Reclaiming Independent Learning from the Education Economy
Being Different
Alternatives to Schools That Help People Learn
How Schooling Hinders Learning
Endnotes
The Education Emperor Has No Clothes: Ideas For Nurturing A Culture Of Learning
by Patrick Farenga
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In the eighteenth century it was not common to suggest that slavery was a sin against fellow human beings. In the nineteenth century it was not common to suggest that women deserved the same privileges of citizenship as men. In the twentieth century it is not common to suggest that children can learn without attending schools. All three are examples of how the cultural attitudes of a population influence not only their view of reality, but also create social structures that reinforce and perpetuate those views. Science, medicine, and law were used to keep slaves and women in their place until cultural attitudes towards these people changed; likewise, I think, we are in the midst of a gradual change in our perception of children. At the start of the twenty-first century some people are realizing that children are people--not little adults nor cute kids--but real people. Yes, children are often inexperienced, innocent, and have various needs that caring adults should address, but they are people nonetheless. As they are recognized as people, children, like slaves and women, will also be treated with respect and allowed more autonomy in their lives.
This is not a polemic for children's rights, but simply a statement that some parents and other concerned adults are working with children in ways that make them view children as people, rather than generic students in need of standardized education. By viewing children as people, as individuals, it becomes harder to classify them as we do in school: A student, B student, and so on down the line. It also becomes harder to teach them subject matter without regard to their emotions and interest in learning it; people usually don't like having their interests dictated to them by others, their time conscripted by outsiders, and their performance in areas they are forced into being judged in public. The community based life-long learning centers that this book proposes are one direction we can take to help humanize education, and grant a degree of respect and autonomy to children in one part of their lives--what they choose to study, to think about. Such centers can probably only come into being on a wide scale with some sort of major funding and legislative approval. However, as the growth of homeschooling and alternative schools demonstrate, one need not wait for the rest of the world to catch up before one can attempt to make the world a better place; the larger scale CCL-LLC concept is based on existing grassroots models that I will draw upon in this chapter.
The models and analysis I present are meant to be guidelines for people in and out of school to consider, though my examples are primarily from my experience as a homeschooling father for thirteen years, and a homeschooling activist for eighteen years. In any case, by starting from the premise of respect for children, and the expectation of getting respect back from children, the cultural attitudes and institutions one discovers for helping children learn and grow into responsible adults are radically different from what is developed when starting from the premise of educational need. As I participate in the CCL-LLC project I am making a conscious effort not to hijack the concept of community centered learning into serving as a vehicle for other agendas I feel are important: childrens rights, environmentalism, spirituality, gender equity, and so on. What I've learned from my eighteen years as a homeschooling activist is that we should be more concerned with growing the general movement, rather than managing the specifics of how each family or school implements the freedom such a movement gives them.
Homeschooling has grown to over a million children,1 not because it only appeals to cultural and religious conservatives, or only to cultural creatives and communards, but because it is broad enough to encompass a wide variety of rationales and approaches. John Holt envisioned the difficulties of such diverse groups working together, but also helped lay the path for their cooperation in 1977 when he published the second issue of Growing Without Schooling (GWS) magazine and wrote, "What is important is not that all readers of GWS should agree on [the reasons for a family to homeschool], but that we should respect our differences while we work for what we agree on, our right and the right of all people to take their children out of schools, and help, plan, or direct their learning in the ways they think best..."2 I hope the CCL-LLC concept will grow according to this same broad principle.
I hope to provoke the reader to reconsider the role our culture at large has in helping people learn, to provide a broad outline of conventional education assumptions that are challenged by existing alternative models, and to provide concrete examples that community-centered lifelong learning centers can emulate and expand upon. Most parents are homeschooling only to help their children learn best; they are rarely homeschooling to start a social movement or prove the effectiveness of a new educational approach. Nonetheless, simply by homeschooling every parent is demonstrating that there are many other places, people, and schedules to help children learn and grow besides those of school. Reclaiming independent learning from the education economy
Education has become big business in modern times. Personal expenditures by citizens on education, plus federal, state, and local tax expenditures, total many billions of dollars every year. I use the phrase "education economy" to denote expenditures of money we make in schools, as well as our contribution of personal time to participate in these institutions as part of the education economy. But the education economy does more than make us pay for educational opportunities, it attempts to determine what learning is valuable and worthy of funding and what is worthless. By turning education into a commodity that is purchased and sold publicly and privately and in need of regulation by the government, we have all but dismissed the value of learning we do of our own volition. The education economy disembeds learning as an integral part of our personal experience, and embeds learning in the larger social context of market forces. It has become incredibly difficult to critique the expansion of school into areas that used to be the responsibility of family, church, and community because we need something to fill the gaps these institutions are leaving. However, are these institutions withering on their own, or are they being pushed into disuse by the growing education economy? It is hard to say absolutely, but as any parent who wishes to teach their own children has discovered, it is obvious that the grasp of school is far stronger on family life than we think.
John MacKnight has pointed out that our institutions have seriously crossed the boundary from being in the service of individuals to being in the service of the economy: We say love is a need. Care is a need. Service is a need. Services meet needs. People are collections of needs. Society has needs. The economy should be organized to meet needs. In a modernized society where the major business is service, the political reality is that the central need is an adequate income for professional services and the economic growth they portend. The masks of love and care obscure this reality so that the public cannot recognize the professionalized interests that manufacture needs in order to rationalize a service economy. Medicare, Educare, Judicare, Psychocare are portrayed as systems to meet needs rather than programs to meet the needs of services and the economies they support. Removing the mask of love shows us the face of services who need income, and an economic system that needs growth.3 One of the steps community centered learning needs to take, in my mind, is one Ivan Illich has urged for decades: to study how the institution of education has disembedded learning from living, and to explore what proportion of institutional services to human activity is truly appropriate for people and communities to thrive. Aaron Falbel shows how Illich's thinking about education is inextricably linked to modern economics: Illich... links education with the notion of scarcity. He defines education as learning under the assumption of scarcity... By scarcity, Illich does not mean a temporary lack or shortage but a generalized condition or perception that things are of value in proportion to their rarity. Money is the most obvious scarce commodity. If money were abundant and freely available, it would cease to have economic value - it would become just paper. The same is true for abundant human activities that are rendered scarce: they become commodities. Learning, dwelling, working, walking, and healing become education, housing, jobs, transportation, and health care. Verbs are turned into nouns. These latter nouns are scarce and must be obtained or purchased from someone else. ...Thus education only appears when we feel a need to make sure that certain scarce knowledge is imparted. Knowledge that is abundant in the world is readily learnable and therefore needs no special arrangements.4 The economics of education dictate that since knowledge is scarce there must be winners and losers, high test scorers and low test scorers, and school is the mechanism for sorting them into their economic destiny. As Falbel notes, people are hungry in the U.S. today--not because there is a shortage of food (we discard billions of pounds of edible food annually) but because some people don't have the scarce money/jobs necessary to purchase it. Likewise, the economics of schooling attempts to determine who will reap the rewards of scarce knowledge and prevent uncredentialed but otherwise qualified people from gaining access to similar rewards. For instance, in New York City one cannot be a sanitation worker without a high school degree; in some retail stores, one cannot be considered for a job without having a two or four year college degree. Jobs that only in the past twenty-five years did not require any college degree--secretarial work, air traffic controllers, graphic design--now increasingly demand them. Community centered learning centers that view learning in human, rather than economic terms, can avoid this educational doctrine of survival of fittest. After all, it isn't credentials that ultimately matter in the work force, but demonstrable competence.
This does not mean that people using community centered learning will be non-participants in local, national, and international economies; all it means is that no one will be disqualified from access to these economies based on their educational credentials. Instead, performance tests, resumes, portfolios, work experience and recommendations, proof of completing specific courses needed for specific tasks, life experience credits, perhaps even assessment of computer simulations for certain tasks and functions, can be used in lieu of diplomas and standardized test scores. This is exactly how homeschooled children, and graduates of little-known alternative schools, gain entrance to college or work without traditional diplomas and degrees.5 One of the key differences between community centered learning and our current school system will be economics. Being different
Many parents choose alternative schooling because they hope their children will turn out differently by being treated and taught differently. For them, having children who march to the beat of a different drummer is desirable. However, many other parents who enroll their children in alternative education settings are concerned that they are depriving their children of future opportunity because they didn't learn certain things in certain ways. There is little evidence to support these fears: homeschoolers and alternative school graduates find work worth doing and get into selective colleges without special difficulty, as research and case histories have shown for decades. Further, the evidence demonstrates that gaining high marks and honors in school is no guarantee of high income and honors in adult life after school. What we, as parents and teachers, need to remember is that while we are important and have influence, we are not the sole determinants of how our children will grow. Children may grow to "be different" despite our efforts to make them conventional! How many radicals have children who grow up to be capitalists, and vice-versa? How many college professors have children who become carpenters, and vice-versa? There are no guarantees that schooling children in any particular way will make them turn into the adults we think they should be. What we can do as concerned adults is nurture and bond with our children as much as possible so that when they do grow in directions we don't expect they will take our admonishments, or encouragements, seriously, and love us as we love them through thick and thin.
Homeschoolers and alternative educators try to raise children in ways that are consonant with their shared beliefs, but that also put their beliefs into action. Homeschooling and community centered learning allow families to live and share their activism each day, not just after school and on weekends. A homeschooler from Vermont puts it this way: Letting lawmakers and school officials know that we're not satisfied with current educational systems and opportunities is important, but its also nice to be able to supply living proof of a better way. In activism expressed by lifestyle, we have begun to question the disproportionate amount of power our nation consumes by taking steps to supply our own. We have one solar panel so far....
Our family certainly isn't unique in this form of activism. I often read about homeschoolers who run home businesses, do home births and grow their own food. I also read a lot about modern-day homesteaders who also homeschool. Our country was most innovative during the era when its citizens were most independent; I'll be eager to see what happens with this next generation of independent activists!6 One need not move to rural areas to live an activist lifestyle, nor must one hold any activist beliefs to homeschool successfully. It is quite common to homeschool conventionally too. A public school teacher I met, also from Vermont, is a very traditional teacher who wanted his children to learn the public school curriculum, but at home. He does not use or believe in portfolio evaluations or other alternative education techniques; he simply had all three of his children use standard textbooks that he purchased and the children paced themselves through each text with Mom and Dad's help. His son earned a National Merit Scholarship using this method. Further, his kids completed their textbook assignments with plenty of time left in each day for independent study, group activities, and community service; the children did not become textbook grinds.
There is a great degree of latitude and possibility in homeschooling that community centered learning can build upon, but it will take courage to do it simply because it flies in the face of conventional school practice. For instance, though there is no biological clock that determines when one should learn to read, administrative directive, disguised as learning theory, dictates that children in public schools should read by age seven solely because they will otherwise fall behind the school schedule and be ridiculed by teachers and students. However, late reading is a common occurrence in homeschooling and alternative schools, particularly Waldorf schools. A researcher at the University of London Institute of Education studied one hundred homeschooling families and found that "learning to read 'late' is a feature of home education, at least for those children who have never been to school.... As long as children have the necessary pre-reading information processing skills, and these are crucial, we should not be too concerned about when they start reading. The trouble is that this does not fit in with school organization requirements..."7
Neil Postman notes how the concept of school-managed child development was created not by studying children developing in their communal surroundings, but by the preferences of schoolmasters. The stages of childhood, what we expect children to learn and at what ages, was determined and organized by how schoolmasters sequenced the curriculum for use in school. The point, he writes, "is that the mastery of the alphabet and the mastery of all the skills and knowledge that were arranged to follow constituted not merely a curriculum but a definition of child development. By creating a concept of a hierarchy of knowledge and skills, adults invented the structure of child development."8
Homeschoolers who do not use this structure of child development discover that children learn at widely varying rates. Some children who are labeled "learning disabled" in school lose that behavior when they learn outside of conventional school, indicating that, for some, the learning environment may be more toxic to learning than the child's genes.9 Like some homeschooling families, not all community centered life-long learning centers will adapt to the learner's schedule; conventional school schedules about what and when people should know things still appeal to many. Some learning centers will probably resemble existing schools, in the sense of having regularly scheduled classes and curricula, and many parents will continue to use them as they always have; other parents and children want formal school structure for some subjects, but not for all subjects. Other learning centers will resemble crafts shops; others will be like living rooms with lively discussions going on, or counseling centers with private rooms, or playgrounds for young children. The idea is to allow as much institutional flexibility for learning to occur as we can provide. This is happening already on a small scale in the homeschooling community; all the examples above can readily be discovered in most cities with homeschoolers.
Those who defend conventional schooling to the exclusion of other alternatives often ask, "How can society risk such flexibility in education? How do we know the children will turn out okay?." First, universal compulsory schooling is a modern experiment in the West; it only began about two hundred years ago in Prussia; in Eastern countries, China and India in particular, I have been told that compulsory schooling goes back at least a thousand years and was used to assure that each social caste kept its place in society. However, in the West families and communities have long raised and taught children in the milieu of work, ritual, and play, creating schools for limited times and purposes, not to mold and shape all children throughout their youth by force of law. Periclean Greece, Elizabethan England, and Colonial America are but three of many societies that did not force all children to attend school throughout their youth; yet the ad hoc and brief nature of their schooling in no way diminished the considerable cultural and intellectual achievements of these cultures. The question should really be, how can we continue to risk having an education system that is so inflexible?
Second, contrary to popular wisdom, school attendance is not vital to making money, living a good life, or becoming an intellectual. The list of well known millionaires who never attended college includes: Andrew Carnegie, Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic Airways), Horace Greeley (Founder, New York Tribune), Soichiro Honda (Honda automobiles), H. L. Hunt (oil tycoon), Ray Kroc (McDonald's), Dave Thomas (Wendy'92s), Adolph Ochs (Founder, New York Times) Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Steve Jobs (Apple Computer). Famous people who rarely or never attended school or college include Bertrand Russell, Germaine Greer, Florence Nightingale, Sean O'Casey, Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Woody Allen, Burt Lancaster, Jane Goodall, Jack London, Bobby Fisher, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Ansel Adams, and Isadora Duncan.10 Finally, studies of homeschooled children who are now adults in the United Kingdom and the United States show that they are well-adjusted citizens. Roland Meighan notes that one study of 53 adults who were homeschooled found that three-quarters of the sample had felt that being educated at home "had actually helped them interact with people from different levels of society... When asked if they would want to be educated at home if they had their lives over again, 96% replied Yes. ... Not one of the sample was unemployed or on welfare... and two thirds were married - the norm for the age group."11
Many stories published in a variety of homeschooling publications over the past twenty years have described what teens and young adults are doing after leaving their homeschool. Growing Without Schooling magazine contains a directory of "Grown Homeschoolers" willing to talk about their experiences, such as how some got into college--including Ivy League colleges--and how others found work they like without going to college. Alternatives to school that help people learn
Educators Raymond and Dorothy Moore began researching and proposing many types of cooperative arrangements between homes and school starting in the late 1950s. For instance, they created a flexible work-education program that encouraged schools to assign each child a number of hours during which he must perform some helpful service in the home.12 Based on their research, particularly in reading, the Moores openly questioned the wisdom of sending children to school at earlier ages and for longer periods of time, and they argued for delaying formal schooling. In 1976 Dr. Moore wrote: If the parents will provide warm, consistent, responsive care for the child under eight or ten, the child will usually receive a far better educational background than if he had gone to school at four, five, six, or seven. This is even more true for boys than for girls. ...[These children] become independent in the right sense. They are stable, highly motivated, and ready for school.13 The Moores' argument at this time focused on children going to public or private school at later ages, but in the past twenty years they have become some of homeschooling's most ardent and articulate supporters. I mention their work as an example of how schools and families can mutually benefit by doing things differently, but, sadly, to suggest to a school that delaying entrance until age eight or ten, or to consider chores around the home educational, is to court a reputation as being "odd." If the Moores' ideas of home and school cooperation sound ridiculous to mainstream school people, is it any wonder that John Holt's ideas, particularly that contemporary education is antithetical to learning, appear "beyond the fringe" to them? Fortunately, some educators and many parents have found that Holt's ideas about learning could easily be put into practice and the positive results have been reinforced by a growing number of people considering homeschooling since Holt's death in 1985.14
Building on the ideas of Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich, John Holt went far beyond delaying school or formal academics and maintained that school may not always be the best place for children. He sought to help create places other than school for children to live and learn throughout their youth. Holt wrote about and testified before state legislatures that schools would be much better off cooperating with homeschoolers rather than trying to shut them down, if only for schools to see what other possibilities for learning exist. [The homeschooling movement is] in effect, though certainly not by design, a laboratory for the intensive and long-range study of children's learning and of the ways in which friendly and concerned adults can help them. It is a research project done at no cost, of a kind for which neither the public schools nor the government could afford to pay.15 In his work at Growing Without Schooling from 1977 to 1985 Holt provided examples of how people can use community resources to learn and find work worth doing without traditional credentials, as well as earn school credentials with cooperative school districts without causing major disruptions to school operations. Today, several school districts are listed in Growing Without Schooling's Cooperative School District directory; there are other school officials who don't want to be listed, but who do cooperate with homeschoolers in their districts. Sometimes this cooperation is as minimal as letting a child take one class per semester; other times it can be as much as granting a child a local high school diploma, or having the school provide access to tutors and materials on mutually agreed upon terms. David Guterson, in Family Matters, describes at length how some cooperative school districts operate.16
Homeschoolers can use classes, traditional teaching methods, even textbooks and purchased curricula, to learn what they desire to know, but they do so on their own terms. They have determined what, when, why, how, and from whom they want to learn, and are therefore in an entirely different relationship with their schooling than students who are in class simply because of their age. Many things can make schoolish arrangements for learning desirable, and certainly interesting teachers will attract willing students no matter where or how they teach. For most people, it is the idea that children must be socialized by compulsory schooling rather than family and other institutions, that prevents them from accepting homeschooling as an alternative. They picture homeschooled children as being socially inept since they only socialize with their parents and siblings; however this is far from true. Research on this topic has consistently shown homeschooled children to be well socialized.17
The vast majority of homeschoolers seek out or create social opportunities for their children to be with other children and adults besides their immediate family. Some homeschooling parents create clubs around certain interests their children may have, such as Science, Rocketry, Magic, or Theater, and conduct weekly meetings at their homes or in local libraries. Some share their expertise in exchange for money, barter, or no payment at all: a single mother we know charges families a modest fee for tutoring children in math at her home; another mother offers a free literature class in her home twice a week to ten homeschoolers; both mothers are former school teachers by the way! My wife, who is not a school teacher or a private investigator, ran a Detective Club for a year in our house, engaging eight homeschoolers and one public school child of various ages in activities that fostered their interests in science, logical reasoning, and reading. This year a father we know who makes his living as an illustrator is teaching an art course once a week in the evening at his apartment, as a way to share his love of art with his boys and their friends. Ordinary people, using their own resources, can be highly effective teachers when they share their own interests with children who wish to learn from them.
Some homeschoolers create resource centers to be used by large numbers of homeschoolers, often forming alliances with local libraries for space and materials. In London, England Leslie Barson created "The Otherwise Club" in her home as a place for children to work together on projects of their own choosing. As the club and her children got older and bigger Barson wanted to reclaim her home. So she found a local community center that let her group meet two days a week for two thousand pounds a year; Barson charges a membership fee of 100 pounds per family, and has been able to gain charitable status for the group.18
Other homeschoolers find and publicize courses and offerings at local museums, historic sites, community centers, and gymnasiums. In Boston, Harvard University's Peabody Museum and the Boston Museum of Science advertise courses for homeschoolers. Technological advances now allow internet courses for learning everything from jazz improvisation to secondary school courses leading to diplomas; there are also video and audiotape lectures by experts in all kinds of fields that can be borrowed from libraries, or from homeschoolers who share the cost and the materials.
Most homeschooling, and certainly the formation and continuation of these clubs and groups, is performed by people not certified by schools as teachers, nor are their activities considered to be mandatory or graded. The participants get what they put into each activity, and should they decide not to learn in these settings, there is no external failing grade or other penalty for them. They can come back to these places and learn what they need when they are ready for it, or they can choose, or create, other situations for them to learn what they wish to learn. These parents and children are not therefore recreating compulsory public school in their communities, nor are they creating alternative schools; they are creating alternatives to school for their children.
I hasten to add that some children need alternatives to home as well; clearly not every family is motivated to work with their children the way the homeschoolers I describe here are. However, the only place besides home for most children is school, a situation we have created with our compulsory education laws, and often school is not a good place for these children either. When neither home nor school is a safe, productive spot for children and teens to be, the sorts of third places that I describe above can be expanded to accommodate them. I doubt we will soon get people to change compulsory education laws in America, but there is wriggle-room in these laws, as homeschooling and many out-of-school programs sanctioned by various school departments demonstrate. By expanding these exceptions to allow children and teenagers to engage in or observe real work--manual labor, professional office work, volunteer work--we will help them learn what is needed to do work well by watching or apprenticing with adults who share their interests and work. They also learn how to interact with others to get jobs done, and how to leave work they don't enjoy and find work they want to try; these are skills that are not only not taught in school, but actually atrophied in most schools. One typically works in silence in competition for grades and is penalized for sharing information, and one cannot change courses when it is apparent that one does not have the capacity or interest to continue with a particular course in school and would like to try something different.
Not all things are apparently educational, but that does not mean they are not important learning experiences for children. To me and many homeschoolers, Play is a child's work. Children typically use fantasy play, in particular, not to escape from the real world, but to get into it: when they pretend to be doctors, fire-fighters, police, and soldiers, they are using their imaginations to explore these roles. My own children often played school when they were younger! People benefit from periods of play throughout their lives, and some people are able to find or create adult work that often grows out of their childhood play. School is all too often opposed to children's play, a trend that is increasing as schools march to the drums of testing and standardization. The London Times published an article recently about research done by Dr. Jacqui Cousins, an advisor to the United Nations on early education, that shows four-year-olds in nursery schools feel upset and anxious about expectations for them to succeed at school from a very early age. Some spoke seriously about "'not getting a job if I don't work hard.'... One girl said that she had to work hard and not play so she could 'get ready to pass my Key Stage One tests'(the tests given to five to seven-year-olds)."19
Further, allowing children and teens to have safe, private, quiet spots where they can read, pray, meditate, or think away from the barrage of mass media that floods into our homes, schools, and communities is just as important as putting children into group situations for play or class. Homeschoolers have noted the importance of allowing their children time to do nothing, periods of apparent inactivity where dreams, aspirations, and personal issues are worked on; in school, these periods are called daydreaming and students are penalized for withdrawing into such a state. One homeschooler writes, "if my boys attended public school, it would be impossible to afford them large blocks of time to go deeply into any activity. We have learned that even doing nothing is important. Doing nothing allows the time needed to assimilate or put meaning to what they have learned during busier moments."20 How schooling hinders learning
Of course, most educators are aghast at such suggestions. Children are like trains to them: they must pull into certain stations at certain times or else they must be repaired. More national curricula, higher standards, more and tougher tests, longer school days, more money for schools, are the remedies educationists propose to work on children to make them effective students. I propose that adults and our social institutions, including public schools, can work with children rather than on them. Using children's various interests and abilities, as well as parents and adults who work outside of schools, we can create all sorts of places for children to be when they don't fit, for whatever reason, into school.
This does not have to be for every family: families that wish to use school as they always have would be free to do so. However, by also providing opportunities for children and adults who wish to learn in other settings we can create a true learning society, one that allows people to have second chances, or as many chances as they need, to learn what they need to learn when they want to learn it. Further, by having places for children to be besides school will allow teachers more time and energy to work with the students that remain in their classes.
Compulsory school is sometimes referred to as a necessary evil since there appears to be no other place or method for children to learn and grow in modern society. Since World War Two we have, through law and custom, increasingly made school the center of our children's lives, turning school into their entire world and fueling their belief that if they fail in school they will fail in later life. The past thirty years have seen a marked increase in the drugging of children in our schools to make them more compliant to compulsory schooling: Ritalin, Prozac, and Lithium are commonly dispensed to children of all ages in America in order to help them cope with the social and academic life of school. Further, the increase in violence at schools, most recently demonstrated in Littleton, Colorado where 15 students were killed and many others wounded by two fellow students, is a vivid reminder that not all children are content with the social life of school or with the type of future school prepares them for. Educators and politicians often cite video games, the availability of guns, and poor parenting as the reason these acts of violence take place and they fund programs to address these issues. However these short-sighted fixes completely overlook the perpetrators choice of targets and clearly stated reasons--their hatred of school and its social castes--and thus obscure the real issue that needs to be addressed: how do we help children learn and grow when they are not doing so in school? I am not proposing that these children be homeschooled, but that we look at homeschooling for ideas of other places for children to be besides school.
Educators spend much time and energy developing interdisciplinary studies and motivational techniques that, at best, can only be extrinsic motivators for all students, reducing learning to a race for grades and privilege for the vast majority who are simply going through the paces of schooling. What homeschooling taps into is the intrinsic motivation of children to learn, using the innate abilities that enable children to learn to speak, walk, and reason from their infancy until they enter school. Schools can do this, but all too often, as noted above, the economics of running a conventional school prevents any meaningful connections between a student's desire to learn and the school's mandate to teach. Gunther Schuller, former head of the New England Conservatory of Music, quit high school when he was younger, and commented, "I have the feeling I would not have been a very good music student in, for example, the rigid programs which allow for almost no electives, which some of our schools demand."21
A homeschooler writes about her thirteen-year-old son and how his interdisciplinary curricula developed to provide a contrast between school mandated studies versus self-motivated studies: [Steve] had developed a strong interest in freshwater fish. Aside from actually going fishing, which is his very favorite thing to do, he managed to read every available book in the library, including five volumes of a fish encyclopedia. He worked out a deal with a friend who is a graduate student in fisheries, to supply him with worms and perch fillets for his specimens. In return, Steve received a large, fully-equipped aquarium, in which to keep his own specimens. A highlight of the year was when he went to seine a local river(drag the river with huge nets to bring up small fish to study) with the curator of the University Life Science Museum. Next week, he starts an apprenticeship with the ranger at a nearby lake (who happens to be one of the most knowledgeable naturalists around). He will be learning, among other things, how to manage a camping and fishing facility. This interest in fish led into many other areas, as a real interest always does: climate, pond and stream ecology, life cycles of insects, etc. My older children continually reinforce my belief that when a child has an interest in something, they have a real need to plunge much deeper into the subject than a normal school curriculum ever allows...22 Perhaps one of the reasons we are witnessing the decay of support for public education, at least in America, is that now that so many of us have passed through the educational process, we, as adults, are realizing how empty and disconnected from real life the rituals of education are and some of us are having a hard time forcing our children to go through the exact same process.
The purpose of compulsory education for our children is commonly stated as being for the purpose of fitting the pupils, morally and intellectually, for the duties of citizenship. To achieve this end, our schools implement a curriculum that is designed to turn all children into good citizens.23 Of course, the treatment is dubious and the results are haphazard, as the never-ending parade of school reforms throughout the past 150 years testify. Yet, it appears that education is changing the definition of citizenship with very little debate. John Holt observed: Thomas Jefferson felt that education was needed to help become and be what he called citizens. By citizens he did not mean what most of us mean when we call ourselves taxpayers or consumers. A citizen was not someone who worried about how to fit into society. He was a maker and shaper of society. He held the highest office in the Republic; public servants were his servants, not his bosses and rulers.24 We are consuming education at a more rapid rate than at any time since we started counting degrees,25 and families are going further and further into debt to fund education for children. But no matter what type of education one consumes, there is no guarantee that one has actually retained and understood all the education received, despite tests passed and degrees earned. For instance, a recent film shows an interviewer asking young adults who just graduated from Harvard if they could explain why the seasons change on earth; no one could do so satisfactorily. A 1993 Gallup poll noted that 1 in 7 adults couldn't identify the USA on an unmarked map; 1 in 4 couldn't find the Pacific Ocean. In 1996 it was reported that only 6 percent of Americans know the name of the chief Justice of the United States; forty-six percent didn't know the name of Speaker Newt Gingrich.26 The assumption that people become good citizens, or well rounded individuals, simply by passing through a professionalized school system is a false assumption.
Jacques Ellul, forty-three years ago, had it right in his book The Technological Society: education no longer has a humanist end or any value in itself; it has only one goal, to create technicians.27 We are in the midst of this change in the relationship between society and school, one in which the idea of good citizen now merely means an employed person who has been certified by the schools as competent. However there is no evidence at all that shows even a modest connection between school performance and later job performance. Many adults hold higher education degrees yet perform jobs that are completely unrelated to those degrees. In 1971 various studies of the links between employment and school credentials, plus original research on the subject, were analyzed by Prof. Ivar Berg, and he found no rational reason for employers to demand advanced degrees of their employees.28 A more recent study concluded that the vast majority of skills taught in school are not transferable to the real world. "Growing evidence. . .points to the possibility that very little can be transported directly from school to out-of-school use."29
In an article entitled, "Trends in American Education," two professors write that "Despite our best efforts, there is ample evidence that success in school is not a reliable predictor of high attainment in later life. . . Somehow we are going to have to learn how to tie learning activities to both student characteristics and concerns and the broader tasks of life which they face outside and beyond the classroom."30
Rather than try to create learning centers where people of all ages can gain skills and socialize in a variety of settings throughout their lives, conventional educators are determined to redouble their efforts because, as these professors note, they see "no real substitute for organised learning outside our formally constituted schools. . ." I hope I have shown that there are existing substitutes for organized learning outside of formally constituted schools, and that they are desirable and possible to achieve.
1. Newsweek, Oct. 8., 1998.
2. Growing Without Schooling: A Record of Grassroots Movement. Cambridge, MA: Holt Associates, 1999, p. 25-30.
3. John MacKnight, The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits. New York: Basic Books, NY, 1996, pp. 39-40.
4. Aaron Falbel, "Beyond GWS: Growing Without Education," Growing Without Schooling #130, Sept/Oct. 1999 p.29.
5. See Cafi Cohen, And What About College: How Homeschooling Leads to Admissions to the Best colleges and Universities. Cambridge, MA: Holt Associates, 2000.
6. Chris Sims, "Learning To Live Her Beliefs" GWS 116, May/June 1997, p. 11.
7. Alan Thomas, Educating Children at Home. New York: Continuum Publishing, 1999; quoted in Growing Without Schooling #130, Sept./Oct. 1999, p. 27.
8. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte, 1982, pp. 45 - 46.
9. Thomas Armstrong, The Myth of the A.D.D. Child. New York: Dutton, 1995, pp. 156-159.
10. These examples, and more, are in An A In Life: Famous Homeschoolers, by Mac and Nancy Plent. Farmingdale, NJ: Unschoolers Network, 1999.
11. Roland Meighan, The Next Learning System: And Why Home-Schoolers Are Trailblazers. Nottingham, UK: Educational Heretics Press, 1997, pp. 7 -8.
12. CBS Script of a radio broadcast with Raymond Moore, "What's New In Learning," Sept. 15, 1974.
13. Raymond Moore, Adventist Education at the Crossroads. Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Assn., 1976, p. 136-137.
14. For Holt's ideas about learning, read any of his eleven books. In particular, How Children Learn (New York: HarperCollins) and Learning All the Time (HarperCollins).
15. John Holt, "Schools and Homeschoolers: A Fruitful Partnership." Phi Delta Kappan. Feb. 1983.
16. David Guterson, Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992, pp. 182-204.
17. See M.M. Delahooke, "Home educated children's social/emotional adjustment and academic achievement: a comparative study." Doctoral dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Los Angeles, 1986. Dissertation Abstracts International, 47 475A;
M. Mayberry, J.G. Knowles, B. Ray, and S. Marlow, Home Schooling: Parents As Educators. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press Inc., 1995;
L. Montgomery, "The effect of home schooling on the leadership skills of home schooled students" Home School Researcher, Vol. 5 (1) (1989), pp. 1--10;
L. E. Shyers, "A comparison of social adjustment between home-schooled and traditionally schooled students." Doctoral dissertation. Univ. of Florida, 1992;
J. W. Taylor, "Self-concept in home-schooling children." Doctoral dissertation, Andrews University. Berrien Springs, MI, 1986.
18. Leslie Barson, "The Otherwise Club" in Growing Without Schooling # 120 January/February 1998, p. 6.
19. "Life is too hard, say children aged four." The London Times, 6/16/99, p. 12.
20. Toby Rhue, in Freedom Challenge: African American Homeschoolers, Eugene, OR: Lowry House, 1996, p. 172. See also "On Doing Nothing" in Growing Without Schooling #117, July/Aug. 1998.
21. "Self-Taught Musicians" in Growing Without Schooling # 37, January/February, 1984, p. 25.
22. "How Interests Develop" in Growing Without Schooling # 53, Sept/October 1986, p. 3.
23. The academic standards for the elementary years of schooling are spelled out by the state of Massachusetts in General Laws c. 71 #s 1, 2 and 3 (1984 ed.):
"Such schools shall be taught by teachers of competent ability and good morals, and shall give instruction and training in orthography, reading, writing, the English language and grammar, geography, drawing, music, the history and constitution of the United State, the duties of citizenship, health education, physical education and good behavior.
#2: In all public elementary and high schools American history and civics, including the constitution of the United States, the declaration of independence, and the bill of rights, and in al public schools the constitution of the Commonwealth and local history and government, shall be taught as required subjects for the purpose of promoting civic service and a greater knowledge thereof, and of fitting the pupils, morally and intellectually, for the duties of citizenship.
#3 requires physical education for all public school students."
24. John Holt, Unpublished Manuscript, "Notes From Talks To Students," 11/23/71.
25. Douglas L. Adkins, The Great American Degree Machine: An Economic Analysis of the Human Resource Output of Higher Education (Berkeley, CA: Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, 1975). See also, Ivar Berg, Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery, (Boston: Beacon, 1972) pp. 178-179.
26. Daniel Schorr, "Americans Lose On Name That Official," Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 2, 1996, p. 18.
27. The Technological Society, p. 348.
28. Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery.
29. Lauren Resnick, "Learning: In School and Out," Educational Researcher, Dec. 1987, p. 16.
30. Donald Barnes and Alexandria Rekkas, "Trends In American Education" Educational Practice and Theory, V. 17, No. 2 (1995) p. 21.
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