocal right to decline and learn in other types of settings, such as at home and in their communities. A strange “right” this is—the right to be forced to attend school under threat of fines, the right to lose your children to social services, and the right to only follow instructions from government agencies about what you can and can’t do for your children’s education.

There is a Swedish news article about making this explicit in their law; my friends in Sweden have translated this blog entry by one of the proposal’s proponents, Lotta Edholm:

Today I have written an opinion piece together with Ann-Katrin Åslund (Liberal Party) in Aftonbladet asking that the social services act be changed so that the social authorities have the possibility act when children are held from away school by their parents - often for religious or ideological reasons. Every child has a right to an education. The school law states that education shall "be designed in accordance with democratic values and human rights". This is incompatible with a system where parents simply can refuse to send their children to school and the social services has no support in law to intervene. Deputy Minister of Social Affairs, Maria Larsson, who is also responsible for conditions for children, should take an initiative to change the social services act so that the social authorities can intervene when children are kept away from school by their parents.

There are significant differences in social attitudes and laws between Sweden and the United States, so it is not useful to simply say that US law is better than Swedish law and they should be more like us. But there is a very strong assumption by the Swede’s that education is a science that can only performed by those who are certified in it, and challenging that perception may be the hinge for successfully challenging the Swedish homeschooling ban. Here are some ideas on that topic:

If there is one correct way to educate all children, why are there so many different pedagogies? If education is only the result of instruction performed by professionals in schools, why do countries with lots of educational options, such as Finland and Denmark, flourish? There is a large research base that supports informal learning and other models besides government schooling: How does Sweden justify ignoring a human’s innate ability to learn on his or her own, as we’ve done for centuries before compulsory schooling became the norm (around 1850), as well as all the research that supports intrinsic motivation, autodidactic behavior, and learning by doing as deep sources for educational excellence? What about the Pippi Longstockings—those children who do not respond to control and prediction in classroom settings but nonetheless succeed in life? Getting parents involved in their children's education is vital according to every piece of research I have read, so why must parents stop at a certain point? Why must education be either/or (school/homeschool) and not both/and? I can go on, but I’ll stop here for now.

Underlying a lot of this discussion, from what I can tell by reading in translation, is also a fear of “the other”: people whose religious, educational, or political beliefs are different from the government’s beliefs. We have struggled with this issue in our own country and have created a pluralist society that tolerates many ways of living and growing, though it is hardly perfect. Nonetheless, we are at least making an effort at inclusion in the United States; it remains to be seen if such tolerance for “the other” will continue in Sweden.