Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey

Today marks the second anniversary of the passing of Dr. Raymond S. Moore, one of the early guiding lights of the home schooling movement. Dr. Moore and his wife Dorothy wrote several of the earliest popular books about home education—Home Grown Kids, Home- Spun Schools and Home Style Teaching. Dr. Moore also wrote School Can Wait.

I was extremely fortunate in that Home Grown Kids was one of the first, and among the few, books which I took to heart as our family began our homeschooling journey. The Moores advocated so many approaches which have worked so well for our family. Chief among these is the delaying of formal education, even until the age of twelve (we didn’t wait quite that long).

The Moores advocated waiting until the child is ready to learn something before forcing the teaching of that something. In our case, the critical something was reading. This approach has also worked with music, penmanship, composition and driver’s education for various members of our family. Looking back at the book now, especially after having worked on our own account of our home schooling experience, I recognize that there are many points in this book, published in 1981, which are not politically correct and probably weren’t in 1981. Some people turned from them years ago because they were Seventh Day Adventists, Others may find their adherence to traditional values off-putting. It is a shame if any of this keeps parents struggling with issues of delaying education, and of trying to find what is best for each child, as an individual, from becoming familiar with the Moores’ work and experience.

Today, as the emphasis on testing and meeting academic benchmarks beginning in the early grades has become entrenched in the schools, the Moores’ advocacy for children, rather than for the system, is more important than ever. From page 193 in my 1981 copy of Home Grown Kids If even one of the senses—vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell—is underdeveloped, formal learning to that extent is handicapped…..Before this maturity has been reached regular schooling has negative effects even beyond poor achievement….generally poor attitudes towards school and general maladjustment…some cases of so called “dyslexia” or “minimal brain dysfunction” are likely caused by nothing more than such pressure on the unready organism to function beyond its ability.

This book is available for one penny plus shipping on Amazon. Although the Moores have passed from this earth, may their ideas live on. We salute them.

(Martine)

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We predicted last year that

… homeschooling is about to get a lot more persuasive as a result of the financial crisis and inevitable recession. Tax revenues will fall and take school budgets down with them, leading to government spending cuts.

Now, the AP reports: Budget crisis forces deep cuts at Calif. schools

Deep budget cuts are forcing California school districts to lay off thousands of teachers, expand class sizes, close schools, eliminate bus service, cancel summer school programs, and possibly shorten the academic year.

Without a strong economic recovery, which few experts predict, the reduced school funding could last for years, shortchanging millions of students, driving away residents and businesses, and darkening California’s economic future.

Here’s a contrarian view:  The present budget cuts aren’t shortchanging CA students. On the contrary, they might be the best thing for CA students in the long run.

The school systems in CA had been faltering even before the financial crisis. They were faltering because they operate on the same Rust Belt model as the auto companies and the other big, uncompetitive, obsolete institutions that we now see failing all around us.

Homeschoolers have built a new model.  The homeschooling model builds social capital in co-ops and other grass-roots organizations. The homeschooling model makes excellent and effective use of technology.  The homeschooling model is economically efficient, spending far less per pupil than school systems.

What can state governments learn from homeschooling?  They can learn the same things that industry has had to learn: big bureaucracies are inefficient, ineffective, and unsuited to the 21st century.  They can learn that empowering people works.  They can learn that they have a choice to make.

On the one hand, they can choose to preserve the economic perks of such interest groups as teachers unions and school administrators at the expense of students. On the other hand, they can take empowerment as their guiding principle, learn from homeschooling, and devolve esponsibility for education to parents.  Using fewer tax revenues than they have spent on schools, they can encourage forms of experimentation and innovation that can lead to a better system.

The financial crisis makes it clear that business as usual can’t continue.  In fact, if the financial crisis breaks the backs of the interest groups that have exploited school budgets for their own economic advantage, and leads to approaches more like homeschooling, it will prove to be a salutary example of what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “Creative Destruction” and the country will be better for it.

(Greg)

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Monday, April 20, will mark the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, in which two students killed twelve students and a teacher and wounded twenty-three others before killing themselves

Why? 

Early news reports said that they were maladjusted loners.  But then the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Department of Education collaborated in a study of thirty-seven school shootings.  They found that school killers are often model students.  They get good grades, participate in sports and other activities, and are in the social mainstream at their schools.  They’re pretty much like the kids who don’t kill –  except that they kill.  

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES):

In 2005, 8 percent of students in grades 9–12 reported being threatened or injured with a weapon in the previous 12 months … In the same year, 28 percent of students ages 12–18 reported having been bullied at school during the previous 6 months

The NCES reports that homeschoolers cite “school environment”, including safety, more often than any other reason for homeschooling.  They’re right to be concerned about the school environment. But there is even worse violence in schools than most imagine.

The novelist and philosopher Walker Percy wrote The Loss of the Creature in 1954, long before the first student picked up a gun to kill classmates and teachers.    This essay is worth reading as we reflect on Columbine, for its discussion of how the educational system depersonalizes students:    

He is deprived of his title over being. He knows very well that he is in a very special sort of zone in which his only rights are the rights of a consumer. He moves like a ghost through schoolroom, city streets, trains, parks, movies. He carves his initials as a last desperate measure to escape his ghostly role of consumer, saying in effect: I am not a ghost after all; I am a sovereign person. 

It may seem a stretch to talk about petty vandalism in a context of school massacres.  But the Broken Window theory of policing connected small crimes with murder.  So it is worth at least considering the possibility that Percy may have put his finger on the answer to the “Why?” of Columbine when he wrote of

A predicament in which everyone finds himself in a modern technical society – a society, that is, in which there is a division between expert and layman, planner and consumer, in which experts and planners take special measures to teach and edify the consumers.  The measures taken are measures appropriate to the consumer. The expert and the planner know and plan, but the consumer needs and experiences. There is a double deprivation.

Such depersonalization is a form of violence that never makes the papers.  It is so common it’s not news. It happens to almost every student.

Its pervasiveness is evident in the very fact that when people ask “Why?” about Columbine and other massacres, the answer is often that the students were consuming the wrong entertainment media.  A popular and reflexive answer to the “Why?” of school shootings is:  video games and dark music.  Back in the 1950s, Americans asked “Why?” about a social problem called juvenile delinquency, and came up with similar answers: comic books and rock & roll.  Are we really to believe that the problem with youth violence is a consumption problem?

Or might it be more reasonable to look closely at the many ways the educational system robs students of their sovereign personhood?  The zero tolerance frenzy that followed Columbine made this depersonalization even worse.  The Supreme Court is about to hear the case of a school that strip-searched a 13-year old honor student, because of a rumor that she might be carrying ibuprofen.  She wasn’t carrying anything before the search and after it she wasn’t even carrying her dignity anymore.

Maybe such depersonalization is a nasty process that human beings inevitably resist in various ways.  Increasing the air pressure in a balloon will lead inevitably to a tear somewhere.  We can be sure the balloon will pop, but we may not be may not be able to predict where the tear will happen. The tear that explodes the balloon may happen in a very normal spot indistinguishable from any other spot.  So too the pressure of depersonalization in schools may lead inevitably to explosions of violence somewhere, often in perfectly normal students and schools — indistinguishable from any other students and schools until they explode.

It’s not the rare student shooter we need to fear. It’s the system that depersonalizes and deprives almost every student who enters it.

(Greg)

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When the teacher is in the home, children learn better.  When tests are puzzle games, children excel. Who’d have expected to read this in the NY Times:

AS Department of Education officials consider how best to spend billions from the economic stimulus plan, they would be wise to pay attention to which programs actually help children’s achievement  

A series of studies on closing the race gap shows that standard school practices hurt kids, but practices more like homeschooling help kids.   That raises the question: why should the nation keep pouring billions of dollars into an educational system that does so much harm to kids?

(Anna)

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From a blog post by the Roman Catholic priest and philosopher, Rev. Robert Connor, on the distinction between training and education:

     …  This movement will depend on the degree and quality of freedom the child is given to be and to become himself. When the child’s mind is controlled and manipulated by adults, it is trained under social pressure. But mental training fails to release the inmost energy of the human mind. In fact, such a training forces the child to repress much of his true nature …  Whether one approaches the subject from a philosophical or psychological point of view, the final conclusion is the same:  Training is an inadequate method of development of man’s emotional and mental life, precisely because the human creature is not an animal! Education is based on respecting children as human beings, on giving them the freedom within a prepared and safe environment with an adult to act as a guide rather than a trainer. Only in education, never in training, are children allowed to be and to become with they really are: uniquely themselves. Only when affirmed by mature parents and educators, i.e. loved for being what they are, even for their ‘otherness,’ and allowed to assimilate spontaneously in their own tempo their whole being into their mental and spiritual life, only then will children find their unique identity and fulfilment, never to be plagued by an identity crisis in later life!

(Greg)

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If you are one of the many homeschooled seniors with a college application pending, here are four things you should do in February:

1) Contact the college admissions office to find out which officer is in charge of your application. Be proactive. Be business-like, but do ask if your file is complete or if more information or clarifications would help.

2) Try something new. Enter a scholarship contest. Add an impressive activity to your list. Volunteer more. And let the college admissions office know. Colleges welcome genuine news of accomplishments or special interests which didn’t make it onto the application. This shows that you are still engaged. A note with the update also shows the college that you are interested enough to make a little extra effort.

3) File financial aid forms – early. But this means your parents will need to get their taxes done early, too. So give your folks extra time to focus on taxes and financial aid by doing more around the house. Take responsibility for more chores. Do the cooking.

4) Check to see which CLEP and AP tests your selected colleges will accept. Take a sample test – you can find samples at libraries, online, from your local high school, and in bookstores. The AP registration deadline is in March, but contact your local high school before deadline for information. Testing out of introductory college classes can save thousands of dollars and make freshman year much more interesting academically.

Meanwhile, enjoy winter’s end with your family. Help your mom finish up any delayed projects that you might not have gotten around to in earlier years. Work together on a puzzle or a craft. Remember her for Valentines Day. Next year, you may be away at college, so take this opportunity now.

Visit Homeschool4free for free homeschooling resources, curriculum and college guidance. Read Homeschooling:A Family’s Journey to get more information about college admissions for homeschoolers.

(Martine)

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An oldish article from the Economist.   Lots of parents stress out about getting their kids into good preschools.  Turns out this may be the worst thing for their long-term education.  

Dimming: Disturbing Evidence of a Decline in Youngsters’ Brainpower

 Both sexes now do worse than before, but boys’ scores have fallen more, suggesting that a decline in outdoor and hands-on play has slowed cognitive development in both sexes. Britain’s unusually early start to formal education may make things worse, as infants are diverted from useful activities such as making sand-castles and playing with water into unhelpful ones, such as holding a pen and forming letters.

-Anna

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Insight into (British) government’s perspective on education. It’s disturbing that forcing 16-18 year olds back into school is Gordon Brown’s knee-jerk response to worries about hordes of unemployed and under-educated teens roaming the streets. The article cites a study by King College researcher Alison Wolf that finds these under-educated teens are making a sound financial decision by going for work instead of the  courses they can get into with their level of education. At the same time, supposedly passing this legislation will result in a drop-off in hirings in this age range, resulting in a catch-22 for both the government and the kids.  If the education doesn’t help, and they can’t get jobs because of legal restrictions on workdays, this will worsen the problem of teen hordes roaming the streets.

(Heck of a job, Brownie)

Delaying the Final Bell: Extending Compulsory Education is no Panacea for Idle Youth

-Anna

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When I was applying to college I considered Rutgers, the NJ state school, in part because I qualified in test scores and GPA for their merit scholarship. I soon discovered that these were only available for school kids (public and private). I knew a couple of homeschooled kids who dealt with this issue–one of them had perfect SATS and was a science whiz. In some states, homeschoolers have changed their education approach in order to qualify for state merit scholarships. Now it looks as if merit scholarships may bite the dust thanks to the economic crisis. 

States Weigh Cuts to Merit Scholarships

-Anna

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If your child is not reading “on schedule”, think about this poem by Billy Collins.

First Reader

I can see them standing politely on the wide pages

that I was still learning to turn

Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon brown hair,

playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos

of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,

the boy and the girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood

the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:

frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams

carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister

even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,

and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type

of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she

were always pointing at something and shouting “Look!”

pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father

as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,

waving at aproned Mother framed in the kitchen doorway,

pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already

and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.

We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,

and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking

permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.

Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,

we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

from Sailing Alone Around the Room, copyright 2001 by Billy Collins, posted by Greg

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