The Purpose of Education

I’ve been putting together a presentation for this coming Saturday. At our Tea Party, we’re spending two consecutive meetings on education issues. My part will be on homeschooling. The beginning segment is about the purpose of education, and some history of education. Since that’s where my thoughts are today, I might as well give a preview here.

The purpose of education, according to Aristotle, is to produce a great soul.

Joe Harless, in his book The Eden Conspiracy, says education should be about producing an accomplished citizen. It should teach the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society.

What should an accomplished member of society be accomplished at doing—regardless of how the person makes a living?

·         Obedience to the law.

·         Informed voting decisions.

·         Contributions to stability.

·         Resolution of interpersonal conflict.

·         Contributions to community improvement.

The Northwest Ordinance, one of our lesser known founding documents, written in 1787, the same year as our Constitution, says “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall ever be encouraged.”

So the purpose of education, then, is to teach religion, morality, and knowledge so that we can have good government and happiness.

Note that encouraging schools and the means of education did not mean government provided it, only that it would offer a gift of land—after surveying, one 16^th of the land would be sold to private owners, and the proceeds would be used “within that township” to help with the building of schools. No state or national oversight. No ongoing support. Simply a one-time grant to encourage building schools.

So far we’re using different words, but we’re pretty much in agreement about what we want schools to do.

According to Oliver Van DeMille, in A Thomas Jefferson Education, there are three types of

education, each with its particular purpose:

·         Public education

·         Professional education

·         Leadership education

We’ll take these in turn.

First, public education. It’s intended to prepare a person for a job, or for servant labor. It teaches what to think. It is implemented in cultures to give opportunities to the poor, to lift them from being a burden on society. The downside—everywhere it had previously been tried—is the deterioration of other education, which can’t complete with “free.”

Second, profession education. It’s intended to prepare for trade, often through apprenticeship, for skilled artisan work, and for law, medical, MBA, or other professional training. It teaches when to think, or under what circumstances to use their specialized training. So, the purpose is to create expertise. It meets this goal, but it is not a substitute for leadership training.

Third, leadership education. It’s intended to produce leaders in home and communities, entrepreneurs in business, statesmen in government. It teaches how to think. So it trains thinkers. It develops character, competence, and capacity to do the right thing—and to do it well—in business, government, church, school, family, and other organizations. It perpetuates freedom.

Historically, for thousands of years, those with resources provided home tutoring, often followed by trade apprenticeship and professional training. Meanwhile the poor got whatever minimum was necessary to make them useful—usually emphasizing physical labor over brain labor.

Public education—that first type, for preparing the poor for service labor—was first tried in America during a time when many immigrants were working in factories, and their children were left to wander the streets. This coincided with the industrial revolution.

In comes Horace Mann, an atheist “progressive.” He said,

What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…. The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men (quoted in Christopher Klicka, The Right Choice—Home Schooling, p. 32).

Within two generations, Mann's ideas flooded the nation. There was the problem of large numbers of poor students from uneducated families. He offered the factory model. Subjects were separated, rather than integrated. Timing was determined by ringing bells, just like in the factories. Schools were top-down authoritarian. Uniformity was paramount.

Then along came John Dewey—of Dewey Decimal System fame. In 1916 he published Democracy in Education. He’s more or less the father of “progressive” education. He had plans to “revolutionize” child training. “Self-realization” became the goal instead of “learning.” He gave no more than a casual nod to teaching English grammar, ancient history, US history, geography, classics of Western civilization, or science.

He looked upon the schools as a wonderful opportunity to indoctrinate America’s youth in the “virtues” of a glorious age where private property, the free market, open competition, and profits would all be eliminated.

What was his background? He got his PhD from Johns Hopkins, studying under G. Stanley Hall—a disciple of German socialist Wilhelm Wundt. Dewey visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s. He failed to recognize the revolutionary desolation and widespread destruction of human values, and instead described it as “a popular culture impregnated with esthetic quality.”

According to W. Cleon Skousen, in The Freeman’s Digest, May 1984, “Today we are reaping the tragic results of the pedagogical misery that America inherited from Dewey’s misadventure in experimental education.” As he explained Dewey’s history before that Soviet visit,

Long before, in 1904, he had joined the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. He had then teamed up with James Earl Russell, the dean of the Teachers College, who was also a student of Wilhelm Wundt, and together they had worked for a quarter of a century diligently building this branch of Columbia University into the largest institution in the world for the training of teachers. By 1953, about one-third of all the presidents and deans of teacher training schools in America were graduates of Columbia’s Teachers College.

One of his contemporaries, Dr. Robert M. Hutchins, saw through the scheme to its logical consequences:

The disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view, education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone (Great Western Books, vol. 1, preface; pp. xii-xiii).

I may have told this story elsewhere, but there’s a segment of To Kill a Mockingbird, where the young protagonist, Scout, describes her disappointment with school. Her description of the first day of first grade (no kindergarten back then) is worth retelling.

Scout’s teacher discovers that she not only knew the alphabet, but she could read all the readers and The Mobile Register (newspaper), which she had learned naturally just by sitting with her father and reading together in the evenings. The teacher says,

“You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers (p. 22 of my copy).

Apparently John Dewey was to blame. She goes on:

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem [her brother] called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus [her father] and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teacher thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me (p. 37).

Maybe it’s time we re-think what is normal.

In six thousand years of human history, children have been brought up and taught by their parents. Turning that responsibility over to the state is a social experiment—an undeniably failing experiment—begun only about a century ago.

While we homeschoolers may look radical to the people around us who don’t know anything different from government institutional factory-like schools they grew up with, we are the ones following the traditional pattern.

We homeschoolers are the ones doing leadership education. We’re the ones teaching how to think.

And insofar as we do well in teaching the knowledge, skills, and information relevant to becoming accomplished members of society, we’re producing great souls.

My kids were worth it.

Dewey

Several days ago a friend of mine, gone back to school for a PhD, was working on a paper related to educational theory. She had to choose a subject from back a ways in time, so she chose John Dewey. I mentioned that I wasn’t a fan of Dewey, so she asked why (there had to be a critical part of the paper anyway). So I looked through what I had and came across a piece I wrote, in 2006, for a homeschooling newsletter. Bits and pieces of it have shown up in my other writings. [You can go to my Education Collection from July 2013.]

Anyway, I thought I’d adapt that 2006 piece for a post here. It’s a good reminder never to give power over what you value most—like the education of your children—to some “expert” or bureaucrat who doesn’t know your child the way you do.

_______________________________

John Dewey could be, whether we know it or not, the biggest reason many of us homeschool.

Let’s go back to the beginning of public education, an experiment that began with a crusade by Horace Mann. Mann believed in shifting the responsibility of educating children from parents (who had done it pretty successfully in America since the days the Pilgrims landed, and many generations and cultures prior) to the state. His “progressive” concepts allowed no room for God. Mann said, “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good…. The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and a pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men” ( Klicka, The Right Choice—Home Schooling, p. 32).

During the industrial revolution, public schools were built up in cities, where there were many immigrants and people working in factories, and there seemed to be a need for the public to provide education where families apparently couldn’t. So, within a generation or two, Horace Mann’s ideas were flooding the nation.

Then along comes John Dewey. (Yes, he is the one who created the Dewey decimal system.) He took Horace Mann’s ideas, and made them worse. I’m about to quote a chunk of material from our history book God’s Hand in the Building of America, Volume 1, by Glenn & Julianne Kimber, starting at p. 269. They quote from an article by Cleon Skousen, whom you might know as the author of The 5000-Year Leap and The Naked Communist. (I’ll reference as they do.)

In 1916, John Dewey published his book Democracy and Education, in which he advocated an entirely new, revolutionary approach to child training. The American schools have never been the same since.

John Dewey called his brainchild “progressive education” but even liberal educators such as Robert M. Hutchins called his whole conception regressive education.

Dewey received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins where G. Stanley Hall, a disciple of the German socialist philosopher, Wilhelm Wundt, indoctrinated him with the vision of a welfare state with the schools serving as the change agent to bring it about in our generation.

Democracy in Education turned out to be a planned pattern of anarchy in education. Something called “self-realization” became the goal instead of “learning.” Nothing but the most casual reference was made to English grammar, ancient history, US history, geography, the classics of Western civilization, or even the basic sciences. School was to be just fun, with each student doing his own thing in a climate of permissive, unstructured confusion.

Contemporary educators of national stature treated Dewey with respectful demeanor but expressed professional horror when they saw what Dewey was promoting as “progressive education.” Robert M. Hutchins declared: “His book is a noble, generous effort to solve…social problems through the education system. Unfortunately, the methods he proposed could not solve these problems; they would merely destroy the education system” (Great Western Books, vol. 1, p. 15).

In practice, Dewey practically threw traditional “book learning” out the window. Dr. Hutchins wrote: “The disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view, education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone” (Ibid., preface; pp. xii, xiii).

Dewey looked upon the schools as a wonderful opportunity to indoctrinate the American youth in the virtues of a glorious age where private property, the free market, open competition and profits would all be eliminated. He visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and, instead of recognizing the wasteland of revolutionary desolation and the widespread destruction of human values, he blissfully described it all as “a popular culture impregnated with esthetic quality” (John Dewey, Impressions of Soviet Russia, [New York; 1932], p. 44).

Long before, in 1904, he had joined the faculty of the Teachers College at Columbia University. He had then teamed up with James Earl Russell, the dean of the Teachers College, who was also a student of Wilhelm Wundt, and together they had worked for a quarter of a century diligently building this branch of Columbia University into the largest institution in the world for the training of teachers. By 1953, about one-third of all the presidents and deans of teacher training schools in America were graduates of Columbia’s Teachers College.

Today we are reaping the tragic results of the pedagogical misery that America inherited from Dewey’s misadventure in experimental education. (W. Clean Skousen, editorial, The Freemen Digest, May 1984). 

Back to my voice again. I remember reading To Kill a Mockingbird a few years ago, where the young girl, Scout, describes her disappointment with school. Her description of the first day of first grade (no kindergarten back then) was hilarious. Her teacher discovered that she not only knew the alphabet, she could read all the readers and The Mobile Register, which she had learned naturally just by sitting with her father and reading together in the evenings. The teacher said,

“You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage—”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.”

I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers (p. 22 of my copy).

Apparently John Dewey was to blame. She goes on:

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem [her brother] called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus [her father] and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything—at least, what one didn’t know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teacher thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem educated on a half-Decimal half-Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me (p. 37).

The book review that led to my writing this piece was of the book John Dewey & the Decline of American Education: How the Patron Saint of Schools Has Corrupted Teaching and Learning, by Henry T. Edmondson III. Here’s a quote from that review:

Eschewing our existing institutions and what he called the “idolatry of the US Constitution,” Dewey promoted a futuristic, socialistic idea of “the Great Community,” whose “seer” for him was the polymorphous, promiscuous, egalitarian egotist-aesthete Walt Whitman, who sang both of himself [“Song of Myself” is one of Whitman’s famous works] and of future “democratic vistas” (National Review, April 24, 2006, p. 56-58).

This is later in the review:

Dewey’s promotion of what he called “social experimentation leading to great social change” was a working out of Whitman’s social, psychological, and sexual radicalism and egalitarianism…. Dewey slandered a wide range of more conservative or traditionalist education-policy thinkers and critics as “fundamentalists” obsessed with a fruitless, retrograde “quest for certainty” (the title of his 1929 book). In this regard he is the father…of our contemporary “post-modern”deconstructionists, with their attacks on “foundationalism” and “logo-centrism.”

The review mentions a truth-speaking Columbia Teachers College professor named Isaac L. Kandel, who saw through Dewey decades ago in his book The Cult of Uncertainty (1943): “A Jewish immigrant writing in a dark time, Kandel knew that Dewey’s influential denial of history, traditional learning, and moral common sense in teacher training and the schools was a new form of barbarism. We are living with its consequences.” 

The point of all this quoting is this: In six thousand years of human history, children have been brought up and taught by their parents. Turning that responsibility over to the state is a social experiment—an undeniably failing experiment—begun only a little over a century ago. While we homeschoolers may look radical to the people around us who don’t know anything different from the government institutional factory-like schools they grew up with, we are the ones following the traditional pattern.

We don’t need to reproduce schools at home; we’re better off reproducing the homes of our founding fathers. We don’t need to teach “group dynamics” (what some people call socialization); we’re better off teaching our children acceptable family behavior. We don’t need our children taught by professionals; we’re better off having them taught by the parents who have a stake in helping them achieve all they can.

Homestyle Education, Part IV

I’ve spent the last three posts reviewing a particular innovative classroom from about twenty years ago: Part I, Part II, and Part III. I’d like to do some followup, now with hindsight.

The Followup

At the time I wrote, it was during my son’s second year in the class. We wondered what to do for the following year. He had been recommended, since kindergarten, for the gifted program at a magnet school across town. I was hesitating, because sending him far away seemed uncomfortable if it wasn’t necessary. During the two years in the multi-age class with an extraordinary teacher, I think he got much of what he would have gotten in a gifted class.

But for third grade we needed to make a decision. The school was trying to expand the multi-age classroom concept. It was going to be tried with a third-fourth class. The teacher wasn’t as experienced or as flexible as Mrs. Crane, but I thought it was worth a try.

In retrospect, we missed a good year we could have had at the gifted school. This next multi-age classroom was just one teacher handling two groups of kids: one assigned third-grade level work, and the other assigned fourth-grade level work. A kid could choose harder work if he wanted, but there wasn’t anything really self-paced or individualized.

Now we had the standard rows of desks, with students sitting unnaturally quiet, and doing the same work others were doing. It was boring. And while our very smart son didn’t get behind, he didn’t really thrive either. So for fourth grade we sent him to the gifted school. By then, it turned out all his neighborhood friends were being sent there as well, so socially it was a good choice. And the gifted classes were innovative in many of the same ways as Mrs. Crane’s class.

Meanwhile, Economic Sphere, our second son, had gotten through kindergarten. His older brother’s kindergarten teacher had moved up to teach a first-second grade multi-age classroom, with some additional innovations. She began the year team-teaching with yet another teacher and classroom. So really there were two classrooms full of students (about 52 total), half assigned to each teacher, but all receiving some attention from both. And the kids ranged from Down’s Syndrome first graders to gifted second graders—a wide range. (Special Ed students also had an aide assigned to them.)

Mrs. Helmsley had been an excellent kindergarten teacher, and her philosophy about how to run a multi-age classroom coincided with Mrs. Crane’s. In fact, eventually they worked together to train other teachers in the district in methods that worked. Part way through the year, it became apparent that the chaos of having 52 kids in a room was too much, so the divider between classrooms was replaced, and the two multi-age classrooms worked separately. But the other innovations continued.

I used to volunteer as a writing helper in the classroom, during what they called Writing Workshop. Kids wrote their own “books,” with whatever help they needed. They illustrated as well. And when they were finished (which often took a number of Writing Workshop sessions), they would “publish,” which meant getting the pages bound. And then they would share, reading aloud to others who had recently published. It was a very satisfying experience to have that sense of completion and recognition. I still have some of Economic Sphere’s first books tucked away somewhere. (His very first published “writing” was a wordless picture book, which was unorthodox even in that setting.)

They adjusted for individual children, which we needed. Economic Sphere came home from school in September of his first grade year, about two weeks into the school year, and said, “I’m the best speller in my class.” He’d only been reading aloud since June, but he was reading the Encyclopedia at that point. I wasn’t aware of the spelling skill yet, so I said, “You mean you’re the best first grade speller in your class.”

“No,” he said, with certainty; “I’m the best speller.” Within days I got a call from Mrs. Helmsley recruiting my help. They had no spelling lists that would do. He needed to come up with his own spelling lists, going through the dictionary to find words he didn’t know yet. Among those early lists were Tyrannosaurus Rex, dolphin, constellation, and reindeer. By year’s end, he had moved on to archaeopteryx. What I appreciated was how delighted his teacher was by his special abilities, and how willing she was to accommodate, rather than say, “Since he’s doing fine, we just won’t worry about him.”

When he got through those two years, we sent him directly on to the gifted school for third grade. The gifted school also did themes, lasting a semester or even longer. They put on plays and musicals. They did murals. The teachers used a portfolio approach to progress reports as well. I looked for just a couple of things at parent-teacher conferences: Was my child progressing well? And did his teacher appreciate him and like him—see in him the delightful things I saw.

I knew these several extraordinary teachers spent their lives thinking up new and different ways to share learning with the kids. These brave souls allowed a kid to bring in the heart of a deer (during hunting season) and led the kids in the dissection. We had a class that used small wading pools to contain habitats for spiders and their webs. We provided a large, green, striped garden spider that was known for beautiful webs.

There were hamsters, rabbits, and chicks in various classrooms. One Saturday we ran over to the school when we got word the chicks were hatching—phonecalls going out to every child’s parents so the kids wouldn’t miss out just because it was a weekend.

It has been a couple of decades, and we left the area fifteen years ago, so I have no way to follow up and find out whether the multi-age classroom concept is still thriving there. It might have been dependent on those few extraordinary teachers. I believe the gifted program is still there; the gifted program we got when we moved here was nothing like that, and the culture shock of disappointment is what led us to homeschool.

Again, these great classrooms I’ve described were all in public schools. But what worked was everything standardization prevents:

·         Personal decision making by the teacher, in concert with the parents, about a particular child and his/her learning style and needs.

·         Curriculum and learning materials chosen by the teacher for her classroom, sometimes for a particular child.

·         Enrichment brought in when it was available, adjusting other things so the special opportunity wouldn’t be lost.

·         Bringing in parents to help in the classroom, so parents were part of the learning taking place.

·         Plenty of individualized education—each child at his own pace, with plenty of opportunity to follow his own interests.

·         Accepting differences in pace and style without shame, stigma, or labeling; this included the “learn, then teach” method, where students helped tutor someone in a subject they already understood.

All of these things are natural within a family homeschool. It would be difficult to approach homeschooling some other way. Schooling within the home is the natural, normal method that has been used, at least for elementary education, through most millennia. The factory-institution style schools we see so often now are a recent anomaly. Functional illiteracy grows as responsibility and choice are taken over by government, usurping the parental role.

The only way for public schools—or private schools—to successfully educate a leadership class is to use the methods that work in the home. Make the school less like a factory and more like a natural learning environment, where differences are cherished.

Next time you come up against Common Core, or CSCOPE, or any other top-down decision, speak up and say, “That’s not acceptable for my child.” And if you can’t get the schools to give you what they can and should, get your child out of there.

Homestyle Education, Part I

Back some twenty years ago, I wrote a piece on the kind of classroom my son Political Sphere was in (and later son Economic Sphere). It says something about the particular teacher, but also the things that worked in that classroom. This was years before I considered homeschooling, but looking back at it, what I find is that, the closer to a family situation, the better the learning. I thought it might be instructive, during the current push to standardize the whole country into limited mediocrity, to look at this case study of what worked in a particular classroom.

The piece wasn’t published, except among teachers in the district; the local paper was only interested in pieces about whatever version of reform was being talked about in education articles—this was a decade before the No Child Left Behind Act, and I'm guessing the phrase du jour was "outcome-based education." It wasn't something I was focused on as a parent.

The piece is long, about 2500 words. So at this point I’m debating how to break it up, or to choose which parts are most useful to look at from our current perspective. But I’m sharing this because so much still applies, and still shows cross purposes with government “experts.”

So today's Part I is an introductory look at the special classroom and teacher in our case study. I’m leaving the piece basically as written, except for changing names of people and places.

 

Case Study of a Multi-Age Classroom

Mrs. Crane’s classroom at Blue Sky Elementary in Tripletown does not look like an ordinary classroom. It isn’t. You won’t see students sitting quietly at assigned desks. In fact, there are no desks, just tables and chairs in small groups around the room, and plenty of open floor space. Walls are covered, ceiling to floor, with finished student work, work in progress, and pictures that may inspire future work. One wall has a life-size drawing of a student, traced around him, covered with positive comments from his classmates.

The room includes computers in one corner. Just inside the door you’ll find a classroom store where children can buy goods with motivational money they earn by doing more than is expected. Several shelves are filed with books for children to choose and read on their own—which they read while lying on a rug, sitting at a table, or wherever is comfortable.

On afternoon visits during reading time, you’ll find the place silent, except for a few quiet voices reading to each other. But the room is anything but quiet during most of the morning. An hour of each morning is activity time. Several parent volunteers come to help out with reading, writing, and math projects. Math sometimes includes cooking during this hour. Students move from station to station, deciding what they want to accomplish, getting personal adult attention while they do it. There’s a lot of talking going on. If you visit now, unprepared, you may see what looks like chaos.

Adding to the apparent chaos is the inherent difference in student ability. This is a multi-age classroom, with first and second graders mixed together. There is no first grade group or second grade group. There is no group of struggling readers or successful readers. There are twenty-seven different students at different developmental stages in math, reading, and social skills. Difference is not only welcome here; difference is expected.

Managing all the difference is a teacher with a plan. Barbara Crane is an energetic and exciting personality. She often responds to student accomplishments with hugs and cheers. At times it’s difficult to identify her in the classroom. Her small size and her place among, rather than in front of, students help her blend in. Several years ago Crane completed her master’s degree in elementary education. Always ready to find a better way, she is now putting the latest in elementary education research to work.

Mrs. Crane’s plan is designed to help students discover how to learn, and to enjoy doing it. Students don’t all learn the same way. That doesn’t matter. Her classroom provides so many different approaches—hands-on experience, pictures, graphs, reading, writing, explaining to one another, experimenting, singing—something has to work for every child.

During the morning Mrs. Crane gathers students for circle time. This is as close as she gets to a class lecture. They talk together as a group about the current theme, which was recently inventions. The purpose is not to learn all there is about inventions; the purpose is to experience many ways of learning about something---such as inventions. The emphasis is on the process, rather than the product, of learning.

Together teacher and students examine unknown inventions brought in for them to examine. They make predictions. They try some experiments. They make charts and graphs about the various inventions they examine. They make up stories about how the inventions could be used.

Themes, such as inventions, are chosen specifically for their ability to supply multi-layered learning experiences. In exploring the theme, students use their growing math, verbal, and social skills. Learning about a theme is not meant to replace basic math and English; it is meant to make them relevant so they can more easily be learned.

This thematic, or holistic, approach to learning is one of several current trends in education. A body of research has become available in the past couple of decades about how children learn, which is slowly making its way into classrooms.

***************

So part I has given us a taste of what this particular classroom looks like. Part II will look at the research behind the approach and how well it addresses education challenges. I expect there will be a part III, looking at the outcomes for the students in our case study. And either mixed in or following, we’ll compare with what we know twenty years down the road.

The Parental Right to Educate

We’ve been covering education topics for a few posts now, mostly in preparation for current related news. Last Friday’s post presented the concept of the parental right and responsibility to educate their children. Monday’s post covered definitions of curriculum and textbooks, to take away some of the mystique of the experts. Wednesday’s post covered more skepticism of centralized control, revealing the lack of connection between accreditation and educational outcomes.



The Romeike family in 2010
photo from NY Times story

Today I want to cover a particular case. I mentioned this case back in October 2011. A German family, the Romeikes, an Evangelical Christian family with six children, found that the German public schools did not meet their family’s educational needs. They found that local private schools (which, in Germany, are required to teach the government dictated curriculum used in public schools) were an even worse environment. They came slowly to look into homeschooling, which is illegal in Germany, and has been since long before WWII. A few people do it undercover. (I actually know an American homeschooling family who worked in Germany for a year, that managed to stay under the radar during their stay.) The Romeikes finally saw it as their best option, believing that, if caught, the outcome would be fines they were willing to pay.

It turned out the fines were onerous, and the government threatened to take the children away from the parents, and possibly imprison the parents as well.

They did the legal thing; they went through the legal system in Germany first. Failing there, and with the threat of family dissolution looming, they came to the United States in 2008 and requested asylum. That was granted in 2010, by a judge in Tennessee, who spoke strongly in favor of their parental rights.

There was reason to rejoice, but it didn’t last long. The Department of Homeland Security (the Immigration and Naturalization Service, under DHS) stepped up to insist the judge had ruled incorrectly, and that the family should not be granted asylum.

There are some specific guidelines for qualifying for asylum. Being persecuted for religious reasons is one; so is being part of a specific targeted social group, which it is argued homeschoolers are. The judge in his ruling spelled out why the family qualified, so he was following the law, even though circumstances were unusual.

The case comes up for appeal before the Sixth Circuit Court on April 23^rd. It’s unclear to me how the case is set up. The Romeikes won the original case, so no need for appeal. So the government must have stepped in to insist on appeal, forcing the family to re-defend their position.

If this were simply a question of asylum, there might be some conceivable reason for pressing the question. If we allowed just anyone feeling unhappy in their home country to come here, we would be hard-pressed to accommodate the rush. But this family has been here since 2008. During the two years it took to get the ruling in their favor, they were productive and contributing members of society. During the additional three years, they have continued their noble behavior—and there has not been a sudden increase in similar requests for asylum based on homeschooling prejudices (or even religious prejudices) from Germany or elsewhere.

So the administration has stepped in, pretty much out of the blue, targeting a clearly harmless family for deportation—when the known outcome will be termination of custody of their own children, plus hefty fines and prison terms. Not only will they lose the right to educate their children as they see fit, they will lose the right to have a relationship with their children, and will have their lives essentially ruined and livelihood ended. That may not be a death threat, as with many asylum cases, but it’s pretty severe.

This is an administration that just set free a large number of illegal aliens who had been incarcerated. They have sued the state of Arizona for even asking people taken into custody for other infractions whether they have legal status. “Everyone is welcome, and we hope you’ll be voting for us soon,” is practically the announced immigration policy.

So why go to so much trouble to expel this particular family that came here legally?

I’ve wondered if there was pressure from Germany, which is an ally, and would appear somewhat embarrassed by the accusation of oppression that the request for asylum implies. There may be something behind the scenes, but there’s no mention of a request for extradition or any such thing in the stories I’ve read. And it seems unlikely there would be such a request. Germany’s stated purpose for the anti-homeschooling law is that they want to discourage factions and separateness within the country; having the family leave means problem solved.

Whether there’s some backroom discussion with Germany or not, this prosecution by the federal government clearly exposes this administration’s belief: there is no parental to right to see to the care, control, and upbringing of children, nor is this administration willing to protect any so-called parental rights.

Not all natural rights are spelled out in the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The reason even those are amendments is that natural rights were understood and accepted, so much so they didn’t need to be mentioned. It was fear that people might someday become corrupt enough not to understand and accept the natural God-given rights that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights. But it was so far from their thinking that anyone would come to believe someone other than parents owned the responsibility for raising the next generation that they didn’t even think to spell it out. Parents choosing how to best raise their children is simply part of a person’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Only in severe cases of abuse and neglect would society (or government) have a role to step in to protect the child.

But this administration is more corrupt than the founders imagined. The insistence on challenging the Romeike decision is a way to codify the administration’s belief that parents do not have rights concerning raising their children—the government wants to make it clear that they believe they have the right to control, to indoctrinate.

Inalienable rights cannot be given up. But just as people can lose their freedom to slavery, any inalienable right can succumb to usurpers if people do not stand strong against the tyrannists. Usually the loss happens little by little. “Free” public schools have been used for the incremental usurpation of parental rights. This administration is testing how far they have already come toward the tyrannist plan to dictate what and how children are taught.

When this federal government puts forth a curriculum (as it has with Common Core), claiming it is best for all our children, it doesn’t matter what is in the curriculum and whether it could be effective as a teaching tool. Such curriculum must be rejected, because the issue is parental rights—and we know that any curriculum they provide comes from the worldview that parents do not have rights.

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* You can learn more on the Romeike case at these links: this story from 2010, this story from The Blaze March 15th, and this video with HSLDA, who are helping to defend the Romeikes. 

Natural Feeding and Teaching

This post is about education. But I’m going to start with an analogy, about food, in hopes of helping you see the current paradigm with new eyes.

Imagine a conversation between a couple of moms at a park on a pleasant afternoon, while the kids play. This is a slightly different time and place than our current nation. Mom 1 is about to call the kids to head home for dinner; it’s time to start the cooking process if they’re going to have dinner on the table when Dad gets home. Mom 2 is surprised.

Mom 2: You cook for your own family? Really? I could never do that.

Mom 1: Yeah, I always have, and the kids are growing just fine.

Mom 2: I’d be afraid I’d do something wrong. I mean, what if I made my kids fat? How would I ever forgive myself?

Mom 1: Well, I mostly make just enough. And it’s not junk food. And we don’t have sweet snacks and desserts all the time, just as an occasional treat.

Mom 2: Yeah, I could never say no if my Emma whined and wanted more.

Mom 1: It takes being the grown up, I guess.

Mom 2: I’m just glad I don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s enough that I have to get them dressed and out the door in the morning. I’m so glad the school feeds them breakfast and lunch. And now that they send dinner home too—what a lifesaver! I’m just so glad the government cares enough about our children to make sure they get fed.

Mom 1: I figure I can do that. And I’m the one who knows what my kids will eat.

Mom 2: But, seriously, do you know what they should eat? Do you have a degree in nutrition? Are you certified?

Mom 1: No, I just use common sense and make things mostly from scratch. It’s not rocket science.

Mom 2: But all those studies—you should get them to eat more broccoli, or less, or use soy or don’t use soy. Is peanut butter really too dangerous? I mean, I’d never feed them something if I didn’t already know they didn’t have an allergy.

Mom 1: Usually you don’t find out they have an allergy if they haven’t eaten it at least once.

Mom 2: Well, still, I’m sure the government data puts the odds in our favor.

Mom 1: One of my kids does have food allergies, to dairy. So I just adjust what I’m cooking for him. You can’t even get one of the school meals without milk, can you?

Mom 2: Well, no, but you can just throw out what they don’t eat.

Mom 1: Yeah. I don’t do that. Like, if I know a kid’s never going to eat peas, I can make sure he gets some food he will eat that provides the same nutrition. I’m the one closest to the situation, so I can easily adjust.

Mom 2: Maybe so, but it’s so much easier to just let the government food specialists make those decisions. Plus, it’s no cost to me. Not only do I have time free that I don’t have to cook, we don’t have to spend that huge chunk of our budget just to feed out kids. I mean, it’s free! What could be better than free?

Mom 1: I guess we just value personal choice, personal responsibility, being able to adjust to our child’s personal needs without having to go through a government bureaucracy that doesn’t care about our child’s individual needs; we like time talking together while we eat, learning together about foods, how to cook, how to make things taste better, getting variety when we want it…

Mom 2: Yeah, strange. Whatever. Hey, gotta get going… (runs off, sits down on another bench by someone less crazy).

daughter Social Sphere dissecting a squid
during a group science day in 2009

This conversation is eerily similar to conversations I’ve actually had about our choice to homeschool. Up until a century plus a couple of decades ago, most parents saw to the education of their own children. Sometimes the mom and dad did lessons at home, taught reading and basic math, and gave assigned readings. Sometimes they joined together with some other families to hire a teacher or two in a neighborhood school. Sometimes—especially for kids who showed promise as they got older—they got to learn more as apprentices or in higher education. What we see taught in college now was frequently taught in secondary schools (calculus was aimed at 8^th grade), and undergraduate universities taught the specialized knowledge now reserved for graduate programs.

I grew up thinking public schools were the norm, and we sent our kids to them. Early on we got lucky.Our very smart kids (never sent to preschools) got funneled into a gifted program that was quite good, despite the bus ride across town. Then we moved, and spent two years coming to realize our needs could not be met in the local schools. Private schools, which we couldn’t afford for three kids anyway, were not going to solve our issues, because we needed some individual attention. So we dove into homeschooling and never looked back.

It was a difficult decision, and kind of scary. But it turned out that it wasn’t so very different from cooking every day for your own kids. You look at what they need; you know enough to either provide the instruction or figure out where to get what they need. So you facilitate their learning one way or another—just like you did when they were learning how to sit up, how to walk, how to talk, how to brush their own teeth. Those are things you have down yourself pretty well, so you just show the way.

There’s really not much necessary learning from elementary school that a functional adult doesn’t have a good grasp of. When things get tougher, at the high school level, finding specialized help, the way people do for music lessons, is easy enough. And getting easier with so many online resources.

And you learn as you go. Just as I’m a much better cook now than I was years ago. And I make it better tasting under more limited conditions (food allergies) than I ever used to know how to do. But it isn’t rocket science. And when they get to the level of rocket science (we actually studied some of that), you can get help, which we did.

Were there holes and gaps in our children’s educations? Undoubtedly. But I guarantee there were not as many holes in things important to me as the public schools would have caused. Anything they may have missed is easily compensated for with a book or an online search. Because they know how to learn on their own now.

I’m often in awe of how well all of my children do that as young adults. What a delight it is to talk over with them what they’ve recently discovered!

There’s more to say about education, but I want to end with a point and a quote. You, as a parent, have the right and responsibility to bring up your children as you see fit. Among parents earnestly striving to care for their children, any interference with that process is wrong. Outcomes for the children will be worse under government control. And our lives and freedoms will be threatened by the government control, no matter how convincing the authorities are about their good intentions.

Here’s the quote for the day, from Ezra Taft Benson, former US Secretary of Agriculture, and author of The Proper Role of Government (as well as former President and Prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints 1985-1994):

The best way to prevent a political faction or any small group of people from capturing control of the nation's educational system is to keep it decentralized into small local units, each with its own board of education and superintendent. This may not be as efficient as one giant super educational system (although bigness is not necessarily efficient, either) but it is far more safe. There are other factors, too, in favor of local and independent school systems. First, they are more responsive to the needs and wishes of the parents and the community. The door to the school superintendent's office is usually open to any parent who wishes to make his views known. But the average citizen would be hard pressed to obtain more than a form letter reply from the national Commissioner of Education in Washington, D.C.

Paradigm Shift Underway

I’m in the process of gleaning through information and data, and simply trying to process the paradigm shift. I no longer believe we live in a free constitutional republic; we live in a socialist-leaning democracy, with the majority ever voting to take more from the producers and give wealth to the non-producers. That is a big piece of news to process. (My son Political Sphere said, “Oh, yeah, I already knew that’s where we were.”)

Here are a few observations from the midst of the shift:

·        The president’s re-election resulted from voter fraud. When more than 100% of numerous key voting districts vote for one candidate—in addition to those votes for the other candidate—it is a given that voter fraud has taken place. They did not even bother with subtlety so that there was only suspicion but not clear evidence. Some estimates I’ve read are that 5% of the Obama vote is fraudulent. But there is nothing to be done, because the Department of Justice is required to prosecute, and they have been refusing for four years—because they are in on the game.

·        The president’s position in power, therefore, is illegitimate—as is true in nearly all despotic regimes. There are probably (almost certainly, just from what we know of Fast and Furious and the Benghazi cover-up) multiple reasons for impeachment. But it won’t happen, because we are in a nation that either tacitly or overtly supports the regime.

·        While much is wrong in this country, the status quo this week is not very different from what it was a week ago. So far I am still able to publish my opinions online. Hyperinflation has not yet taken all our belongings. In many ways, life slogs on as it has the past four years. While dangers loom, today is still scary but tolerable. While we still have the ability to act with some freedom, we should do so.

·        Those of us paying attention have some advantages the enemy does not:

o   We have a good work ethic and a larger supply of common sense.

o   We are much more likely to rely on God for help and guidance.

o   We value family and safeguard it. With the difference in replacement rates alone, we could overcome the opposition in a generation, simply because they don’t raise offspring.

·       Since the enemy does not raise replacement offspring, they plan to control the next generation through control of education. [Here is the part you’re probably not ready to hear yet, because your paradigm is still shifting.] The way to avoid the loss of the next generation is to pull our children and grandchildren out of public schools—either into private/parochial schools, or, better yet, homeschooling.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this last point. I came across this article the day after the election, which refers to another article, “TheLast Radicals,” from National Review, of all places. One of the paragraphs in this piece reveals why homeschooling is so frightening to “progressives”:

The problem is not educational outcomes: Students in the Seton program tend to score on average in the 80th percentile on standardized tests. The problem is that progressives operate as though the state owned children as joint property. Dana Goldstein, writing in Slate, urged her fellow progressives to resist the temptation to homeschool, arguing that the practice is “fundamentally illiberal” and asking incredulously: “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive?” She went on to argue that the children of high-achieving parents amount to public goods because of peer effects—poor students do better when mixed with better-off peers—meaning that “when college-educated parents pull their kids out of public schools, whether for private school or homeschooling, they make it harder for less-advantaged children to thrive.” She does not extend that analysis to its logical conclusion: that conscientious, educated liberals should enroll their children in the very worst public schools they can find in order to maximize the public good.

One of the outcomes of last week’s election was that our local school board, in a conservative area of the very red state of Texas, now has seven out of seven non-conservative teacher-organization-controlled trustees. The largest most local taxing entity, with the most effect on our everyday family lives, is controlled by people whose ideology is at odds with the people paying for schools (not paying their salaries; school trustees are unpaid—which adds to the puzzlement about how much money got put into their campaigns). If we cannot have a say, even at the local level, at our own school district, in a conservative area, it is time for that government institution to be abandoned.

This will not be a popular idea. It will take a while for this sad reality to sink in to people who still see schools as this great social opportunity, where their kids are building lifelong memories. But wishing to give our children what we had does not make it so; some of those memories are still available for some students at some schools—but becoming educated in the philosophies of our brilliant founding fathers (all of whom were homeschooled), along with the ethos they lived, is no longer an option in most public schools.

We began our homeschooling journey in 2000. It was something we saw as essential for our family at the time. It turned out there were benefits we had no idea we would get. It was a wild decade-long ride, and required so much energy and dedication that parents have to be truly committed to the holistic education of the children they love in order to meet the challenge. So I haven’t up till now done much proselytizing about homeschooling.

But with the paradigm shift, while we still can, it might be urgent to give this next generation the truths about freedom that we know but they are not being taught—before such teaching is prevented.

If you have even an inkling of interest in the possibility of such a drastic lifestyle change, there are a few places to explore:

·       A ThomasJefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of leaders for the 21^st Century, by Oliver Van DeMille.

 

·       TheWell-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home, by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer (I got my copy signed by the authors when I heard them speak).

 

·        THSC.org (Texas Home School Coalition); sign up for their free weekly online newsletter, and get the handbook, which is specific to Texas law, but since Texas is a groundbreaking state for homeschooling, it would probably be helpful to any homeschooling parent.

·        Miracle in Texas, a video telling the amazing story from the early 1990s when the courts declared homeschools to be private schools, which paved the way for homeschooling freedom across the country.

 

At some point I’ll post more of our experiences, which might either make you want to dive right in or scare you off, depending on who you are. But, consider, for the sake of life, liberty, and family, whether the next step for you is to escape from government institutional indoctrination schools.

Leadership Education--Do You Have the Right Stuff?

I’m thinking about one of the details toward the end of Agenda, the documentary I talked about in Tuesday’s blog, in the “What can we do?” section. It was to homeschool.

If you’ve read my First Blog and/or the introduction to the website Spherical Model, you know I homeschooled. Our family did it for the last ten years we had school-age kids (graduated Social Sphere in spring 2010). There were times it did indeed feel heroic. For us it also seemed necessary, so it was just life as we knew it.

I hesitate to recruit others into homeschooling. It is something of a calling. The 2-5% of families that do it are set apart, in a way, from other parents and children out there. But the suggestion in the movie made me think it would be worth asking a few questions, to let you evaluate whether you have the right stuff to homeschool.

First, do you believe that you as a parent have an inalienable right to the bringing up of your children as you see fit (assuming that you do not infringe on their God-given rights with behavior that is clearly abusive)? If you believe you have that right, do you also recognize the responsibility to bring them up in ways that will give them knowledge, wisdom, and an ability to support a home and family in a civilized society?

If you believe these things, then educating your children is something you are committed to do. There are several possible ways to accomplish it:

• Nod approval as your children seek their own resources and learning.
• Educate them yourself.
• Hire private tutors to educate them under your supervision.
• Hire a school that you have chosen to offer a full range of subjects.
• Turn over the choices of subjects and schools to a public institution.
• Some combination of the above.

According to A Thomas Jefferson Education, a subversive book you ought to read when considering your child’s education, there are three types, or levels, of education:

1. Public education, which tries to prepare everyone for a job, any job, by teaching them what to think. This includes rudimentary skills designed to fit them to function in society.
2. Professional education—from apprenticeship and trade schools to law, medical and MBA programs—which creates specialists by teaching them when to think.
3. Leadership education, which I call “Jefferson Education,” which teaches students how to think and prepares them to be leaders in their homes and communities, entrepreneurs in business, and statesmen in government.—TJE p. 31

The point is that leaders have traditionally (and almost exclusively) been taught by private tutors. Learning tends to start in the home, with basic reading and math through a range of elementary subjects. Then private tutors are hired for more depth in chosen areas, and as the student grows and learning depth increases, a mentor often directs the individual study. That’s how Thomas Jefferson was educated, as well as a great many of the founding fathers. It’s the method used for royalty pretty much throughout history.

We think of the term “public education” as meaning public schools, government funded institutions, which is accurate. But the purpose is to “educate” the vast public with a standardized level of rudimentary skills. The purpose isn’t to educate for leadership, since the vast public are seen as those to be led, not those who lead. If public education is used for a future leader, it must be supplemented beyond typical public school levels. Leadership education methods, on the other hand, do not preclude a child from going into any field; they open up the possibilities for more.

So, then the question is, if you want your child to learn how to think, how will you go about it? A certain level of wealth and resources are required for private tutoring—including homeschooling. I have known people who must work while homeschooling, but it’s difficult and not ideal. So, in a world where households economically almost require two incomes, homeschooling requires a dedicated parent whose job is educating the children (or combination of two parents to add up to full-time teacher). Most homeschoolers are not wealthy—certainly including us. But they make sacrifices that allow for living off a single income. That’s not possible for everyone, but it is more doable than many realize. Expenditures per year, aside from that lost income, are relatively small. You can of course spend much more, but $300 a year per child is easily adequate (and maybe well beyond what you need) if you have a local library and the internet.

The most common reason people give me for not homeschooling is that they could never teach their own kids. I think they picture standing up in front of their children and spewing out knowledge and assignments, with the children resisting the way they resist doing chores. That isn’t reality in a homeschool. A homeschool teacher is more a learning facilitator and collaborative learner, rather than a lecturer. But there are family dynamics and personality quirks that could make it difficult to teach at home.

Here’s one way I knew I could do it. I used to feel heartsick when summer was coming to an end, because it meant we didn’t have time to go do fun things together as a family. I was never counting the days until I could have alone time in the house. Lack of chaos, better cleanliness, etc., I craved like the next person. But those were secondary to enjoying being with my kids.

I never sent them to preschool. That was in part because we never had the money. But it turns out our going to the library, reading together, going to museums and other family field trips, and doing art projects and science experiments for the fun of it pretty much superseded any need for institutionally imposed structured learning during those early years. And our more or less accidental results were superior. (Or, possibly, I just happened to luck into having three gifted level children.)

Homeschooling was a lifestyle change, and pretty intense for that decade. But it was a life I loved. Maybe the best years of my life, at least before grandchildren. Our family benefitted not only educationally, but spiritually and socially as well. Socialization was far superior with homeschooling than it had been with public schooling. I wish I had considered starting sooner. We had good neighbors who homeschooled and set the example. But at the time we also had good public schools, including an excellent magnet school for gifted kids that we used from 3^rd grade on. So I didn’t see the need until two years after a move to an area where schools didn’t meet our needs. (I could detail the schools’ failures, but you don’t need that.)

Another day we can cover what public schools are doing to the education levels of our nation’s next generation. Today is just to consider that possibility that homeschooling, or some other method of private tutoring, could be in your future.

• Do you have the desire and drive to give your children the best possible education you can?
• Do you have the minimal level of money and resources needed to make homeschooling a possibility?
• Do you have the patience—or the willingness to gain it—that it takes to spend long hours raising and educating your own children?

If the answers for you are yes, we should talk.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”~ Thomas Jefferson