I've had another busy day today, but I did manage to find this depressing news from Germany:
A German school official has ordered seven families homeschooling their children in Northwest Germany to enroll their children in public schools immediately, or the children will be forcibly removed by police and taken to school. Any resistance on the part of the parents will result in the children being removed from their homes, according to a Home School Legal Defense Association report.The families argued that, as Christians, they wanted to protect their children from the godless and humanistic values being taught in public schools. They also assured officials that they were providing an adequate education through a German correspondence school.
County education director Heinz Kohler dismissed the families' beliefs, stating, "you and your children are not living in isolation on some island but rather in an environment posing intra- and extracurricular situations where you'll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed."
Kohler further explained that homeschooling could not be allowed as "children should not be encapsulated or kept apart from the outside world. In these cases, the parents' rights to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society "
You will be socialised!
I found this at an American anti-abortion site. Americans can contemplate this kind of thing with relative detachment, but here in Britain, for anyone who favours the right to homeschool, it is different. Homeschoolers here must have in the back of their minds the thought that the EU might one day decide to "harmonise" the rules about homeschooling, and something tells me they probably wouldn't harmonise them in such a way that Germans would be allowed to homeschool. Although, I suppose that there is always that hope.
I interrupt my Christmas holidays with news of Peter Williams, and of the battle that his parents are embroiled in with Hampshire LEA.
Who is Peter Williams? Well, among other things, he is a chess champion:
A seven-year-old chess champion has been pulled out of school by his parents after a row over skipping lessons to practise the game.Peter and Carol Williams decided to teach their son Peter at home in Alton, Hampshire, after the local education authority refused to give him time off for training sessions.
Peter's school, St Lawrence Primary in Alton, had blocked a request to give him a day off every week to play chess.
Peter has dazzled experts with his talent for chess since the age of five - beating scores of older children and adults.
Most recently, the prodigy won the top prizes of £100 and £120 respectively in the Central London Adult Rapid Play and Adult Long Play championships.
He has also won several junior tournaments, including the mini squad under-nines championships last year.
Peter said on Tuesday: "I like the money and the trophies. I want to be the best."
His father added: "Peter is the best chess player of his age in the country.
"We just want him to have the very best chance.
"We wanted him to have time to study and, as children of his age learn best in the morning, we wanted to take him out of school one day a week.
"But the school and the local education authority were treating it as truancy. It's a disgrace really."
Mr Williams said he expected Peter will remain out of school until he is old enough to go to secondary school, where he hopes the timetable will be more flexible.
This report by Alice Mascarenhas, of a chess tournament in Gibraltar, includes some stuff about what sort of boy Peter Williams is:
Gerard Matto, at seven years of age, is one of the youngest local players, playing for the first time in the Amateur Tournament. He had made friends with Peter Williams who has been playing since the age of five. Now, also seven years of age, he is one of the main hopefuls in the English camp, participating in the international tournament.Having a bit of fun, and after a game, I caught them pawn flicking. They insisted on teaching me how to play anti-chess. A challenge I could not refuse.
Peter is a great Harry Potter fan, and often believes he is a magician himself when facing a chessboard. But not surprisingly, he keeps his moves a secret and just like young Matto is not daunted by any of the adult players.
Peter smiles and tells me cheekily he plays because "you can make loads of money". But on a serious note he is a natural at the game and obviously enjoys the challenge.
"You have to concentrate."
So what else do you enjoy other than chess and reading Harry Potter? "That's easy, educational studies," came back the reply.
It certainly doesn't sound as if Peter Williams is going to degenerate into a vegetative state if he pursues those educational studies that he so much enjoys at home, with his parents, rather than at a school which is determined that he must fit into their routine, no matter what.
I wonder if that remark about "loads of money" is making any difference to how those LEA edu-crats are now treating this case. I say, good for you mate. But I wonder if they approve quite so much.
Both of those reports are somewhat out of date, the first one dating from the summer of 2003. However, having finally heard about this ruckus via Daryl Cobranchi's blog in the USA (such are the ways of the blogosphere), I emailed Peter's mother, and I got an instant response, which you can read at Samizdata by following the trackback below (this being the posting that is going up first). Daryl Cobranchi has posted the address of a Hampshire edu-crat and a Hampshire councillor, whom you can write to if you want to join in this argument. My suggestion (based on what I learned when I was an Amnesty International volunteer a long time ago): be polite and phrase your points in the form of questions rather than put-their-backs-up assertions which might be wrong. Lots of polite letters should be the procedure. No doubt this has now been happening for some time.
Here is an imperfect but just about legible scan of the Failure Notice that Hampshire LEA sent to Peter Williams (snr.), also a bit of a while ago.
Charming.
This article is getting attention from fellow ed-bloggers (here and here).
Final sentences:
One of the real benefits of homeschooling is that the student learns from the beginning that his/her education is his/her responsibility and not the responsibility of the parent/teacher. Homeschooled children are usually self-starters who are very flexible. They learn to do research, to look for information on their own, and to make good use of whatever resources are available. As a result, they are able to educate themselves far beyond the level of the typical public schooled child.
I am about to become a lowest-possible-form-of teacher. Consent is one prejudice I bring to this. Another is that teaching means inflaming and then encouraging and assisting the above quality, of self-starterdom. In practice that means: when they are concentrating on learning something that they have chosen to learn do not interrupt.
Like consent, an easier rule to expound than to follow. We shall see.
Pail Fail!Right, hon. Fail means you dont win.
Cane Fane!
Uh well, feign is a word. It means you pretend in an evil way.
Cake Fake! It's hard to describe the gusto she employs to shout out the rhyme. Pride and triumph. FAKE!
Absolutely right. That's a rhyme.
Then she turned over a picture of a duck.
We had a little talk about bad words.
Its all a minefield.
Yes, I would imagine it is. Although, what's wrong with "luck", or "tuck", or "muck". Or even "suck"? There's innuendo there, but just ignore it.
I really am fascinated to see what happens with the Lileks/Gnat saga. Will he still be bleating updates on the relationship in ten years time, I wonder?
Apologies for taking so long to link you all (?) to Sean Gabb's recent piece entitled Home Schooling: A British Perspective, but better late than never. Says Sean here: "This will be published in 2005 in an American book about home schooling across the world." And if you follow that link, you can also access other writings by Sean on the related matter of truancy (and also this!)
I have read through this piece, which is quite long by the standards of internet link destinations (28 pages in my print out), and my immediate reactions are very favourable.
Sean starts with what has always been his strong suit, some history. Home schooling has a long one. (Only very recently has our Royal Family not home schooled.) And so does the kind of schooling that now causes parents to want to rescue their children from it.
There then follows a description of the legal position with regard to home schooling, both in England, and in Scotland where things are different.
He makes the point that estimating the exact number of people involved in home schooling in Britain is difficult, because these are not people who volunteer details of their child rearing arrangements with the kind of people who do research into such things. They prefer to keep things to themselves.
He itemises and expands upon the various reasons why people choose to home school, under the three headings of: discipline and safety, curriculum and quality of instruction, and religious and ideological dissent.
He describes the extremely varied home schooling methods used, many of the people he refers to, of course, preferring not to use words like "school" or "schooling" at all. He speculates that the effects of home schooling can't be that bad, and seem pretty good, certainly compared with the available alternatives.
He describes the slow build-up among the meddling classes of the desire to meddle in and evntually to expunge home schooling, which is particularly strong in Scotland, and, given that there don't seem to be many harmful educational effects from home schooling, Sean speculates about other motives for this meddlesomeness, mainly, he suggests, ideological.
If I had started at the beginning of reading this piece with copying-and-pasting bits that were especially important and particularly felicitously expressed this post would have gone on for ever. I will confine myself to reproducing here the Concluding Remarks:
There can be no doubt that - whatever may be the numbers overall - the number of children educated at home has increased and is increasing. During the next few years, it is also at least reasonable to believe that there will be a debate over whether the numbers ought to be diminished. On the one side will be the supporters of an activist state, divided as to their motivation, but united in their belief that education should be supervised by the authorities. On the other will be the home schooling parents. Most of these may be hiding, and they will continue to see safety in concealment. Those who are visible can be expected to fight all efforts at regulation with a passion not seen in British politics within living memory.We may, then, be returning to something like the debates of the middle and late Victorian years, when education was considered more than just a matter of funding and standards.
Well, I reckon EUrope etc. rouses the odd spot of passion already. But otherwise, very good. Read it all, or at least dip in it more extensively than I have here.
That's Sean on the right, holding forth at my Last Friday of the Month Meeting in April of this year.
Here are two more reports, about how home schooling is on the up and up, in Scotland:
The latest figures produced by the Scottish Executive show there were 480 children educated outside school in Scotland, who were known to the authorities, in 2002/03. The number represents a 38% increase compared with 2000/01, when there were 349 children in the same category.Over the past five years, the number of children excluded from Scottish schools for violent behaviour has increased by almost 18%. A study of young people in Glasgow last June revealed that 20% of young boys, including primary children, carried knives to protect themselves.
A spokeswoman for the Home Education Advisory Service (HEAS), told Scotland on Sunday: "The most common reason which people give us for considering home education is fear of violence and bullying at school. They fear that their learning is being disrupted, and that its making their lives miserable.
"Many fear that the system is unable to cope and keep the small number of children who cause problems from ruining it for the rest of them.
... and in the USA.
In Florida, the number of home-school students has nearly tripled over the past ten years. Nationally, the United States Department of Education says the number has swelled to more than a million kids. Home-school experts say it's even higher.Oregon researcher Brian Ray, of the National Home Education Research Institute, estimates two million kids are now taught at home.
"In the last four years, we think home schooling has grown at least 30 percent," says Ray. "Study after study, many of which I've done, have shown that home-schooled children are well above average 15 to 30 percentile points above on standardized achievement tests."
Ray points to last year's first and second place winners of the National Spelling Bee both home-schooled. And now even Harvard University says it accepts home-schooled applicants.
My bet is that it won't be long before Harvard goes looking for home schooled applicants.
Outstanding letter in today's Times:
Studying at homeFrom Danielle Shanks
Sir, I'm a 15-year-old, home-educated student and for me, leaving school was one of the best things I've done. I left about a year ago, thoroughly miserable after being bullied for three years and after various meetings with teachers about it, which achieved nothing.
I am now doing a correspondence course.
Contrary to the popular belief, it is actually quite easy to make new friends outside of school. I've kept in touch with one friend from school and I play the violin, so I go to an orchestra every Saturday, where I've met new friends. I'm also a member of " Education otherwise", which is a home-ed organisation, where I write to various pen-pals.
How sociable is school anyway? You have all your cliques, but if you don't fit in you can be ostracised.
Yours faithfully,
DANIELLE SHANKS,
56 Vaux Crescent,
Walton on Thames,
Surrey KT12 4HD.
September 20.
Here is the link to Education otherwise. Otherwise, I think it says it all.
Category: Bullying • Home education • Socialisation
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Lew Rockwell writes about home schooling versus school schooling, and about phonics versus whole word literacy teaching.
Long-time readers may recall a column titled, "A Tale of 2 Children," wherein I compared two 3-year old children, one of whom was being taught to read by his parents and one who was destined for public school. The two children are now 5 years old, and I recently examined their progress.The child in kindergarten is not yet reading, but he has learned his complete alphabet now. The homeschooled child, on the other hand, surprised me by reading at an error-free fifth-grade level on the San Diego Quick Assessment test. I verified his competence by asking him to read selections from C.S. Lewis' "Prince Caspian" to me, a book with which he was previously unfamiliar. While he occasionally stumbled on words such as versification and centaur, (he pronounced them "versication" and "kentaur"), his comprehension was reasonably good as well.
Suddenly, it was not so hard to understand how homeschooled children, on the average, test four years ahead of their public-schooled counterparts.
The problem with public schools and reading is not hard to grasp. Whole language, the favored method, is a disastrous approach to reading that is destined for failure. Children who learn to read while being taught this method learn to read in spite of it, not because of it.
Yes, that's how it seems to me also. Read more about the phonics method here.
By the way, every time I visit a phonics site, such as the one linked to above, I look for a step-by-step description of how to teach reading in the best phonics way possible. After all, these people are adamant that there is a best way. So what exactly is it? I want to have a how-to guide to read. First do this. Test it like this. Then do this. Test this like this. Then do this. Then do that. Practise it like so. Reinforce it like so. Learn to spell this list of words. And so on.
The trouble is, when I think I may have found such a guide, I either find I have to pay for it, which seems odd given that these people are trying to spread literacy and not just to make money. Or else I find myself reading yet another argument about why the method they favour is the best one, or, even more tangentially, why other methods are bad. Which is absolutely not the same thing as the best method itself. These arguments are important, and it is important that the best team wins them. But an explanation of why a method works is a quite distinct matter from the thing itself.
Can any of you phonics-persons help me? Please note that I will fisk you/it mercilessly if you merely show me yet another argument about why your particular brand of phonics works, or indeed any method which ever digresses into this related distraction. I want the thing itself, and nothing else. This must be available, to read and to link to, somewhere on the Internet. If it isn't, then it damn well ought to be.
A comment has recently been added to this posting about Muslim homeschooling, from way back in 2002. I said I was in favour of it. Corey writes as follows:
Hi Everyone,I think this is a good discussion. I like the freedoms involved in homeschooling my kids. I really support everyone's freedoms to do this. I happen to be a Muslim and even though I wear the headscarf, I am by no stretch an extremist. I have quite liberal views about human rights and social justice and as a Muslim I plan to give my kids more than just a religious education. In fact we'll focus on secular materials most of the time. (The nice thing about homeschooling is that we can still observe our 5 daily prayers together) and I'll be able to teach them some history that wouldn't be available as curriculum in public school. Our public schools over here are very overcrowded and riddled with gangs, drugs and the like. I think, as an educated woman I can find many resources to enrich my children more so than the public school. Even though I'll be homeschooling, I will especially teach my children respect for other people's belief systems and cultures. I feel very committed to that. I think that most people, no matter what religion they are or what culture they come from, try to teach cooperation and acceptance. Lately, there has been a lot of post September 11 backlash against the Muslim community. These hate-crimes and incidents have targetted many school children. Parents really appreciate the option to homeschool, especially if they feel that their child is in danger.
Corey might also be interested in this more recent posting on the same topic.
A couple of months ago I reported on Mean Girls, basically because I had just introduced my Gratuitous Picture policy, and this was a fine excuse for pictures. (And of course mentioning this movie again is another picture opportunity. This time I've chosen a snap of one of the boys in the movie for my lady readers.)
However, quite aside from its pictorial possibilities, it seems that it is also quite a good movie.
It certainly, according to 14-year-old Ellie Veryard, serves up many lessons about the joys of all that socialisation that home schooled kids miss out on. The heroine of Mean Girls was home schooled before then being school schooled. And I'm guessing/hoping that if this movie does well in Britain, it will get more people thinking about home schooling, simply because home schooling is an important part of the story.
Interesting plot to this movie, I think you may agree:
Plot Summary: Raised in African bush country by her zoologist parents, Cady Heron (Lohan) thinks she knows about "survival of the fittest." But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when the home-schooled 15-year-old enters public high school for the first time and falls prey to the psychological warfare and unwritten social rules that teenage girls face today.
It's the way that "home-schooled" is now a standard feature of American life, needing no explanation. I intend to check this out on video, if only to see how the whole home-schooled thing is treated.
It's Mean Girls. And as is all very proper for a Hollywood movie, not many of us can remember sharing a school with girls like this:
Again, I've been wandering the Internet looking for pictures to decorate this. Although, perhaps this
Mean Girls still would be more appropriate for here.
I've just finished a posting at Samizdata which ends thus:
And now I will go and do a posting here
I.e. here.
about the educational vibes of combining home working with home educating.
And I reckon if I had to leave it at that, that would suffice.
Put it this way. Here are two big current trends on the up: home working and home educating. Between them they reunite children with the world of work, something educators have been wanting to do ever since an earlier generation of idealistic educators finally succeeded in wrenching these two things apart from each other.
In the present world, where work is work and school is school, all too many children emerge from their schools with their brains reasonably well exercised by year after year of school work, but with a basic ignorance about work work and about how work work is done. That was me, definitely. I remember it distinctly.
School work is all about individually getting ahead and showing promise. Cooperating at school verges on cheating, because the point is that you must do the school work. The point of work work is merely that the work gets done, and so long as you pull your weight in some capacity or another, you earn your pay. Work work is cooperating, and if you cooperate successfully no one expels you for cheating. No, they praise you for cooperating.
And the other thing that school work systematically separates you from is economic reality. The school spends money the way it spends it. And you do your school work. The connection between work and wealth creation is severed, during a human being's most impressionable years.
(One of the points I make in this Libertarian Alliance piece, of which I am very proud and which people often link to still, even though it was written a decade ago, is that children who grow up in families where money is a constant worry and a constant battle grow up systematically more economically savvy than do those children whose parents are economically more comfortable and less burdened.)
It seems to me that all of these myopias are likely to be somewhat and perhaps even completely corrected if kids are educated in a home where real work work is also being done, even if the only regular message they get is that Dad is now busy and must not be disturbed, because if he is disturbed this will cost the family money.
The complaint about home education is that it isolates children from "reality", and from the wider world, and smothers them in a protective cocoon. What an irony if it was actually this exact trend that reunited education with reality.
Apologies to all home educators reading this who have known about this for years, but the thought has only just occurred to me. Home work work plus home school work anecdotes welcome.
I've just got around to reading this from the BBC, about the rise in Britain of working at home. The key change has been the arrival of broadband connections for millions rather than for a few thousand.
One of the big breaks on the rise of home education in Britain has surely been the rise, at about the same time, of the two-wage/two-salary family, with both parents needing to be away from home during the day, and needing old fashioned schools simply to keep an eye on their kids even if actual education there is something of a bonus.
The rise of working at home is surely, therefore, going to help home education. Anything which makes it easier for at least one parent (maybe by the two of them taking it in turns) to stay at home, as in this case, is bound to encourage it. And before commenters tell me that there are all kinds of problems with trying to combine working with child minding, I can fully appreciate that. I didn't say it necessarily makes child minding easy; I merely say that for some parents, it makes it easier. And it surely does.
l'm thinking in particular of children who are old enough to work undisturbed for quite long periods of time (something at which home educated children often excel), but who are nevertheless too young to be left at home entirely on their own. That way, Mum or Dad can also get some serious work done.
This story from last month reminds me of something Tim Evans said to me at that meeting I talked at a week ago. He said he'd met this American lawyer who'd been representing/lobbying for Home Schoolers in the USA, and the message was that Home Schoolers are a political force that a US politician crosses at his peril.
Despite this threat, I'm optimistic about the future. There is great cause for all like-minded Americans to be optimistic. A new political force is rising up that will prove to be extremely powerful.The "vast right-wing conspiracy" is indeed growing and becoming more organized, as an unlikely group of political activists arise. Homeschoolers are a group that will soon be a force the left will have to contend with.
Unfortunately, in the past, conservative organizations have always fallen short of the effectiveness of liberal groups. The biggest problem with conservative Christians is not their ideas, but their leadership and organization. The culture wars have been fought by highly organized liberal groups and by dozens of unorganized conservative groups lacking commitment and strength.
Yet, that is changing, and homeschoolers are leading the charge.
This week, I went to a program at the state Capitol called TeenPact a homeschool program dedicated to educating young people about state government. This organization is an unprecedented opportunity for young people to grow in their knowledge about government and interact with lobbyists, representatives, senators and offices around a state's capitol.
If change in America must be founded upon understanding and education, TeenPact is a prime example of how it should be done.
The Homeschool Legal Defense Association is another organization that not only represents homeschool families and fights legal battles in court, but has also begun to spearhead the movement of homeschoolers in politics. Furthermore, with HSLDA's new political action committee, the force will become more relevant in politics.
And I rather think that Tim's lawyer friend was something to do with the organisation linked to in the text quoted above, the HSLDA.
The whole world will be affected by this, in the longer run. Were it not for the example of America's homsechoolers who are proving and will increasingly prove that homeschooling works well, and better than the average state education system the rest of the world might impose compulsory school attendance upon itself without any knowledge that there is a superior alternative. But as American homeschoolers have their inevitable impact upon the world, and increasingly make their voice heard in US politics, that self-imposed delusion cannot and will not persist. There is another way to do things. As they said about the Atom Bomb in 1945, the only secret about it is now public knowledge: it works.
Here's a Boston Globe article about home education.
This was my favourite bit:
Bryanna Rosenblatt says her public school friends envy her, because they all think she's home in her pajamas all day. But she keeps herself on a regular routine: up, showered and dressed by 8 a.m., tackling a curriculum of her own design. Clonlara School, a Michigan-based home-school program, offers an accredited online high school that tracks Bryanna's classes, and will provide a transcript come time to apply to college.Home-schoolers who don't correspond with online high schools are creative in how they document what they do, so that they can demonstrate to school districts - and later to colleges - what they are learning. Many are diligent in logging daily activities, with each tallied in a different column. Playing Monopoly is math. Chess is critical thinking. Collecting stamps is history. Attending concerts is fine art. Pen pals and e-mail count as writing.
Bryanna is a pretty, ponytailed girl who likes to keep her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her black sweatshirt, emblazoned with CKY, the culty band that celebrates skateboarding, skits, and stunts. Her home-schooling experience is much more structured than her mother, Tammy Rosenblatt, had ever envisioned. Since Tammy decided to home-school Bryanna in kindergarten, she's always imagined Bryanna following her intellectual abilities into unusual educational opportunities. But Bryanna craves structure. She found some textbook catalogs in her mother's car and insisted that she get some. And she sets aside a few hours a day to lead herself through school books about literature, science, and algebra.
"I felt like a failure when she wanted textbooks," says Tammy. "I didn't think we home-schoolers were supposed to use them. But I also know that we're supposed to be flexible."
This reminds me of a favourite cartoon. Scruffy parents, very small boy in very smart suit, including collar and tie. Caption: "Yes, we wanted to raise him as an anarchist, but he wouldn't be told."
That Clonlara home-school program is presumably this.
Where would I be without helpful emailers? (See also: immediately below.)
One of my many unpaid research assistants, Tim Haas, emails me with update news from the BBC about the recent threat to regulate Home Schooling.
Here is the original scare story that this all refers to.
Says Tim:
Of course the headline and subhead ignore the real story - that the welfare manager who called for more stringent regulation because of a case of home educator abuse was completely wrong - but the rest of it isn't so bad.
Indeed. Sample quote from the new BBC story:
A leading education welfare manager has apologised for stating wrongly that a child, who died from natural causes, had been subjected to abuse.Jenny Price, general secretary of the Association of Education Welfare Managers, said she regretted that the information, published in good faith, had been incorrect.
And, having had complaints from home educators, Mrs Price says it is clear some education authorities "do not fully understand the home education ethos".
You can almost hear the angry phone calls, can't you? Phrases involving "fingers" and "burnt" suggest themselves, or even other phrases involving "stick" and "hornet's nest".
I can't remember when I said it, but I definitely did say, here, some time or other ago (yes I said it here), that the Home Education "commmunity" (which really is something of a community) is too dangerous a beast to be simply steamrollered by the state education machine. If Home Education was at all severely messed with, the politics of this would be horrendous for the messer, I think.
Here's what I put here on May 12 2003, apropos of whether Home Ed might ever spread to France. I apparently talked with someone about how
any government which took on the home-schoolers of Britain would have got itself the Political Enemies from Hell. Think of all those terrifyingly bright children who'd overrun morning television. Consider the fact that many home-schoolers have considerable demonstrating experience. I may not hold with their political views about war, peace, etc., but these people do know how to lay on a good demo and to mobilise the media. And they must be, almost by definition, among the most intellectually self-confident people around.
Of course I hope that isn't just wishful thinking, but I really do think that.
This article by libertarian Wendy McElroy, entitled The Separation of School and State, contains much wisdom and many links of interest.
Sample quote from near the end:
My purpose is not to dispute with parents who send their children to public schools. I believe the system is a brutal failure, but parents must decide for themselves. I advocate extending alternatives far beyond the typical private versus public school debate, and even beyond homeschooling.
In particular, McElroy links to this article by Michelle Malkin which I missed when it first came out. Here's how that starts:
New Jersey's child welfare system, like most state child welfare systems, is a corrupt and deadly mess. Children are lost in the shuffle, shipped to abusive foster homes, returned to rapists and child molesters, and left to die in closets while paperwork piles up. So whom does the government decide to punish for the bureaucracy's abysmal failure to protect these innocents?Homeschoolers.
And what does the government think will solve its ills?
More power and paperwork.
My kind of quote. The piece ends equally well:
A crackdown on innocent homeschooling families to cure the incompetence of government child welfare agencies is like a smoker lopping off his ear to treat metastatic lung cancer. It's a bloody wrong cure conceived by a fool who caused his own disease.
Amen.
And this would be all part of why I often put educational stuff on Samizdata rather than here, this being an Instalink to this.
I probably should have said something about this there as well, instead of merely here (see post immediately below here). But Perry de Havilland has now mentioned it.
A commenter named Kelli, who I assume to be English, has already asked about "homeschooling libertarians". Please go there and answer her if you can. As usual, the message here is: do read the Samizdata comments, and of course join in, because you too can then enjoy that big readership, now running at about 6,500 per day, Perry tells me. But do it quick, because Samizdata is a high turnover blog and stories fade from view fast. Some Samizdata comments are inane, of course, but I have already learned a lot about the whole Spanish language in the USA argument, from the comments on the Spelling Bee posting.
Getting back to that BBC report about Home Education harassment, I can find no further mentions today (although my searching skills are not stellar) in the three British broadsheets I regularly link to (Guardian, Telegraph, Indy) about this latest menace to Home Education.
I have a busy afternoon ahead of me, preparing for my Brian's Last Friday meeting tonight, but Julius Blumfeld, to whom thanks, has just emailed me with the link to this, from the BBC:
Some parents claim they are educating their children at home to hide the fact they are abusing them, welfare officers say.The Association for Education Welfare Management has asked the Children's Minister, Margaret Hodge, for the power to check up on home educators.
It says the forthcoming Children's Bill is a good opportunity to change the current practice.
Home educators regard the move as offensive and unnecessary.
It was only a matter of time. Just what will this "checking up" end up amounting to, I wonder?
Let me see if I can quickly dig out a posting here of me prophecying that something along these lines would be happening some time soon.
Well, how about this? - not from me but from Julius, on January 16th 2003:
Yet as more parents home educate their children, it will become increasingly visible. And as that happens, the pressure will grow for the State to "do something" about "the problem" of home education. The pressure will come from the teaching unions (whose monopoly it threatens). It will come from the Department of Education (always on the lookout for a new "initiative"). It will come from the Press (all it will take is one scare story about a home educated ten year old who hasn't yet learned to read). And it will come from Brussels (home education is illegal in many European countries so why should it be legal here?).
Not bad.
The pattern is the same with home education as it is with everything else. Something goes wrong, in the context of harmless, legal activity X. Therefore everyone not just wrongdoers but everyone doing X gets screwed around from now until the End of Time by the government.
Child abuse is already illegal. The way to stop it is to punish it as and when it is detected. The way to detect it is for neighbours to keep an eye and an ear out for it. The idea that harassing people like Julius Blumfeld and his family is going to improve anything except the salaries of the harassing classes is absurd.
Incoming email:
Brian,I am a recently retired computer analyst (20 years).
I would like to teach but don't want to get involved in the public school mess.
My question to you is: Is there a way I could earn any income by teaching
home schooler's technical computer subject material?Or: Is there some other way to earn money thru home schooling, for example, writing course material about computer related topics?
This is an idea I had but I know nothing about home schooling except that it is becoming more popular and will probably continue to do so if the public schools don't revamp the education system.
I would appreciate any ideas you may have.
Sincerely, Michael Hansen
Ideas and responses anyone? I should guess that this kind of knowledge is now swilling around the Home Ed movement like an ocean and no one is going to pay a cent for it. But what do I know? The Agony Midwife posting system has worked well in the past, where I put up the Dear Brian letter, and my commenters deal with it. So maybe something good will happen with this one.
News of a paper entitled "Cyber and Home School Charter Schools: How States are Defining New Forms of Public Schooling".
Cyber and homeschooling charter schools have suddenly become a prominent part of the charter school movement. Such schools differ from conventional schools by delivering much of their curriculum and instruction through the use of the internet and minimizing the use of personnel and physical facilities. This paper examines how these alternative charter school models are emerging within the larger public school and charter school communities with particular attention to recent developments in California and Pennsylvania . In these two states public scrutiny of cyber and homeschooling charter schools has led to considerable debate and demands for public accountability. Of particular concern is the need to modify the regulatory framework to accommodate cyber and homeschooling charter schools as well as consideration of the differing financial allocations that are appropriate for schools that operate with reduced personnel and facilities and the division of financial responsibility between state and local educational agencies.
My instant reaction is that "of particular concern" is for people who care about "regulatory frameworks" to bugger off to Timbuktoo and die. Instead of "defining new forms of public schooling", why don't these people just let other people go ahead and do them? Especially when these schools only require "reduced personnel and facilities".
It's on the up. It's far cheaper. Before you know it there'll be no excuse for public money being spent on education at all. And then what? Answer, we must regulate the damn thing until it is good and expensive again, and only highly qualified people are allowed to do it, and in good and expensive ways.
But that's probably just me. They probably have their hearts in approximately the right place.
You can read the whole thing, in one of those absurdly unwieldy pdf files that occupy sixty pages of uncopiable text when they could have been presented as ten copiable ones.
Anyway let's have a look at the final paragraph of this thing, to see where they're coming from.
As we mentioned earlier, existing research that examines nonclassroom-based schooling is limited. New research efforts will need to focus on school-level analysis that can assess the effectiveness of instructional programs, organizational and governance structures, resource use, and the accountability mechanisms that nonclassroom-based schools employ. Ultimately, new research will assist us in deciphering the viability of sustaining these alternative schooling models under the context of increased state and federal demands.
"Deciphering the viability ..."? Alternative schooling "models"? "Under" the context ...? I still can't tell if these people are meddling class meddlers, or fighting the good fight from within the heart of the beast, and talking the beast's language in order to outwit him.
My life is too short to be ploughing through stuff like this. Maybe your life is longer.
Category: Free market reforms • Home education • Sovietisation
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Incoming email:
Hi Brian
My daughter is in her GCSE year and I am confident that she will pass sucsessfully. However, after much discussion it is clear that school is no longer beneficial, and she is becoming increasingly stressed and upset in that environment. If I had been more knowledgeable in the past I would not have sent her to school. I am unsure of the regulations in the UK, maybe you could tell me: can she be homeschooled for the last six months before her GCSEs?
Thank you for your help.
Rebecca Hayes
Rebecca: the only help I can really give you is to put this email up here, and ask those who really are sure of their ground to answer your query by commenting. My thanks in advance to anyone who can do this.
My understanding is that there is no big problem about any of this, but my "understanding" is too much of a guess to be any use. You obviously need to be sure. I hope one of us here is able to help you to be sure.
If it doesn't sound too patronising, Rebecca, it's great to see a parent willing to have "much discussion" with her child. Not all parents have the sense to do this, or they only do after something truly ghastly has already happened. Whether we here can help or not, I wish your daughter and you all the best, and all future educational happiness and educational success.
Not heard of "Eragon"? You are about to, it would seem. And because of Eragon, it looks like homeschooling is about to get another big boost.
Meet the Paolinis of Montana:
For years, Kenneth and Talita former members of a survivalist cult led by a woman called Ma Prophet seem to have lived on a shoestring, with only occasional employment. Kenneth, the son of an Italian immigrant, used to be a photographer, but doesn't appear to have had much work lately.He and his wife have devoted their lives to their children, schooling them at home and, until recently, rarely venturing outside their small community of Paradise Valley, Montana.
And one of those children, Christopher, has written a book. And it's not just any book:
The British edition appears early next month, but already it is a huge bestseller in America, where it has surged past the Harry Potter books. Almost half a million copies were sold in only two months, a screenplay is in the works and at least a dozen foreign-language editions are on the way.
The book, Eragon of course, began life self-published. But then:
Their big break came when the popular crime novelist Carl Hiaasen visited the area on a fishing trip with his young son, and the boy became immersed in a copy of Eragon. On the way home, Hiaasen asked his son why he couldn't put the book down. "It's great, Dad," came the reply, "better than Harry Potter."To a novelist who has had his fair share of bestsellers, those words were magic. Hiaasen alerted his editors in New York, and the next thing the Paolinis knew, the prestigious publisher Knopf (a part of Random House) was offering them a contract.
This is one of the more educationally startling bits of the Telegraph story:
"I was only 15 when I started Eragon. I didn't know how to write. I just told everything in one gigantic burst, then spent another year revising it. "
Talk about learning by doing.
If Christopher Paolini turns out to be the perfectly nice, well adjusted, civilised person which I fully expect him to turn out to be, then that will ram the homeschooling point with particular force, because the popular fear is that whereas when maths professors do it, that's okay, maybe, when people called things like "Ma Prophet" get mixed up in it, only bad things can result. But now, it seems, the result is Eragon.
Category: Books • Home education • Learning by doing • Literacy
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More words of wisdom from home educator Julius Blumfeld:
When we started home education we were slaves to the school timetable. If school children were learning, for example, to tell the time aged five, then so must our children learn to tell the time at age five.
So when (I shall call her) Agnes had her fifth birthday, Mrs. B began the immense task of teaching her how to tell the time. Believe me it isn't easy. Much effort was spent and not a few tears were shed. Eventually, after many months, the effort began to pay off. Finally, some time during her sixth year, Agnes began to manage it. Hallelujah.
But the memory of all the effort involved was such that when (I shall call her) Janet reached her fifth birthday, Mrs. B decided to put off the wretched task for a bit longer. Weeks passed. Then months. Eventually I could stand it no longer. "She's six and a half and she can't even tell the time" I said. "What will the neighbours think?" So Mrs. B gave in and promised to begin teaching Janet how to tell the time.
So off I went to work. And when I came back that evening, Janet could tell the time. Well perhaps I exaggerate. But it certainly didn't take very long. Nor is it anything to do with Janet being cleverer than Agnes. It is simply that teaching the average a six and a half year old to tell the time is far easier and quicker than teaching the same thing to the average five year old.
As time has passed, we have seen the same thing over and over again. Something that takes weeks or months to learn at age X, takes a fraction of the time at age
X + N.
On the other hand, of course, if a child needs to know how to do something now, it is no use leaving it until they are older, even if the learning process will be quicker when they are older. No doubt a child could be taught to read more quickly age 17 than age seven, but that is no argument for leaving reading until a child is 17.
So there is a balance to be struck between needing to know and needing to know now. If a child learns too soon, huge amounts of time are wasted. If a child learns too late, opportunities to use valuable skills and knowledge may be lost.
The implications are obvious. A system of education that treats children as an undifferentiated mass will either end up wasting huge amounts of time in teaching subjects at too early an age, or will deprive children of knowledge they should already have acquired. Either way, the process will be hugely inefficient.
I have no idea how schools can address this problem, except perhaps this thought. One of the lessons of home education is that full time formal education for children is largely a waste of time. If things are taught at the right age for the child, the entire primary school curriculum can probably be mastered in about six months (albeit spread over a number of years). So why not cut the school day from seven hours to two and let children decide which classes they want to attend and at what age?
There are of course many reasons why this is unlikely to happen any time soon. But perhaps the main reason is this. Although dressed up as places of learning, the primary function of schools, especially government schools, is child minding keeping children off the streets while their parents do other things. Far from efficient teaching and shorter school hours being a desirable goal, it is probably the last thing most parents want.
I leave others to work out the implications of that.
Julus
I've been reading the autobiography of Yehudi Menuhin, and I promised yesterday that I'd be reporting on how violinist Louis Persinger taught Menuhin. But this came first. Hephzibah and Yaltah are Menuhin's sisters.
I went to school for precisely one day, at the age of five, by which time I could read quite well and write and calculate a little. Tremendous discussions preceded the experiment, whose brevity suggests that my parents thankfully accepted the first token of its unwisdom to return to their basic convictions. My one morning was not unhappy but bewildered. Very quietly I sat in the class, the teacher stood at the front and said incomprehensible things for. a long time, and my attention eventually wandered to the window, through which I could see a tree. The tree was the only detail I remembered clearly enough to report at home that afternoon, and that was the end of my schooling. Some time afterwards Hephzibah attended this same school for a whole five days, at the end of which the superintendent asked for a private interview with my parents to tell them their daughter was backward; whereupon Hephzibah too was whisked home and within the year fluently read and wrote. After two failures, a third experiment for Yaltah was never even thought of.So we were educated at home. What did we lose thereby? Most obviously we lost acquaintance with other children. By the time I was ten I was used to adults taking me seriously but was only on tentative speaking terms with boys and girls of my own age. The academic gains and losses of the system are harder to weigh. If we didn't take mathematics beyond the beginnings of algebra and geometry, nor even study physics or chemistry, nor learn Latin and Greek, I believe that the languages and literature we did concentrate on were taken beyond the levels offered by most schools. I was thirteen and my sisters nine and seven when a holiday at Ospedaletti was celebrated by daily readings from The Divine Comedy in the original.
They all turned out okay. Mind you, their parents were remarkable people.
More news of the spread of home schooling in New York. I quote at length because New York Times stuff soon hides behind a payment wall. If you want to read the whole thing, as we bloggers say, read it now.
Newcomers to home schooling resist easy classification as part of the religious right or freewheeling left, who dominated the movement for decades, according to those who study the practice.They come to home schooling fed up with the shortcomings of public education and the cost of private schools. Add to that the new nationwide standards uniform curriculum and more testing which some educators say penalize children with special needs, whether they are gifted, learning disabled or merely eccentric.
"It's a profound irony that the standards movement wound up alienating more parents and fueling the growth of home schooling," said Mitchell L. Stevens, an educational psychologist at New York University and author of "Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement" (Princeton University Press, 2001).
"The presumption of home schooling is that children's distinctive needs come before the managerial needs of the schools," he said. "And, it's easier to do than it was 10 years ago, because the ideologues were so successful in making it legal and creating curriculum tools and organizational support."
In addition to dissatisfaction with schools, Mr. Stevens and others say, social trends have fed interest in home schooling. More women are abandoning careers to stay home with their children. And many families yearn for a less frantic schedule and more time together.
"This may be a rebellion of middle-class parents in this culture," Mr. Stevens said. "We have never figured out how to solve the contradiction between work and parenting for contemporary mothers. And a highly scheduled life puts a squeeze on childhood."
The link was added by me, and I do recommend that if you want to know more about home schooling in the USA and haven't already read this book, you follow that link. Sample quote from the Introduction:
Theirs is a post-1960s America, a nation now sensitized profoundly to the fact that state officials and school bureaucrats can abuse their powers, a nation that has grown rather more accustomed than it used to be to groups that do things unconventionally, to people who live their ideals. Many of today's homeschool sages became adults in the 1960s and 1970s. Many participated in the cultural innovation and experimentation of those decades. Even years later, they think of themselves as their own people, a bit outside the mainstream. Notably, I found this sentiment to be as pervasive among conservative Protestants as among other home schoolers. These are people who have self-consciously done their own thing, or the right thing, regardless of what the neighbors or the in-laws might think.
The everlasting search for a meaningful life turns another corner in the road.
There's a posting and prolonged comment-fest about home schooling going on at Crooked Timber. I'd like to have time to join in, but I alas don't.
The consensus seems to be that although in a perfect world home schooling wouldn't be allowed, the world being the messy place that it is now, it should for the time being be allowed. Very generous.
Incoming email:
Hi Brian, I've been enjoying your blog and thought you might be interested in this article.My own comments here.
Jeremy Hiebert
Indeed. Me and quite a few readers of this, I believe. The links are both worth following. At the end of the second, we find Jeremy saying, of a computerised home schooling set-up of some kind that the regular teachers somewhere or other in America are getting angry about:
This new model may be bad for teachers, but what about kids? I didn't really understand Stephen's logic a couple of weeks ago when he said that homeschooling was a bad idea because many parents are not qualified to teach. The idea that none should be allowed to because some can't do it well seems a bit absurd, and the public system is in the midst of trying to figure out what it means to get "qualified teachers" when funding keeps getting cut and districts face teacher shortages. We all know smart people who would make better teachers than many of the ones that the government says are qualified. And what if they had good curriculum to use with their kids, online collaboration tools and all kinds of extra-curricular social activities available - sports, clubs, friends, travel, etc - wouldn't that have the potential to be an excellent learning experience?
As they say in America: you'd think.
By the way, in case you'd not noticed, I regard all incoming emails from strangers to Brian's Education Blog as publishable unless it explicitly says otherwise.