Research Proves Kids Can Learn Complex Things On Their Own

I learned about this research from a press release, since the research paper itself is in German. However, I find it striking in several respects, not just because it supports self-directed learning for children.

1) The release opens with this sentence: "Self-directed learning has long been heralded as the key to successful education. Yet until now, there has been little research into this theory." Something that is "long-heralded" must have some basis in reality for people to recognize its efficacy, and there is more than a little research into this theory. A brief perusal of my Research page, the work of Holt, Neill, and alternative schools everywhere, research such as that done by Alfie Kohn, Frank Smith, and Thomas Armstrong, as well as studying history prior to the invention of compulsory schooling about 150 years ago, shows that self-directed learning is not just how every baby learns a most complex thing—how to speak—but also how most children and adults learned until we corralled everyone into classrooms.

2) Professor Kristina Reiss, one of the researchers is quoted:

"We now know that students – also those who are weaker in math – have the skills to master even very complex subject matters at their own pace,” continues Reiss. “Although extended phases of self-directed learning are often advocated, they are still not part of the everyday school curriculum. But they are an important option for teachers as varied lesson formats ensure a lively and interesting learning experience.”

It really bothers me that this research admits that providing time and space for self-directed learning should be advocated for use in schools, but when unschoolers claim they are doing this (GWS has printed their stories since 1977) they are often taken to task by educators for not providing a rigorous, or even adequate, education to their children.

3) Germany, Sweden, and other countries outlaw homeschooling because they claim their public and private schools provide a professional education that no parent can provide. This makes little sense if self-directed learning is in play since the teacher, if there is one, is "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage" in that situation. It is interesting resources, access to people and places, doing things alone and with people, supportive parents, friends, and mentors that encourage self-directed learning, not necessarily a professional teacher's "varied lesson formats."

I can sense the thrust of where this research will be used in classroom practice from the quote above: it will be used as another technique to get kids to do what teachers want them to do in order to complete the teacher's lessons, rather than as a genuine attempt to build on a child's self-directed learning, as unschoolers have successfully been doing for decades.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE:

The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, another academic resource that supports self-directed learning, has a call for papers for their next issue. As an advisor to the Journal, I've been asked to solicit articles for the next issue. If you're interested in doing so, here's the information you need:

I am pleased to invite submissions for the eleventh issue of the online peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL), to be published as papers become accepted. Authors of original research interested in submitting manuscripts to be considered for publication in JUAL should review the JUAL home page, and the Submissions for detailed information on submission requirements.
 
JUAL seeks to bring together an international community of scholars exploring the topic of unschooling and alternative learning, which espouses learner centered democratic approaches to learning. JUAL is also a space to reveal the limitations of mainstream schooling.

JUAL understands learner centered democratic education as individuals deciding their own curriculum, and participating in the governance of their school—if they are in one. Some examples of learner centered democratic possibilities are unschooling, Sudbury Valley, Fairhaven, and the Albany Free School. In terms of unschooling, we view it as a self-directed learning approach to learning outside of the mainstream education rather than homeschooling, which reproduces the learning structures of school in the home.
It will offer readers relevant theoretical discussions and act as a catalyst for expanding existing knowledge in specific areas of practice and/or research on learning relevant to the journals mandate. The journal will be available at http://www.nipissingu.ca/jual/index.asp as a free publication containing material written in French or English. JUAL will initially be published as articles become accepted for publication. When enough articles to make an issue are available, we will publish them as an issue.
 
I invite you to circulate this announcement to colleagues, graduate students, researchers and/or organizations who may be interested in submitting a manuscript to JUAL for consideration.
 
Questions can be addressed to the editors of JUAL by contacting Carlo Ricci at carlor@nipissingu.ca.

A Matter of Conscience

Kelly Green has written a series of rousing essays and commentary about contemporary homeschooling that deserve to be read by any homeschooler who is thinking about the national and international social and political situations homeschooling now faces. Ms. Green, an experienced homeschooling parent and group leader who lives in Canada, uses current events in the United Kingdom and Sweden, in particular, to drive home her points. As a homeschooling political activist, Ms. Green draws upon and comments on her work with the Canadian government, helping ground her political views with practical strategies and tactics.

The United Kingdom situation, described in blog posts on this site and easily found on the Internet (Search on “The Badman Report”), is convincingly presented as a case of professional overreaching and media bias against homeschooling. The now-discredited report claimed that homeschooling parents were two to three times more likely than the general population to abuse their children. The media reported it, accepting the government consultant’s report at face value, and British homeschoolers were tarnished as a group and threatened with severe regulation. It took a major effort to halt the bad legislation that was marshaled in response to the report; though halted, there is no reason to relax one’s guard. As Ms. Green points out, the underlying arguments in such political actions are that parents can’t be trusted to care for their own children and children can’t be trusted to learn without going to school; both groups require the ministrations of professionals, and the professional class requires clients to grow. For instance, in Sweden, as part of the government’s successful move to make homeschooling illegal, Green writes, “I was amazed, recently, to learn of the frontal assault by teachers on home educators in Sweden. They were encouraging children to wear t-shirts that said, “Every Child has the Right to be Taught by a Professional Teacher.” This argument looms for all homeschoolers, and the work of Ivan Illich, John McKnight, and Mahdu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva in Escaping Education, are important touchstones for homeschoolers to reference as we insist on learning in our own ways in the face of professional overreaching and bureaucratic development.

Green presents some strong arguments against any government attempt to standardize families and how they learn, including some interesting insights into Tasmania, which, for reasons that have eluded me, is considered an excellent model for homeschooling regulation by UK and Irish homeschoolers. Ms. Green shows all is not well in Tasmania for homeschoolers, nor is it time to rest in the UK either: Green ends her book with a description of recent unfair media attacks upon homeschooling in Scotland.

Her sources in England provide fascinating first-hand accounts of the turmoil and fear homeschoolers faced during the months of media coverage, Parliamentary debate and intrigue. Further, many of her larger points also resonated with me, particularly her essay “So What’s Wrong with a Parallel Society Anyway?” Germany and Sweden have used this argument, in conjunction with the professionals-only argument, to stop homeschooling in their countries. Green writes:

Societies have very different ways of handling minority groups and “outsiders.” I have to admit that one of the things I love about my adopted country of Canada is the way Canadian society makes a good faith effort to respect the cultures and wishes of its many minority populations … I arrived here [in Canada] in the post-Pierre Trudeau moment of multiculturalism, and I have loved living in a place where the dominant image is of a Cultural Mosaic as opposed to a Melting Pot. I don’t want to be an ingredient in a soup, thank you very much. I would much prefer to be my own individual paint blob or bit of glass in a work of art.

As the son of a proud Italian-American father (my mother says she’s a Heinz: 57 different varieties mixed-up in her gene pool!), I grew up around some family members who were more comfortable speaking Italian than English, who loved to visit “Little Italy” in Manhattan, yet, were also incredibly in love with, and loyal to, the United States. I know, firsthand, that a country can thrive without its population being homogeneous.

I do have reservations about some of the book’s essays, such as the one about social engineering; it echoes arguments about Outcome-Based Education we heard in the early nineties in the United States and Green’s essay doesn’t really add anything new. I think Green’s social engineering argument could have been more strongly linked to the parallel society issue, thereby moving the issue beyond standard conservative talking points on OBE.

By arguing that education is a freedom or a right that should be protected by the government, we end up becoming dependent on the courts and government officials for guaranteeing that right, which, in turn, makes that right or freedom dependent upon future court and political decisions. Right now, our personal learning, and whom we decide to learn with or from, is currently our own family’s business until we become compulsory school age; then, in some places, we must register as homeschoolers to continue learning as we want to do. By encouraging a "rights mind-set" to protect homeschooling we will probably be protecting lawyers' and politicians' jobs more than our right to homeschool. Green does not go down this path in her book, but whenever someone claims something is a "fundamental freedom" I worry what the next step will be in their argument.

One of my favorite passages in this book deals with the issue of government regulation of homeschooling. Green notes, “Suddenly, the state is a member of your family, making sure that you are doing “it” right, whatever “it” is. So instead of just living, you are living, like the Truman Show, with a camera in your life, in your brain, watching your every move. You find yourself stepping back from the moment, from the experience, thinking how you will write this up in eduspeak to please the “monitors,” the “authorities,” the teacher who has been assigned to sign off on your educational provision. That’s not life; that’s performance art.”

Ms. Green makes a point early in the book that she is in favor of notifying the government when families want to homeschool their children, a point I support, though for slightly different reasons. She writes:

A notification-only law is not the same as registration. It is not a licensing scheme. It implies no power on the part of the state to refuse permission to home educate.

At the same time, the family would be notifying the state of its intent to maintain complete control and administration of the child’s education. This could, possibly, benefit home educators in several ways.

By making such an intent official, home-educated children could never be confused with those classified as “missing education,” or “excluded,” or “truant.” Those terms would be restricted to students whose relationship with public school has broken down, not those who have chosen to have no relationship with public school whatsoever.

… Finally, such a system allows for a multi-tiered approach. Those families who want a notification-only relationship with their local authorities can have just that. Those families that want some level of support may be able to enter into negotiations with the local authority to see what might be available to them (although, traditionally, this approach does come with strings attached).

Further, there is, to me, an important point that gets muddled in this book, namely, that education is not the same as teaching and learning. Education is the professional commoditization of teaching and learning, whereas teaching and learning are everyone’s birthright. Teaching and learning are natural activities, two heads of the same coin, that we can unconsciously engage in, such as when a parent coos and babbles at their newborn child, or that we can consciously engage in, when we have the need or desire to do so. Educators have long-encouraged strong distinctions between informal learning and formal learning, devaluing the former and promoting the latter. But careful observers of how people learn, such as John Holt, Peter Drucker, and Sir Ken Robinson, show us how porous those informal/formal distinctions are in the worlds of childhood, work, and academics, and how informal learning is far-more used in life and work than our formal learning in classes is used. Yes, there are instances where specialized, formal instruction makes sense—I want someone trained in brain surgery to operate on my head—but that doesn’t mean we all need to go through medical school, just those who chose to and have the ability to do so.

I encourage you to read and discuss Kelly Green’s important contribution to homeschooling. It is a timely overview about the problems homeschooling is currently facing worldwide. Just because things are okay for homeschoolers in North American now, doesn’t mean our situations will remain that way. All it took in Germany was one family’s court case to make homeschooling illegal for all German citizens. In Sweden, politicians and educators fueled fears about people who are different and coupled it with a belief that professional education made other forms of learning unnecessary; that’s all it took to make homeschooling illegal there in less than a year. In the UK, a report by a consultant to the government nearly made independent homeschooling extinct in a few months. We delude ourselves if we think such things can’t happen to us; laws and attitudes can change quickly, particularly when institutional hubris, social conformity, and money collide. Green’s A Matter of Conscience: Education as a Fundamental Freedom provides us with much food for thought and action in this matter.



All homeschoolers would qualify for asylum

The Christian Science Monitor printed their story about the German homeschooling family who received political asylum in the US yesterday and it contained two rather interesting nuggets of information. The first is the decision, if upheld on appeal, will grant asylum to any sincere homeschooler. From the article: “Homeschoolers are a movement of sorts,” says Peter Spiro, an expert on international immigration law at Temple University Law School in Philadelphia. “The immigration judge looking at this claim said there is a coherence to this group ... and that denying the rights of this group [to homeschool] is persecution.”

The article claims Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has already been contacted by other German homeschoolers who want political asylum. Here is where the second interesting nugget turns up, when Mike Donnelly, an attorney for the HSLDA, is paraphrased:

"Donnelly says his group is not directly affiliated with a Christian church, but his website mentions staff members’ faith. He also said the homeschooling movement in the US was not just Christian – the National Center for Education Statistics says only 36 percent of homeschooled students are kept home for religious reasons."

It has been well noted that as homeschooling has surged in growth—74% in less than a decade—it has also significantly diversified, thereby diminishing the influence of evangelical homeschooling leaders. However, to read that HSLDA is downplaying its religious orientation a bit, or at least downplaying it for this article, makes me feel even more that we are entering a stage where inclusive and global homeschooling associations are the next stage of development we face.

Update On Political Asylum for Homeschoolers

The New York Times, in an article titled, “Granted Asylum To Learn At Home” (3/1/10. P. A15), provides some analysis and quotes from Judge Lawrence O. Burman’s decision that shed new and surprising light on his decision to grant political asylum to the Romeike family, who were German homeschoolers. Judge Burman writes that Germany’s ban on and strong punishment of homeschoolers is “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans.”

Burman also writes that homeschoolers are a group who have “principled opposition to government policy” and are “members of a particular social group.” When coupled with the issue of the Romeike’s also being persecuted because of their religious beliefs Judge Burman found the family qualified for asylum. The article then notes:

“It is definitely new,” said Prof. Philip G. Schrag, the director of Georgetown Law School’s asylum program, who added that he had never heard of such a case. “What’s novel about the argument is the nature of the social group.

But, he said, given the severity of the penalties that German home-schoolers potentially face, the judge’s decision “does not seem far outside the margin.”

The US government is appealing the decision so this case can be precedent setting and therefore something to watch. It’s still not clear to me how or if this decision would apply to secular German homeschoolers seeking asylum but, as reported in the Times, the breadth of the decision surprises me; I look forward to reading the complete decision.



German Homeschoolers Get Political Asylum in US

Homeschooling is illegal in Germany and families that can’t afford or don’t want private schooling there have no other options. The Romeike family, citing what they perceive to be an anti-Christian curriculum in the schools, nonetheless decided to homeschool their children. The family was heavily fined for homeschooling by German authorities and forced, under police escort, to send their children to school. Previous homeschooling cases from Germany that I’m aware of resulted in the families relocating or finding refuge in an alternative school there. Now an immigration judge in Tennessee has granted political asylum to the Romeikes. As noted in The Washington Post, the Romeikes moved to Tennessee in 2008 but by seeking political asylum now the Romeike’s are making a public statement they hope will be used to sway German public opinion. The Home School Legal Defense Association claims this is part of the reason they offered to represent the Romeikes in immigration court, so it seems the motion for political asylum is more a public relations move than a serious legal maneuver. According to the article in The Guardian, “The case does not create a legal precedent unless the US government appeals and a higher immigration court hears the case.”

It is unlikely there will be a rush of homeschoolers from countries where homeschooling is illegal seeking asylum in the US. For instance, The Post writes, “Romeike said in an interview that when his oldest children were in public schools they had problems with violence, bullying and peer pressure.” It is not clear at all that other German parents whose children also suffer violence, bullying and peer pressure in school, but who homeschool for secular or different religious reasons, such as Islam, would be granted political asylum in the US. It appears this case is more about the freedom to practice Christianity as one wishes rather than about the freedom to homeschool, however, until the judge’s opinion in this case is made available we won’t know his full reasoning for granting the Romeike’s asylum.

The reasons Germany used to ban homeschooling were upheld by the European Court of Human Rights in 2006, namely that parents can choose from existing private schools if public ones aren’t to their liking and that only education delivered by schools guarantees a high standard of learning for all children. Most importantly, the Court upheld Germany’s argument that “Schools represented society, and it was in the children’s interest to become part of that society. The parents’ right to education did not go as far as to deprive their children of that experience.” Critics of homeschooling are airing all these reasons in the United States too, so we need to be thinking well beyond narrow religious exceptions for homeschooling and continue to make the case that all children can learn well in places other than school.

The academic argument seems to me to be losing ground, as more and more homeschoolers enter the work force or University and do as well or better than their conventionally schooled peers. The choice argument is disingenuous at best, since a mandatory selection from a list of schools provided by the state is hardly a genuine choice. The social integration argument, though there is ample evidence that schools create and solidify class distinctions among students rather than provide social integration and mobility for them, still resonates with people for a variety of reasons. First, our suspicion of “others” in our current climate of national fear and xenophobia makes us less likely to support freethinkers and other non-conformists. Second, the “melting pot” democratic theory of public schools, despite more than a century of alienated students, dropouts and school violence, as well as the creation of a citizenry that is less civically engaged than earlier generations, nonetheless continues to hold sway in public discussions about social integration.  I propose that true, lasting social integration among diverse groups of people occurs when they share common goals and experiences throughout their lives, not just when they are children in school. Cutting the arts, sports, and free play at recess for schoolchildren eliminate activities that actually encourage groups of children to socially integrate and reveals our true priorities for schooling. Pitting children against each other for grades and social rank in school is hardly social integration, but it does teach children a deep social lesson about what is really important to adults.

Corrections and additions to my previous blog:

1) Graham Badman is not a Member of Parliament; he is a former director of Children’s Services in Kent who was asked to head a review of homeschooling regulations for Parliament.

2) Erwin Fabian Garcia Lopez also made a presentation at the conference in Bogota. He compared and contrasted homeschooling with conventional schooling and in doing so he reminded me how no matter what country we live in, the school bell tolls the same for all. Schools everywhere use behavior modification techniques to create a standard good student, but with homeschooling we have the chance to work with, not on, children to help them grow.