The Empowered World: Fixing What's Broken In Our Own Ways

Steven Zuckerman contacted me months ago about participating in a large, online event to promote social change at the grassroots level and it is now happening. Homeschooling is one way that Steve sees grassroots social change occuring in the field of education, and I was pleased to be asked to be interviewed as part of this program. As you can see from viewing the speakers and interviews for this four-day event, there is a lot of cool stuff happening outside the walls of university, school, and government institutions that isn't getting much international attention, but which is affecting lots of people nonetheless. This event is FREE and will put you in direct touch with such people and their ideas. Here are the details:

As millions of people around the world are looking for progressive improvements in systems that have broken down, Shaping the Future Global is committed to showcasing ideas and how-to-enable actionable events through a global platform. Thousands of people will be experiencing this event. We hope you will be one of them!

We have an incredible event that will start live with presentations in Melbourne, Australia on Saturday, December 1 at 9 a.m.  Holding an event with multiple time zones is never easy, and therefore the events have been aligned with our home base in Melbourne, Australia in mind. 

With all due respect to all listeners and participants, please be advised that all sessions are archiveable and can be listened at your leisure after the events are over.   Some of the events are live, some are pre-recorded.

All events will be made available at the time of broadcast/webcast found at the schedule of events page:

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

 Please note that the start times in other time zones are as follows:

USA Eastern Time (New York, Miami)    Friday, November 30, 5 p.m.

USA Central Time (Chicago) Friday, November 30, 4 p.m.

USA Mountain Time (Denver)  Friday, November 30, 3 p.m.

USA Pacific Time (Los Angeles) Friday, November 30, 2 p.m.

London: Friday, November 30, 10 pm

Geneva/Paris/Munich  Friday, November 30, 11 p.m.

Jerusalem: Saturday, December 1, 12 a.m. Midnight

For all other time zones, please adjust your clock accordingly.

All events are immediately archived for playback after each event is over.

Home page: www.shapingthefutureglobal.com  and www.theempoweredworld.com

Presenters Bios: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/presenter-biographies

The Global Peace Centre: http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/the-global-peace-centre

Schedule: Eastern Time USA http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/nyc-eastern-time-zone

Schedule: Melbourne Australia time   http://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/australia-time-zone

We anticipate an amazing, empowering and wonderful event dedicated to enabling progressive change at a time of globalization.

John Holt, Secretary of Education? In Memory of George McGovern

There are some moments in history when hindsight allows to see that if other things had occurred history would be different. For instance, learning that George McGovern died this week, I was thinking about his legacy and how different America would be if McGovern had defeated Richard Nixon, who characterized McGovern as a radical and whose use of dirty tricks during the election eventually cost him the presidency. The New York Times obituary noted:

The Republicans portrayed Mr. McGovern as a cowardly left-winger, a threat to the military and the free-market economy and someone outside the mainstream of American thought. Whether those charges were fair or not, Mr. McGovern never lived down the image of a liberal loser, and many Democrats long accused him of leading the party astray.

Mr. McGovern resented that characterization mightily. “I always thought of myself as a good old South Dakota boy who grew up here on the prairie,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2005 in his home in Mitchell. “My dad was a Methodist minister. I went off to war. I have been married to the same woman forever. I’m what a normal, healthy, ideal American should be like.

“But we probably didn’t work enough on cultivating that image,” he added, referring to his presidential campaign organization. “We were more interested in ending the war in Vietnam and getting people out of poverty and being fair to women and minorities and saving the environment. It was an issue-oriented campaign, and we should have paid more attention to image.”

But another issue dear to McGovern is overlooked in all the discussion of his liberal politics: before he entered politics he was a college history teacher with a strong interest in education. I knew from speaking with John Holt that McGovern was very interested in Holt’s work and ideas, so I asked him to write an introduction to the 1988 edition of How Children Fail. Here’s what he wrote, in part:

As a member of Congress especially interested in the issues of education, I exchanged correspondence with John Holt when the first edition of How Children Fail was shaking the educational world in the mid-1960s. He exerted a strong influence on my thinking about educational matters. Indeed, as a presidential nominee in 1972, I carried John Holt’s book in my briefcase on the campaign trail. I knew the book well, and my familiarity with its insights gave me the capacity and confidence to speak forcefully and meaningfully on educational concerns. I remember drawing on John Holt’s wisdom in a major campaign speech in New Jersey before a huge convention of the National Education Association.

It is sad to note that children continue to fail in America’s schools—perhaps on an even larger scale than when John Holt first wrote of these matters. But a visit to schools in any part of the national will reveal the same uninspired children and lack of attention to what is being taught of which John Holt wrote a quarter century ago . . . (PF: McGovern is writing this in 1988.)

. . . Obviously failure on such a large scale is not to be laid solely at the feet of our teachers. Rather, such a failure embraces the home, the neighborhood, and the whole community. The finest of all teachers are not able to compensate entirely for the failings of home and community.

. . . The author believes that one of the basic needs of children is to be in the company of adults who are willing and able to listen to the individual child revealing and discussing his or her own concerns, hopes, anxieties, and fears. Too many teachers dislike and distrust children and are themselves fearful of an honest and free-ranging dialogue with their students. Too many teachers are comfortable only with dull and routine ways of conducting their classrooms and ignore the interests and questions of children.

“It is not the subject matter that makes some learning more valuable than others, but the spirit in which the work is done. If a child is doing the kind of learning that most children do in school, when they learn at all—swallowing words, to spit back at the teacher on demand—he is wasting his time, or, rather, we are wasting it for him. This learning will not be permanent or relevant or useful. But a child who is learning naturally, following his curiosity where it leads him, adding to his mental model of reality whatever he needs and can find a place for, and rejecting without fear or guilt what he does not need, is growing in knowledge, in the love of learning, and in the ability to learn.”

These convictions of John Holt form the centerpiece of this book and they are worthy of our careful reading and consideration today.

George McGovern understood what John was attempting to do in his work as a teacher and with his writing; I wonder what would have happened to the course of American education with a leader who grasped these concepts and acted upon them? However, after McGovern lost the election John Holt began to stop hoping political leaders and big institutions would help make his ideas about education happen. Instead, he appealed to citizens and parents to support and enact the changes he sought and the ever-growing homeschooling movement proves that this was a path worth blazing.

John Holt and Grant Colfax on Education in 1985

This past weekend I tried out a new version of my Teach Your Own seminar and I learned a lot, and I think most of those who attended felt they did, too. The seminar participants had great questions and responses that helped me realize new ways to arrange my format, and all agreed that I needed to allow more than three hours to complete the session. Since then, people from ME and NJ have asked me to bring the seminar to their states, and we’re working on it.

While rethinking this seminar I went through all my old files, speeches, and presentation materials and discovered some cool things I hadn’t seen or thought of in years. For instance, when we discussed allowing children to do real things and real work and how it helps integrate self-esteem and knowledge, I remembered this article about Grant Colfax from 1985. I didn’t include it on Saturday because I felt I had too much material (I most certainly did!), but I’m glad I remembered it to share with you.  First, there are some great quotes from John Holt in the article, but best of all, as a young person with a nontraditional education who got into Harvard, Grant has some very interesting observations that I hope you enjoy, too.

Open publication - Free publishing - More grant colfax

Legendary Learning

One of the most popular books we sold through the John Holt Book and Music Store was by Nancy and Malcolm Plent, “An ‘A’ in Life: Famous Homeschoolers.” Nancy and Mac published various editions of this book during the 15 years or so that we sold it and I know many people found support and inspiration from knowing that people as diverse as Agatha Christie, George S. Patton, and Gloria Steinman were homeschooled. That book has been out of print for some time but Jamie McMilllin has created a successor:
Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers' Guide to Self-Directed Excellence.

Ms.McMillin does more than describe the biographies of famous people; she also describes the richness of homeschooling, including unschooling, so this book is also an overview of the homeschooling landscape by an eclectic homeschooler. No commitment to any one philosophy or idea about education is fully endorsed or described—openness to experimentation is the focus of McMillmin’s approach—but enough information is provided so if an approach is interesting to you, you will be able to easily get more information about it from the book’s well-done references.

Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers' Guide to Self-Directed Excellence is an interesting amalgam of biography and opinion. Rather than present each person’s educational biography and life accomplishments as separate entries, McMilllin uses their lives to connect how they learned things in their own ways to how homeschoolers today, and people in general, learn things. Here is an example:

Timing is everything. The famous homeschoolers I studied seemed to learn much more when they were ready and motivated for personal reasons. Naturalist John Muir had been drilled in arithmetic at a young age, but claimed he never really understood it until he taught himself as a teenager. After the age of twelve, Thomas Edison taught himself everything he needed to run his various businesses and experiments. When fifteen-year-old Teddy Roosevelt was preparing for the Harvard Entrance Exams, he was behind in required math skills but soon caught up with the help of his tutor.

There are many more current examples in homeschool books about kids who were able to learn four years worth of elementary mathematics in just a short period of time when they were older and motivated. My son Jesse . . . is one example. He absolutely hated math textbooks, but was happy to play all sorts of math games (including computer games). Finally at the age of twelve, he conceded that he didn’t recognize some of the math concepts his school friends were talking about so he wanted to catch up. He had also decided by then that he wanted to go to college and knew from family discussions that he would probably need to take an SAT test. So we selected a curriculum together and he buckled down—without any harassment on my part. He didn’t like math any better than before, but he learned quickly (and pulled down a respectable score on the SAT too!). Timing is everything.

I think this book is best for people considering homeschooling or who are just getting started with it, particularly the many bits of advice McMillin gives for living and learning with your children. But everyone will enjoy the many insightful quotes from famous people about learning that are peppered throughout the pages, such as these:

“Just as eating against one’s will is injurious to health, so studying without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it takes in.”—Leonardo Da Vinci

“The years teach much that the days never know.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Creativity, not science, lies at the leading edge of the evolution of the human species; that is the delightful and beautiful paradox.”—Robin King

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.