We've Got to Be That Light

Dr. Jeff Goldstein of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education contacted me about helping him to spread the word about an inspirational video he made based on a keynote address he presented to the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) National Conference in San Francisco. He wrote,

 

I received the comment below from YouTube on 11/30/11 from a homeschool mom that was touched by the video. It really got me thinking deeply about the vital importance of homeschooling, and homeschool moms and dads, as a fundamental element of national education. I think the video might be a wonderful thank you for homeschoolers.

 Here is the homeschooling mother’s comment he is referring to:

As a homeschooling mother, I am a teacher of one child. It is very challenging, but also full of the freedom to teach the way she needs. However, I miss the inspiration and support that school teachers get from the school system. Your video brought me to tears, because it gave me that inspiration that I need, in my isolation. I also loved the groove of the musicalization of your speech; it was very artful. I'll be sharing this with all the homeschooling moms I know. Thank you.

The powerful institutions that control schooling refuse to cooperate or otherwise support homeschooling (see the NEA resolution, section B-82), but there are individuals and smaller groups within those places who nonetheless reach out and consider homeschoolers allies and not enemies (and vice versa). In this spirit, here is Dr. Jeff’s video.

Education is scarce, but learning is abundant

The paradox in the headline is one that is made by humans, not nature. Education—namely, what goes on in schools and is certified by them—is made scarce by defining only those who have school degrees as being educated; this means the more degrees one has the more educated you are supposed to be. Those who can pay for the most expensive (scarcest) degrees—or if they are poor receive an even scarcer scholarship—are thought to be more educated than those who attend schools in less tony zip codes. This mentality leads most parents to fret that their schools are shortchanging their children, and the current call for teacher accountability to be tied to student achievement is one example. Costly studies, programs, and additional teacher certifications are all being done to make sure that if a teacher teaches, the student will learn it and prove it by getting a higher score on a test than they did before the teacher taught the material.

Since homeschooling throws this paradigm out the window it is ignored by policy makers, educators, and most parents who feel their children won’t learn anything worthwhile on their own or from their community. However, homeschooling has much to add to this discussion, particularly in times of economic contraction and tuition increases. Homeschoolers have been finding people and places for their children to learn with and from for decades, but they are not necessarily certified teachers, though some are. Indeed, many of them are local businesspeople, other homeschoolers, and people who are willing to share their interests with others.

The fact is, if you know how to do something you can help someone else learn it. You may not be a good teacher at first, but it is possible to learn how to be a good teacher on the job, especially if you are able to get honest feedback from your students. Most important, learning is a journey and you don’t need to have a master teacher who holds your hand every step of the way. Teachers, like guides, change depending where you are in your journey. Few people are exploring where and how teachers and learners can find one another since it is assumed this process can, or should, only happen in school according to bureaucratic formulas. However, John McKnight and his colleagues have been learning otherwise for many years.

John McKnight is a pioneer for encouraging people to get more involved in their local communities and develop local resources that aren’t controlled by distant institutions, and his work has inspired me over the years. His website, www.abundantcommunity.com, is a great place to learn about his work. This blog entry was particularly striking because it deals directly with low-cost ways to learn. He writes: 

Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed.

This grim prospect depends upon whether we have the novel belief that it takes a school to educate a child. Historically, the primary source of education was the knowledge and wisdom of the villagers. However, as the power of schooling grew, the neighborhood knowledge got devalued and unused. And so it is that local people often feel cornered as schooling recedes.

In one African-American, working-class neighborhood in Chicago, they’re finding out what their neighbors believe they know well enough to teach the local young people. When they interviewed 19 adults living on 3 blocks, they found that they were prepared to teach 37 different topics.

To see the list of topics and learn more about this, read John’s essay “It Takes A Village to Educate a Child.”

Want to Learn? Don’t Go to College

PF: Nadia Jones, a homeschooler who is now a working adult, is a guest blogger for me today.

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For many in the United States of America, going to college has been considered a stepping stone to making money, despite the fact that hardly any of the skills one learns in college has any bearing on the daily tasks required of most jobs, even high-paying ones. The other, learning-based view of college is that a higher education is necessary in a civic sense—it helps mold young minds to think critically, to become more knowledgeable and sensitive about the world within them and around them. This has been the traditional (though now in our technocratic age, obsolete) view of the necessity of college.

As someone who has been to college, I can say without hesitation that neither objective was achieved after I graduated from a top-twenty liberal arts school only a few years ago. As an English major, I was not prepared for the job market in the slightest, unless you count learning to please superiors by agreeing with their point of view as an employable skill. Using the more traditional view of the importance of a higher education, the one that I believe in more whole-heartedly, I was equally disappointed. All the promises they fed me since orientation about being a scholar, about learning to think for myself, ended up being a beer-soaked, mind-numbing process of learning how to navigate the system.

This is how it works—you choose a few classes that sound interesting or that meet requirements. You attend them whether or not you feel like it. You work really hard to make good grades your first semester until you realize that there’s this thing called grade inflation. Grade inflation, a phenomenon in which higher grades are given for work that would have received lower grades in the past, is increasing rapidly, as noted in this New York Times article. The result is that we students learn that you don’t have to work hard, to improve over time, or to do anything really except to “win over” the professor.

Professors, whose performance (and pay) are increasingly being evaluated based on student reviews, and whose research dominates their professional lives, have no incentive to direct their students to achieve the goals of learning and critical thinking. As such, the student-professor relationship has become one that is based on a radical free-market ideology. Instead of students and professors, we have customers and salespeople. In this environment, the only positive outcomes are that students meet others who are much like them—reasonably smart but overly-opportunistic, entitled young men and women whose idea of success is going through the motions of college, grubbing for grades, going to parties, making friends, and networking for that high-paying job. In the process, learning is sacrificed.

Now do I regret having attended an institution of higher education? Not necessarily—I did have fun. But the fun incurred is not worth the student debt that now cripples my finances. I learned more by reading on my own before and after college than I ever learned in any of my classes. Even if college used to be a place where one could leave having learned to think and to evaluate independently, a college education in America now is nothing more than a four-year summer camp after which you earn a credential that everyone says you must have in order to succeed.

I question this logic, however, because I know several people, both friends and family members, who never went to college and are smarter, more enterprising, and dare I say, more successful, than 90% of the people I know who hold bachelor’s degrees. If you have an interest in working in academia, then yes, a college education is necessary. But for almost any other goal in life, whether personal or professional, it won’t help you much except to dig you deeper in debt. Trust me, I know.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie-related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

School as Behavior Modification Center: Mission Accomplished!

Professor Dennis Rader does some interesting work with right-brained learners and helping teachers and students find the gumption to fight for change in our schools, as well as supporting homeschooling and other activities that foster learning outside school settings. He created this satirical poster promoting factory-style learning and teaching for the 21st century.

 Thorndike/Skinner Public School Mission Statment

Learning Foreign Languages or Just Learning to Play the School Game?

One of my current projects is to redo the HoltGWS.com website and to scan all the issues of Growing Without Schooling magazine and put them online; I'm about halfway through this project as I write this. It is now ten years since we stopped publishing GWS and I'm only now able to look at all these papers, audio and video recordings, books, and back issues with fresh eyes. I've had to organize these materials several times since 2001 as we downsized the company, put many of Holt's papers in a research archive at the Boston Public Library, and sorted and moved boxes from different colleagues' homes to mine. To be honest, it was often emotionally difficult for me to go through these materials in the past—so many memories, friends who've died, children who've grown up—but recently I've been invigorated by engaging with this material. I'm struck by how relevant all the writing in GWS remains—so many issues are the same for homeschoolers in 2011 compared to 1977: Are my kids really learning if I'm not teaching? How will they get into college if they want to go? How do I deal with skeptical school officials and relatives? Further, many of the comments John Holt made about learning at home seem even more important today, and I'll be highlighting some of those in later entries. But what really excited me this week is the discovery of a cassette of John being interviewed on a Boston radio station about the "A Nation At Risk" report in 1983. John spends nearly an hour talking about school and school reform, with just a few mentions of homeschooling. I'm in the process of digitizing this interview but I discovered this transcription of a section from that interview that ran in Growing Without Schooling 51. Donna Richoux, the editor of GWS then, followed John's radio comments with earlier writing by John about learning foreign languages in school.

First, from the WBOS interview in 1983:

Q. Does it alarm you that the report ("A Nation At Risk) described that not one state has any kind of requirements for foreign language?

JH: Not at all. The whole foreign language thing in schools is a big shuck from the word go. If you want kids to learn foreign languages, send them to places where they speak those Languages. I taught for a while at a private school here in Boston, a private secondary school, very good one, small, lots of money, very, very bright kids, very capable teachers. We had a French teacher there, a native-born Frenchwoman, an extremely competent woman. She liked the kids, the kids liked her, she had all the latest jazz: language labs, audio-visual materials, all the latest techniques. She wrote a report to the head of the school. She said. "Children take French in this school for four years, and these are very bright kids with all the best, and they don't learn as much French as they’d learn if they spent three months in the country.”

Q: How are they going to do that? I mean, in a rich private school I can understand. But what about in a public school in the United States?

JH: What's the point of teaching it? If you're living in a part of the country where there are—this is true in many parts of the country—let us say Spanish-speaking groups, or here Italian, you know you've got Iots of people in Boston who speak Italian - if you want kids to learn Italian, send them down to the North End and let them talk to people who speak Italian. But generally speaking, human beings learn what they have a need for, what they feel a need for. We‘re not good at learning stuff because somebody says, "Hey, someday you may need it, someday it may come in handy.” When we see a connection between real life and this stuff that we need to learn, then we're good at learning. 

And from a 1968 paper based on questions asked by teachers:

Q. If learning is best when one needs it, why has foreign language learning been emphasized at the early primary stage for total contact with the foreign tongue?

JH: For two reasons. The first is the assumption that since children learn their own language best when young, they will learn foreign languages in school best when young. The assumption is false. The child learning his own language has a hundred practical reasons for learning; a child learning a foreign language in school has no practical reason for learning it. The second reason is, quite frankly, that the modern language lobby is powerful in education these days. It has been able to create a situation in which schools and teachers feel they have to teach foreign languages early, whether they want to or not, and whether or not this leads to any useful or lasting results . . .