John Holt: question or quiz?

John Holt talking about the differences between a question and quiz during a lecture in Spokane, WA from the early 1980's.

Once an Unschooler, alway an unschooler!

We were recently interviewed by a student taking her Masters in Journalism and when it was my oldest daughter's turn to speak she said something that really warmed my self directed heart.
When asked how she found high school, she replied:
"If my mother hadn't let me go I would have felt that I was not in charge of my learning. But being in school was my decision in and this way, I'm still un-schooling because I choose to go. I know that I can always come back home if I want to."
She talked about some of her friends who 'stress out' so much over marks and although her marks are excellent she sees them for what they are: just marks.
She says;
"I tell my friends that there are many ways to get into Uni or College if that is the goal. Marks are not the only way in. They say, "You're crazy!""

This is what I wanted all along; that my kids could understand that having good marks will not make your life happy/successful etc. That there is need to take responsibility for one's passage in this fantastic world; that dependency is the enemy of contentment.

Trained to them.

Remember when you tried to toilet train your kid?

You soon learned that they were training you-not the other way around. That's if you were respecting the organic evolution of things. It was on their schedule not yours.

Years later, it doesn't change.

But I'll admit it. I'm a slow learner. I've tried and sometimes still try to get my kids to do what I want them to do.

Even when I do this, I know it's wrong. It's the old saying again:"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

The more I parent, the more i am forced into seeing that my kids, (like me) resent being told what to do.

Bossing around my kids, trying to make them do math, or do chores just creates disaster.

I'm trusting that like with toilet training, they'll eventually come around to my good sense (tongue in cheek) but in the mean time, I'm left with my thoughts: how can people in a family (actually in the world) live together peacefully when we're all at different levels of maturity?

Self sufficiency

Well, when you read it in Time, you know that the winds of change have finally caught up with the tired and worn out.

The article, 'The Dropout Economy,' by Reihan Salam has it's finger on the pulse of a new way of thinking that's rapidly gaining momentum as more and more people take a look at the world around them and where it's heading, and decide they can do something different.

That's us, we who un-school. That's us; who make their own or do without. That's us, who don't think money is the only thing worth working for. That's us, who don't take kindly to being told what we should think, and how we should act and what we should value and emulate.

The author notes:

"Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality."

The point is, the jobs of today will no longer exist in the future. Kids that drop out already know this. Many of them are already preparing for the new working world that according to the author of the article will be one where,

"Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming."

It's already here. 'The times they are a changing'; it's organic nothing can stop it.

Comments Welcome!

play music video

Just a bit of creativity to share - thanks to Joanna for sharing with us!

Learning, Learning Everywhere!

When will they ever learn?
My daughter comes down the stairs, her face flushed with frustration. "What's wrong?" I ask.

It's her friend she tells me. She has spent over an hour explaining to her best friend of 7 years (they are both 11) about the idea that you don't need to be sitting at a desk to be learning.

"She keeps saying that if you aren't at a desk studying you're not learning," my poor daughter cries out in despair.

They agreed to disagree (and preserve their wonderful friendship) but I assure my daughter that her friend is far from being the only person who takes that view.

In fact, if my life long work hasn't been about exploding this myth I don't know what it is about!
What does it mean to learn? Let's look at a dictionary definition.
From http://www.thefreedictionary.com/learning

Learning is the act of gaining knowledge
Knowledge gained by study; instruction or scholarship
The act, process, or experience of gaining knowledge or skill.
Knowledge or skill gained through schooling or study.

As you can see from the definitions, learning at a desk (schooling) is only one way of gaining knowledge.
Learning happens all the time, everywhere. We can not not learn. We might learn good things, or bad things but we will learn.

Gaining knowledge can be done by active study anywhere; it can be a process of becoming 'aware of' through frequent observation it can happen watching tv, going on a hike and observing, reading a book, talking with people, exploring, experimenting, sitting under a tree and reflecting. Not doing anything can result in learning.

Another thought on learning:
We are going to be changed by what we learn.

http://webhome.idirect.com/~kehamilt/psydef5.html

Learning is a process by which experience or practice results in a relatively permanent change in behaviour or potential behaviour

You are not going to store the knowledge in your head for the sake of storing but for the sake of engaging in the world, hopefully contributing.

Comment, thoughts welcome!

bad boy!

Trouble in the Kingdom:Home Education Under Attack

While we in the 'provinces' enjoy a relatively non-intrusive home education environment our brothers and sisters in the UK are not faring as well.
You might have already heard of the vicious anti-home education campaign that's occurring over on the home island with the new measures being put in place to 'keep an eye' so to speak on home educating families. Why is this happening?

Kelly Green is a Canadian doing a great job of keeping us up to date on the struggle for civil rights that UK home educators are going through and she has created a space for their voices to be heard in North America on her kellygreenandgoldwordpress.com
She explains,

"The U.K. Department of Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) [How sinister does that sound?] is currently proposing legislation which will remove parental authority from biological/adoptive parents and legal guardians in order to transfer this authority to the state. English home educators have repeatedly made the point that the proposed legislation, stemming from the discredited Badman Review on Elective Home Education (June 2009), will make the state the parent of first resort rather than last resort (as is the case with children taken into care).

....These changes will affect all English families.....the government has so successfully manipulated the mainstream media with Badman’s cooked statistics on child abuse, many people in the general public have come away with the impression that home educated children are at higher risk of abuse than children who attend normal schools.

....Thousands of home educators have been doing whatever they can. They have written and signed record-breaking numbers of petitions, contacted their MPs, blogged, started Facebook groups, participated in mass lobbies of Parliament, lobbied the House of Lords, created video documentaries, and prepared countless documents. More than 5000 responded to the DCSF consultation on the Badman proposals. The government promised that it would take these responses into consideration before it proposed any changes to legislation.

The consultation responses have never been published, but anecdotal evidence suggests that they were almost universally opposed to the Badman proposals. Nevertheless the government has drafted drastic changes to legislation regarding home education, changes which are based on those very proposals.

.....To summarize these changes very briefly, if the bill were to pass as proposed parents would no longer have the power to decide how their children will be educated. If they wish to educate their children at home, they will need permission from the state. Local authorities will be able to deny this permission on virtually any grounds they choose, and if permission is once denied, then it may be denied for all time. No second chance, no appeal.

Registration will not be compulsory, but parents who do not register their children (that is, request permission from the local authorities) run the risk of having their children automatically ordered to attend school.

Worst of all, if the family complies with these demands, they will still be forced to allow local authorities to inspect their homes and interrogate children as young as five years old for up to four hours at a time with no parent or trusted adult present. Parents who object to this or who refuse to allow their children to be questioned alone by local authorities education officers know that the local authorities can use their refusal as grounds to order the children to attend school."

In Canada where we're sitting comfortably it would behoove as to pay attention to the persecution going on over there and consider how we can lend a hand.
Thorsten Wetzig is a home-educating parent who has lived in the UK and now resides in Canada. He has observed that one very important way to further the cause and help home educators in the UK is by being open and public about how we home educate here in Canada.

To quote Wetzig: "In my eyes a major issue in the UK is that the Home-Education (HE) groups are pretty closed; at least less open than in Canada. It was not an easy thing for us to come in contact with homeschoolers in UK when we arrived......So what we could do from here is to show the British Home Schooling families how we do HS here in Canada and what we do and that we don't lock out the public. This is nothing we can force. It is a long lasting process and there is still lots of fear amongst UK Homeschoolers to come together with public and the government. Just my experience." 

In the majority of countries, including the UK and Germany (from where Wetzig hails and where home education is strictly verboten!) universal public schooling is one of the golden achievements of society. I don't disagree.

People in impoverished countries, or barbaric countries where women are still not allowed to get educated, would sell their souls to the devil in order to go to school and get a chance to improve their lives.

But we are not in those countries; we have alternatives. Doesn't it follow that being in a safe situation as we are, it behooves as to be more visible about the many ways that people can learn? We need to actively challenge this lack of public education and fear in a non-confrontational way.

Perhaps North Americans can help the UK by profiling our higher vis-ability through film, conferences, u tube, main stream publications and so on reaching out to the UK powers that be and general public there to say, "Hey. We're normal folks!"
Your comments and thoughts welcome!

Conformists and High School exams

"His practical sense extended to university admissions. Thode did not like the trend that saw only grade 13 examination results as the criteria for admission to university. "By continuing to require higher and higher performance in such exams," he said, "we will soon reach the level where we cut out some of our most imaginative people, students who perhaps are non-conformists but, once they find themselves, will leave many of the others far behind. I can think of Churchill and Einstein as examples."

Harry Thode, McMaster University President, 1961-1972
source: Zack, Martin and Lee. Harry Thode: Scientist and Builder at McMaster University, McMaster University Press, 2003

Pushing our kids away

When my sister and her husband took a week long trip to Mexico without their two and a half year old, it got me thinking about how often we hear society's message that in order to have a 'real vacation' we need to be away from our kids. Like, only with the kids out of the way, tucked safely in bed, or at someone's house, can the fun really begin.

It got me thinking further about how fast we are to 'push' our kids away, convinced that this will 'toughen' them up, teach them 'resilience,' teach them to be independent and capable.

The danger with this way of this way of thinking is that we end up creating a situation that is the opposite of what we set out to do.
If the child is not ready and we force premature separation, we are likely to end up with a kid that is anxious and fearful.

It is also hard on a mother who goes against her instincts: she suffers separation anxiety and feelings of guilt.
Timing is everything. As for me,I look forward to vacationing with my entire family this summer, and view this as a time for relationship enriching.