Valedictorian Says Goodbye to Standardized Schooling

A month ago I spoke at the AERO conference in Albany, NY and I spent some of my time with my friend John Gatto. It is always stimulating to hear John's thoughts however, despite John's fame and following, I often get the feeling at events like this that we're preaching to the choir and that those who are in a position to make, or at least serioiusly support, the changes being presented at alternative education events never attend or simply dismiss such educators as nuisance outliers. For instance, I met a superintendent from Michigan who not only sponsored a talk by Gatto at his school, but tried to implement some of John's ideas in his district. The superintendent nearly lost his job in the ensuing brouhaha, as Gatto's comments and ideas upset more parents, teachers and administrators than excited them about making changes to their school.

So I was pretty amazed to read the following in a high school valedictory speech, given by Erica Goldson at the Coxsackie-Athens High School (NY) graduation ceremony. Ms. Goldson is clearly influenced by the work of Gatto and other education outliers, giving me hope that the message of self-determination and social consciousness that is embedded in those writings are actually being heard beyond the small alternative schooling community. As John Holt noted in the first issue of Growing Without Schooling magazine (August, 1977): "We who do not believe in compulsory schooling, who believe that children want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it without much coercion or interference, are surely not more than 1% of the population and perhaps much less than that... This does not trouble me any more, as long as those minorities of which I am a member go on growing." Ms. Goldson provides evidence that our numbers are slowly growing beyond our homeschooling/alternative schooling enclaves. Here is an excerpt from her speech that I hope you'll enjoy.

 Some of you may be thinking, "Well, if you pass a test, or become valedictorian, didn't you learn something? Well, yes, you learned something, but not all that you could have. Perhaps, you only learned how to memorize names, places, and dates to later on forget in order to clear your mind for the next test. School is not all that it can be. Right now, it is a place for most people to determine that their goal is to get out as soon as possible.

I am now accomplishing that goal. I am graduating. I should look at this as a positive experience, especially being at the top of my class. However, in retrospect, I cannot say that I am any more intelligent than my peers. I can attest that I am only the best at doing what I am told and working the system. Yet, here I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer - not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition - a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.

John Taylor Gatto, a retired school teacher and activist critical of compulsory schooling, asserts, "We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness - curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids into truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then. But we don't do that." Between these cinderblock walls, we are all expected to be the same. We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.
H. L. Mencken wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that "the aim of public education is not to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States." (Gatto)

Unschoolers Will Not Learn To Do Things They Don't Want To Do

I think the unschooling segment I appeared on with the Yablonski/Biegler family on The Good Morning America TV show probably caused more heat than light today. There were so many important points to make—schooling is not the same as education, lack of curriculum is not lack of instruction, how and why different scopes and sequences for learning work—but, in the total 4 minute segment, it was all I could do to mention that children are natural learners from birth. As you can see, today’s interview didn’t have the negative edge of yesterday’s presentation, so at least that’s an improvement.

But yesterday's damage is done; unschooling is just a version of hookey that produces uneducated kids to those viewers, not a genuine way to help children learn and, as the host kept implying, it should be more regulated. If only we could have spoken about how kids can do serious work without being coerced into doing so, how learning can be rich and non-linear when it occurs outside school, how unschooled kids fare in college and the world of work. There are plenty of books and videos and studies we could have discussed, but instead it all got bogged down in the refrain, "Isn't it the job of the parent to teach the child to do things that they don't want to do?" What a negative way to think about learning and work: "I have to do things I don't want to do only because someone with power over me tells me I should." So much for self-starters, questioners, think-out-of-the-box employees; no, according to this concept we want to primarily educate our children to become adults who Obey. The world is full of opportunities that teach us how we must sometimes do things we don't want to do in order to accomplish something we do, so I don't think that's a lesson parents, or schools, need to endlessly drill into kids. I think the job of parents is to show how joy for life and love of learning can be sources of discipline and hard work, not fear, bribery and misery. Children do help out with chores around the house, cooking, and more without bullying them into it. In fact, I read about a study that shows altruism is inherent in children as young as 18 months; kids really want to join in and help and we can work with that ability instead of quashing it so they'll only help when we command them to do so. There's much more to say on this topic, but I'll get off my soap-box now.

On another note:

I recently listened to a podcast entitled John Holt: Libertarian Outsider, by Jeff Riggenbach. It is an interesting portrayal of Holt’s work, with some excellent quotes from John’s books, particularly Freedom and Beyond. Sponsored by the Mises Institute, the 20-minute presentation often makes John seem like Captain Ahab, pursuing the education whale with monomaniacal intensity. As a result, Riggenbach neglects to mention Holt’s other causes and interests, such as music, fiction and ecology, but this is a minor matter. If you want to learn more about John’s work and speculate about why Holt didn’t become a “capital L Libertarian,” as John used to say or, as Riggenbach notes, a “Movement Libertarian,” this is a good place to start.



New Research Supports John Holt's Views About Learning

One of the core ideas of John Holt’s approach to education is that children are good at learning. John asserted in the early sixties, often and clearly, that children are natural learners and that adult interference in their attempts to learn, often through uninvited teaching, inhibits children’s learning. This idea continues to be met with skepticism as most adults believe not much is going on with babies and young children; they are considered to be silly giggle machines incapable of clear, deep thought. Indeed, I must admit my dismay as I read more and more from both homeschoolers and schoolteachers that they worry how children aren’t ready for kindergarten or that they must formally teach children how to talk and walk. Why is it that the more educated we become as a society, the less we trust our innate abilities to learn? Further, with so much emphasis being placed on getting children “ready for school” at ever-younger ages—preschool playgroup consultants could become a new market—I applaud every parent who decides to let their children play instead being plugged into an early enrichment program.

An article in The NY Times (Aug. 16, 2009) about current research done on how babies learn confirms what John wrote nearly fifty years ago and should give heart to parents and teachers who want to help children learn in their own ways.

Alison Gopnick, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of The Philosophical Baby, writes, “The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.

New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.”

Gopnick cites her own and others’ research that demonstrate that babies and children up to five years old have “capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic [that] allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them. Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet.”

The important thing Gopnick points out, as Holt did, is that babies and young children learn best from the people, places, and things that surround them, not from formal lessons. She writes, “The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cell phones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)

But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

A very important aspect of this research is that preschool-age children have developing, flexible brains that can’t focus on just one thing to the exclusion of all else around them—the opposite of what school expects from kids—and that this openness and curiosity are what feed their brains. Gopnick writes, “Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But… children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative. …Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.”

It is refreshing to know that even more research backs up the idea of giving children free-range in thought and action, though it seems this information never gets a fair hearing in schools or politics since we keep making policies in those areas that lock and track children into specific learning at younger and younger ages. Research and theories that confirm the “babies are smart” idea existed before John wrote of course, but, like Holt’s ideas, they never get serious attention from educators. One of John’s favorites was a wonderful book by Millicent Shinn, The Biography of a Baby, written in 1900.

If you’re interested in reading Holt’s perspective on this issue, I suggest reading the chapter “Learning Without Teaching” in Teach Your Own, and John’s books How Children Learn and Learning All the Time. In fact, John wrote Learning All the Time, his last book, to be, in his own words, “a demonstration that children, without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in exotic, specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will, and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we call the Basics.”

International Research Conference on Homeschooling and Unschooling

The countries in red are where homeschooling is legal. Maps created by Azucena Caballero.

On Nov. 4 – 6, 2009, I participated in a most unusual education conference, a joint effort by the education and sociology departments of the Universidad Nacional of Colombia in Bogota. In addition to faculty and students, the organizers invited local homeschoolers to attend. The result was a great mix of theory and practice for all who participated.

Like most Americans I successfully completed years of Spanish in high school and college and therefore cannot speak nor read it. But my hosts provided me with several able translators and I was able to appreciate each presentation as a result. I’m certain lots of subtle issues got lost in translation, but I hope you’ll enjoy what I was able to capture.

Many of the professors I met at the Universidad Nacional were very interested in how children learn outside of school and how parents and other adults can help them. They were not afraid to consider alternatives to school for children either. At the end of the conference there was a plenary session where some teachers attacked or showed their dismay about homeschooling and the head of the education department, Dr. Fabio Valencia, defended homeschooling, saying words to the effect that “we can learn from those who are on the frontier of education.”  I’d like to share some of the international research and ideas I garnered from this event. Unfortunately, I also learned how homeschooling is under serious attack in parts of the world, so not all the research news was upbeat.

The United Kingdom

Dr. Paula Rothermel presented many interesting thoughts about homeschooling throughout the conference. She was particularly helpful to me for understanding the horrible situation British homeschoolers are currently facing. Graham Badman has made scandalous accusations in his report to Parliament about homeschoolers, such as claiming homeschoolers are two times more likely to abuse children than non-homeschoolers, a statistic that is hotly contested but nonetheless printed by some newspapers. Badman also remarked that homeschooling mothers are likely to have Munchausen’s by Proxy syndrome.

I recently learned that even though a Select Committee of Members of Parliament rejected the Badman report as ill-informed, the government is adopting Badman's recommendations anyway! Here is the proposed legislation: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmbills/008/10008.38-44.html

I will post more information about the situation in Great Britain as I learn about it. Search "Graham Badman" in YouTube.com and you will find many responses from homeschoolers and support groups to the Badman Report. This Facebook page, Stop the UK Government from stigmatising homeschoolers!, has current information.

Norway

In one of our large group discussion sessions Dr. Christian Beck, from Norway, spoke about the small homeschooling population ithere, about 400 families, and he expressed concern about the tightly knit social lives of some of these families. However, he also noted the many places and people homeschoolers visit and use for educating that have little or no connection to schools and how these same places and people can be used by students, particularly minorities, to supplement or replace school attendance. In his formal presentation Dr. Beck used data from the international PISA test score surveys to show that better schooling results from less schooling; Ivan Illich often made this claim not only about education, but also about health care and modern institutions in general. Dr. Beck showed those countries with less economic development, such as Finland, and therefore less funding for schooling, scored significantly better on PISA than more developed countries, such as the US.

Mexico

Illich’s name and work came up often during the conference, most powerfully for me when Dr. Braulio Hornedo Rocha spoke. Braulio lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the same place where Ivan Illich lived for much of his life. Braulio operates Universidad Virtual Alfonsina and his presentation about education and the homeschooling situation in Mexico (it is illegal) was both funny and poignant. He incorporated the Pink Floyd video of “The Wall” to make his point about the need for educational options, and despite the video being in English everyone understood what was being said. Music and pictures are truly universal languages. Braulio was fond of saying, “We need more poetry and less police,” a point he made beautifully in his presentation.

Spain

Spain was particularly well represented at the conference, which is a bit surprising since its homeschooling movement is so young. Dr. Madalen Goiria, a law school professor, spoke about the history of homeschooling in Spain and noted it began when my colleague, Elsa Haas, translated articles from Growing Without Schooling magazine and published them, along with her own and other’s observations, in Aprender Sin Escuela in 1991. Dr. Carlos Cabo provided an overview of homeschooling in Spain, using quantitative analysis to support his findings. Cabo noted that religious views were the least popular reason why people chose to homeschool in Spain, and the vast majority of Spanish homeschoolers cited multiple reasons for homeschooling. Sorina Oprean is a homeschooling mother from Romania who lives in Spain and is a founder of ALE: Asociacion Para Libre Educacion. Oprean is a contributor to a book about Spanish homeschooling, Educar en Casa, dia a dia, and her presentation focused on what individual families do at home with their children. The maps of homeschooling around the world and in Europe that I’ve reproduced above are featured on the back cover of the book.

Canada

Dr. Blane Despres and Dr. Carlo Ricci, both from Canada, are also, like Dr. Rothermel, homeschoolers. Despres presented a very humane and empathic talk about how schools and homeschoolers need to be more understanding of each other and Dr. Ricci participated in a panel discussion from his home in Canada via Skype. I thought it a modern day irony that though Dr. Ricci and I had corresponded via email from our homes, we never “met” until I travelled to Bogota and spoke with him face-to-face virtually.

Colombia

Several of the moderators and presenters at the conference were homeschooling mothers and fathers, including the conference organizer. Though one of the Universidad Nacional professors didn’t like the idea of parents teaching their own children, he was very taken by the idea of children teaching children and building places where this could happen. This is an idea Holt envisioned happening through homeschooling, the creation of new places for children to learn that are flexible, individualized, and child-friendly. Holt’s experience showed him it could not happen in conventional schools, so he turned to homeschooling to see if this, and other opportunities for learning that school denies children, could occur. Perhaps this is an area where homeschoolers and schools can work together?

I presented the final speech at the conference, “The Challenges Homeschooling Presents to Social Science Research,” which you can download and read by visiting the Downloads page and clicking on the article title.

The conference organizer, Erwin Fabian Garcia Lopez, and his partner Alejandra Jaramillo, are also unschoolers and they connected me with local unschoolers/homeschoolers. The homeschoolers I met in Colombia, like most homeschoolers I know, were more interested in what they could do with their children instead of debating educational theories. We spent hours talking about how children learn outside of school, the emotional issues homeschooling causes for adults and children, and how school and government policies affect their daily lives. They were particularly impressed with how many materials homeschoolers in the US have available to them, and I wonder how long it will take before Colombia hosts a homeschooling conference with vendors. Though small in number now, Colombian homeschoolers feel their numbers are growing and some traveled from cities far from Bogota just to meet other homeschoolers. The legal situation is similar to what it was in the United States in the late seventies: homeschooling is not illegal, but it is not common, so many people think it is illegal or just weird.

When the conference was over I was taken to a homeschooler’s home in Chia, about an hour outside Bogota, where at least forty of us gathered for a fantastic meal in a beautiful home. We were treated to two musical concerts; one by six teens playing songs by Colombian composers using a variety of guitars and a cello; the other by younger kids who played percussion instruments and sang songs that had everyone rocking.

Colombia struck me as a country trying to emerge from a difficult, violent period by moving forward with strong civic purpose. There was a lot of construction in Bogota, particularly for their innovative mass transit system, the Transmilenio, that should reduce car use in Bogota. Indeed, in 2003, Bogota held the world’s largest Car Free Day and it was so popular it has become an annual event. Perhaps Colombians’ willingness to create new uses for public spaces, to rethink old institutions and habits and to nurture new ones, is spilling over to their conception of schooling.

NOTE:

A Colombian unschooler I met, Viviana Ordonez, writes an interesting blog in Spanish. It can easily be translated into English using “Google translate” at the top right of the page.