Education Collection

This past month, upon reaching the 400^th post milestone, I did a collection of “best of” posts (part I, part II, part III), mainly related to the three overlying spheres of the Spherical Model. That left out some specific topics. So I followed up with the Defending Marriage collection. Today I'd like to add the Education collection.

If you know me, you know I spent ten years homeschooling my children. When I first started homeschooling, I felt so strongly about the decision that I thought it would probably be right for everyone who could possibly do it. I’ve modified somewhat over the years. Homeschooling is a lifestyle choice, and it takes energy and organization. Mostly, though, it requires a personality that gets excited about learning and helping others learn. That was natural for me, which made homeschooling amazingly fulfilling to my life—while it was also exhausting. I’m so glad we did it. But if someone knows about themselves that they don’t have the personality for it, what they really need to do is recognize their responsibility to see to the upbringing and education of their own children and see to it they provide the best opportunities they can manage. So I don’t as a rule proselytize toward homeschooling, although I’m often a resource for people thinking about trying it.

My friend Paige shared this homeschool field trip photo from 2008

However, after the election last fall, I came to recognize a greater urgency about parents seeing to their children’s education. Some of that comes from the intrusion of the federal government into every aspect of our lives, and the needed resistance to Common Core or any other centrally planned curriculum. Some of the change comes from the real frustration we face locally. Here in one of the most conservative states, in a part of town where conservatives dominate, where schools are considered (by someone else’s standards, not mine) to be high performing—here, of all places, you would expect the school board to reflect the parents and their values. But this election completed the turnover so that seven out of seven board members are moderate to liberal. They consider their constituencies to be the teacher organizations and the businesses that benefit from school spending (builders, curriculum providers, for example).

If in such a place we cannot guarantee that parents are the ones to respond to, then I have no hope for the efficacy of the public school system. Alternatives must take a greater role: private schools, charter schools, homeschools, online schools. Maybe there are alternatives we haven’t even discovered yet. But I do say, louder than I used to, that the federal government has absolutely no business sticking its nose into the education of my children and grandchildren. And state and local public schools have failed to prove that public school has a better purpose or outcome than providing the minimum skills for those whose parents can’t or won’t provide basics necessary for functioning in society.

So, I’m collecting the posts I’ve written related mainly to education. This includes a series of related posts this past March:

3-28-2011 What Works for Schools 

4-7-2011 Commencement  

5-7-2011 Public School Economics Lesson    

5-10-2011 New Paradigm for Education    

7-20-2011 What Make IQ So Racist?  

10-26-2011  Parental Rights   

10-2-2012 Local, Local, Local  

10-3-2012 The Priorities Question, School Board Part II   

11-12-2012 Paradigm Shift Underway  

3-15-2013 Natural Feeding and Teaching   

3-18-2013 Education vs. Indoctrination   

3-20-2013 Skeptical of Accreditation  

3-22-2013 Parental Right to Educate  

3-25-2013 Oppression through Education  

4-5-2013 More on CSCOPE  

4-15-2013 Homestyle Education, Part I  

4-17-2013 Homestyle Education, Part II  

4-20-2013 Homestyle Education, Part III  

4-22-2013 Homestyle Education, Part IV  

5-17-2013 You Might Be Living Under Tyranny If…, Part II (Romeike update)    

If you’re Texas local, and you’re even considering the possibility of homeschooling, Texas Home School Coalition is holding its annual convention next week, August 1-3. Full info here: http://thsc.org/events/convention/   The theme this year is Standing Firm. It will be, as usual, at the Waterway Marriott in The Woodlands, about an hour north of Houston, just off I-45. The most it will cost is $35 per adult for non-THSC-members at the door. A good deal. I feel nostalgic thinking about the good things I’ve learned at past conventions, and some of my favorite book and materials shopping as well.

New Paradigm for Education

My thanks to Voluntaryist Student for bringing this to my attention yesterday. This is 12 minutes of lecture from creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson to RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts), accompanied with animated drawings on a white board. The examples nevertheless are quite American: RSA Animate: Changing Education Paradigms

I couldn’t have said it better, but I can say a bit in support of his conclusions.

Back when my kids were in public schools, in a part of the country where we had quite good ones, I wrote a piece about the unusually effective multi-age classrooms they were in at the local elementary school (this was first and second grades, before they started attending a gifted magnet school, and long before I considered homeschooling). The multi-age classrooms contained abilities ranging from Down’s Syndrome first graders to gifted second graders, in a classroom of about 22, with one teacher and usually also one aide specifically to help the special ed students. It was understood that everyone was at different levels in different subjects, and those who understood something could help those who didn’t understand it yet.

The two main teachers who did this were marvelous in their own right. They were trying to teach other classroom teachers to do what they did, but I think results of that were not as promising as originally hoped. Nevertheless, what these teachers did worked well. They had clipboards they carried around with them, and they marked various things they observed about each child. They answered questions and guided and directed. Much of the day looked chaotic, with children placing themselves around the room at scattered desks or, more likely, on colorful floor mats.

Sometimes the class did things together, like going through daily routines related to calendars and weather, and counting by fives or sevens, or whatever the number was that day. And they read stories aloud together as well. Usually the whole class was on the same subject at a given time of the day (math, or writing). I used to help with writing lab, a segment of the morning twice a week when parent volunteers went student to student to answer questions about spelling and punctuation and help kids say what they wanted in their project of the day. Some would need almost no help, but did enjoy having someone read what they wrote. Some would need to tell an adult what they wanted to say, and then trace over it. When they completed writing a “book,” they would “publish” it by binding it and reading it with any other students that recently finished. (My son Economic Sphere’s first such project was a wordless picture book, so, yes, I did know he thought out of the box from very early on.)

At parent/teacher meetings, these teachers would show a portfolio of the student’s work. What was important was not how they measured against some national mean, but how they measured against where they had been the last time parent and teacher met. Was there progress? Was there a pattern in the types of errors in math or spelling? Were there things the parent could do at home? And how was the student doing socially, etc.?

Discipline was rarely a problem. One of the most effective “severe” methods of discipline was separation from the class. The student acting up could sit at his desk while the class had story time or something else together. Once the problem student let the aide know he was ready to control himself so he wouldn’t bother the other students, he was allowed to rejoin them. (I can’t tell you how different this was from the school we got after our move, just before homeschooling. At least I can’t tell you today. Maybe sometime.)

So, as I was writing about this experimental classroom, the conclusion was that, as much as possible, these multi-age classrooms were designed to resemble learning in a family. [Doesn’t everything civilization-building grow from roots in the family?] Ages and abilities differ. There’s a lot of independent learning, as well as fun together time. There’s appropriate discipline, but not a lot needed once there’s an understanding of expectations and plenty of interesting things happening.

Having this experience was an advantage to me once we started homeschooling. I didn’t try to reproduce a factory classroom in my home; I tried to make home a place where we enjoyed learning things together. It was often a messy and chaotic business, but it was a fun ride.