|
Editor of Editor
of Author of unschooling books Interview on
Radio Free School
|
Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - December, 2006 Christmas As Poetry –
December 19, 2006 Snow again,
making the four o’clock mid-December lake In case I don’t get back to the computer before Christmas (a little vacation
– what a concept!,) I wish everyone a very
happy, peaceful holiday.
Getting Out into Real Life (With a
Driver’s Licence) – December 16, 2006 And that reminds me of something I read in the transcript of the committee debate of the legislation, which originally said if you left school before you turned 18 you couldn’t get a driver’s licence, although the legal driving age is 16. Clive Holloway, who is a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, sent a submission to the Premier and the committee members: “Sir, as a high school dropout who has been a full professor at one of your universities for many years, I would like to disagree with your draconian attempts to force youth to stay in school by denying driving licences. “I dropped out of a prestigious high school with excellent teachers that I still revere today. My reasons were partly to do with family finances and partly to do with my own feelings that I should get out into ‘real life.’ “Within a year I was able to afford a used vehicle and get a driving licence. This enhanced my working opportunities, and the freedom encouraged me to explore more. One of my explorations led to education upgrading at night school. With my equivalent of a higher diploma, and the freedom to move [that] a driving licence gave me, I was later able to resume my education full-time at a college and work at nights in a hotel restaurant. Finishing my college education with an industrial diploma, I was able to enter graduate school and earn the M.Sc. and Ph.D. which put me on the road to university teaching and research.” So much for the need for a high school diploma. When Kids Reject What They’re Offered –
December 15, 2006 That made me think about the law that was passed this week here in Ontario changing the legal school leaving age from 16 to 18 and allowing the courts to prohibit a teen from getting a driver’s license as a punishment against truancy. Fortunately, the originally proposed legislation was watered down quite a lot thanks to lobbying by the homeschooling community and others. But it should never have been conceived in the first place. Refusal to attend school is a result of dissatisfaction with school, not of criminal intent. But for almost as long as schools have existed, those who reject their services have been blamed. The word “truant” has early English origins meaning “vagrant,” “beggar” and “wretched.” Christopher Shute, author of the book Compulsory Schooling Disease, writes in the new issue of the British journal Personalised Education Now: “Our criminalisation of our children solves a lot of problems for us, and absolves us from thinking about the environment we create in our schools for those who reject the schooling process. Yet…their behavior is no more unreasonable or immoral than that of an adult who walks out of a bad play or refuses to pay for an ill-cooked meal in a restaurant.” It’s high time our society started to respect
young people’s ability to make decisions for themselves, and to
facilitate their access to what they need to grow and develop. If
something is not working, providing more of it won’t help. Nor will
punishing the victim. But I dare say most if not all of the folks who
are making these decisions went to school, so perhaps they can be
forgiven for their lack of commonsense and vision. Here’s hoping they continue to listen to those of us with more of both. Is Hunting a Feminist Sport?
– December 10, 2006 This is clearly not a simple issue. And I don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes so I’ll avoid gender-casting and talk about myself. I am not in favor of anybody killing wild animals (except maybe for survival, which is not what we’re talking about here.) It’s cruel, unnecessary and exploitive. I believe sport hunting degrades both the hunter and Nature. Especially problematic are novice and unskilled hunters whose targets suffer terribly due to the shooters’ inaccuracy. And I wonder how a “civilization” that perpetrates cruelty toward other species for its own enjoyment can minimize cruelty within its own ranks. Isn’t there is enough violence in this world without women contributing more of it. If you’re curious, here is a
Women Hunters non-profit organization and website. Among other services,
they maintain a list of taxidermists. And they’ll help you introduce
hunting to young girls via their
Young Lady Hunters section. During a recent discussion about this with a
colleague, I discovered that a number of books have been written on the
subject. So I’ll be keeping my mind open and digging into
Woman the Hunter by Mary Zeiss Stange, a Professor of Religion and
Women’s Studies at Skidmore. Dangerous Experts – December 7, 2006 I normally wouldn’t be concerned about that sort of error, but the article raises some red flags for me. Saulny states that this “most extreme application of the [homeschooling] movement’s ideas” is “a cause of growing concern among some education officials and social scientists.” The only such person she names is Luis Huerta, a professor of public policy and education at Teachers College of Columbia University, who told her, “It is not clear to me how they will transition to a structured world and meet the most basic requirements for reading, writing and math.” Huerta is quoted in both of Saulny’s pieces as a national researcher whose focus includes homeschooling. But that statement made me wonder what homeschoolers on what planet he’s been researching...and what he’s doing in an article on unschooling. His webpage doesn’t even mention “unschooling” and the only mention of homeschooling is in the context of charter schools and public school policy. He has a Ph.D. in “Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation.” A Google search on his name turns up many versions of the NY Times stories, as well as a paper entitled “Cyber and Home School Charter Schools: How States are Defining New Forms of Public Schooling” and a similar chapter in a book that’s for sale on Amazon.com. I wonder if Saulny is so source-challenged that she’s used him as the basis for her statement that “there is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students.” That, of course, is nonsense. Either this is a case of someone pretending to know something he doesn’t or a bad case of academic arrogance. I’d say both, along with some bad reporting. Saulny keeps inferring that unschooling is worrisome: “Some worry that the general public is unaware of the movement’s laissez-faire approach to learning.” Who, precisely, is worrying? Huerta? Saulny? I hope that’s all it’s about. Otherwise, with all the media attention these days on unschooling – including what I hear was a dumb Dr. Phil show – someone more paranoid than I am might think it’s the beginning of an active school industry attack against unschooling. Read carefully this quote from Huerta in Saulny’s piece: “As school choice expands and home-schooling in general grows, this [meaning unschooling] is one of those models that I think the larger public sphere needs to be aware of because the folks who are engaging in these radical forms of school are doing so legally. If the public and policy makers don’t feel that this is a form of schooling that is producing productive citizens, then people should vote to make changes accordingly.” That’s dangerous stuff…unless this alarming
comment was taken out of context. I’ve written him to ask. At the same
time, I have suggested that he figure out the different between “schooling”
and “education.” Nurturing Strengths, Not Protecting Weaknesses –
December 1, 2006 I’m just putting the finishing touches on the January/February 2007 issue of Life Learning magazine, which goes to press early next week. And I’ve noticed that nurturing our children’s strength is a theme that runs through a number of the articles in this issue (and I guess in most of the articles we publish in every issue.) Sandra Rakovac writes about how what we often think of as protection is actually taking away an individual’s power and, as such, is counterproductive to the development of confident, strong, capable personalities. Julie Persons shares how her young son learned to manage his own TV watching, in spite of the fear that he would “become a professional TV watcher.” Deborah Dyson is watching her life learning teens demonstrate strength of character as they become adults looking for new ways to interact as a family. Marion Cohen points out that the tyranny of wanting to do the right thing for our unschooled children can cause us to replace school-type “authorities” with a seemingly more benign homeschool-type…but authorities nonetheless. This authority can ignore children’s strengths and streamroll their autonomy. These parents have all learned to trust that when exposed to the wonders of the world, children will learn what they need to know. They know that when we try to turn their every experience into a “teaching moment,” we weaken them in many ways and turn our home into the very school we’re trying to avoid. These are tricky lessons. We want to trust our
children to grow, to learn and to thrive. But the world can seem like a
frightening place and bringing children into it is a massive
responsibility. But what are we fearful of? The late Catholic author and
philosopher Thomas Merton had this to say about fear and its effects:
“At the root of all war is fear – not so much the fear that men
(sic) have of one another as the fear they have of everything. It is not
merely that they do not trust one another; they do not even trust
themselves.” Perhaps learning to trust ourselves as parents will help
us trust our children to develop their own strengths. Return
to current weblog copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2007 |
Topics & Passions: natural learning ~ What I'm Reading: The Ingenuity Gap by
Thomas Homer-Dixon (Knopf, 2000) ~ What
I'm Listening To:
Bach Violin Concertos by Itzhak
Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman with the English Chamber Orchestra (EMI,
2001) ~
Fav
Bookmarks:
Positive News ~ Fav Quotes:
Art, Writing, Creativity
|
