Unconventional ideas for teaching and learning.

June 18, 2008: "The time's they are a-changing" sang Bob Dylan many years ago, and this song has been going through my head a lot over the past three weeks as I contemplate what's going on with the homeschooling movement. There's no doubt that homeschooling is growing world-wide and the Internet is part of the reason; I recently addressed the first national Polish homeschooling convention ion Warsaw via video conference from my home in Medford, MA. But there is also no doubt that state and national conferences in the US and Canada are seeing declines in attendance and, I think, the Internet is part of the reason for this, too. My recent appearance at a joint "Christian - Secular" conference in British Columbia presented this fact to me again, as have other appearances at large conferences with static or dwindling numbers in recent years. However, the overall number of people who homeschool continues to rise in the US and abroad. What's going on?

I suspect the following trends and issues are at play as the independent, live conference model diminishes while homeschooling grows, though perhaps growing at a slower pace than the explosive rate homeschooling had in the nineteen-nineties.

1) There are more "enrolled home study" students (those who use online curricula and teachers) and services now than at any point in the homeschooling movement. Independent homeschoolers, cobbling together resources from each other's recommendations and their local communities, are decreasing as more families pipe-in education to their homes via computers and television. This dependence on technology over depending on each other for education support marks a shift, to me, in the very nature of homeschooling, causing people to prefer email answers over face-to-face answers. Further, as more schools co-operate with homeschooling families, I think these families turn to the school, whether private or public, for support first, and then default to local and state homeschooling groups if the school doesn't address their needs. This is another reversal of the way things were when I started homeschooling in 1981.

2) Conferences are expensive to put on, travel and hotels are expensive for families, and both are getting more so. In comparison, the cost of doing a video conference is negligible. My appearance in Warsaw, Poland involved a free Skype video-phone connection, a borrowed Mac laptop with a video camera built-in, and about two hours of my time. Considering how much time I lost just rebooking my cancelled flights and waiting in airports on my recent journey to Vancouver, BC, I'm ready to video conference at the drop of a hat. I heard about a weeklong Christian online homeschooling conference that happened recently. It cost $40 to attend any and all sessions, the sessions can be downloaded and viewed or listened to any time you want, and no one had to leave their homes to present or attend. People appear to be quite willing to trade-off the live "give and take" of a seminar in favor of canned content given the cost/benefit issues noted.

3) Homeschooling conferences may not be addressing the needs of new homeschoolers, who are more technology-savvy and aren't as politically motivated as early homeschoolers needed to be. Indeed, the melding of politics and homeschooling may be turning off the new generation of homeschoolers who seek community and inclusion rather than political polarization when they go to a conference. Homeschooling conferences are probably a victim of our political success since homeschooling is now common and accepted by most school and higher education officials, and the right- and left-wing political slant of many homeschooling groups is losing its appeal to the more moderate newbies coming to the movement who primarily seek learning opportunities for their children and not political labeling and herding.

4) Homeschooling is growing because materials are abundant online, in books, and from accessible local "learning stores." Homeschooling conferences are shrinking because people no longer need to go to an annual conference vendor hall to find materials for their kids when they are available online or locally year-round.

Things are changing, and I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing. But for someone like me, who has seen homeschooling grow over 27 years, it is disconcerting to realize that the homeschooling conferences that were so much a part of my career and my family's enjoyment are becoming relics of the past.

April 28, 2008. Structural Issues. I often hear unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers twist their thoughts into pretzels over the issue of how much structure their days should have. Radicals like to brag their days have no structure, traditionalists point to how each lesson is carefully structured to build on the previous day's work, and most people find themselves caught between these two poles. I don't ask my kids to do math every day, but are we really "unstructured" if instead they practice singing on a daily schedule?

The fact is, as John Holt wrote years ago in his book Freedom and Beyond, "As there is no life without structure, so there is no life without constraints. We are all and always constrained, bound in, limited by a great many things, not least of all the fact that we are mortal. We are limited by our animal nature, by our model of reality, by our relations with other people, by our hopes and fears. It is useless to ask if life without constraints would be desirable. The question is too iffy even to think about—what is important is ...is not whether there are limits but how much choice we have within those limits... ...The idea of limits is not of itself opposed to the idea of freedom. The difference between a free community or society and a tyranny—this is another way of saying what I tried to say about structure—is not that one has limits while the other does not. It is that in a free society you can find out where the limits are; in a tyranny you can never be sure."

Holt's point is beautifully restated, and acted upon, by the people at North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, a resource center in Hadley, Massachusetts. They have composed a document entitled "Seven Principles that Inform Our Work at North Star" and one of their principles captures the essence of this statement: unschooling doesn't mean lack of structure or goals; unschooling just has a structure that supports self-directed learning. As North Star writes:

"Structure communicates as powerfully as words—and often more powerfully. It's not enough to tell kids that we want them to be self-motivated, or that we want them to value learning for its own, if the structure of their lives and their education is actually communicating the opposite message. Voluntary (rather than compulsory) classes, the ability to choose what one studies rather than following a required curriculum, and the absence of tests and grades all contribute to a structure that supports and facilitates intrinsic motivation and self-directed learning."

Be aware and proud of the structure and freedom you are providing your children. Tell people who say you are not providing a disciplined, structured environment for your children to learn in that you are, indeed, creating a structured environment for your child, one that allows intrinsic motivation to flourish; that it may look like a circus or private meditation is part of the process, not the goal. There are some educators, and a growing number of unschooling families, who know that the process of self-motivation and self-regulation can take a long time, even years, to take root. Ironically, a lot of the time it takes for self-motivation to take root depends on how much time a child has been in conventional school, but that will be a topic for another day. Patience and awareness are the keys here, not results and judgments. As John Holt wrote in Freedom and Beyond, "Every time we try to manage the lives of young people, we give up the chance to see how they might have managed their own lives, and to learn what we might have learned from doing it."

April 10, 2008: It has come to my attention that there are some concerns about my credibility as a speaker, stemming from questions about my children’s school attendance and our approach to homeschooling. I’m going to try to address these concerns as succinctly as I can.

My experience with homeschooling is both professional and personal. I began working for and writing about homeschooling in 1981, and since then I have accumulated a long, visible track record as a public speaker and advocate for homeschooling. My colleagues at Holt Associates and I kept Growing Without Schooling magazine going for sixteen years after John Holt's death. I wrote, edited, and published my own and many other writers' articles and books about homeschooling, testified in court and lobbied Congress and state legislatures on behalf of homeschooling, met and hashed out differences between school officials and unschoolers in many states and even in foreign countries. I am quoted as a homeschooling expert in the media, I have promoted all the Growing Without Schooling conferences and seminars, as well as the Learning In Our Own Way Conference, and currently operate three websites that promote homeschooling in general and unschooling in particular. I was also a full-time unschooling dad for three and a half years after Growing Without Schooling closed.

Throughout their lives, each of my three daughters, who are now 21, 18, and 15, have spent most of their time homeschooling and stretches of time in school. Sometimes a child in our family has attended school because she wanted, for myriad reasons of her own, to try school at that time, and because we chose to support that experiment rather than to oppose it. At times, the decision that one or more of our children would attend school has been made in response to the needs of our family as a whole.

During our girls’ homeschooling years, we have supported and nurtured them and their learning in a huge variety of ways, most of which would generally not look anything like what would happen in a conventional school classroom. I cannot take the time or the space here to write the full-length essay that would be required to address such questions as “What is unschooling?” or “What kinds of practices could be said to violate the spirit of unschooling, and what practices are compatible with that spirit?” I will say that I have always believed in and been excited by the stories of freedom, choice, flexibility, support, real-world activities, and above all trust and respect for children and families that John Holt wrote about and that hundreds of parents and children described in the pages of Growing Without Schooling for so many years. The possibility that the term, or the idea of, unschooling could come to mean something so rigid, so codified, that a family could be measured against it and found wanting would have baffled any of us in those days of publishing GWS magazine. It baffles me today.

Our daughters are vital, interesting, interested young people, and their homeschooling experiences are clearly important parts of who they are today. I would love to tell you more about them and about our family’s experiences growing and learning together, but the spirit in which I do that sharing is critically important to me and to my family. I will share with delight, as proud parents do; I will share with curiosity and interest, as those of us who are fascinated by children’s learning have been doing for years; I will share with a hope of helping others, as those of us who write and speak publicly about homeschooling and learning in general have also been doing for years. But I won’t talk about my children in a way that seeks to measure their lives against others’ standards, assumptions, or definitions of how they should have been living or learning or what would have been best for us as a family at any given time. My aim is to offer other people hope and possibilities about their children’s lives and learning, rather than doctrine and judgment. It seems reasonable to expect the same in return.

January 19, 2008: Why Separate Education from Health and Welfare?

My wife and I saw a wonderful play over the holidays, No Child... written and performed by Nilaja Sun. It was a stunning performance based on her experience at a high school in Bronx, NY. She was hired to teach a six-week drama course to some of the most difficult students in the school system and she chooses a play about prisoners performing a play.

From the program: "Just as the inmates transcend their prison through theater, the young students find hope through the performing arts. Like the convicts in the play, theater allows the students to imagine a life without "two metal-detecting machines, seven metal-detecting wands, five school guards, two NYC police offers. All armed."...

Not only was this a brilliant, sixty-five minute presentation of the issues and personalities that keep our schools running, it was also an incredible display of acting. By the end of the show I felt I knew the distinctive faces, voices, and gaits of about 17 characters though we were giving a standing ovation to just one performer. Nilaja Sun is nothing less than amazing and I hope she continues to act and develop new material at such a high level of mastery. As a teacher she grasps that it is her connection to each student and her ability to work with them from those connection points that is far more important than following the prescribed activities of the day and funneling their learning towards test-taking skills. But what spoiled the show for me was the program.

In the program is a long essay and list of action items about reforming education, written by a Director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. After reading it I felt my heart sink - here was a brilliant drama about how bureaucracies, political mandates, and educational theories are failing our children TODAY yet nothing but the same OLD answers are proffered. Even chestnuts we in the homeschooling and alternative schooling communities have been saying and doing for decades - such as asking young people how to improve their own educations - are suggested as new, untried ideas to study. But it seems like such lip service to me. After all, it is hard to imagine that even most graduate students are taken seriously when asked for their opinions about how to improve their education, let alone a second-grader. I think this is because the more you buy into schooling, you tend to become more dismissive of those with less schooling, but I'll explore that issue another time.

In one sense, this play is nothing new. There is an entire genre of dramas depicting cold, bleak schooling experiences being changed by individual teachers who reach out to students to work on specific issues that are preventing the students from moving forward in school and in life. Of course, these shows usually have a bittersweet ending, with the students moving forward but the teacher getting fired or quitting for not fitting in with other faculty, the administration, the parents, or because they aren't allowed to continue using their maverick teaching methods. For those of us familiar with the professional teaching histories of John Holt, John Gatto, Jaime Escalante, Marva Collins, Jonathan Kozol, etc. this is a well-known fate for school reformers. Though Nilaja Sun almost quits in the play, she doesn't, and the program notes say she continues to work as a teaching artist in New York City.

In short, the school reforms suggested in the program are unlikely to change anything because they are focused on funding the institution of schooling, not the institutions of family and community, where the crisis is actually occurring. Years ago, Education was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. During the Carter Administration, the Dept. of Education was created because Education was considered too important to be lumped in with health and welfare. By thinking we can educate people without addressing their personal lives and living conditions we have made a grave mistake.

We know that good students come from secure families and communities, but we won't address this directly. Study after study shows that income level is the best predictor of school success, yet we ignore the implications of this. Instead we think we can create a separate world in school where teaching, discipline, expectations, and rewards are enough to overcome dangerous neighborhoods, poor parenting, poverty, bad diets, neglect of all sorts.The theory is that these problems will be overcome because, somehow, the lessons from school will be useful to the lives of children when they leave school. Unfortunately, this is true for only a small portion of each graduating class as most graduates forget most of what they studied as soon as the testing is over. Businesses and colleges have complained about this for decades, noting how graduates are not strong enough to handle their work without remedial training. Schooling is an empty ritual for most kids, who go through the motions or openly disrupt the ritual simply because they have no other options other than becoming a "dropout." Indeed, schooling seems to have lost it's compass and its primary purpose is to prepare students for the next level of schooling, rather than life outside of school. This is illustrated by the trend, noted by psychiatrists and historians (for instance, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood by Stephen Mintz, Bleknap Harvard, 2004), for young people to be infantilized by more years of schooling. Our young today delay taking on traditional adult responsibilities that previous generations typically embraced by the age of 21 (getting married, leaving home, holdling down a regular job) because they are spending so much more time in school and college than previous generations did.

I think we need to experiment by using public funds to improve ones' home life and community as educational reforms that have a lasting, positive effect on individuals and society. Money is tight for us all, and since we need to make funding choices I think we need to start thinking about how we can get the most bang for our educational dollars beyond paying for additional hours of schooling for kids.

For instance:

Can we talk about creating jobs for poverty-stricken parents as a more direct way to improve the lot of children than giving them laptops? Wouldn't a child whose family had a steady income do better in school than one who does not?

Can we talk about giving children and adults the health care they need instead of funding more standardized tests for the nation? Why make health-care available to a child then cut it off to them when they are adults? Healthy people are better able to handle challenging tasks, in and out of school.

Can we encourage parents and children to eat meals together rather than pressuring them to spend more time on activities for school and work? Why not encourage family-time that does not make parents watch-dogs for the schools and that nurtures conviviality and good eating habits?

Can we think of the world as an exciting environment to explore and learn from, rather than as a global classroom managed by experts? The world can be dangerous and tricky, but is keeping children in the womb of Alma Mater the best way to confront this situation? Why can't we invite children to help us make the world better now, in whatever small ways they can, rather than wait until they're college graduates?

Nilaja Sun captures the moment perfectly: she portrays school honestly from the crusty custodian to the energetic boys bouncing around the desks. Given the calls for more funding for schools, more teacher training, expanding school to encompass medical and social services for children, making schools more accessible to parents, it is hard to see how the community, parents and children benefit directly from such changes, though it is obvious how the schools benefit directly by their growth in importance, labor force, and funding.

I don't want to de-fund schools nor am I saying close the schools, as other homeschoolers and unschoolers might wish. Though homeschooling and alternative schooling clearly demonstrate a variety of ways that foster good citizenship and academic achievement, I know they are not the right "fit" for everyone-and neither is school. By thinking and working with children and adults outside the conventional "Teach 'em and Test 'em" model, we can free our minds to consider other ways of learning, teaching, and participating in our society. Homeschooling demonstrates a wide variety of places and people besides school classrooms where children can learn, and the literature of school reform often contains stories about alternative programs that succeed without following the conventional, "Sit down, shut up, and do as I say" educational process. Intensifying schooling to address the problems of discipline, parental involvement, student participation, poverty, and health is the wrong tool for addressing these long-standing problems.

Nov. 26, 2007

I was with a group of teachers and their principal in a very convivial setting: A cozy Irish pub in Cambridge watching TV to see one of our friends compete in Jeopardy. That evening, Donal became a Jeopardy champion while I got to answer the same question I've been asked for decades about how we unschooled our girls: "But what about socialization?"

No matter what the composition of the audience is, this question is bound to come up. History, research, scholarly articles, and present-day circumstances – grown homeschoolers, 2nd generation homeschoolers, unschooling circles growing internationally, the established political presence of homeschooling activists – none seem to refute the belief that we best learn to be social beings - considerate and empathic towards others different from us -by being forced to compete with others for grades and rewards in school. The cognitive dissonance of this position grates on teachers and students, as countless books have noted, yet it persists.

^{John Holt once said in an interview about his schooling in elite private schools, "School de-socialized me," a realization that fed his empathic understanding of what children felt like while being taught in school. Indeed, modern school discourages socialization even more than in John Holt's day. Group activities, peer-led spontaneous play and conversations, projects, group field trips, group walks, swimming, climbing, running games, hiding games, strategy games, physical education and the arts in general, are all cut or strongly de-emphasized in favor of increasing teacher's time on the task of teaching to the test to prove productive use of state funds for educaton.}

Socialization in school seems more and more an attempt to subdue a restive population than an effort to train citizens to participate in a democratic republic. Yet, parents who homeschool their children are routinely criticized for not subjecting their children to this social treatment, as though our children were missing out on some vital growth hormone that if not administered by a trained professional will result in catastrophic developmental delays for the child.

<sup>Fortunately, Rachel Gathercole has written a book that finally tackles the socialization question in depth. From research, to anecdotal evidence, to history, Gathercole presents current information about how and why homeschoolers are socialized as well as or better than conventionally schooled children. The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling is available from

http://www.rachelgathercole.com/</sup>

Here is my foreword that appears in the The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling

“What about socialization?”

That question provokes a subdued, almost rote, response from me now that I’ve worked with homeschoolers for twenty-five years. Probably the hardest thing about being a homeschooler is repeatedly answering questions about homeschooling and socialization. Often these questions are honest exchanges, but sometimes they implicitly carry a criticism: “Aren’t you socially handicapping your child by homeschooling them?” It is hard to feel good about discussing homeschooling with someone who seems to assume that by keeping your family close you are automatically suffocating them. Further, a tactful reply is not always easy when you are fielding questions from folks who already have their answers.

However, the last thing I have ever been worried about as a homeschooling father of three daughters is their socialization. Homeschooling has always allowed them lots of time and opportunities to make and sustain friendships with children and adults. In fact, now that my girls are young adults and teenagers I’m more comfortable than ever with our decision to homeschool our children. All the risks we were warned about when we homeschooled our girls turned out to be stale conventional wisdom: they won’t learn anything; they’ll be put in lower level classes if they return to school; they won’t be able to get into college or find work; - especically - they won’t be socialized!

Now, homeschooling isn’t the answer to everything, and not everyone should homeschool. Homeschooling is and should remain a self-selecting and self-correcting activity. But given the amount of books, articles, movies, videos, plays, and personal stories about the everyday de-socializing experiences children experience in the course of contemporary schooling, I am amazed how people think this type of socialization is the best we can offer children. “It’s the real world,” is a sad, and wrong, response. Bullying, verbal and emotional abuse, forced labor and stress from one’s workload at least have some hope of remedy or adjudication in the real world of adult work. In the world of school socialization, these are just things kids must get used to. “After all,” supporters of school socialization contend, “Our kids need to be citizens in a democracy… “ Well, now I think we’re really on thin ice. As a homeschooling mother wrote to a school official in 1921: How can democracy be taught in an institution that doesn’t practice it? But I digress…

Socialization. With all the tension in our world from differing political views, differing religious views, and differing classes, we can certainly use better social skills and socialization. However, school is increasingly becoming a place where testing and competition are paramount virtues, not individually-paced learning and group co-operation. Our children need other social outlets besides the increasingly limited opportunities schools provide, and it is homeschoolers who are finding or creating many new opportunities for children and adults to socialize during “school hours.” It will be a sad irony that homeschoolers may some day soon be criticized for allowing their children to be so social that they might fall behind their schooled age-mates who are compelled to spend so much more of their “time on task!”

That is one reason why Rachel Gathercole’s book appeals to me: she presents data, stories, and research about how homeschoolers develop social skills and, in doing so, she demonstrates the wide variety of possibilities for socializing children that exist in the real world besides sending them to school. The other reason I like this book is that the next time someone says to me, “I’m thinking about homeschooling but I worry that my child won’t be properly socialized,” I can just hand them this book.

October 16, 2007: UNSCHOOLED. On Sept. 29 I addressed the Maryland Home Education Association Conference, speaking about home-based learning, showing a documentary film entitled "Unschooled," and then fielding a discussion with the audience about the movie. It was a very positive experience, great to see old friends and make some new ones, and fun to be speaking for my fifth time at the MHEA conference. Manfred Smith, the conference organizer, noted that John Holt addressed the first MHEA conference twenty-five years ago. I feel so old thinking back to those early years, but also so grateful to have those memories. I remember driving down to an MHEA conference in the mid-nineties with my whole family; I spoke while my wife and kids operated the Holt/GWS book tables. The recent weekend was quite a trip down memory lane for me since the conference was in the same location as the one my family came to years earlier.

,,,The documentary, "Unschooled," generated a lively response from the audience. I asked the film-maker for a brief biography and here's what he sent:

Jason Marsh produced, directed, and edited UNSCHOOLED, a documentary about the educational movement known as unschooling. He is also the founding editor of Greater Good (www.greatergoodmag.org), a quarterly magazine that reports on the science of human happiness, compassion, and altruism. Previously, he has worked as a public radio producer, kindergarten teacher, and as the managing editor of the political journal The Responsive Community. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The movie is 25 minutes long,and builds a cogent argument for letting kids learn in their own ways. The film uses understatement and humor, instead of vitriol and slogans, to make the case for unschooling. The production values, editing, and pacing of the film are pretty professional, which makes this documentary entertaining as well as intellectually satisfying.

The audience reaction to the film was very positive, but, of course, there were some criticisms, all the usual ones I hear about unschooling.

"Doesn't anyone ever say 'No' to their children in unschooling?"

"What about socialization? They seem to spend a lot of time alone or with their parents."

"It seems so hippie-ish, so California. Don't regular families unschool?"

Members from the audience, and myself, responded to these comments and we had a good discussion chewing over the many issues this film raises.

I think this film presents unschooling in a coherent, positive way. I particularly like how we see children and teenagers doing things on their own and I'm saddened by comments that this seemed like a sign of their isolation rather than a sign of their personal development. Are we getting to the point in our society where adults are uncomfortable just watching a child do something on their own, without any adult in the room managing the experience?

Another point that "Unschooled" brings up about homeschooling and unschooling is an interesting response to the criticism that unschooled children will not choose to do anything academically challenging, preferring to play videos, watch TV, or goof-off every time such a choice must be made. In the film we see young Lexie and her committed-to-unschooling mom doing a standardized test together. Lexie says in her voice-over that she enjoys taking tests. During the scene her mom mocks the test several times, calling it "stupid," while Lexie insists, "It's not a stupid test!"

When an unschooler's child likes something about schooling, as Lexie likes to do tests, it can really challenge our beliefs about school and our parenting. However, our adult expectations about how our children should feel about schooling are sometimes at odds with our kids' feelings, and I think its good for us to see how people handle those moments. I also think it is good to remember that our children are growing up in a culture that is far more saturated in educational marketing than we did as children. Kids who are raised with access to modern media and group experiences can not help but be exposed to the public blandishments and harangues to consume educational children's television and videos, stay in school, go to college, then graduate school, then law, medical, or MBA school, etc. It's no wonder our unschooled kids want to know what school is like; school has become forbidden fruit to them! Immersed in media and the travails of their schooled neighborhood friends or siblings, our unschooled children wonder if they're smart enough to pass the same tests or good enough to play on the same teams as their schooled age-mates. As the pressure to attend school intensifies I think we'll be seeing more and more unschooled children working through these issues in interesting ways, as Lexie and her mom do in this film.

"Unschooled" is a fine way to introduce friends to what unschooling is like for three families, and a good way to initiate conversations about how parents and other concerned adults can provide children with unique, wholesome, and engaging learning oppportunities in their local communities that do not have to resemble conventional schooling.

"Unschooled" is currently available directly from Jason Marsh: www.unschooledfilm.com

I will be adding it for sale to this website soon.

September 23, 2007. Getting ready for the Maryland Home Educator's Conference next weekend and I'm looking forward to seeing old friends and making new ones.

I'm particularly looking forward to showing Jason Marsh's documentary, UNSCHOOLED, and leading a discussion about it. I'm a big fan of Peter Kowalke's Grown Without Schooling, and many of the other videos I've seen that document homeschooling or alternative schooling, but they usually are not compelling tales. UNSCHOOLED has a quick pace, good production values, and a compelling narrative about three unschooling families.

In twenty-five minutes we get a first-hand look at how unconventional, child-led, interest-based education can work for a variety of families. But it also serves as a critique of conventional school, since one of the unschooling parents is also a public school teacher. The movie delve a bit into the tensions and philosophies that enforce compulsory schooling, but done with wit and understanding and not rancor. For instance, a CA school official comments on a transcript of an unschooler, pronouncing the young man will probably not get into college. A few scenes later we see this young man getting accepted to U-Cal Berkelely.

There are many such nice moments in this movie, and most are centered on, "What do the kids do all day?" the eternal question asked of unschoolers from the moment Holt coined the term. Lots of things: jumping rope, reading books, playing on the beach, role playing with the Dickens' Christmas group at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, learning to be a blacksmith, cooking healthy meals. How this connects with education, unschooling, homeschooling, and college admissions is a fascinating story told concisely in a film that I look forward to sharing. I'll let you now what the folks in MD think about it when I get back next week!

My keynote address, "Living Better with Home-based Learning," is a new talk that emphasizes how learning with our children should be considered a gift, not a chore. I'll explore the benefits of home-based learning using the lens of our most precious commodity, time, and I'll illustrate it with stories from my work with John Holt, Growing Without Schooling Magazine, and my own experiences as a homeschooling dad.

Sept. 11, 2007: I've been remembering Raymond Moore a lot lately. He passed away July 13, 2007, and I've been thinking about my many encounters with him and Dorothy in the homeschooling scene during the nineteen-eighties and early -nineties. On the phone, at a conference, or in print, Ray was always a gracious and friendly man. He wrote many books about education and possessed a forceful voice that he used passionately and effectively when addressing audiences. You can read Ray's obituary at www.moorefoundation.com/.

My first personal encounter with the Moore's was at a WHO (Washington Homeschool Organization) conference. I spent some time speaking with them during the day, both backstage and in the vending hall, and I quickly felt comfortable in their presence. That night I was up very late discussing the pros and cons of ...homeschooling research with friends I had until then only known through long distance phone calls and letters. I overslept and had to rush to get to the auditorium where I was giving a keynote speech that morning. As I approached the podium I realized I had about fifteen minutes before I had to speak, so I turned to Ray and Dorothy Moore, who had just left the podium and come backstage, and asked, "Do you know where I can get a quick cup of coffee?"

Dorothy was a bit flustered and I immediately realized the social faux pas I committed before a devout Seventh Day Adventist. However, she smiled at me and said, "Why would I know that?"

Another conference, this one in Atlanta, Georgia. Ray and Dorothy were taking questions and answers from the audience. Someone asked Ray, "How do you recognize a good learning situation? Ray replied quickly and firmly, "Who's asking most of the questions? If it's the teacher, it's a bad learning situation. If it's the children, it's a good learning situation."

Ray was an early supporter and expert witness for the Home School Legal Defense Association, but they had a falling out some time in the late eighties. I miss Ray's forthright proclamation, which I heard him say nearly every time he spoke in public, that homeschooling should be protected for everyone's interest, not just Conservative Christians'. He backed that talk with action by participating in the launching of at least two inclusive homeschooling groups that I was part of (one national and one international) and flying all over the world as an expert witness in homeschooling cases.

Ray worked with me as a publisher and engaged me as a sounding board about homeschooling issues over the years. His views about education were akin to John Holt's thinking, though not the same. I once described to a friend the difference between John and Ray's work, "Ray is better late than early; John is better never than ever"

Ray was forthright and compassionate towards the stress parents, mom's in particular, feel when they homeschool. In their books, Ray and Dorothy were always reminding parents to relax. I heard Dorothy say something along these lines: "Don't sweat the small stuff… and it's all small stuff." They were so concerned with the increasing academic pressure parents were introducing into their homes they wrote a book in 1988 warning about it entitled, Home School Burnout (Wolgemuth & Hyatt). Here are two sentences from the dust jacket:

"Although the home school movement in America is, by no means, a contemporary craze—Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt were all home schooled—there has been, in the past ten years, a marked surge of the number of practicing home schooling families across North America.

"Tragically, however, what was intended to be the flexible, child-centered approach to early education at home has, in may cases, become a miniaturized replication of the formal, high-pressured learning in large, public classrooms most home schoolers decry."

On the front page of my copy of Home School Burnout Ray wrote:

To Pat and All,

There are reasons why John is the most frequently mentioned (173, 277, 280, 282) individual in this book. Gratitude to you for your help, also. John was a dear friend to me. Some of his flavor here.

Ray Moore, 1988

Home School Burnout received mixed reviews and many homeschoolers openly worried it would give a negative view of homeschooling to the public. I thought it was an honest, and ultimately positive, book since the Moore's provided many examples of families that recognized, and then eliminated, the stresses that were causing their burnout. So, after the first printing was sold, the book was repackaged and released as The Successful Homeschool Family Handbook.

How sad to think how our government and media lavish praise and attention on products like Baby Einstein and how the majority of citizens – and homeschoolers! - want more formal education at earlier ages for children. How sad to think Ray and Dorothy were sounding an alarm in 1988 that John Holt sounded in 1977, an alarm still ringing in 2007. Will we ever really hear it?

As Ray would say, I feel blessed to have known him.

Click here to view a jpg of this inscription

Some other memories of Raymond S. Moore:

http://www.moorefoundation.com/

http://www.pahomeschoolers.com/messages/22088.html

August 24, 2007. The September 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine contains a fantastic essay: Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty Years of Blaming America's Educational System for Our Stupidity. I remember the writer, Peter Schrag, as co-author of The Myth of the Hyperactive Child and Other Means of Child Control, a popular book in the late seventies. Unlike most education critics, Schrag cuts through the rhetoric of the schooling industry and actually does something we don't see in print often: he finds authoritative right-wing and left-wing voices that all say the same thing in fancier words: school stinks. But Schrag goes deeper and criticizes our cultural support for schooling children to be something we want them to be, instead of helping them to learn for their own benefit. Schrag makes this point elegantly.

He does so by tracing the history of using schools as little factories to create better educated citizens to leap the science gap caused by the Russians when they launched Sputnik. Schrag writes, "The upshot of Sputnik and the various economic, political, and social crises of the succeeding years – real or perceived – was (and is) an uninterrupted string of American educational reforms, what Stanford University's Larry Cuban and David Tyack have called a 'tinkering toward utopia.'"

The Californian scholars' use of the phrase "tinkering toward utopia" sounds so polite when compared to the rhetoric of New York City Teacher John Taylor Gatto. In The Lure of Utopia, Gatto writes, "The cries of true believers are all around the history of schooling, thick as gulls at a garbage dump. As I wrote that, USA Today was telling the story of principal Debbie Reeves of the Barnwell Elementary School in a wealthy Atlanta suburb, who delivered herself of this amazing statement for publication: "I'm not sure you ever get to the point you have enough technology. We just believe so fervently in it."

Though from different coasts and points of view about schooling, the authors all accuse schools of being tools of social control used by influential elites for a number of reasons. Schrag has some strong insights into the forces that drive our irrational support of schooling as the answer to our social and political woes. Here are a few quotes:

"[Standardized Test] Scores of each major ethnic subgroup have increased, but the achievement gap between whites and others, as almost everybody knows, hasn't come close to being eliminated."

"Now the warnings that followed Sputnik and rang through A Nation At Risk are ringing again—this time not about the Soviets, the Germans,, or the Japanese but about the Chinese and the Indians."

"Money is hardly the issue: Funding for public schools has never been higher. But neither has the number of tasks charged to the schools, which, in the hope of getting more money, they have eagerly taken on."

"Even as the the incomes of the very rich soared, the median inflation-adjusted household income earned by college graduates was lower in 2005 than it had been five years earlier."

"College graduates, it should be obvious, earn more on average than high school dropouts. But that doesn't begin to explain our rapidly growing income disparity, particularly the gap between the top 1 percent and everybody else, or why that gap is so much larger in the United States than it is in Europe."

I'm glad to see this topic covered by Mr. Schrag, and I hope he will explore this matter in more detail in the future. For instance, schooling is mentioned a lot, but why not compulsory schooling? It is, after all, the legal status of forced attendance that gives the schooling industry so much of its power, money, and control in society. How can we change a system that is solidly supported by the general public? How can we convince our fellow citizens that they don't need to make their babies learn to read early in order to get into Harvard, and that going to Harvard isn't for everyone and that's okay? How do we say no to demands for ever more school credentials and still have opportunities for advancement and employment? Homeschoolers have found their own answers to these questions for years, though now that these questions are emerging on a larger stage perhaps they'll be taken more seriously by society.

I urge you to read the whole essay and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For more information about Harper's and Schrag's essay visit: http://www.harpers.org

August 12, 2007: The blink of an eye can be all it takes for a moment of astonishment to creep into our lives. For instance:

V iew this YouTube video of a new paintbrush

When we experience a jolt of unexpected pleasure we are sensing the world as young children do, raw and fresh. But this enjoyment doesn't have to be reserved for a few lucky students who are allowed to play with expensive technology under the care of well-meaning teachers. Sure, our children use video cameras, digital audio recorders, text messaging and Nintendo the way we used typewriters, telephones, cassette recorders, and Nintendo: For social communication, sharing music, and gaming. While I feel this is true, I also feel it is true that there is a digital divide, though I don't want to remedy this by giving everybody the latest digital gadgets. There are existing technologies we haven't fully exploited that we can use more fully.

For most children, just learning how to draw a person well or how to draw objects to look like they have three dimensions would create a similar level of excitement and wonder as the children express in the paintbrush video. Like the kids in the vidoe, they would benefit not just from the technological experience, but from the human connection that links the lesson to the heart as well. There are probably a great many art teachers, or art professionals wishing to share their knowledge with the young, who would welcome to opportunity to share their pleasure in using the tools of their trades.

But how can artists learn the methods and goals of schooling if they aren't properly trained and supervised in educational techniques? We can't allow the unplanned to intrude much into the educational process; it tends to take children away from their time on task and it throws off the curriculum schedule, which in turn ruins the compulsory testing schedule, eventually causing property values to decline and, before you know it, there goes our global competitiveness.

Moments of astonishment, such as when we first hear a striking melody in a new song, or experience a moving theatrical performance, an inexplicable magic trick, a beautifully written piece, or a funny line, seem less likely to present themselves to children whose lives are increasingly ruled by plans, ever higher expectations, and actuarial tables. Come to think of it, the same is even more true for adults, so it is even more important to try and enjoy, and share, our moments of astonishment whenever we can, to remind ourselves that our creativity and our childrens' abilities, need not be limited, but instead can be expanded, by technology. But that technology doesn't have to be an expensive, institutionally copyrighted, government funded, expert contolled electronic whizbang. Technology can also just be pencil shared by two people.

August 7, 2007: Apparently parents need only fill two roles in American society: breeders and payers. We must supply the economy with new consumers, and we must pay for their education, health, and welfare until they become employed and take their place in society as good consumers. But shouldn't education do more than just make us educated consumers?

Of course, about one hundred and fifty years ago, when Massachusetts decided to pass the first universal compulsory school attendance laws in the nation, they didn't think of school as preparation for being a good consumer. Instead, the purpose of compulsory schooling was to create "good citizens." It appears, however, that in America one cannot be a good citizen without being a good consumer. The boundaries between "citizen" and "consumer" have been blurred to the point that our President can mollify the citizenry with uninterrupted business and theme park vacations. Apparently, if we don't participate in our economy as much as possible, the forces of Evil will win.

There are groups fighting the invasion of schools by corporate interests, and there are groups fighting the commercialization of childhood. Why should there not be a group that fights the commercialization of parenting? The very experience of parenting becomes altered when we see ourselves as consumers of parenting information products instead of adults seeking advice from other adults. Parents are cowed and neutered by consumer forces to turn over not just our money, but our responsibility for our children, to others for a fee. Television convinces most parents it is educational, to the point that many adults now willingly expose children to TV for its "positive benefits." Our schools convince us that learning is a difficult and time-consuming task for children, and that we unqualified parents need to step aside and let the experts handle the growth and development of children every day, for longer and longer periods time. Our politicians tell us government is too difficult for the average American to understand, our lawyers tell us we're too dumb to sit on juries, our doctors tell us we have the best health care in the world though most patients can't afford it. And we're told to spend even more money on education because, well, look how complicated the world is and how stupid most people are. This seems to me to be accepted wisdom, not hard reality.

For instance, one little action, homeschooling, is becoming more and more common for people who are not satisfied with being just breeders and payers. Despite little to no support from major institutions and open ridicule by many educators homeschooling has grown by leaps and bounds, particularly in the last ten years. Despite two generations of homeschoolers taking their places in higher education and the workplace the accepted wisdom is that homeschoolers are constantly in danger of being unsocialized and stupid.

Homeschoolers choose to spend much more time with their children, watching and helping them learn, and we don't want to give that pleasure up to others. Even though homeschoolers spend more time with their children than most parents, they stillworry about their children, as any parent does. Two of the biggest worries parents have when it comes to homeschooling are:

1) Their children will never learn anything beyond what their parents can teach them

2) Their children will never be able to get good jobs or college degrees

Over twenty-five years of working with homeschoolers, my three daughters, and alternative schoolers has amply rewarded me with evidence and confidence that these are fears based on accepted wisdom, not reality. This site, and many others I plan to cite, prove this with personal accounts, media stories, and research. Doing away with the accepted wisdom that education is about consuming as much schooling as possible is, to me, one significant step parents can take towards breaking out of the mold of being just a breeder and payer, and growing into the role of parent and citizen

July 24, 2007:

The British tried to eradicate Irish culture in many ways. They established laws that forbade the teaching of Irish language and culture, as well as the teaching of Roman Catholicism, in an attempt to Anglicize the Irish through schooling. The Irish resisted in many ways, such as by founding "Hedge Schools" in the eigtheenth century, and, in the 20th century, by enshrining in the Irish Constitution parents' right to teach their own children.

I had the great pleasure of speaking to Irish homeschoolers I learned that even though homeschooling is protected by their constitution, the regulation of "education in places other than recognized schools" still concerns government agencies. Fortunately for the Irish, the person the government sent to the conference to speak to them was very open to learning about homeschooling in all its variations and he was willing to engage in dialog about how he could best serve homeschoolers. Unfortunately, as in the United States, a driving force for his concern to regulate homeschoolers appeared to be fear of litigation, particularly from children or their advocates who, allegedly, would sue the government for failure to provide proper education for special needs students if they were homeschooled.

During the discussion we had after his presentation, I mentioned that there is no such thing as educational malpractice, which is why so many methods and technniques exist in education, and why expanding options and choices for learners is more important than narrowing options for them. Nonetheless, worries persist in Ireland, as they do in the US, that someone will sue a school district into bankruptcy because the schools did not somehow provide adequate education for homeschooled children.

It's sad how school officials on two different continents are similarly saying that homeschoolers need to be more regulated so schools won't be sued in courts. We've become so self-conscious about litigation regarding children that playing tag has been banned during recess in some school districts because the schools fear being sued by a parent whose child might get hurt from playing the game. It's not just happening in the US and Ireland either: my friend in British Columbia, Matt Hern, writes in his book FIELD DAY about taking a group of kids from his learning center outdoors. They were playing on a hill, rolling their bodies down its incline, when a policeman pulled his cruiser over, got out, and asked them to stop because "someone might get hurt and there'd be a lawsuit." It is sad to me that our fears of lawyers lurking in the background are considerably more influential than common sense, history, research, children and families, when it comes to education and raising children. The British tried to standardize the Irish into British subjects by politics, money, and force and ultimately failed. Will fears of educational litigation succeed in standardizing the Irish, and us all, instead?