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Archives
- July, 2006
September University – July 24, 2006
Yesterday, I received an update from colleague and occasional Life
Learning contributor Charles Hayes. He is promoting a new way of aging,
with the aim of erasing the notion of retirement from our vocabulary.
And he’s dubbed it “September University.” He writes, “September
University…is a vision of retirement that replaces a time devoted to doing very
little with a time of reflection, when people who’ve entered the
September of life have the opportunity to make their greatest
contribution to the generations to follow. A September University frame
of mind means looking forward to sifting through a half-century or more
of experience, sorting those things that are truly important from those
that aren’t, and finding ways to pass on that wisdom.” His sense is
that many people were so turned-off learning by their formal education
experiences that they avoid the kind of contemplation and
knowledge-creation that the world so badly needs. Hayes has been
writing about self-education for more than two decades. He has
published five books on the subject and one novel. His latest book,
The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of
Lifelong Learning, is concerned with using our knowledge and experience
in our later years and leaving the world a better place in the process.
And he has a new book in progress entitled September University: Rediscover the Wonder of Existence and Help Change the World. He’s
set up an online dialog, accessible on the
September-U website for people who are interested in exploring the
concept.
Posted: 2006/07/24
5:29 PM
Is it the Bullying or the Drugs? – July 23, 2006
Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko is a Canadian writer whose three
daughters learn without attending school. For the last five years she
and her husband have been producing
Radio Free School, a weekly radio show by, for and about unschoolers. She is also an occasional contributor to Life Learning
magazine. Beatrice has begun
a series of six columns on the subject of homeschooling to be published
on the CBC website. The
first column went up last week. At the end of each column is a selection of
comments from readers. One poor, uninformed public school supporter
asked, “What about the social skills that home-schooled children will
never experience due to seclusion?” Aside from displaying his total
ignorance of the
subject and ignoring what Beatrice wrote about the richness of the life
learning lifestyle, this guy must be talking about a school system
on another planet. He wrote about
the “important life lessons [that] are learned on the playground every
day” and said that homeschoolers are overprotective parents who are
keeping their kids away from the real world, which he equates to child
neglect.
Maybe it was supposed to be irony. Or maybe the guy
is an articulate (albeit macho) ostrich. I can’t imagine he’s a caring parent…or
else why would he want to expose his children to the bullying, violence,
competition, drug dealing and otherwise general mean-spirited and
negative “socialization” that occurs on playgrounds, let alone what
goes on in many classrooms? His reasoning appears to be that “These
children will then lack social interactions once they leave the home,
furthering their educations in university and/or college.” Aha! Life
is violent, competitive, mean-spirited and boring, so we need to expose
our children to those things from an early age in order to prepare them.
Nonsense. Even if one agrees that life is that awful, the best
preparation for a bad adult experience is a good childhood one. One like
that experienced by most life learners – rich in contacts with people
of all ages, full of meaningful interactions in their communities and
grounded in trust and respect for their humanity.
And gosh, what about trying to change that awful life?? Is that not one of the purposes of good
socialization?
There may be valid reasons for parents to send
their kids to school, but socialization isn’t one of them. That
homeschooled children are poorly socialized is a dead argument,
slaughtered a long time ago by generations of superbly well-socialized
adults who learned without attending school and buried by the ongoing
socialization problems in public schools.
Posted: 2006/07/23
3:14 PM
Freedom and Self-Knowledge – July
19, 2006
I continue to ponder the idea of the sort of group learning that we call
school. Is the institution inherently good or bad, benign or
problematic? Is the concept flawed, or is the word merely tainted? For
me, there are a couple of issues involved. One is the idea of group
learning and group interaction; the other has to do with choice.
As my children were growing up, I saw the benefit
of being able to figure out who they were first, on their own and within
their supportive family environment, before moving away from the family
setting and on to collaborative learning in larger groups. There are
varying opinions on the appropriate age for this to happen, but I
trusted that they would find their own speed and path. And they did.
(Their choices eventually involved regular school, choices I respected but
did not agree with.)
And that leads to the choice part. I’ve always
felt that the biggest problem with the concept of school is compulsory
attendance. While there may be some schools for children that are
voluntary, they are rare. Even the much-lauded
Sudbury Valley
model forces students to make an attendance commitment. And maybe the
infrastructure involved – building, staff, materials, meetings –
needs the stability of a somewhat dependable group of regular
participants. But is a school truly democratic if attendance is
compulsory…even if it’s run democratically on every other level? Or,
to put it another way, does it rank the freedom of children lower than
its own health or survival?
In response to my July 6 post on this subject,
Jessica Kiley wrote: “I think it was John Holt who shared this
perspective on schools –the ingredient that is missing from every
school, even the ‘free schools’ that were experimented with years
back, is that attendance is required, not a choice. Even if a child has
complete freedom to choose the lessons, or to choose an activity other
than participating in the lessons, the choice is generally not included
to leave the school altogether or to attend by personal motivation
alone.”
In fact, as Life Learning columnist Sandy Lubert
shared in the May/June issue, in Instead of Education, Holt “used
spelling creatively in order to distinguish between S-chools, where
educators ‘get and hold their students by the threat of jail or
uselessness or poverty’ and s-schools, ‘which help people explore
the world as they choose.” An interesting concept, but I think we’d
be better off designing some new language to describe learning that is
truly non-coercive, rather than using creative spelling or appending
prefixes like “home”, “un” or “de” to the “s” word. A
democratic school is better than an undemocratic one, but
it’s still a school. I
don’t mind leaving schools of all stripes to those who want them, but
my work involves changing the whole paradigm to reflect the fact that
people do not have to be forced to learn. Nor do they have to attend special places to do it.
Posted: 2006/07/19
8:09 AM
Getting Bored – July 18, 2006
I’m working hard this week to finish off our magazines one week early
so I can take a vacation. So, in effect, I’m speeding up so I can slow
down. My normal speed of life is pretty frenetic, so slowing down is a
relative term. But I’m searching for a more long-term slower rhythm,
trying to make changes in my life and my work so I can be bored.
Boredom, I theorize, can be a good state – ultimately leading to
creativity and productivity, as I wrote a few years ago in Life
Learning. I think that’s because boredom creates some space for peace
of mind to creep in.
Usually an efficient multi-tasker, I’m not good
at being bored, typically trying to fill up the empty moments with work
or random activity, to speed up the slower pace. So on this vacation,
I’m going to try to dilute the adrenaline, to let go of my to-do list,
to practice doing nothing for awhile, to try and get bored. I guess the
process is a bit like learning to meditate – being patient with
yourself until it becomes second nature.
I am not sure why I’m so careful to avoid
boredom, although I suspect it has something to do with all those
earnest clichés I heard as a child, which turned me into a doer rather
than a “be-er” (which, in itself, isn’t such a bad thing.) Like
idle hands being the devil’s playground and an idle mind being the
devil’s workshop (or was it vice versa?) and the need to make hay
while the sun shines. But as an adult, I know that the word “bore”
has another definition that involves tunneling through something, so
I’m using that analogy to get to the other side of my dedication to
work and to find that elusive peace of mind. Gotta get back to work now.
Posted: 2006/07/18
3:20 PM
30 Years of History – July 16, 2006
This fall marks the 30th anniversary of the company
that publishes Life Learning magazine
– a company that my husband Rolf and I
launched in 1976 to publish books and Natural Life magazine. We were
looking for a way to generate an income so that we could both stay at
home with our life learning daughters Heidi and Melanie, who were ages
four and three at the time. Looking back over those three decades, we
are proud that we have been at the leading edge (and ahead of it, in
some cases) of many progressive trends and movements, from independent
publishing itself, through environmentally sustainable business
practices, home-based business, green politics, the natural foods
industry (I published a natural foods industry magazine in the early
1980s) and, of course, learner-directed homeschooling.
For Natural Life magazine’s birthday, I have been
putting together a retrospective of the last 30 years. In doing so, I
recently came across an editorial that I wrote in 1979 sharing a bad
experience we’d had with a truant officer
– he’d entered our
home by means of a lie, then threatened us with the removal of our 5-1/2-
and 7-year-old daughters if we didn't enroll them in a public school
within two hours. That, of course, was not the correct procedure (to put it mildly!) and he
found out that we knew more about our rights than he did
(again, to put it mildly.)
As a result
of that experience, I decided there was a need to organize homeschooling
families. So my editorial also announced that I was
founding a pioneering homeschool support and advocacy organization. Our
daughters have grown up, the movement has grown up and our business has
matured with the addition of Life Learning magazine almost five years
ago. It’s been an exciting journey, and we look forward to more
adventures and more progress towards a better society.
Posted: 2006/07/16 7:40 PM
Ranking Educational Alternatives – July 6, 2006
Over the past few months, I’ve had two articles
submitted for publication in Life Learning magazine from parents who have sent
their children to a specific model of “democratic school” after a
period of homeschooling/unschooling. In both cases, family circumstances
led to the change. And in both cases, the families were very happy with
the schools, to the degree that they have both become big boosters of
that particular brand of school. In fact, they both feel that the school
experience is “identical but superior” to learning at home. These
two articles have got my mind churning. Is there a need to rank
alternatives? I don’t think so – there is a need for many
alternative choices in all aspects of life and some will be more
suitable for each of us at different times and in different situations.
(Did we learn to rank in school?) Can the life learning process really
happen in a school, democratic or otherwise? I don’t think it can, but
I need to be sure my own bias isn’t getting in the way. Are parents
and other immediate family members an integral part of the education
process? Not necessarily, but most of the time they provide the best
type of nurturing for their children. Do most of us at one time or other
create sweeping but incorrect generalizations from specific situations?
Of course we do. What, in fact, is a school? I don’t have the answer
to that one right now.
I wrote five fast pages in my journal this morning
about these questions and their answers. I feel another
book…or at least an article…coming on. Feedback, as always, is
welcome.
Posted: 2006/07/06 3:45
PM
Kids Can Claim Age
Discrimination – July 1, 2006
I can’t think of a better way celebrate Canada Day than to thank the
Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for ruling against age discrimination
against children. This province’s Human
Rights Code currently prohibits those under 18 from claiming age
discrimination. (Who knew? And I wonder how many other jurisdictions have that provision.) Anyway, the government has been using that
provision to cut off therapy funding for autistic children once they
reach the age of six, in spite of the ruling Liberal party’s
pre-election promise to fund the therapy for all autistic children. A
group of families has been trying to access the funding through the
courts; the government has been claiming the right to cut off funding
on the basis of age. But now, the Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in
favor of the children, saying that the Human Rights Code provision that
allows for age discrimination under the age of 18 violates children’s
rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The tribunal’s decision
is not law unless/until it is adopted or cited by the courts, but it is good news
for the families in the autism case who are now free to proceed in court
with their argument that the government is discriminating against them
on the basis of age, as well as disability. But it could also be very
good news for all children, who may now be able to complain that they
are being discriminated against in other aspects of life. Hmmmm. Wonder
that could mean for compulsory education laws?
Posted: 2006/07/01 1:51
PM
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