ere’s a good article about unschooling in City on a Hill Press. In it, I found several worthwhile snippets about unschooling, but also some concise and precise explanations about problems with today’s public school model.

Take this tidbit about how schools have changed over the past 100 years or so, for example:

“Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.”

Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.”

So true — and definitely something that has contributed to our decision to homeschool.

However, the article also states that “Children with two working parents must attend school,” which is patently false. Many single parents homeschool while holding down a job, and many families with two working parents homeschool. Where there’s a will, there is very often a way.

Tags: unschooling, homeschooling, school failure, City on a Hill Press,

Blogger and homeschooling parent Celeste has written a terrific post, “Show Us the Body,” in which she compares demonstrating the benefits of homeschooling to providing evidence of Big Foot’s existence. She writes:

I still don’t know whether Bigfoot exists, but I do empathize with the poor believers who are struggling to produce evidence. As a homeschooling parent, I’m very familiar with the challenge of working with intangible evidence and trying to convince people that SOMETHING is happening, even though it can’t be seen or measured.

How much do my children know? How much did they learn today? How long did it take them to learn it? Are they ahead or behind? Homeschoolers are constantly being asked questions like these, and it’s really hard to give answers that will convince a skeptic.

Of course, we all know the benefits of homeschooling are real, whereas Bigfoot is just a big hoax.

We do, right?

Celeste’s post resonated with me, not so much because I need to explain homeschooling to others but because I sometimes need to remind myself of our goals. As a new homeschooler (year 1) of children who previously attended day care, preschool, and K-2, I know how hard it can be to trust that homeschooling is “working.” In previous years, I had some level of certainty that the kids would eventually learn to read, write, and do algebra. I was never big on whether they were “on track” with a particular schedule of learning because I believe that kids should move at their own pace and learn when they’re ready. But at least I knew they were being exposed to structured learning opportunities that were covering the basics.

But look who’s supposed to cover the basics now! It’s up to me and my husband to make sure our kids have the opportunity to learn what they need to learn. (Let’s ignore for the moment the huge debate about what kids “need to learn” in the first place. That’s a book-length post.) As I expected I would, I do sometimes panic: Are they learning enough? Am I doing enough and providing everything they need in order to learn? Are they still interested in what we’re doing or am I boring them to tears? Do they still love learning, as they have since they were born, or will I, like so many schools, unintentionally stifle their passion? Are they figuring out who they are and what they enjoy doing with their time?

Taking the Long View

I’m discovering that in the short term — and I consider looking back within a single year the short term — it’s almost impossible to answer those questions. While it’s vital to reflect on the short term and make adjustments to fit the kids’ needs, it’s also important for me to keep it in perspective. These are events or trends that happened during a relatively short, fixed period of time; they don’t necessarily predict future trends or events, nor do they exist in isolation. They exist in the context of everything that came before them and, eventually, everything that will come after them. And they reflect the whole child and all of what he or she was experiencing as a human being during that time, not just subject matter knowledge.
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Tags: homeschooling, stock market, bigfoot, long-term investing

Over at Blogcritics, where I sometimes cross-post my blog entries, Diana Hartman has written an article about fairness and what it does and doesn’t mean. Or maybe it’s about what it should and shouldn’t mean.

Hartman rails against scholastic relay races that either let all the kids compete regardless of skill level or that don’t have winners and losers, against the way school awards are given out to students, and against making tests easier in response to complaints that the tests aren’t fair.

She makes a good point with her last example, one from “real life”: the driving test U.S. military and their dependents have to pass in order to obtain a driver’s license when they’re stationed in Germany. Upwards of 45% have been failing the test — leaving military family cars in the holding lot for months at a time — so the military has decided to make the test easier. (Or at least that’s how Hartman sees it. I don’t know anything about the test.)

The problem — and I agree with Hartman on this — is one of safety. If she’s right and the test is being made easier, we now will have a bunch of U.S. drivers over there who don’t have as much knowledge and skill as the German citizenry. How dangerous will those drivers be on the German roads? How smart was it to make the test easier as a matter of convenience for U.S. military families new to Germany? Time will tell.

Generally speaking, it’s a bad idea to lower standards on tests that measure a minimum competency in a skill or a field that impacts someone’s safety or health. I wouldn’t be happy if the state medical board exams suddenly got easier just so more medical school graduates could become licensed doctors, for example. Making tests like these easier does not necessarily make them any more fair, anyway.

The rest of Hartman’s examples come from her family’s K-12 school experiences. She’s apparently drawing a connection between lowered standards in American schools with the lowered driving test standard. “Why should we expect the adult graduates of American schools to work hard to pass a driver’s test when their school experience taught them that everyone should pass life’s tests?” she seems to be asking.

Unfortunately, these school stories don’t help her argument. First, K-12 schools are not “real” life and shouldn’t operate as if they were. And second, the specific anecdotes Hartman relates are cautionary tales about creating competition between students more than they are about lowered standards.
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Tags: competition in school, teamwork, fairness, bad teaching

What should we do with high school students who skip classes and don’t do the coursework? Fail them? Or let them get credit for the course by completing a study pack provided by an outside vendor?

I say hell yeah to option #2.

The takeaway message from students who say things like, “I want to get done with school the easiest way possible,” is not that the students are lazy or too smart and bored to be bothered with the work. The message is that many high school students don’t see any relevance to their lives and interests in their coursework. They don’t have much, if any, choice in which courses they take, and they certainly don’t have any input into how the school is run. They go to school because they’re compelled to by state law (at least until they’re 16 in most states) and not because they want to.

They’ve lost the desire to learn because the schools aren’t interested in students’ desire to learn. Schools are interested in pushing as many kids through the same program as efficiently as possible, no matter how diverse those kids’ interests may be. For the most part, students are treated the same way and must take the same basic coursework. If you don’t expect some students to be completely uninterested in schools like that, you’re deluding yourself.

In the corporate training world, a basic premise is that whatever training program you’re building had better be relevant to the target audience because that audience seeks out skills and information that are relevant to their careers. They’re extremely tactical in their approach to training, and they don’t suffer foolish training programs gladly.

For some reason, educational theorists assign this premise specifically to “adult learners,” as if relevance and purpose don’t matter to “child learners.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has ever watched a child try new things — like learning to walk or learning to read — knows that children approach everything they do with a purpose. Unfortunately, traditional schools don’t allow children to pursue purposeful activities; all activities are selected by the adults for the children. By the time high school rolls around, who can blame them for wanting to get out of that environment with the least effort required?

Tags: public schools,student choice,course credit,educational theory,purposeful learning,compulsory attendance

When I first saw the headlines saying that Teen People was no longer going to be available in print, I thought, “There is a checkout counter god after all.”

And then I thought, “Finally, no more Teen People used as a source in college research papers.” (Yes, when I was teaching a few semesters ago, more than one paper used that rag as a source.)

And then I realized Teen People was still going to be available on the Web.

The really sad thing: It was probably the only source that the students had held in their hands in the publisher’s printed form. That means they a) may have bought some recreational reading material and b) actually had to type whatever content they were quoting from the magazine.

No more. Future issues will be available in electronic format only, which makes the copy-and-paste “research” method the undisputed king of college paper writing.

Tags: writing, research, college, teens, people

To our collective detriment, U.S. public education has become so insanely politicized that it’s damn near impossible even to have a reasonable discussion about educating our children, never mind actually do something to improve education. One popular dividing line: reading instruction.

Back in the day, schools used phonics as the primary method for teaching kids to read. But, according to a book I’m reading, “[phonics] was gradually abandoned because of increasingly obvious defects and shortcomings. Nevertheless,” the author continues, “it seems apparent today that in throwing out phonics, the educational theorists threw out the baby with the bath water.”

Familiar, yes? The phonics/anti-phonics debate. The pro-whole language/anti-whole language debate. The desire for some to return to the good old days of reading instruction, which magically — as often happens in distant memories — worked for just about everyone. Or the desire for some to eschew anything from the past and to use only newer methodologies and, as my book points out, “‘reading clinics,’ staffed by ‘reading specialists,’ to attempt to remedy the defects of early instruction.”

The yin and yang of educational theories. The us vs. them mentality. The I win/you lose educational machine. That’s where we are today.

Here We Go ‘Round In Circles

Apparently we were there yesterday, too. The book I referenced above, Learn to Read: A Linguistic Approach, was published in 1961. (The bulk of it was written in the early 1940s, but it wasn’t published — and it’s introduction, which I quoted, wasn’t written — until 1961.) The phonics debate to which it refers was raging in the 1950s, fueled in part by the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, by Rudolph Flesch. The introduction to Learn to Read says Flesch “voiced in concrete terms a vaguely felt but widely experienced dissatisfaction with current [aka, 1950s] instruction in reading in the elementary schools of our country.” Flesch advocated “a return to materials and methods long since discarded.”

You know, phonics.

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Tags: educational choice, homeschooling, learning, phonics

CNN has the news that Tennessee is going to make gym mandatory five days per week for its public school students. They’re doing it, they say, to address the rampant obesity among even the youngest students.

I have a simpler solution. It’s called RECESS. How about schools reinstate THAT instead of creating yet another bureaucratic, red tape machine that, in this case, doesn’t really do students any more good than letting them play outside for 30 or 40 minutes a day?

And it wouldn’t hurt if schools stopped selling nutritionally horrid lunches, either. In my local elementary school, pizza is available every day. That means a kid who’s on a subsidized lunch plan or whose parents send her to school with lunch money every day can eat pizza five days a week. And nobody cares.
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