Compulsory Miseducation

I've been trying to get back to reading, which was near impossible whilst drugged out on the painkillers, and have restarted the book 'Compulsory Miseducation' by Paul Goodman. Published in the 1960s and is a criticism of the formal schooling system, as it was in America at this time. I'm only a few chapters in, but thought these few sections worth quoting:

(on High School 'dropouts'

"..Numerically far more important than these overt drop-outs at sixteen, however, are the children who conform to schooling between the ages of six to sixteen or twenty, but who drop out internally and day-dream, their days wasted, their liberty caged and scheduled. And there are many such in the middle class, from backgrounds with plenty of food and some books and art, where the youth is seduced by the prospect of money and status, but even more where he is terrified to jeapardize the only pattern of life he knows"

And on learning to read:

"A great neurologist tells me that the puzzle is not how to teach reading, but why some children fail to learn to read. Given the amount of exposure that any urban child gets, any normal animal should spontaneously catch on to that code. what prevents? It is almost demonstrable that, for many children, it is precisely going to school that prevents - because of the school's alien style, banning of spontaneous interset, extrinsic rewards and punishments. (In many under privaliged schools, the IQ steadily falls the longer they got to school.)Many of the backward readers might have had a better chance on the streets."

Finding your work

I've currently found myself in the situation where I am reading around 4 or 5 books at the same time. No this isn't my usual scatty 'where-did-I-put-that-book-nevermind-I'll-start-another-one' behaviour, but a pleasant side effect of ordering too many books from Amazon, them all arriving within days of each other, and me not being able to resist peeking into each new arrival.

There's something truly wonderful about receiving a book in the post. In my imagination the books are individually wrapped in brown parcel paper and tied with string, smelling of exotic libraries in foreign places.

In reality they appear in a dull-looking padded envelope sandwiched in between bills and junk mail, and mostly they smell of the sorting office floor where they've probably been kicked around a bit.

But at least our regular postman is considerate enough to knock on the door and pass them over in person, a huge improvement on the relief postman who will try and stuff anything forcibly through our rather narrow letterbox. If on the rare occasion we are actually out, our lovely postman will carefully place the packages in the porch behind our green recycling bin. Sometimes I don't notice them there and have the surprise of finding them a day or two later when I'm not expecting them. It's almost as good as finding a ten pound note in a pocket that you didn't know you had, except that the latter is such a rare occurence that I don't believe it has ever happened to me.

One of the books I've just finished is John Holt's Freedom and Beyond. I'd like to say it's a beautifully written, eloquent examination of educational philosophy, but I'm not that posh and actually it's not always that well written (but who am I to criticise the acclaimed Master?). It does however make some very interesting points (in between the grumpy-old-man-bemoaning-the-state-of-society ramblings) and there is certainly lots of food for thought. Some of the issues I'm sure have already been covered in his other books; I have no idea in which order his books were written, but there is a great deal of overlap between them in terms of subject matter. A large proportion of this book is devoted to discussing Schooling and Poverty (plus a further chapter on Deschooling and the Poor) which make some pretty damning accusations against the American education system. These accusations are a common theme in most of his books, though there are occasions when he strangely holds up aspects of the English Education System as an example of better practice. I'm not so sure this would apply today.

Here is a quote from the book in which Holt is agreeing with the arguments of James Herndon (How to Survive in Your Native Land) :

'...no one can find his work, what he really wants to put all of himself into, when everything he does he is made to do by others. This kind of searching must be done freely or not at all.'

Sometimes you find someone says something that says exactly what you would wish to say if you found the words to say it.

Learning all the time...

John Holt's book 'Learning all the time' arrived in the post today, and as if to reaffirm some of its content my children have been happily learning all day.

At least I assume they are learning. It's a difficult thing to quantify, but just from observing them (as discretely as I can) I can almost watch the cogs turning, each time leading to a new discovery or a new question.

dd1 (4) today discovered some magnetic letters and shapes that I'd acquired from our local 'Swap Shop'. They'd been in the footwell of our car for 3 weeks, first in a box with a lid, then in the box as the box lid got stood on(!), and then finally, when the box was used first as an impromtu plate and then a notebook, they just got left strewn across the footwell. Feeling diligent today (and aware of the rapidly deteriorating state of the inside of my car) I scooped them up into a perfumed 'nappy sack' and brought them indoors.

Dd1 showed some interest, so I left her with them, not sure exactly what she wanted them for. She picked out a few and quickly found something to stick them on - the metal cupboard door under our kitchen sink. I don't know if I've ever 'taught' her anything about magnets and magnetic things, but I guess she'd just absorbed the information somehow. With the bag (and another box of magnetic letters that we found) she started to make a tower up the cupboard of the magnetic animals/objects, swapping them around. First it was the house on top of the sheep on top of the ....and so on. She talked all the time, not for my benefit, just as if to explain to herself what she was doing and why. Next she made a tower up the cupboard door of the magnetic letters. Sometimes she stopped and asked me what a particular letter was (I was in the kitchen, making lunch). She was particularly fascinated with the 'i' and the 'j' letters because they had joining plastic between the 'dot' and the 'stick' part of the letter.
'Hmm...' she said about the letter j,'this one is the same, but it's got a curly bit on it'.
I said 'yes that's 'j' for jump'. We thought a little more about other words that began with 'j'. She suggested a word.' Yes, jug that's a good word.'
'No, not jug she replied junk' . I had misheard her.
'Ah like junkbot', I said. Junkbot is the name of a game on the Lego website, where the player has to move bricks to assist the 'junkbot' in completing his task. It's a popular game with her brothers.
'Yes, but it's not junkbox, not box like a box', she emphasised. 'It's bot. Junkbot.'
'That's right, Junkbot. Because it's a robot that carries junk', I said.
We laughed as at that moment the dog sneaked in and stole one of the letters. Look I said, ' he's stolen the letter that begins his name. 'He's got j for Jack. What a clever dog'.
It was true. I took the 'j' from his mouth and put it back in the box.

Learning beyond the classroom:education for a changing world

The above is the title of a book by Tom Bentley that I stumbled upon accidentally while browsing on Amazon. It arrived a few days ago ahead of all the other 'home education' books that I've ordered and today I managed to get a swift look at a few pages.

I know nothing about the author, but just from the introduction I feel the book might have a few nuggets to interest a home educator. While he is primarily looking at how education within the current school system can be improved so that children become fully functioning adults within society, he seems to be only a few steps away from the conclusions that some home educators come to: that school can be for some children a pointless experience and for others an outright damaging experience.

Here is a quote from the introduction:

'At the heart of the argument is the recognition that learning can take place in any situation, at any time, and that to improve the quality of education we must overcome the historical mistake of confusing formal, school-based instruction with the whole of education. This does not mean that learning is easy. Developing understanding and the capacity to thrive is challenging and difficult, and to do so successfully requires discipline, rigour and consistent effort. But if we continue to focus our efforts to improve the abilities of young people on the institutions which contain them, we will soon reach the limits of progress. If we want a quantum leap in education performance, we must be prepared to think more radically, and to develop young people's capacity to learn in society, rather than at one remove from it'

he continues later..

'Young people are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with the wisdom of ages. From the earliest age they begin to convert their experience into assumptions and theories about the world. Their learning should incorporate and reflect these assumptions, and challenge them to become deeper and more sophisticated. But too often, school-based instruction encourages them to place what they learn in a narrowly-bounded category, failing to give them the means with which to compare it to the other assumptions and experiences that make up their world view. Overcoming this failure is partly a question of good teaching, but it also depends on direct experience: the chance to test out formal knowledge in a range of circumstances, to observe other people using such knowledge in varied and valuable ways, and to learn how conflicting perspectives can be reconciled.'








Recently I've been discussing autonomous education with several home educators. I say, recently, but it's a recurring topic, particularly at our fortnightly pub evenings. While some of us - including me - lurch from autonomous to a more controlled/controlling form of home education, there are others who are so firmly convinced of it's benefits, that they have wholeheartedly taken on an autonomous approach.



At the Museum


Personally my gut instinct tells me that an autonomous approach to education is right, is natural, is surely what must work best. After all, what better way for a child to learn than by following his/her own interests, developing at their own pace, learning things when they need to, because they need to. I should, in theory, be nothing more than a facilitator for my children's education. But - and there's always a BUT - I'm not sure how much it works in practice for us.

Chalk drawing 'bugs' on our

front path one evening

There are periods of frustration and doubt, fears of how I might be failing my children, when I feel the need to impose some sort of educational regime. This is usually as a result of an encounter with an overenthusiastic parent and their 'genius' child(ren). I call all children who apparently have more knowledge than my children in key areas a 'genius'. I'm guessing this is more due to my own insecurities and the need to label these children with something that excuses my children for their 'lack' of knowledge. Anyway, for whatever reasons, the doubts flow. 'What about maths???! What about spelling?!!! If so and so's child can convert digital to analogue time, knows their 9 time table and can draw a dodecahedron, then why can't mine?

So I panic and we lurch into some brief period of formal education and lots of resistance. Fortunately the panics seem to be getting further apart, so I guess that must be a good sign, yes? Alternatively it might just mean I'm beyond caring anymore! Well, whatever, the kids are always much calmer when we're 'autonomously educating'. I'd like to say I'm more relaxed about it too, but I'm not so sure. Underneath all those years of formal education nibble away at my new-found beliefs. After all these years I'm still deschooling...

Making a 'fish' from empty cups-->