The Sandy Hook Shootings and Homeschooling

As it should, the tragedy of the Sandy Hook school shootings created an outpouring of emotion and sympathy from the public for the victims and their families. Unfortunately, as usual, the larger, social implications of the mass murders are being used by various groups to advance their own agendas: sensationalized, breaking news by competitive media groups who interviewed the children right after their horrible experiences; the political points being scored for and against gun control immediately after the event; calls for putting armed guards in the schools, and so on. I was wondering if it was even appropriate for me to write about the shootings today, but some things need rebuttal, particularly recent charges made about homeschooling in light of the shootings.

I agree that action needs to be taken to restrict access to weapons of mass killing and not just for the mentally ill; the vast majority of gun deaths are caused by “normal” people under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or uncontrolled emotion. But I want to move beyond the conventional boundaries of the gun debate and explore why when these horrific events happen people view homeschooling both as an alternative that provides safety for children and as an act of extreme individualism that destroys the social fabric of America.

An opinion article in the New York Times that appeared on Dec. 16, 2012, written by a philosophy professor, had what I thought was a good argument about how we delude ourselves that an armed society creates a civil society, however it bothers me how he uses homeschooling as his prime example of extreme individualism. Like many academics that are critical of homeschooling, this author makes an assumption about how all homeschoolers act and think based on little evidence:

After all, a population of privately armed citizens is one that is increasingly fragmented, and vulnerable as a result. Private gun ownership invites retreat into extreme individualism — I heard numerous calls for homeschooling in the wake of the Newtown shootings — and nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military, as the case may be.

. . . Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite.

Clearly this writer views homeschooling as embracing the “I got mine, you get yours” ethos, which is in homeschooling if you look for it: for instance, support groups that only support people of the right faith who will sign statements of faith, or the secular version where new members must reveal their educational and economic backgrounds before being considered for admittance. However, this ethos is well established in our school system, too: public schools determine access based on one’s zip code and private schools can deny admission based on religious beliefs or lack of income and that is perfectly okay with our society. “I got mine, you get yours” is embedded in the way we distribute education in America. Many, including me, feel that homeschooling is a way to bridge this divide rather than make it larger, by making education much more personal and local than it currently is.

I am an inclusive homeschooler: I am open to new people and new ideas coming into homeschooling and I think this is the best way for us to grow and become strong as a movement; too much inbreeding is always a bad thing. John Holt saw that homeschooling could merely mimic the school system, but he felt it was a risk well worth taking in light of the inbreeding he saw in schools of education. Holt had, as I do, faith and hope that if people spend time listening, playing, and working with children outside of schools, new opportunities will present themselves for finding, as Holt put it, “work worth doing and lives worth living, not just, or even a better education.” New combinations of schooling and living are certainly happening, slowly but surely, as homeschoolers move in and out of school and college, leverage online and other types of classes and mentoring, or go directly into work without conventional—or any—high school or college degrees. This is not an insignificant development in a world where more intensive and costly schooling is the default answer to all school problems. But all this gets lost when homeschooling is cast out of the conversation as extreme individualism and nothing else.

The biggest irony for me about homeschooling being viewed as extreme individualism is that the driving impetus for embracing homeschooling by Holt (Teach Your Own), Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society), and others is to create a convivial society, one where children aren’t segregated by age and law from other people, where knowledge and skills are openly shared. Another irony is how educationists claim that homeschooling is not concerned with supporting public institutions or commons. Illich (and other thinkers like him, such as E.F. Schumaker and John MacKnight) wrote deeply about our loss and need for public commons; the institutional model for learning often cited by Holt (and later by John Gatto) is the public library, not the public school. Open to all, no questions asked if you check out Dr. Seuss or the works of Einstein regardless of your age, young and old organizing or attending events together—the public library is a convivial model we can build upon. In addition, Holt provides many other ideas for places and opportunities that help people learn in his book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better.

Holt viewed learning as both a personal and a social activity, and he saw homeschooling as a way to reintegrate those activities for learners. School atomizes them, emphasizing personal achievement and competition for grades over social activities, particularly free conversation and play in school. Now even recess is closely controlled, if the school has recess at all, and free-ranging conversation among children in school has always been viewed as taking away valuable instruction time from teachers. Since compulsory schooling was created in the United States children and teachers have written about how their love of learning and individuality are crushed by school: Holt, Kozol, Kohl, Dennison, Herndon, wrote a lot about this in the sixties and seventies; Kirsten Olsen’s Wounded By School makes this case for the twenty-first century. There is something that must be done in society and school for supporting individualism, though that discussion is curtailed when the discussion is polarized into you must attend school to contribute to society or else you are an extreme individualist.

The big picture I have is of a society that is open and generous towards its young, allowing them to have many different types of teachers, scopes, and sequences (to use the language of schools) for learning in or out of school. This inclusive vision of learning won’t prevent violence, but I think it will diminish it a lot by providing people who are alienated from their schools and social spheres with a fresh start in a different environment (not necessarily a different school!) or just different people in their lives.

Inclusive homeschooling and its larger goal of creating a convivial society get lost as educationists portray homeschoolers as extreme individualists and conventional schooling as the best place for children to learn and grow. Perhaps I’m in the minority among homeschoolers with these thoughts; some homeschoolers do want to be extreme individualists and that’s fine—you have the right and ability to do so in the United States, and sometimes circumstances make being an extreme individualist your only good option.

However, I want to continue finding and working with homeschoolers and others who want to build a society that provides numerous ways and supports for people to live and learn together, not just more secure, gated schools. Tragedies like Sandy Hook should make us think more broadly about what we can do about school violence, rather than make us circle the wagons more tightly and exclude homeschooling as a way to contribute to the solution.

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.

The Student Resistance Handbook

 Unschooling explicitly provides children with far more opportunities for self-expression than conventional schooling permits, but unschooling is limited to those adults who are willing to try it with the children in their care. In school students are increasingly treated like cogs in the education manufacturing machine: the only rights students’ seem to have in school and in society are the right to be compelled to attend school and the right to obey authority. Complaints about school by students are often perceived as whining and student government is often just political show rather than genuine governance. The War on Kids is full of examples of the mistreatment of students in schools and the film’s creator, Cevin Soling, has recently added a new component to help students in school: The Student Resistance Handbook (click on Take Action to get the free download).

This is a work in progress and I’ve offered to help Cevin fine tune and promote this as a way to give voice to students who feel powerless to change anything about their school experiences. We don’t want to get students in trouble but we also don’t want to make them feel there is nothing they can do when school treats them so poorly. Please comment and let us know your opinions, pro and con.

Here’s a bit from the Handbook about the purpose of resistance for students in bad school situations:

Resistance can take many forms.

Direct confrontation will likely lead to adverse consequences and accomplish little. The complete lack of rights and due process in schools leave students in a vulnerable position. Oppressive institutions do change if large groups organize, walk out, and strike. Because of the climate of fear and routine indoctrination, it may be close to impossible to get large groups of students to rally to a cause.

A better strategy is to use the same techniques that are used to hold down students. Identify the methods of the captors, name them, and understand them. Once these methods are understood, they can be used both by small groups of students or a student acting alone. Schools are miserable oppressive environments and that waking nightmare should extend to administrators and teachers so they experience the dread of having to be there to the same degree as students. This, combined with making the cost of running the school untenable, are two of the main tactics outlined in this handbook.

The Salem witch hunts ended when the wife of the governor of Massachusetts was accused of being a witch. Joseph McCarthy was stopped when he accused the military of harboring communists. Zero Tolerance and other irrational policies will not end by students begging for change. They will end when those in power are subjected to the same treatment.

This handbook was devised to provide suggestions for legal means to minimize the oppressive nature of your incarceration in school and to expose the hypocrites who support the institution. Keep in mind that many of the people who judge, grade, punish, restrict, repress, oppress, control, and prevent students from pursuing their own best interests, actually believe they are helping students. They do not see themselves as prison guards. Pointing out how oppressive the school environment is will probably upset them and will likely harden their beliefs long before it changes their minds. When students insist on exposing inhumane conditions and agitating for change, they cannot expect support from the staff. They can expect pushback and anger. You are threatening to undermine their power.

This is what you are up against. Stand your ground. Know that you are in the right.

Alfie Kohn on Why Numbers Trump Human Feedback in Education

Our ability to manipulate our world by using numerical data has led to some impressive acheivements as well as to some horrible developments, particularly when people get reduced to numbers and are treated as such. This has been happening for over a century in our schools and we've now reached a point where one's grade point average has become a shorthand for one's social worth in many situations.

Alfie Kohn has written a good rebuttal to this situation in school with this essay in Education Week: Schooling Beyond Measure. Here's a quote from the article to whet your appetite:

In education, the question "How do we assess kids/teachers/schools?" has morphed over the years into "How do we measure ... ?" We've forgotten that assessment doesn't require measurement, and, moreover, that the most valuable forms of assessment are often qualitative (say, a narrative account of a child's progress by an observant teacher who knows the child well), rather than quantitative (a standardized-test score). Yet the former may well be brushed aside in favor of the latter by people who don't even bother to ask what was on the test. It's a number, so we sit up and pay attention. Over time, the more data we accumulate, the less we really know.

Online Learning's Growing Pains

 In my last blog post I asked, "I wish there were more research about homeschoolers and their use of distance learning compared to how school uses it now and proposes to use it in the future. Does anyone know of such studies?" No one replied to me with a direct answer, but I learned from a friend about this recent story concerning the failures of K12, the largest distance learning company in the United States, and it led me to the other stories I link to below.

Educators are tied to the notion that if a properly trained teacher doesn't expose a child to an idea, thing, or event the child will never learn about it. In the school model of learning, I see why this is believed so deeply, but here is more evidence that this is a flawed view about the scope and sequence of learning in real life.

Here is a for-profit company, using the latest technology as well as federal and state curriculum standards, exposing children to the school curriculum on a daily basis in their own homes, and yet, according to this study, the online students do even more poorly than the brick-and-mortar students. As John Holt noted in 1964 in How Children Fail, "I teach but the students don't learn; why?" Holt's answers to this question are deep and took years to develop, yet they are ignored by schools. The school response has always been that it is better to focus on the institution of school and technology, since they are more easily controlled by education officials than children and society. Someday we may decide to work with the children and society side of this equation, but here are the current results of working with the teaching and technology side from the study "Understanding and Improving Virtual Schools":

• Only 27.7% of K12 schools reported meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in 2010-11. This is nearly identical to the overall performance of all private Education Management Organizations that operate full-time virtual schools (27.4%). In the nation as a whole, an estimated 52% of public schools met AYP in 2010-11.
• Thirty-six of the 48 full-time virtual schools operated by K12 were assigned school performance ratings by state education authorities in 2010-11, and just seven schools (19.4% of those rated) had ratings that indicated satisfactory progress status.
• The mean performance on state math and reading assessments of K12-operated virtual schools consistently lags behind performance levels of the states from which the schools draw their students.
• The on-time graduation rate for the K12 schools is 49.1%, compared with a rate of 79.4% for the states in which K12 operates schools.
• Many families appear to approach the virtual schools as a temporary service: Data in K12’s own school performance report indicate that 31% of parents intend to keep their students enrolled for a year or less and more than half intend to keep their students enrolled for two years or less. K12 also noted in this report that 23% of its current students were enrolled for less than a year and 67% had been enrolled for fewer than two years.

The above study led to this article that should be read by anyone considering replacing human contact and relationships for learning at home with technology: 

Study Renews Call to Slow Growth of K12 Inc. Virtual Schools

Finally, the day before I read these articles (thanks to my friends who keep sending me these suggestions to read, BTW), I read this one about how Arizona State University is taking educational technology to its next logical step if you believe that only what you teach and expose people to is what they learn and care about:

With 72,000 students, Arizona State is both the country's largest public university and a hotbed of data-driven experiments. One core effort is a degree-monitoring system that keeps tabs on how students are doing in their majors. Stray off-course and you may have to switch fields.

And while not exactly matchmaking, Arizona State takes an interest in students' social lives, too. Its Facebook app mines profiles to suggest friends. One classmate has eight things in common with Ms. Allisone, who "likes" education, photography, and tattoos. Researchers are even trying to figure out social ties based on anonymized data culled from swipes of ID cards around the Tempe campus.

Data mining hinges on one reality about life on the Web: What you do there leaves behind a trail of digital bread crumbs. Companies scoop them up to tailor services, like the matchmaking of eHarmony or the book recommendations of Amazon. Now colleges, eager to get students out the door more efficiently, are awakening to the opportunities of so-called Big Data.

The new breed of software can predict how well students will do before they even set foot in the classroom. It recommends courses, Netflix-style, based on students' academic records.

Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That's a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. "The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class," she says. "They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what's going on with their students."

So the latest research says online learning is worse than learning in conventional schools, and the president of the National Center for Academic Transformation says that half the kids fail and half drop out of conventional college introductory classes. What's a parent of a schoolage child to learn from this research?

There are other paths for learning besides using canned lessons in school and at home, as homeschoolers have shown for decades now. Homeschoolers have been using the Internet and other technologies for decades but I think there are substantial differences in the motivations and uses for technology when the learner works with technology rather than the technology being used to work on the learner.