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Archives
- July, 2007
Recognizing Choice in Education – July 25, 2007
I’ve just heard from Leslie Barson at Education Otherwise in London,
England about a great idea called International Freedom in Education Day (IFED),
which is planned for Saturday, September 15, 2007. The idea, which
originated with families in France, is to promote the idea of the importance of free choice in education,
and to spread information about the alternative ways of learning that
are available, or are being fought for, in various countries. The focus
will be on home education, but they also welcome alternative and free
schools to take part in this global event.
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.
Posted: 2007/07/25
3:03 PM
A Bad Idea From the Start – July 24, 2007
I was just reading yet another media account of cyberbullying, where
students are making life miserable for teachers on websites like
Facebook and YouTube. This time, the teens had used a supply teacher’s
cell phone to disrupt her personal life, which led to her having a
nervous breakdown. The article quoted a teacher’s organization
official as saying cyberbullying has become “the number one
non-academic problem facing classrooms today.” The official said he
hopes cellphones will be banned in schools.
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.”
Posted: 2007/07/24
1:35 PM
A Homeschooling Pioneer Has Died – July 15, 2007
Anyone who has been around the homeschooling movement for awhile, or who
has sorted through stacks of old homeschooling books, should recognize
the name of Dr. Raymond Moore. Along with his now-deceased first wife
Dorothy, he was one of the founding pioneers of the North American
movement. Together, they wrote some of the early homeschooling books –
including Home Grown Kids (Word, Inc., 1981) – and some of the books
that formed the foundation of non-school-based learning, including
Better Late Than Early (Reader's Digest Press, 1975, 1982,) which was
one of the books that I was grateful to discover in my early days as a
homeschooling advocate. (A complete list of their writings can be found
at the
Moore Foundation website.) Sadly, Raymond Moore died on Friday, July 13
at the age of 91, after having a massive stroke on Father’s Day.
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.
Posted: 2007/07/15
5:45 PM
Letting Go of the Kid – July
8, 2007
I hope you’re
doing OK, said my eldest daughter after I told her, across the
distance, of her grandmother’s impending death. Yeah, I’m OK. No, I’m
more than OK. That part of me that had always felt like a kid has
finally grown up.
Posted: 2007/07/08
10:29 PM
The
Child Care Career – July 1, 2007
There are many organizations supporting or protesting child care of
various sorts, from non-profits and commercial centers to stay-at-home
parents of both infants and older unschooled children. And they often
disagree publicly and vociferously about their strongly-held positions,
in spite of their universal concern for the well-being of children. So I
was pleasantly surprised to read a press release announcing an
agreement between a daycare advocacy group called the Canadian Child
Care Management Association and a parental rights group called the
National Family Childcare Association to work together to help
policymakers develop inclusive child care policies based on family
choice.
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.
Posted: 2007/07/01
12:59 PM
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