Dr. Robert Kay, a psychiatrist who worked with the Philadelphia public school system for many years, has been a friend and supporter of unschooling for decades. Bob and I have also been friends for a very long time and I always enjoy his ideas and articles about education. Erick Mijlin, of Artifact Pictures, took an interest in Bob and filmed "a meandering conversation about teaching and learning" with him. Bob's genial presentation of the concepts behind mass education and individual learning confirm unschooling as a fantastic option for families. The entire 27-minute DVD is available from Artifcat Pictures. Artifcat has released two excerpts that you can view below.
This summarizes the history of education in under four minutes, relying heavily on John Taylor Gatto, Joel Spring and Michael Katz.
This summarizes, in under two minutes, how and why learning occurs and what we can do to help it flourish.
As another school year begins so too are the media stories with their formulaic reporting about homeschooling: Talking heads debating the pros and cons of learning at home; education experts concerned about gaps in homeschooler’s knowledge; “Wife Swap”-types of videos that contrast strict school-at-home moms with loosey-goosey unschoolers; and the common lead to so many articles and TV segments that I’ve heard since 1981, “The school bus drives past the Farenga home but their children aren’t on it. They are part of the growing and controversial homeschooling movement…” There are occasional well-done stories, of course, but I’m struck by the large amount of cookie-cutter reporting about homeschooling that I’ve seen over the decades and am now re-seeing, as I look through my back issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine, my work files, and the current news in print and online.
Why can’t the media, educators, and most parents get past the standard questions about socialization, college and employment for homeschoolers that I, and many others, have responded to with studies, case histories, anecdotes and the evidence of at least two generations of socialized, college-educated and employed homeschoolers? Why can’t we get into the real meat of the issues, such as: How can society/local communities capitalize on such dedicated parental involvement in education? Why do colleges accept homeschoolers without conventional high school degrees and what can that mean for reforming our schools? Do students who have autonomy in their studies and lives become employees who are team players?
Our sentimentality about children often gets in the way of seeing them as real people and we are further bound by our own sentimentality about our schooling and upbringing. It “worked for us” goes the thinking, so it will work for our kids. The problem is, our kids are growing up in a completely different environment than we did. Talk about socialization should not be about whether or not homeschoolers feel hurt because they don’t get Valentine’s Day cards from classmates (this was how the socialization question was phrased to me on a national TV show), but about the sort of socialization our kids experience from bullies in school, Colombine-type threats and experiences, and the “teach ‘em and test ‘em” policies we have that make test scores more important than social experiences in school, such as playing at recess, art, sports, drama, choir and music. Our “lens of sentimentality” limit not only our expectations of what children can do, but also our relationships with children. Can it be that our sentimental memories and expectations of schooling and youth make us ignore the realities before our eyes? When I came across this piece of unpublished writing by John Holt that we printed in GWS 68, I felt Holt had, again, summed up a complicated issue very plainly and neatly and pointed my thoughts in a new direction.
Here’s what Holt wrote:
…I fear and dislike sentimentality because I’ve learned from experience that it is one side of a coin whose other side is callousness, contempt, and cruelty. The trouble with the people who think that some of the time children are little angels is that when the children are not behaving in ways they like they think they are little devils. The people who at one minute are ready to shed crocodile tears at the thought of an eight-year-old doing actual work will in the next minute become indignant to the point of rage or panic if I suggest that that same eight-year-old be given some kind of say about his learning or the conditions of his life. This dainty angelic creature, who at one minute we had to protect, in the next minute turns into some kind of dangerous criminal monster. In fact children are not angels or devils, saints or monsters, not naturally good or naturally wicked, simply human beings very much like the rest of us, with the additional assets of having rather more energy and hopefulness than we do, and the liabilities of being somewhat smaller, weaker, and less experienced. If we could only agree not to take advantage of their weakness and inexperience, not actually and positively to prey on them, they would be safe enough making a great many decisions which we now don’t let them make.
But it was an email from a friend about Justice Marshall that made me smile at the complex relations we have as we learn and grow in America. My friend noted that Justice Marshall isn't just the Massachusetts "gay marriage" judge, she's also the Massachusetts "you-can't-do-home-visits-to-homeschooling-families" judge! It is a poignant reminder that no one political party has a monopoly on protecting the rights of homeschoolers, and that friends and allies of freedom can be found everywhere.
Seth Godin has a great blog entry about the coming demise of higher education. Though predicted decades earlier in work by Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, and John Holt, among others, the commodification of degrees has become as out of control as the commodification of health care (which Illich also addressed in the seventies in his book Medical Nemesis). In a nutshell, turning education and health into products that must be administered more and more by licensed professionals leads to a cost-spiral that creates further classes and divisions in our society.
I posted a new segment of the John Holt lecture today. This picks up where the previous one, about children learning pronouns, ended. The opening is a bit disjointed, so let me fill in the gap: John is referring to the girl he described earlier who correctly learned to use pronouns by making knowledge out of her experience of using words. John then compares this process to what scientists do in their work.
Besides some good insights into how and why children learn, you can also hear John offer some advice that might seem unlike Holt, namely if you use a quiz or curriculum because it makes you comfortable, then that’s okay because that benefit outweighs philosophical concerns. As John says, “If you worry less your kids will worry less…”
John earlier described how children often don’t know what they know, and how it takes a long time for some children to realize they actually know how to read or solve a math problem on their own. Change occurs gradually for adults too, and John’s empathy is born from his own experience: he was a superstar classroom teacher who gradually learned that great teaching techniques are not enough for helping people learn. So it is with us homeschoolers: we can eventually learn to trust our children to learn in their own ways, but we have to give ourselves time and permission to learn how to do that with each one of our children.
Learning is a natural process that can easily become muddled by unnecessary interventions, no matter how well intentioned. Being worried and uptight about children’s learning seems to be the default position for most parents and schools; this video clip shows an alternative. There’s John talking about all the clever things he did to help kids learn to spell in his fifth grade class, and then saying he doubted any of it was really necessary. In the video you can hear children playing and John observing and commenting about them, providing ample evidence that children are active, joyful learners who want to be part of adult activities but in their own ways. The ease John displays with this audience of children and adults shows us another way we can engage in helping people learn without making all parties feel uptight and worried that they aren’t learning enough or teaching properly. Here are the words that John uses to end this segment; I think they’re worth repeating.
“There is no way to meddle with or speed it up [i.e. the process of children learning—PF] without doing damage to them… I’ve been saying this to the schools for over twenty years and got absolutely nowhere. So I’m saying it to what I take to be a more serious audience, with a stronger commitment to success, namely homeschoolers. I don’t necessarily expect that everyone’s going to walk out of the room thinking that I’m right. But I want you to be sensitive to the kinds of experiences which will confirm this for you. So if you see your kids doing some of these things, you think, “Maybe John is right.” I don’t particularly ask you to take it on faith but I do ask you to do what I did, which is to observe your children learning with these ideas in mind.”
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.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 11:14AM 