Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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If you have home educated your kids for any length of time, and have been paid a pound for every time someone asked you, "What about socialisation?" then by now, you are very rich indeed. Here is a very good objectively argued article about the social effects of segregating children into peer-groups from the Jewish World Review. Sample passage:
"Homeschooling, by contrast, enmeshes students in the real "real world," where there are babies to be fed, where people still recall the Great Depression, and where every stage of life and learning is represented. Homeschooling avoids the monolithic teen-culture, providing a wide array of models for kids to emulate. Natural hierarchies like age and experience are much more evident, and so there is less pressure to form hierarchies based on superficial or damaging attributes. Children whose better qualities or talents are overlooked by their peers are likely to find that other age groups are more open to what they have to offer--for example, a shy boy might blossom when teaching a younger student; a girl who often seems defensive and snobby might mellow when she finds an adult who appreciates her intellectual talents."
(Eve Tushnet also writes a blog, which looks rather good. I like those blogs where personal and philosophical and linkage things are all in it together.)
Watching a very small person take their first little steps into the big fray of the mixed-age running-around gang at my home ed meeting the other week, I thought yet again about the enormous benefits of being surrounded socially by a whole range of people. Not many two and three year olds get to play in a big group with gentle, motherly and fatherly seven and eight year-olds to keep an eye on them on a regular basis. But home educated ones generally do.
Although children have a need for same-aged friends as well, due to their incredibly fast growth-curves which can make the difference between ages four and five far more significant than the difference between ages twenty and sixty, being comfortable with all ages is good and useful in life generally. I find having friends of all ages fanscinating and a privilege and quite my favourite way of learning things. To anything that makes that easier: rock on!
The Homeschooling Revolution links to us (thanks, HSR!) here. Read this site, it's very interesting for its education and homeschooling-related links.
O'Donnell Web has the various thoughts of a human being who also happens to be a libertarian homeschooler. Some of you might just identify.
Someone takes issue with Taking Children Seriously here (scroll right down to the bottom). The idea that Ms. Fitz-Claridge (as she is now known) invented TCS solely "to sell books and speaking engagements" seems very amusing to me. I find TCS forums very interesting and fun, but the idea that they represent an effortless way of making a living seems absurd. Besides which, I am quite sure that Sarah F-C would never consider doing anything so immoral as to attempt to acquire personal benefit from what should be a selfless institution of charity and love, and is, as I write, rinsing out her sack-cloth and ashes for another round of religious chanting. (What are sack-cloths and ashes, anyway? Someone?)
The trouble with coaching kids to pass exams is, it's quite easy to do if you know how and can harness enough effort. And the better people get at coaching and being coached, the less time they are spending on the important thing: learning how to learn themselves, without the use of spoons.
1. People want to get better exam grades, so they get better at exam-coaching and being coached,
2. More people do better in exams,
3. The grades don't seem to mean as much anymore,
4. People moan "Exams are getting easier",
5. Exam-passers rightly get annoyed,
6. Employers, univiersities etc find it harder and harder to use exams as a reliable guide of actual capability,
7. The sytem gets devalued.
As a libertarian home educator, I think it is rather good that the system gets devalued. This is what is bound to happen when learning is institutionalised, and "education" is taken too seriously. It's not actually so hard to jump through hoops, given the right training (although people who consider hoops pointless are of course the hardest to train; motivation is what counts). But being able to jump through hoops is not the same thing as being able to learn.
This is why universities complain increasingly about students with no wherewithal to go and read books and form opinions on their own. Students are being too well educated to be able to think for themselves anymore. It was very often the failings in the system which previously enabled them to learn: the gaps they had to fill in for themselves.
The way to teach someone to learn for themselves is to stop teaching them, and start looking for ways of enabling them to develop the knowedge they are seeking out autonomously, for themselves. Exams are alright for some things, but they're no substitute for real learning; if even university professors are telling us that (I met one the other week who said exactly this) then surely it must be true....
I was talking recently with a friend at the local home ed. group, who was made redundant from his job as an accountant, and is planning to retrain as a plumber. You don't need a degree to be a plumber. You just need to be able to do plumbing. There are courses available, also for electrician-ing, plastering, bricklaying and so on.
There seems to be a big demand for people who can do thse things, possibly because schools and parents only seem to value the kind of education that results in a "degree", resulting in vast numbers of young people with BAs in travel and tourism, flower-arranging, sociology or whatever, who have no idea how to do anything that other people might actually want to pay them for. If the UK has an economic downturn anytime soon, those youngsters are going to become one very big unemployment statistic. Having a degree doesn't make you able to do anything: it's an abstract qualification measuring theoretical knowledge and academic skills (if it's a good degree: many don't even do that).
Many schools and universities are genuinely very good at helping people gain impressive academic qualifications. Home educators and/or establishments where academic stuff is valued less than other things may be less good at helping with those impressive academic qualifications. But impressive academic qualifications are not the entire point of life. People also need social skills, moral understanding, critical scepticism and practical problem-solving abilities in order to make their way happily in the world. Schools may or may not have a responsibility to help with those areas of learning, but they are certainly capable of interfering and monumentally messing them up, often in the name of "success".
Of, course, there is nothing inherently wrong with specialised intensive academic study at any age: but where choices are not provided, children may very well be paying a price higher than we, or they, realise. There's no way of knowing. This is why consentual rational parents offer children many interesting activities to choose from, and help them develop their interests, while providing sound information on what is useful for what and why, which things matter and how, and what might be interesting to try in the future. Or to put it another way, you can hot-house your children all you like, but don't expect them to grow up happy or thank you for it in the future.
The Donny Osmond Effect* is a weird and unpredictable random outcome. That's why I'm not jumping up and down for joy about this home-ed story. Maybe understanding cable TV shows is actually objectively more valuable than knowing where the planets are. Who knows?
*Donny Osmond says he hated being made to perform as a child, and won't do the same thing to his children; but he thanks his parents for causing him to have the uniquely interesting experiences that performance led to.
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