Alternatives to Compulsory Education - My Radical Roots

This weekend I attended the Alternatives to Compulsory Education conference, presented by four speakers who wanted to begin a dialog about the need for alternatives and what they might look like. I am full of ideas and have decided that the best way to organize my response is to tackle each talk individually. I am hoping to be able to update this post with links to the video recordings of the talks.

The first presentation was by Cevin Soling, director of the documentary The War on Kids (available streaming on Netflix). Cevin's talk was darkly funny, deliberately provocative and radical. It really reminded me how I felt about school when I was fifteen. That's not an insult; I'm not saying his talk was like the shallow ranting of a naive teen. He validates the misery and suffering that many--most-- students feel when trapped in school. Here are some of my favorite points from the presentation, and the thoughts it prompted for me.

There is a nostalgia surrounding school, and many adults have a selective memory about their experience. There's a difference between liking school and remembering you liked it. Further, just because some people like a thing doesn't make it good. Did you like school? How did you feel about your teachers? What you were learning?

Failure is endemic to the system. Even if we created an ideal school with experienced teachers, low student:teacher ratios, and students with perfect home lives, 20-30% of students would be labeled failures. The system is set up so that there must be winners and losers, and someone has to score the worst on those standardized tests.

That point reminds me of the summer my husband taught a college physics class. This was during his grad school career. Chris is an effective teacher who worked hard to help his students understand the subject. He was given the "Distinguished Teaching Assistant" award for his dedication to his students. But because "too many of them" did so well in the class, the university re-normalized their grades to reflect an "ideal" bell curve. This curve did not reflect the rubric presented in the class syllabus. Chris and the students fought the changes, but the lowered scores remained, and Chris swore off a career as an instructor. What's the point of doing good teaching if the institution punishes your and your students' success?

Bullying is endemic to the autocratic structure of schools. We won't be rid of bullying as long as young people are legally required to attend institutions where their rights are violated and they have no power. Teachers bully students. In an environment like that, some kids will cruelly take out their aggression on other kids.

Compulsory schooling creates a monopoly on community. This is what people are really talking about when they ask homeschoolers, "What about socialization?" They don't mean that cliques and bullying are healthy ways to socialize children. They want to know how that child will experience community when all the other children are in school. The good news is that not all the children are in school, because many parents are choosing different options, then actively seeking out and creating communities.

We defang our arguments when we criticize school. Cevin criticized the TED Talk Do Schools Kill Creativity? for its polite descriptions of school's shortcomings. I know I have been guilty of this, diplomatic to a fault. Most teachers and administrators are very good, well-intentioned people. We all know what the road to Hell is paved with. But we're reluctant to offend anyone, because our relatives are teachers and all our friends send their children to school. We don't want to raise hackles lest people quit listening to us at all. I really struggle with this one.

"But Not in My School." A few teachers and administrators will admit that some schools are troubled, but assert that their school is a very nice place where students are respected. They will make these assertions even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary. The point here is that criticisms of compulsory school are not isolated examples that have been exaggerated. The problems are widespread: students are being abused, minor misbehavior is dealt with as criminal offense, rates of childhood mental illness are rising, and human beings cannot learn in these types of dysfunctional environments.

My First Homeschool Planner

Yesterday I had a great day for homeschool planning. I visited the local garden center and came home with a large planter and a packet of sunflower seeds. I just need to buy enough potting soil, and we'll be able to plant flowers together. I am very excited about this project!

After the garden center, I made a quick stop at Target and bought my very first homeschool planner. It's a typical student planner with monthly and weekly layout pages. It's pretty too, with a trendy blue and green chrysanthemum pattern on the cover. Lately I've had too many ideas for just the sticky note program on my smartphone. And given the way that our homeschool revolves around the seasons, I like being able to plan with a calendar in front of me.

I mostly want to use my "planner" as a record book, to write down after the fact what we did on a given day. It gives me another way to reflect, come up with more ideas, and correct imbalances. I can see, for example, if it's been way too long since we got to the playground. Although I have gotten plenty of things for Ladybug's education lately (like sunflower seeds), I kept coming back to the idea of a set of matching cards/tiles to play memory. I couldn't figure out why my brain refused to let go of this idea, or leave it for another time. Then, after jotting notes in the planner, I realized that the memory game is the next math activity, and there hasn't been much new in that subject lately. So I quit fussing over it and just bought the game. The planner helps me make decisions and clarify my thinking.

Something about having this first planning book, which begins its dated pages July 2013, makes me feel like I just officially signed up to homeschool preschool. 2.9 - 3 seems to be a magic age for preschool entry, as well as readiness for so many fun activities it's overwhelming. I think that's why I intuitively reached for my planning book around now. There's so much to choose from, yet some days are filled with illness, bad weather, and tons of TV. When I get down about these times, it really helps my mood to have a record of the big picture, in brief notes about how we spent our time.

The cover of the planner reads "2013 // 2014," and with those tiny dates it creates a school year. A host of holidays, Ladybug's 3rd birthday, rotating seasons that will wind up somewhere in summer 2014. However we fill the time, it will be her first year of preschool, and -- it's official -- we're doing it together at home.

Loose Tooth T

I read a great blog post today about the growing movement of people who are homeschooling their preschoolers. The emphasis of the post is that young children learn best through play, and we adults would do well to let them do it. No need for flashcards, scripted lesson plans, or worksheets. There can be a lot of pressure to do early academics, and it can be hard for geeky parents like me to resist it. So I welcome any reminder that play, and usually free play, is the best way for young children to learn about their world.

I focus on setting up our home so that it is a rich environment (like having a special art corner). We read, we play games, we go out in the world. We listen to songs and dance around. We even watch TV sometimes (gasp! a perfect mom "no-no"). I do all these things, but because of what I know about the importance of free play and the lure of early academics, I avoid lessons and direct instruction.

I am starting to see how fun it is to watch my daughter learn academic type things in her own time, as a natural corollary to the way we spend our day. For example, we have been reading abridged Winnie the Pooh stories, which are divided into tiny "chapters." Of course, each chapter is numbered. Bug is starting to make a game of talking about and identifying the number at the beginning of each chapter. Cool! I wasn't even thinking of that as a "learning opportunity," which is what helps to keep it fun and keep me relaxed. If I'm not counting on her to Learn Something, I'm not going to be pushy or slightly tense. I can focus on our relationship and her needs. All this is part of my grand desire to let learning be fun. Not make it fun. It already is fun, when you stay out of the way. Let it be.

Approaching learning this way, I am collecting little "how it happened" stories. Here's how letter recognition happened for Ladybug:

Our fridge, with "Chicka Chicka" magnets

Over Christmas, Ladybug and Daddy took a trip together, and on that trip Daddy bought the classic book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. It's a rhyming alphabet book where the letters each climb a tree, fall down in a crazy pile, and one by one climb up again. The letters are distinguished by the various bumps and bruises they suffer when they tumble out of the tree. Ladybug's favorite letter is "loose tooth t." For a while, Daddy read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom every night, and the two of them played seek and find the letter. Suddenly, when I was reading various other books to Bug during the day, she was captivated by the presence of loose tooth t on many pages. A few times she even held down a page I was trying to turn, so she could point out and just ponder the fact that loose tooth t was in this book too. I felt like I was revealing an ancient secret when I said, "You'll start to see that all the letters are in all the books!" I guess it is an ancient secret, but we'll get to the Phoenicians later.

One day in particular, Ladybug was captivate by the word "OUT" written in large type. It was in a book about a bat (a follow up since she so loved Stellaluna). She kept flipping back to the "out" page and recognizing each of the letters, and saying "out" and not really reading, but still taking some step towards understanding that the story was coming from this code. What's memorable to me is her intensity. She had a glimpse of what that "out" word stood for and was so determined to study it more, to understand. I told my husband that I was glad he was there that day to see it happen, because I would have thought I was making it up otherwise.

Teaching reading can invoke so much stress. Should you take a phonics or whole-language approach? Do you need to be an expert to teach it? What if you mess it up? In all the homeschooling guides I read, there is a special section devoted to easing parents' worries about READING. I have always believed that I wouldn't need to worry about this too much, that the child of two bookworm parents who is lovingly read to will also blossom into reading. Am I excited by these first little signs? Of course. But I promise, at least for now: no flash cards, no scripted lesson plans, no worksheets.