Make Math Illegal

John Holt wrote, “I suspect that many children would learn arithmetic, and learn it better, if it were illegal.” As an adult who has come to enjoy math after a youth filled with hatred and shame about the subject, I see the wisdom in Holt’s words. I probably would have arrived at this place sooner in my life if I hadn’t had to spend so much time pretending to comprehend math for my classes, so much time memorizing “math facts” that were meaningless to me, and so much time avoiding math during my years after high school because I thought I couldn’t do it. In my twenties I was fine with basic arithmetic and double-entry bookkeeping, but anything beyond that, such as number lines and exponents, and I would run away as quickly as possible from them.

Now I enjoy math, because I see how it works in things that interest me. This is not something a teacher in school showed me but something I realized as I grew older and learned more about math through my interests in literature, science, puzzles and magic. However, the long, non-linear path to learning I took for math does not fit in the curricular model of conventional schooling, and so we force our children into the same curricular charade of learning I, and many others, endured. Somehow I managed to pass my courses with, I think, only one bout of summer school for math during my school years, but I promptly forgot about all mathematics since I had no reason to remember or use any of it other than the threat of failure. Once that threat passed, all the algebra, geometry and other math I studied passed out of my head too.  This is a pretty common occurrence among schooled people, but society is in complete denial about it. Instead we reason, “If we teach it, they will learn it, and passing a test proves they learned it and we’re good teachers.” We hold onto this belief despite evidence in all our lives to the contrary. All one has to do is look at the large numbers of high school and college graduates in the United States who have successfully completed three or more mandatory years of a foreign language and compare them to those who well-remember or use any of the languages they studied once they’ve graduated school.

While thinking about unshooling math, I was pleased to read Peter Gray’s recent Freedom to Learn blog about math, When Less is More: The Case for Teaching Less Math in Schools. In it, in addition to some good resources, he tells the story of L. P. Benezet, a superintendent of schools in Manchester, New Hampshire. In1929 Benezet dropped teaching arithmetic until after fifth grade. According to Gray, “Benezet went on to argue that the time spent on arithmetic in the early grades was wasted effort, or worse. In fact, he wrote: "For some years I had noted that the effect of the early introduction of arithmetic had been to dull and almost chloroform the child's reasoning facilities." All that drill, he claimed, had divorced the whole realm of numbers and arithmetic, in the children's minds, from common sense, with the result that they could do the calculations as taught to them, but didn't understand what they were doing and couldn't apply the calculations to real life problems. He believed that if arithmetic were not taught until later on—preferably not until seventh grade—the kids would learn it with far less effort and greater understanding…. In sum, Benezet showed that kids who received just one year of arithmetic, in sixth grade, performed at least as well on standard calculations and much better on story problems than kids who had received several years of arithmetic training. This was all the more remarkable because of the fact that those who received just one year of training were from the poorest neighborhoods—the neighborhoods that had previously produced the poorest test results.”

Unschoolers have long noted that having a longer scope for learning, even years, as this case demonstrates, is not a hindrance to children and actually confers many benefits. I think it is interesting that the children who were not taught math had teachers who were directed to spend time on “recitation,” a practice many parents use without knowing this label. According to Gray, this meant “The children would be asked to talk about topics that interested them—experiences they had had, movies they had seen, or anything that would lead to genuine, lively communication and discussion. This, he [Benezet] thought, would improve their abilities to reason and communicate logically. He also asked the teachers to give their pupils some practice in measuring and counting things, to assure that they would have some practical experience with numbers.”

There are many ways to approach learning math, we do not have to all use the standard drill. As the above shows, you can even more or less ignore math for years and not harm a child’s ability to calculate or learn higher math concepts. But, for some reason, many unschoolers worry about whether or not their children will learn math properly. There is some idea that the math curriculum is so logical, so necessarily step-by-step, and so demanding that it must be approached piece by piece in the most carefully orchestrated manner or the student will become helplessly lost. This is conventional wisdom that just isn’t true.

A teacher, Alison Blank, has created a neat type of online presentation called a prezi, posted below. Her prezi is entitled Math is not linear and I hope it will give you inspiration to consider other ways to think and learn about math. Blank writes from the perspective of a conventional school teacher (“To be clear, I am not advocating that students get to choose what they study any more than I would let five year olds [sic] choose what they eat. You still direct the class, but when possible, do it from behind the scenes by providing strategic problems.”) but her ideas can easily be adapted for use by homeschoolers, unschoolers, alternative schoolers, or autodidacts everywhere.

There are many scopes and sequences for learning math, many different entryways, and I look forward to sharing more in my next blog. I hope you’ll share some of your stories with me too!



Math is not linear on Prezi

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.



Unschooling on Good Morning America

ABC TV did a segment about Radical Unschooling on its news show, Good Morning America, and it was pretty negative. However, since response was so strong the producers decided to do more on the topic tomorrow. They have invited the Biegler/Yablonski family featured in the story to be interviewed live in the studio and I'll be chiming in from Boston via remote hookup. I'm told our segment will air around 8AM EST tomorrow.

“I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for four talks I’ll be giving in Portland, OR on March 20 (click the sidebar if you want more information about this engagement). I wanted to include some new videos and perspectives for these talks and I started rummaging through my files from my days with John Holt and found a bunch of video and cassette tapes of talks by John. I’ve started watching one, a four-hour VHS tape of John speaking to homeschoolers in Spokane, WA. I’m not sure of the date, I think it is 1983 or 1984, given references John makes to some of the kids who came into the office then. I hope someone who views this, or some of the other segments that will be posted, will remember at least the year. Let me know if you have any guesses or ideas that would help date this video.

I am about two hours into this video and I’ll certainly post more of it as I watch it and become more adept at extracting video from tape and then uploading it to the web. However, there are so many classic John Holt lines, and some surprising comments John makes, that I couldn’t wait any more to start sharing it with people. I think for much of the public there is a perception of John Holt as a wide-eyed radical who romanticized childhood. I hope this, and future clips, will show John as the quiet, plainspoken but deeply thoughtful man he was. This short segment also shows Holt’s deep empathy with children, a quality that is sorely lacking in all our discussions of education today. John’s analysis of how children struggle with pronouns is radical when you consider how few current day teachers would recommend, as John does, to leave the children alone and let them figure it out for themselves. Indeed, in my mind I hear a chorus of educators clamoring as to why they must intervene instead of following Holt’s advice:

“They will develop learning delays!”

“They’ll fall behind their class!”

“You are guilty of educational neglect because you should be making your children learn how to correctly use pronouns!”

Of course—and I see this in this particular clip—John could be quite passionate about certain things, in particular about how children learn and what parents and other concerned adults can do to help them learn. As you will hear John say, “I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

This particular lecture is in a setting John enjoyed being at: speaking with a group of parents and children in a comfortable setting. In much of the tape I’ve seen so far you can hear lots of babies babbling and children playing in the background and, often, John will stop speaking and comment on what he sees or hears from the children in the audience.  I also found cassettes of radio interviews John did with NPR and the BBC, as well as tapes John made of himself playing the cello or speaking in foreign countries. The cassette tapes are usually very good quality recordings, either professionally done or recorded by John himself, who was quite an audiophile. However, the video tapes aren't the greatest quality. Nonetheless, I decided to work with them to get them online because there just isn't much video of John and I hope people can look beyond the grainy images and scratchy sound to experience, or re-experience, John Holt and his observations about children. I look forward to sharing these with you as I move more of these recordings into digital formats.



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.