Challenging Assumptions blog by Wendy Priesnitz

 

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Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural  parenting, green living, social justice and more by writer, author and Natural Life magazine editor Wendy Priesnitz. 

Archives - June, 2009

School Districts Making Money on Homeschooling – June 22, 2009
A study into the financial effects of homeschooling on schools has found – contrary to conventional wisdom (which often isn’t particularly wise) – a net benefit to their bottom lines. A story in yesterday’s Washington Times quotes John Wenders and Andrea Clements and their research report “Homeschooling in Nevada: The Budgetary Impact.” The conclusions are interesting and the principles can be applied to other school jurisdictions. Another myth busted, assumption challenged.
Posted: 2009/06/22 3:29 PM

Who is the Abuser in the UK? – June 20, 2009
Every once in awhile, there are suggestions from critics (and occasionally in a court of law, most often in relation to divorce proceedings) of home-based learning that keeping kids from attending school either facilitates situations that could lead to child abuse, or is, in itself, child abuse. Since home-based learning is undertaken by caring and conscientious parents with major commitments to the well-being and safety of their children, it is ludicrous to suggest that it fosters abuse. I actually believe that schools abuse children all the time by bullying them (or creating the circumstances where bullying thrives), forcing them to study things in which they are not interested and which often have questionable validity and generally trouncing on their human rights. (See my books and those of John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Alice Miller for starters.) Don’t even get me started on a rant about daycare workers who use children to make pornography, teachers who date their teenaged students….and other abuses. At any rate, child welfare and education are not the same thing, and governments already have adequate powers to protect abused children under current laws…and, sadly, often bungle the job anyway. At the very least, there is simply no logic in the idea that children who are safe with their parents during school hours suddenly are just fine during holidays, at night or at other times.

However, I have found it rather useless to argue. Instead, I work towards positive change and tolerate the allegations as brayings of the ignorant or death moans of the warehouse model of education to which we still, unfortunately, subject so many children. However, there is a situation developing in the UK that I cannot ignore. English law has, since the 1940s, allowed parents to educate their children at home without any state interference. However, seemingly out of the blue, allegations began to be made of a link between autonomous learning as it tends be called in the UK and child abuse. The government commissioned a controversial report, as I wrote about here back in January. The Badman Report into Home Education (named after its writer, giving its opposition a much-needed chuckle) was published on June 11. The review moved far from its questionable mandate of investigating whether or not homeschooling could be a cover for abuse. As a result, its statements and recommendations are very worrying for those of us who care about civil liberties and family rights, let alone the paranoid over-regulation of home-based learning and especially unschooling. For instance, autonomous education is described as “little better than child-minding.” So it’s no surprise that the recommendations include compulsory registration of home educators and the issuing of “School Attendance Orders” with non-compliance to be a criminal offense. On the child abuse front, it recommends giving the government the right to inspect the “premises of education” without suspicion of abuse and the right to interview home educated children without adult support and without suspicion of abuse. Interesting, isn’t it, that parents are not allowed to inspect schools whenever they want and to quiz school children to see if they’re happy, healthy and learning, and that kids who do poorly in school aren’t thrown out of school to learn at home. (Well, often schools are quick to suspend students who are labeled “troublemakers,” but helping them learn at home isn’t the goal) and that governments continue to tolerate an appalling low standard of education in our schools.

This clearly is a whitewash, a ham-fisted attempt to assert control where control isn’t needed and an abuse of power under the guide of protecting children’s rights. But it needs to be taken seriously. There is a groundswell of anger arising. Even the Church of England has weighed in with this succinct statement: “Prevention of abuse under the cover of home education seems to be the main reason for this review, and in making it so, has the effect of tarnishing the reputation of the many parents who choose to home educate their children from the best of motives.” Home educators have been organizing against the implementation of the recommendations, a task that involves raising large amount of money. If you want to learn more or contribute, there are a number of groups and websites to visit. The Homeschooler website is a good place to begin. And here is a facebook page about fundraising and lobbying.
Posted: 2009/06/20 2:57 PM

Telling Our Own Stories – June 17, 2009
In the next few days, Jerry Mintz’s Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) will be publishing a new book called Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories. I am one of the “visionaries” who has dared to think about education in different ways, along with Riane Eisler, John Taylor Gatto, Matt Hern, Herbert Kohl, Deborah Meier, Ron Miller, Pat Montgomery, Zoe Weil and others. Alfie Kohn wrote the foreword. We were all asked to answer the following questions: What was your schooling like? When did you realize that there is a need for an alternative approach? What have you done since to help realize that vision? What are you doing now? The common theme behind all of our stories is the need for change in how we think about and implement education, learning and teaching.

Editors Jerry Mintz and Carlo Ricci say, “This book is about celebrating and understanding the diversity of possibilities in the hopes that people will be inspired to act. It’s about showing what can be done. By bringing together a wide range of alternative mainstream schoolers, homeschoolers/unschoolers/life learners, free and democratic schoolers, Montessori and Waldorf schoolers, we hope that we can learn from each other, and that readers will be inspired enough to join in.” I have yet to see a copy myself, but I am looking forward to it with anticipation.
Posted: 2009/06/17 10:20 AM

You Can Put Kids in School All Day But You Can’t Make Them Learn – June 14, 2009
Here in Ontario where I live, a report will be released tomorrow that will recommend the integration of daycare facilities into schools. That’s so parents of four- and five-year-olds can leave their children at school from 7:30 in the morning until 6 p.m, as opposed to the typical two-and-a-half hours per day that kindergarten lasts. There are benefits – convenience for working parents and less shuttling around for their kids, perhaps some economies of scale and streamlining of programs. And apparently, the arrangement is common in other countries. However, the plan is being touted as “full-day learning” with the Ministry of Education taking “full responsibility for learning [my emphasis] from birth to young adulthood.” Do the consultants and educational bureaucrats really believe that this move will do more than replace a patchwork of childcare arrangements for working parents? That it will facilitate learning? You can put kids in school for any length of time you want and teach them for any length of time you want, but you can’t make them learn. And however much the Ministry wants to take full responsibility for other people’s learning, they just can’t. They can provide a learning environment and, I hope, the best one possible. (Whether or not a school is the best environment for learning is another posting…oh, wait, I already wrote the book!). But learning is not something that is done to children; it’s something they do for themselves. So let’s not kid ourselves about the purpose and benefits of keeping kids in one institution from early morning until evening. And let’s have some discussion of the downside.
Posted: 2009/06/14 5:57 PM

Simulated Play To Replace Real Outdoor Activity – June 13, 2009
Many writers, myself included, have taken up Richard Louv’s clarion call to get kids away from the television and computer and back outside to play. But that is not an easy task, given the proliferation of exciting computer games. And now, pretty soon, your kids won’t have to go outside to play good old fashioned skipping games. They’ll be able to stay right inside with their computers and simulate the act of skipping, with help from the Japanese computer giant Nintendo. The company is helping academics from three British universities to convert a variety of traditional playground games into Wii-style computer games. It’s all in the name of preserving folklore, according to Dr. Andrew Burn, from the Institute of Education. He told the Telegraph newspaper “…we are already seeing a migration of school playground games and songs into new media, such as YouTube, the video-sharing website.” A better way of preserving such games would be to encourage kids to get outside and play them.
Posted: 2009/06/13 2:33 PM

Learning to Think for Ourselves and Beyond the Experts – June 7, 2009
There was an opinion piece in my local paper today entitled “Is Oprah Winfrey Giving Us Bad Medicine? It was written by a young oncologist and associate professor named David Gorski who also blogs anonymously and runs a website that discredits health care professionals who practice alternative and complementary medicine. (He attacks people who believe in supplements, acupuncture, naturopathic and homeopathic medicine, and those who question everything from vaccines and mercury amalgam fillings to circumcision.) In this article excerpted from the website, Gorski states that “Oprah displays as close to no critical-thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I’ve ever seen, and uses the vast influence her TV show and media empire give her in order to subject the world to her special brand of mystical New Age thinking and belief in various forms of what can only be characterized as dubious medical therapies at best and quackery at worst.”  I have never watched Oprah’s show, but I wonder if Gorski fears that we – lacking critical thinking skills – will blindly follow the advice of her guests and hurt ourselves. Although I don’t know his motivation, maybe he also fears loss of income for himself and the pharmaceutical and medical establishments (which he doesn’t think influence him and his critically thinking colleagues to over-prescribe, over-operate, and medicalize birth, life and death in order to make a living.) I don’t want to give this guy more publicity than he deserves, but he reminds me of my mother who told me to do something without providing any reasons other than it was good for me and because she – the omnipotent parent – knew better what was good for me than I did. Sometimes she did; often, she didn’t. He also reminds me of the “we’re the experts and we know best” treatment that, as an unschooling advocate, I’ve been subjected to for 30 years by academics and others who are part of the school mainstream. They know what’s best for me, my family, my children, all children and society, presumably because they were trained in educational theory. That their views (indeed, their education) may be narrow-minded, unthinking, old-fashioned, disproven or influenced by the interests of the industry in which they work has never occurred to them. Perhaps that early practice in deconstructing my mother’s bogus reasoning is what provided me with the motivation, later in life, not to blindly accept what the experts told me was best for myself and my family.

Black and white answers – air-tight explanations about, for instance, the cause of health issues and a quick, total cure – would certainly make life simpler. Trouble is, human health isn’t black and white and our education system isn’t very good at teaching the open-mindedness, research skills, critical thinking and other skills that are needed to explore the shades of grey. We have been educated so as not to want to take responsibility for our own health or our decisions about it. We have learned that experts should research, learn and pass exams to prove they have the solutions to our problems. We are taught that there is a hierarchy of knowing, that we need to do unquestioningly what we’re told and that someone who is self-taught is a quack. Schools do, however, teach bullying, which Gorski apparently learned well. Too bad medical school didn’t teach him much about the purpose of education and, indeed, of medicine, which is to improve our quality of life. He quotes Oprah as saying, “We have the right to demand a better quality of life for ourselves. And that’s what doctors have got to learn to start respecting.” Gorski responds, “That statement epitomizes the attitude that infuses The Oprah Winfrey Show when it comes to medical issues and science. Anecdotes trump science, and scientists should ‘respect’ pseudoscience because of feelings and a desire for ‘quality of life.’ Indeed, these are exactly the attitudes that permeate the Complementary and Alternative Care movement and the anti-vaccine movement.” Thank goodness for that movement and for any other that encourages us to look beyond the corporate experts and make our own decisions. And why the heck is a respected daily newspaper searching out (by Gorski’s admission on his blog this afternoon) this sort of drivel to fill the spaces between its ads? 
Posted: 2009/06/07 4:13 PM

Profitable Non-Profits – June 3, 2009
Every so often, we hear from someone representing a non-profit organization wanting a discount on a subscription, a book, booth space at an event, or something else that we happen to be offering. Our stock answer is that, as a very small, independent company with strict ethics, we can’t afford to offer discounts…and that when we are able to pay ourselves the same amount as their executive director makes, we’ll be happy to revisit that policy. (For the smaller groups, which are often run by volunteers, we usually find ways to barter, sponsor or otherwise support each other’s work.) My vacation reading last week was Christine MacDonald’s exposé of environmental non-profits Green, Inc., and it confirmed for me just how corporate (dare I say profitable?) some of the larger non-profits have become. MacDonald – a journalist who has also worked for Conservation International – pored over tax returns to find out that the chairman of CI made $391,398 in 2005, that the president of WWF-USA took home $347,588 in 2006, and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope made $239,508 the same year. The highest paid appears to be the National Park Foundation’s president, who apparently makes over $800,000 a year! In some cases, housing and travel allowances are also paid. Total revenues for the non-profit sector in the U.S. in 2004 were quoted as $1.36 billion, with expenses of $1.26 billion.

Perhaps Sierra Club’s Pope wants to catch up with his higher paid colleagues, because he has increasingly been taking his organization in a more corporate direction. Last year, I wrote about Sierra Club’s controversial decision to partner with Clorox, endorse its Green Works line of “natural” cleaning products and receive a cut on sales. And now, Pope is taking it all one giant step further, launching a for-profit online venture called Sierra Club Green Home. According to this article on Grist, the business is a joint venture with a group of well-heeled investors who think they can turn a profit by using the venerable organization’s “brand” and member base. Sierra Club is careful to hide the for-profit aspect of the endeavor, presumably because it could endanger its tax status. Any individual squeamishness is dealt with by painting it as “social entrepreneurship.” (Full disclosure: We received a glossy brochure in the mail inviting us to sign up for a free listing in their database; when we tried to do so, we were rejected because they’re not including magazines.)

Compromising one’s identity and integrity is nothing new. But I won’t be revisiting our no-discount-to-non-profits policy anytime soon. And I’d suggest a dose of caveat emptor when deciding which groups deserve/need your donation of time or money.
Posted: 2009/06/03 11:29 AM

Supporting Breastfeeding – June 2, 2009
If you live in Canada, INFACT Canada and INFACT Quebec are asking for your help. They are urging people to sign the Canadian Breastfeeding Protection Petition, which calls for action on improving breastfeeding support for mothers and babies across the country. They hope to get 100,000 signatures, which will be delivered directly to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Although early, exclusive and sustained breastfeeding is recommended for mothers and children by the World Health Organization and Health Canada, many women terminate breastfeeding early because of lack of supports. Recently, the World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research have also added their voices to the need to strengthen societal supports to enable mothers and children to breastfeed as recommended. So the country’s breastfeeding activist organizations are asking that we sign and share the petition.
Posted: 2009/06/02 12:41 PM

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copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2009

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life learning / unschooling
simplicity
environment
natural parenting
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What I'm Reading

Clean Food by Terry Walters (Sterling, 2009)
Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World by Andrew Weaver (Viking Canada, 2008)
Attached at the Heart by Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker (iUniverse Inc, 2009)

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What I'm Listening To

Live in London by Leonard Cohen (Sony Music, 2009)
Bare Bones by Madeleine Peyroux (Rounder Records, 2009)
Messin' Around by Molly Johnson (Anthem, 2006)

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Daughter Blog
The Mother/Daughter Project
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
Organic Consumers Association
Grist
We Are What We Do
Free Rice
Mothers Movement Online
Personalised Education Now
Foundation for a Better Life
Learning Freely Network
What's On My Food?

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