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.

If College is About Making More Money, You Might Want to Reconsider

Dale Stephens’ Uncollege efforts are, I think, a very positive step in the direction of creating a movement to reclaim higher education for individual enrichment, instead of viewing college as general certification that one is eligible for work. Of course, this flies in the face of conventional media reports that bellow to the masses that unemployment is more horrible for those without a college degree. Dale digs into the conventional wisdom to reveal some inconvenient truths about the costs and benefits of college degrees:

As the New York Times reported last May, while the average unemployment rate of all college graduates may seem low, the rate for recent college grads is up to three times higher, while their starting salaries have sharply declined . . .

For those under twenty-five the outlook is grim: 22% are unemployed and 22.4% are working in jobs that don't require their degree.  The environment college graduates face is frightening.  My friend Jenny wrote a piece in the Times in August called "Generation Limbo," profiling graduates from elite schools who are working as bartenders and collecting welfare checks.  

In response to the article about me in the New York Times last week, a commenter called me irresponsible for suggesting that young people skip college when the unemployment rate is higher for those without degrees.  Ten years ago, this may have been true.  

Today, I think it's irresponsible to suggest to young people that getting a university degree will secure a brighter future.  The reality is that only half of recent college graduates are working in jobs that require their degree, and they are doing so with an average of $27,000 in debt.

 _________________________________

In my last post I quoted from Dan Rubin, an adult who was unschooled, and I noted that it was unclear from his writing if he’d graduated college. Helen, Dan’s mom, wrote back to me that Dan does not have a college degree, though he took some college courses. Nonetheless, Dan is “Creative Director for a major international company.” There are other ways to find work worth doing and make a decent living than just by graduating college.

College and Learning Are Not Identical

Why push more people to complete four years of college when there are other less expensive ways to help them find work worth doing and lives worth living?

I am developing a much more detailed response to this question that I’ll post in the coming weeks, though I feel I’ve been responding to it in various forms for all of my 30-plus years in homeschooling, but I feel compelled to provide a quick reply today based on some contacts I’ve had related to this issue.

First, Dr. Robert Kay, a retired school psychiatrist who is a long-standing, unabashed supporter of alternatives to conventional school, recently wrote this letter to his local newspaper and shared it with me. Though not all the articles he cites are current they are nonetheless still true and relevant and useful to anyone who wants to understand the issues involved. Further, some unschoolers will undoubtedly take exception to Bob’s claim that electronic gadgets should be rigidly controlled for the young, but Bob has his reasons for this. In fact, he rigidly controls his own computer use for these reasons, so if you want to engage him on this issue you’ll have to contact him via post or phone. Send me a private message and I’ll send you his contact information.

To the Editor:

While "Obama Calls for Restraining Rise in College Tuition" (News, Jan. 28) we might check out the Wall Street Journal of 8/13/08 -- "For Most People, College is a Waste of Time", a 10/06 op-ed in The Evening Bulletin -- "A Solution to the Fraud that is Higher Education", The New York Times of 4/27/09 -- "End the University as We Know It", and the Baltimore Sun -- "Is America's Love Affair with College on the Rocks?"

Not to mention the fact that in 2006 just 31% of college seniors were proficient in reading -- down from 40% in 1996 -- while, from K through most of graduate school, virtually all subject matter is happily forgotten come summertime.

So perhaps we should consult with wealthy Switzerland where 77% leave school at age 14 and then, as in the home/unschooling movements, HELP kids keep on learning with the joy, rapidity, and effectiveness of the average toddler especially if we rigidly control all electronic gadgets while exposing them to books, magazines, newspapers, libraries, museums, work, concerts, theater, movies, i.e., the wide, wide world. Meanwhile, we could check out the Inquirer article of 12/12/91 -- "Don't Try Another Choice Plan: Change the Very Nature of Schooling," plus three definitive works -- How Children Fail (Classics in Child Development) by John Holt, School is Dead (out of print) by Everett Reimer and Deschooling Society (Open Forum) by Ivan Illich.

Yours,

Robert E. Kay, MD

Related to this is an email I received from Helen Rubin, a GWS subscriber whose grown son, Dan, is doing well because of, not in spite of, unschooling. Helen shared Dan’s recent blog post about his educational background; he is a professional photographer and designer, but it is unclear if he even graduated college from the post. However, he is clear about who his most important teachers and experiences were and how they inspire him to want to make the world a better place.

So was there an “aha” moment where you really knew what you wanted to do?

I don’t know if there was a single point. If there was, it doesn’t come to mind. There was no epiphany but that kind of ties into the way I was raised. The most valuable thing my parents instilled in my brother and me is that if we’re passionate about something, or even interested in it, we should just do it and let it run its course and if it’s something we learn more about and decide we’re not interested in, that’s fine, but we didn’t decide that prematurely. Instead of one big moment, there were a series of moments, and those continue. That’s an ongoing thing with me. I probably chase those moments, to be honest.

You talked about some of your mentors and people who have supported you. Who has encouraged you the most on your creative path?

Um, it has to come down to my folks, ultimately. I don’t think I’ve had people in my life who aren’t encouraging, but the groundwork for all I do and who I am was established when I was young. They were enabling in the most positive ways, fostering and encouraging creativity. My family (Mum, Dad, Alex, and me), we’re the kind of people who recognize when someone is passionate about something and we will do whatever we have to do in order to encourage that person. I feel really lucky that I haven’t had any barriers, and because of that, I try to help others if I see someone who needs encouragement.

That’s cool. So then, do you feel a responsibility to contribute to something bigger than yourself and what do you hope to contribute?

I want to fix the world. I feel a constant pressure, not to do any one thing worthwhile, but that everything I do should make a difference. The only shame of it is that the drive to contribute to something doesn’t always result in me being able to do something. It isn’t always a clear path from, “I want to help, I want to make products that don’t suck, I want to fix every interface I see that’s difficult to use.” I think that’s my favorite thing about design as a broad term. To me, design is the medium through which I can improve the world.

Reflections from an Adult Unschooler

Astra Taylor, a writer and filmmaker, has written a personal essay about growing up as an unschooler, and she reflects upon the influence of Growing Without Schooling magazine on her life. It is nice to know that the work me and my colleagues did is appreciated by those who were directly affected by it, and I really like how Astra understands at a deep level how our culture is increasingly against self-directed learning, particularly for children, and how schooling is dominating their lives more now than ever. This has always been a difficult issue to find allies and support for and, as Astra notes in the selections below, it has become nearly impossible in today's womb-to-tomb schooling climate.

Also, like many home- and unschooled children I know, Astra chooses to go to public school and comes out to unschool again. Reading how she navigated high school and college, moving in and out of school as her heart and ambition move her, shows how many different combinations of learning opportunities can be used instead of the linear, factory-style model of school consumption.

When my mom was doing her stint stalking caribou, books about radical education were in wide circulation. First and most famous was A. S. Neill’s Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing, an account of the legendary antiauthoritarian boarding school in England, which sold more than three million copies between 1960 and 1973—an astounding figure. Then there was Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation (1964), John Holt’s How Children Fail (1964) and How Children Learn (1967), Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967) and Free Schools (1972), Carl Rogers’s Freedom to Learn (1969), George Dennison’s The Lives of Children (1969), and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1970), to name the most influential. In those early days Growing Without Schooling, the magazine started by Holt and published well into the 1990s, came in a brown paper wrapper, as though the subject matter addressed in its pages might be as objectionable to the postmaster or to nosy neighbors as pornography.

These publications were part of a top-to-bottom movement to devise new philosophies of and forums for learning. First there were the “freedom schools” that had been part of the civil rights movement. Next were the hundreds of “free schools” founded across the country committed to child-centered and democratic education. Finally, there was the widespread campus unrest against the corporate multiversity, beginning at Berkeley, which then became part of the movement against the Vietnam War and culminated in the massive student strikes that shook the nation—coupled with the establishment of open universities, where idealistic students and faculty sought to liberate learning from the tyranny of accreditation.

Today, the prospect of a book like Summerhill—one that paints a sympathetic portrait of kids who refuse to attend classes, do schoolwork, or obey authority—reaching an audience of millions seems absurd. Instead we have well-meaning studies like Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting and The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing. These and countless other recent books and articles rightly criticize the current emphasis on testing and tracking, our obsession with “enriching” kids as though they are bags of flour, and our single-minded obsession with climbing to the top of the meritocracy no matter how rigged and meaningless it is to begin with. But in the end they make no rousing or imaginative suggestions of other ways to live and learn. After-school tutoring is OK—just do it in moderation. Ditto for SAT prep classes, sports, and other “extracurricular” activities. These books advise parents to stay on the well-trodden path of standardized schooling, but to travel it a bit slower.

. . . We differed from homeschoolers in essential ways. We weren’t replicating school at home. We had no textbooks, class times, schedules, deadlines, tests, or curricula. Were we fascinated by primates? By rocks? By baseball cards or balloon animals? If so, it was our duty to investigate. My parents eschewed coercion and counted on our curiosity, which they understood to be a most basic human capacity. This is really what the whole debate over compulsory schooling is about. Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not? This trust isn’t always easy to muster. The older I get the more astonished I am that my parents had it in such abundance when most of us mete it out as though it were a scarce resource; whereas I suspect the more we dispense trust to others the more we see how deserving most people are of it. After all, have you ever met anyone who isn’t interested in something? Sometimes other people’s interests aren’t fascinating to you, sure—but people always have interests. Have you ever met someone who was incapable of learning? John Holt, who coined the term unschooling, summarized his view this way: “The human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.”

After enduring some higher education Astra discovers the Albany Free School, whose work and efforts we wrote about and supported at GWS for years (as well as many other radical writers and teachers), and writes about her conversations with Mike Guidice, a young teacher there. Mike notes, after some time working at the Free School, “I am just now starting to understand the intersection of my antiauthoritarian politics and the school.” This, I think, is a very important realization for those of us who have been working in this area for so long: the connections we see as obvious, and that drive us to continue our work, are not that clear to young people who did not grow up with the ideas, books, and trust in their abilities to learn that Astra describes.

Indeed, many of those books and ideas, which were very popular in the sixties and seventies, are now out of print and ignored by academics, so they only exist in little enclaves on the Internet and in society. Most important, as Illich and Holt wrote in the early seventies, education is no longer a personal quest but has become a public commodity we are compelled to consume; those who refuse to partake are considered by the education establishment to be uncooperative citizens and losers who, obviously, need more schooling so they can be made to fit into society. Fortunately, in the United States and elsewhere, we can still be conscientious objectors to compulsory education and help our children, and others, escape the negative effects of schooling. But as Astra notes at the end of her essay, the creation of a new community that supports learning and provides resources for all children to learn instead of focusing resources on schools to control and predict learning, seems to be a public policy that is impossible to achieve.

Growing up, I experienced unschooling as a compromise, the more appealing of the two extremes available in Georgia given my family’s modest budget: staying at home and teaching myself, or going to public school and having my spirit crushed. What I really wanted—what I still want, even now, as an adult—is that intellectual community I was looking for in high school and college, but never quite found. I would have loved to commune with other young people and find out what a school of freedom could be like. But for some reason, such a possibility was unthinkable, a wild fantasy—instead, the only option available was to submit to irrational authority six and a half hours a day, five days a week, in a series of cinder-block holding cells. If nothing else, we should pause to wonder why there’s so rarely any middle ground.

To read Astra Taylor’s essay in its entirety, you can go to the magazine website that published it: http://nplusonemag.com/ or you can purchase the essay as a Kindle Single. 

Education Without School Conference in Bogota, Colombia

It is exciting for me to publicize the third conference in Colombia devoted to exploring and supporting alternatives to conventional schooling. When I attended the first conference in 2009 I was impressed by the interest and support given to the event by the school's faculty, and especially to the number of parents who traveled great distances in order to meet other like-minded parents. If you are interested in how unschooling and ideas about other alternatives to school are catching on around the world, this is an event worth exploring.

Invitation to the Third International Congress on Education without school, Education, Family, Self-Learning Collaborative, flexible models of schools.
Bogotá. November 2, 3, 4, 2011

 Please visit
 http://educacionsinescuelacolombia.wordpress.com/

 Sincerely,

 Organizing Committee.
 Education Research Institute IEDU
 Faculty of Humanities
 Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá