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.



Wondering About Life and Learning

Two things I've read so far this week have made me stop and think:

Boston Globe, September 20, 2010. Front page headline: AREA SCHOOL SEGREGATION CALLED RIFE. "Public schools in the Boston and Springfield metropolitan areas are among the most segregated in the country, often isolating black and Latino students in low-performing schools, according to a report released today by Northeastern University."

The irony of this report for homeschoolers is that we are often accused of fostering "parallel societies" and segregating our children from minorities and other social groups, the very problem our schools have not solved and, I think, a problem that is made worse by more intensive schooling. Indeed, I would argue that the majority of homeschoolers, unschoolers in particular, are seeking to get their children more involved in real-world activities and groups and therefore are not keeping them away from "others." Some homeschooling families, such as the Millmans, choose to live in blighted neighborhoods with mixed ethnic groups and poor schools yet are able to nurture positive outcomes for their children. Others, such as David Albert's family, make social work and volunteering part of their homeschooling lives.

But mainly I hear the voices of Ivan Illich and John Holt in my head when I consider this 21st century research, since both, in the 1970s, were making the point that schools don't integrate society but divide it into even finer class distinctions, creating an educational underclass. Education, as they predicted, has become a social divider based largely on one's ability to afford to live where private and public schools are well-funded and where neighborhoods and their social benefits are fully functioning. We certainly need more social glue but schooling, as currently conceived, is more about making children compete in a Race to the Top where, inevitably, a few will win and many will lose than it is about cooperating towards common goals. As John Holt noted when asked what he thought about the Back to Basics school reform movement in the early eighties, "'Increasing standards' is just a code for flunking more children."

It is remarkable that despite all the fear-mongering about segragation and child abuse that homeschooling's critics have complained about over the past 33 years (using 1977, when Holt started Growing Without Schooling magazine, as my milestone), these things are not nearly as wide-spread and common as the segragation and child abuse that continue to occur in public and private schools (over 20 states permit paddling and other forms of corporal punishment in public schools, to site one abuse). Families that can't wait for schools to change and want to avoid these unjust practices and model other ways of living and learning should be encouraged, not demonized.

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On another note:

I'm reading a fascinating book, The Forger's Spell, by Edward Dolnick. It is about a con man and art forger who scammed Herman Goering, Hitler's second-in-command. This footnote has reverberated with me since it illuminates much of what I see going on in politics today:

It was in a conversation with Gilbert in Goering's jail cell, on the night of April 18, 1946, that Goering offered what became a famous observation on mass psychology: "Why, of course, the people don't want war," he said. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in Englad nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

Gilbert remarked that in a democracy the people have a say in the decision to got to war.

"Oh, that is all well and good," Goering replied, "but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

The Complacency of Sentimental Education

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.

It's Time to Homeschool College

For decades I've been carrying a message from John Holt that has really come home to roost now that my children are college age: Our oldest has graduated college; our middle child hated college, left, and is working instead; our youngest starts college this fall. Plus I've been advising and consulting parents about how to get their nontraditionally educated children into college since the eighties. A popular speech of mine that we turned into booklet in the early nineties was titled: "Teenage Homeschoolers: College or Not?" wherein I argued against going to college just because you are 18 and can do so. I argued there must be better reasons for going than "because I can." But the message of John's that echoes more today than ever for me is this: college is among the chief enslaving institutions of America.

When Holt said this I believe he was thinking about graduates who spent time and money on degrees to work in fields they no longer enjoy but are now trapped by their mortgages and loans into staying. Now this critique is gaining traction outside the circle of alternative schooling, probably because the cost of higher education is so out of alignment with its benefits. Nonetheless, the conventional wisdom is we must send our kids to college so they can make more  money than high school graduates do. James Altucher, a Wall Street Journal writer, claims: "in my view, the entire college degree industry is a scam, a self-perpetuating Ponzi scheme that needs to stop right now." Here are two of the seven reasons not to go to college that Altucher makes that take the money argument on directly:

3. The differential in lifetime income between a college graduate and a non-college graduate over a 45 year career is approximately $800,000 (read on).

4. If I put that $200,000 that I would've spent per child to cover tuition costs, living expenses, books, etc. into bonds yielding just 3% (any muni bonds) and let it compound for 49 years (adding back in the 4 years of college), I get $851,000. So my kids can avoid college and still end up with the same amount in the worst case.

There are other good reasons not to go to college that he presents and I recommend reading the full article.

Homeschooling's Liberal Judge and Other Piece's of Interest

The news in the Boston Globe was interesting:

Margaret H. Marshall, the first woman chief justice of the state’s highest court and the author of the landmark 2003 decision that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage, announced yesterday that she will retire this fall to spend more time with her ailing husband...

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.

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The Indian Express wrote an article about how the "teach 'em and test 'em" methods of Indian schooling are burning their students out and creating a new class of students, "school leavers," and "gappers." Now homeschooling, gap years, and alternative schools are finding more interest and support from Indian parents. Shikshantar: The Peoples' Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, is featured in this article.

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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.