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Archives
- December, 2006
Christmas As Poetry –
December 19, 2006
Today, I’m working hard to tie up business and personal loose ends in
preparation for the arrival of one of our daughters tomorrow evening from Nova Scotia. I
got a bit waylaid this afternoon sorting through photos and poems in
order to finish up special gifts for her and her dad. (Oh, did I just
blow the secret?!) I’ve
been trying to craft a new poem for the season, but the muse must be out
shopping. So here’s
the one I sent to friends a couple of years ago:
Snow again,
making the four o’clock mid-December lake
blur gently along the wharf’s wooden edges,
while racing layers of clouds hurry the darkness.
This morning as I wrote winter poems and holiday letters,
moisture drizzled down the kitchen window.
In the freezing traces I saw the cycles of age
that have given me the courage to be less afraid of changes.
And now the stone-gray water is reflecting the generous hearts
that support me as I prepare to set out again in the afternoon.
As the Christmas lights blink on in the building next door
and the potted plant promises a bud on my windowsill,
I remember to pay attention so I don’t miss Spring.
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.
Posted: 2006/12/19
9:34 PM
Getting Out into Real Life (With a
Driver’s Licence) – December 16, 2006
Thanks to everyone who has sent notes of agreement about yesterday’s
posting. Typical is John’s comment: “Your last paragraph reminds me
of something I’ve found myself saying a fair amount lately when I
encounter someone who is unreasonable and/or acting like they have
knowledge on an issue about which they are very much ignorant. I find
myself saying, ‘They obviously went to public school’.”
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.
Posted: 2006/12/16
4:13 PM
When Kids Reject What They’re Offered –
December 15, 2006
In a coffee shop yesterday I overhead a
conversation between the barista and a teenage girl who was studying her
marketing textbook. The 20-something barista shared his scorn with the
teenaged student about the dumbing down of the curriculum –
simplifying it, he said, so it had little relevance to the real world.
We’re not stupid, he said, so they could make what we were supposed to
learn more relevant, more real. And not as boring.
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.
Posted: 2006/12/15
12:22 PM
Is Hunting a Feminist Sport?
– December 10, 2006
Women are apparently turning to hunting in big numbers across
North America. The last three or four years have seen a huge increase in the number
of women picking up guns and sitting in duck blinds in the cold and
dark. And these days, the papers are full of articles about them. One
recent story in the Halifax Herald was headlined “Hunter killing
deer, stereotypes.” I’m all for getting rid of stereotypes, but this
hunting thing has got me baffled. Are the hunting and rifle
organizations needing new membership funds? I’ve heard a bunch of
reasons why women are learning how to hunt, including relaxation, taking
on new challenges and getting in touch with their inner “wild
woman”, socializing with friends or male family members, enjoying time
outdoors, enjoying the scenery, learning survival skills. One woman was
even quoted in an article as saying it was great to see wildlife up so
close! So is this some kind of Artemis goddess thing? Couldn’t they
just shoot photos while hiking, snowshoeing, canoeing, cross-country
skiing, camping, whatever?
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.
Posted: 2006/12/10
3:36 PM
Dangerous Experts – December 7, 2006
An article on unschooling was published in the New York Times Education section on November 26 under the headline “Home
Schoolers Content to Take Children’s Lead.” It has since been published
by a number of other media outlets, including the International Herald
Tribune, where it was headlined “In extreme form of home schooling,
kids call the shots.” The writer, Susan Saulny, (who wrote an
earlier story about homeschooling last June) provides a pretty good
description of a couple of unschooling families. However, she apparently
portrayed Pat(rick) Farenga of Holt Associates as a woman in the
original version and a correction was posted with the web version of the
article, which does make one question the accuracy of the rest of the
piece! Did she even interview him?!
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.”
Posted: 2006/12/07
10:56 AM
Nurturing Strengths, Not Protecting Weaknesses –
December 1, 2006
One of the many things I admire about my two 30-something daughters is
their strength. Did their dad and I role model that? Sure, their
grandmothers too. It helped that they didn’t go to school and thus
retained their self-esteem. I think what contributed most was our
respect for and trust in them – trust that they’d learn what they
needed, that their opinions mattered, that they knew what was best for
themselves – knowing without a doubt that they were strong, capable
people.
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.
Posted: 2006/12/01
10:12 PM
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