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Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural parenting, sustainable living and more by Wendy Priesnitz. Archives - July, 2007 Recognizing Choice in Education – July 25, 2007
The interest is gathering in Europe and internationally. Events related to the IFED may take place throughout the month September, but on the 15th, the plan is to have many events in different countries all over the world, celebrating Freedom in Education. In Paris, a giant picnic on the theme of home education is planned, preceded by a press conference on September 10th. In London, a home education fair is planned. In Vienna, an evening event on September 7th will be dedicated to a discussion of freedom in education, and the practice of home education and unschooling. During the week preceding or following September 15th, there will be a gathering in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg focusing on the topic “Human Rights and Home Education.” French home educators are creating a website for Freedom in Education Day and they are
inviting everyone to create their own local events and having them listed on the website. They can be contacted through the
website. This is a great idea for individuals families and groups to get involved in at the not-back-to-school time of year. A Bad Idea From the Start – July 24, 2007
His time would be better spent questioning why students feel the need to taunt their teachers and others using any means, technological or not. Maybe he’s already decided that this is expected behavior from students. After all, they are people who have few rights, and who are at the bottom of a hierarchy of power where teachers and other adults have the right to compel, arbitrarily punish and confiscate. One of my major frustrations is that most people
– and virtually all so-called educators – fail to challenge any of
the assumptions that our society makes about education. If they did,
they’d quickly see that schooling is the problem with education. As
Winston Churchill once said, “Schools have not necessarily much to do
with education…they are mainly institutions of control where certain
basic habits must be instilled in the young. Education is different and
has little place in school.” In an earlier age – before cell phones,
Facebook and YouTube – schools might have had a fighting chance at
control. But not now, when rigid, inflexible systems and rules just get
in the way of young people’s ability to set their own goals, to
structure their own lives and to learn from the vast array of societal
resources. Sorry, Mr. Teacher’s Organization Official, this is
an academic problem. And it won’t be solved by compulsion, coercion
and confiscation. It will be solved, for starters, by modeling respect,
which our school systems, by their very natures, are ill-equipped to do.
As John Holt once told a reporter, “It's not that I feel that school
is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a
nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning
happens, cut off from the rest of life.”
A Homeschooling Pioneer Has Died – July 15, 2007
Ironically, an hour or so before I received notification of his death, I came across a white paper he wrote in 1994 about what he worried was the “religious ravage of homeschooling” by HSLDA founder Michael Farris. I first knew Raymond and Dorothy Moore in the 1970s and ‘80s when they worked tirelessly to help defend both secular and Christian homeschoolers in Canada and the U.S. who were being challenged in court. A devout Seventh-day Adventist, Dr. Moore had helped Farris found HSLDA, ostensibly to continue that work. But he became deeply concerned about how Farris’ activities constituted “a serious tactical error if homeschooling is to be known for its serious contribution to…education instead of simply another passing educational fancy, and if it is to be truly respected by legislators instead of pressuring them.” And so he reluctantly spoke out. I am not sure it made any difference, because the organization continues on its divisive and damaging way. One of Raymond Moore’s legacies is his research that children can’t effectively learn academic subjects until they are developmentally ready – that children belong at home without formal education at least until age eight or ten. I hope he is also remembered for his attitude of caring friendship toward homeschooling families of all religious and political stripes and toward legislators whom he knew respond better to information and reason than to accusation and alienation. Memorial services are being held in August in
Portland, Oregon and Sacramento, California. The family suggests donations to the Raymond S. & Dorothy N. Moore
Memorial Scholarship Fund at
Weimar Institute, Weimar CA 95736. Letting Go of the Kid – July
8, 2007
The
Child Care Career – July 1, 2007
The NFCA/CCCMA agreement commits both associations to advocate for, among other things, parental choice through financial equalization factors and taxation by way of a model of a child care benefit voucher system, which could be used to purchase a variety of types of daycare or to support a parent who chooses to stay at home. I see this agreement as encouraging, but only the beginning of the end of the pursue-a-career-or-stay-at-home cultural and emotional battle zone that has been dubbed “the mommy wars.” One of the first volleys was launched a few years ago by law professor Linda Hirshman who wrote that privileged, educated women who choose to stay at home to raise their children are hurting themselves and other women. This idea that staying home with children undermines the advances of the last four decades of the women’s movement is the basis of much of the scorn and anger that has been heaped upon me and other unschooling/homeschooling advocates by other women. We’re letting down the side, so goes the argument. As Hirshman wrote in a controversial article in The American Prospect magazine in 2005: “A good life for humans includes the classical standard of using one’s capacities for speech and reason in a prudent way, the liberal requirement of having enough autonomy to direct one's own life, and the utilitarian test of doing more good than harm in the world. Measured against these time-tested standards, the expensively educated, upper-class moms will be leading lesser lives.” As if nurturing the development of the next generation isn’t important work – perhaps the most important work of all! But then, if we think it is so important, why isn’t a capitalist society willing to pay – and pay well – for it? And so this devaluation of parenting over having a career continues. As one unschooling reader recently wrote to me: “My biggest struggle now as a mom is to get beyond the conditioning by our society that I previously bought into, that being a mother isn’t enough. That it doesn’t really matter and putting the kids in daycare and school and going back to work is the only way for me to make a *real* contribution to society...” And she asks, “What if [the women’s movement] had fought for the value we were already providing, rather than insisted we be allowed to behave like men?” Over my 35 years so far as a mother, I’ve often
thought that motherhood is a series of choices, sometimes quite
difficult ones. But thank goodness I have had choices. All parents need
to have choices as to how they live their family lives; perhaps this new
child care agreement is the beginning of a broader recognition for and
status of one of those choices. Return
to current weblog copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2007 |
Topics & Passions: natural learning ~ What I'm Reading:
Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken (Viking, 2007)
~ What
I'm Listening To:
Messin' Around by Molly Johnson
(Universal Music, 2006) ~
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