Doc Searls on homeschooling
When we have kids, we’ll probably homeschool (if our schedules allow, which we will break our necks to ensure they do. If we can’t manage it for some reason, we’ll send them to the Lycée where Antoine went, if we’re in London, or one of the other affiliated Lycées around the world.). Amongst other silly ideas people have about why kids “need” school, I think it’s pretty bogus to claim that kids need it in order to learn ’socialisation’. That was a ridiculous thing to say before advances in technology such that we enjoy now, let alone in 2006. Alice Bachini-Smith, who knows a thing or two about homeschooling, writes:
These days, schools are basically daycare centres in which education (hopefully) takes place. They haven’t had a monopoly on knowledge for quite a while, not since books became affordable and parents learned to read them too, never mind the (gasp!) internet. Doesn’t everybody know that already? Our teen is learning everything she needs with almost no teaching time at all (and much of that online using instant messenger).
Schools aren’t just failing. They’re a joke. Anything you need to learn, you can learn infinitely better without institutional hindrance.
Filed under: Children, Education, Life, The State Is Not Your Friend
[…] Good to see the esteemed Doc Searls writing about homeschooling today (via Jackie Danicki). I guess it’s going to be a long long time till people lose their fear and suspicion of homeschooling, stop repeating the same old objections that have been proven false for so many years, and just take on board the reality that- yes!- it works. […]
I’ve no objection to home-schooling in theory, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see it face any legal prohibitions, but having seen some of the effects in practice I’d be very wary.
It’s plainly true that homeschooled children can still socialise in various ways, and when I’ve challenged them on this point they’ve said so themselves; that they had friends, sports teams and so on they interacted with through their childhood. They didn’t seem to recognise or see it as relevant that these were all self-selected companions and relationships. Social skills are also massively about dealing with people you wouldn’t normally choose to associate with, coming to understand their motivations and wishes and learning to live with them and make yourself bearable to them. School provides that experience by the bucketload in terms of number of hours and number of people in a way homeschooling simply cannot. The absence of this experience in those I have known who have been homeschooled has always been obvious to varying degrees - even to the point where those far wiser in these matters than I have stated with certainty that someone must have been homeschooled long before that person revealed he had been.
I’m not saying homeschooling can’t sometimes be done well, and produce people as well-adjusted or better-adjusted than the average Joe. But the nature of homeschooling makes it much more difficult. If the alternative was an incredibly bad school, I’d try to homeschool children of mine because education certainly matters as well as socialisation - but there’s definitely a trade-off that needs to be faced there.
Peter, I find that a pretty weak argument against homeschooling. Are you saying a child has to be forced to sit in a classroom and listen to dull teachers for seven hours a day, for thirteen years (give or take), in order to learn how to socialise with people one would not normally choose to associate with? Seriously?
Yes, school is the only access children have to the public.
I can see how home schooling would work for young children. It wouldn’t be that difficult for parents to acquire whatever knowledge they may have lost when it comes to whatever a 7 or 8 year old might need to learn. But when you hit the teenage years, and the subject is physics, chemistry, calculus that I never really got myself all those years ago, French or German, and maybe even Art (if that’s the direction the child is going), how can a parent hope to pick up a strong enough understanding of these subjects to teach their own children? If you’re not artistically or mathematically inclined, or never seem to ‘get’ Shakespeare or poetry, how can you hope to school your children in these areas?
I can see how home schooling wins when compared to the worst our schools have to offer, but there are good schools out there, with good teachers who understand their subject and have the ability to explain it to students in ways that ‘amatuer’ parents could rarely hope to match.
Bill,
What is it that you think home-schoolers do, exactly? Just buy a couple of text books and train themselves as teachers? Does it not occur to you that some of the hugely talented teachers you mention might have figured out how to supplement their incomes by creating teaching materials for people to use at home? ‘Cause they have.
Also, you’re making the common mistake of assuming that a teacher can only teach up to their own level of competence. This isn’t true — if it were, humans would never progress. I used to teach juggling: despite not being all that good at it, I was good at teaching it, and taught plenty of people who quickly became far better at it than me. It is perfectly possible for someone who doesn’t understand Shakespeare to teach English literature to a kid who goes on to become the next Kenneth Brannagh. In fact, it happens all the time. Look at all the musical geniuses who never have any training but just sit down in front of a piano one day and take to it.
Kids have a lot of enthusiasm for learning, which school tends to beat out of them. Give bright kids access to books and knowledge, and they’ll suck up all they can get, unless, for instance, you embark on an eleven-year program of aversion therapy to make them associate learning with misery.
I wasn’t home-schooled in maths, and yet I got so bored with the slow pace of maths at school that I ploughed ahead through the syllabus myself, taught myself quadratics, then, when our teacher finally caught up with me, taught half the rest of the class quadratics using my method because no-one could understand his. According to you, how could this possibly have happened? No-one had taught me this maths — my mother, in fact, is completley innumerate and can’t even multiply a whole number by zero to this very day; my dad’s numerate, but never taught me maths at home. So, somehow, I was able to attain a higher level than any of the people teaching me. This isn’t unusual; it’s what kids do, if you let them. The most important thing home-schoolers do is to encourage the right frame of mind.
(Somewhere during that time, I might add, my parents got dragged into school so that my maths teachers could complain to them that I was slacking in class. This was one of the “best” comprehensives in Inner London.)
Getting on with people we didn’t hand-pick is nothing to do with school. It’s perfectly possible to attend school and simply ignore people you dislike as much as you possibly can. Homeschoolers are a relatively small community. Our homeschooling teen has to get on with people she didn’t hand pick at every homeschooling event, class and meeting she goes to. I absolutely don’t see any relevance to that particular criticism.
Homeschooling is not one homogenous entity like institutionalised classroom schooling is. We’re all different. The main argument for it has to be simply that it’s better than school for that family, the way that family is going to do it. People tend to think that the onus of proof is on “homeschooling” as the new system, but this is false. It’s not new, it’s ancient, and individual families unsupported by the government are not responsible for “homeschooling”.
I’ve seen one family homeschooling for whom it really was a very bad idea indeed because their ability to cope was way below their opinion of themselves. Eventually they faced reality and their kids went back to school. They had caught up and high in their classes after a term. Almost any child can do this. School lessons are nowhere near as demanding as people like to think.
Bill, that’s an old old argument. It’s false, because the way people learn is not limited to the way schools would have us believe they must learn. Teens are no different from adults in that they can learn from a person telling them stuff, or from books, or researching on the internet, or a virtual conversation, or DVDs. They can learn from an adult learning alongside them.
Live human beings don’t have a konopoly on knowledge anymore, people! Look where we are!
And there are classes: evening, daytime for homeschoolers, and extra-curricular for schoolkids. Our teen goes to Japanese lessons every Saturday morning. It’s not available in schools. The schools don’t even offer more subjects than the real world, these days.
(Every homeschooling discussion always ends with the critic saying, “But come on, homeschooling can’t do everything schools can do, surely?! No it can’t.
And schools can’t do anything like what a small group of individuals can do. They don’t have the flexibility. The real argument is institutionalised systems versus small-group flexibility. In this day and age, no contest.
Of course, it’s also phenomenally expensive in terms of time, commitment, responsibility, effort and being criticised by everyone who thinks your kids are being neglected. I had it used against me after my divorce. For some reason, critics seem completely unaware of those things. Would people be trying to tell me to put my aged granny in a home, I wonder, on the grounds that obviously institutions can better meet the needs of individuals than my family can?
Such a shame to say schools ‘aren’t just failing, they’re a joke.’ I couldn’t afford to work around my children to the extent it meant I could homeschool them, even if I wanted to. Some schools are still great you know. As for home-schooled children doing better academically, that’s marvellous but it doesn’t make them happy, does it?
I don’t think Alice is trying to bring shame upon anyone who can’t or doesn’t want to homeschool their child - and neither am I.
As for happiness, well…what about it? Are you saying that children who go to school are happier than those who are homeschooled?
(When I consider all the things parents do in order to make their children ‘happy’, I can think of few instances where this actually has the desired effect. In most cases, it seems to turn children into people who are ill-equipped to deal successfully with life’s struggles and who believe the world revolves around them.)
I was miserable at school and miserable at home. Homeschooling wouldn’t have made me much happier, but it wouldn’t have made me any sadder either, and at least I’d have been able to learn more stuff.
But kids who do prefer school to home shouldn’t be home-schooled, no. Happiness trumps achievement every time.
I couldn’t begin to know who is happiest. What I “do” to try to make my children happy is to love them the best I can. All I meant by saying it was a shame to say schools are failing is that this rather sweeping statement glosses over all the encouragement and achievements from the passionate, committed and caring teachers working day in day out in schools and making learning fun. That’s all. Good day. :grin:
Happiness trumps achievement every time.
Are you serious, or being British? I honestly can’t tell.
Linda, I agree that there are exceptions to the general state of schools.
Linda, I’ve said many times in many places that I have no problem with people sending their kids to school. Three quarters of my kids go to school. They’re all absolutely fine.
When I say “schools are a joke” I know very well that the vast majority of kids do engage in learning in school. I know that the vast majority of teachers are decent people doing their best, and achieving a respectable standard of learning facilitation.
But the idea that institutional learning is the best way for kids to learn is wrong-headed. The idea that it can keep up with the modern world is false. Your, and my, kids can achieve those things, but school is very limited in its ability to help them, compared to what homeschooling makes possible (were it viable, which it isn’t for many many parents, including myself with 3/4 of my own kids, right now).
Schools need to get real, and learn from what homeschooling has done, if they really want to move into the future. At the moment, the vast majority of people are suspicious of homeschooling, and support institutionalised school, in a completely false dichotomous argument that doesn’t benefit anyone.
The amount of weight people put behind schooling versus homeschooling is ridiculous. That’s the joke I was referring to: a deluded, backward attitude that can only cause harm.
No, I’m being serious. I was absolutely, utterly miserable at my school, but the idea of leaving it was considered unthinkable, absurd, by my family, because it was such a good school. I finally got fed up and left to go to a different sixth form, and shortly afterwards realised that five years of my life had been thrown to hell for a handful of fucking GCSE A-grades. I’d rather have got Es and had friends and been less suicidal. And, frankly, it’s not as if I was ever not going to get As anyway — see my comments above about maths classes. The only really valuable stuff I got from that school was a rather good musical training. But I’d have got that elsewhere. It wasn’t worth it.
Squander Two- I totally sympathise and agree on everything you say. One of the most awful things about the pro-school brain-dead attitude one comes across is kids who commit suicide due to bullying. If that’s not an argument for maintaining the right to homeschool, I don’t know what is.
> the vast majority of kids do engage in learning in school.
Julie Birchill once said that 80% of kids should go to school, 10% should just be given a big pile of books and left to it, and 10% should be given useful training in physical and manual skills. Sounds about right to me.
Getting on with people we didn’t hand-pick is nothing to do with school. It’s perfectly possible to attend school and simply ignore people you dislike as much as you possibly can. Homeschoolers are a relatively small community. Our homeschooling teen has to get on with people she didn’t hand pick at every homeschooling event, class and meeting she goes to.
How often are these? If they occur a few times a week then I’m sure the child in question will pick up a lot of social skills, as long as the kids themselves are as broad enough range of people (the bar here doesn’t need to be especially high - high fee-paying public schools don’t have that broad a range of people and they certainly don’t seem to produce unsociable people).
But once you go down this road, you’re not so much defending the idea of education taking place in the home as finding ways around some of its unwanted side-effects by organising a great deal of education that will happen elsewhere. I notice you pointedly didn’t say “being educated in the home provides all the social skills one needs”.
I don’t think anyone who has commented here would deny that in some cases and for some people school will be preferable and in others homeschooling would be better. But recognising the downsides and disadvantages of both is the way to calculate most accurately which would be better in either case, and simply ignoring the social angle is a terrible way to do it. I am not talking merely about social skills being lacking to the point of holding a conversation with a stranger at a wine and cheese party - I mean to the point where it would certainly be picked up on at any job interview.
Just one example I think highlights the point was the way two of the people I mentioned above talked. Even their voices told a story about the limits of their lives, both being monotonous and unvarying, lacking in any intonation - in no way moulded to be interesting for the other person to listen to. It sounds a small thing, but these were both very bright, informed people with interesting things to say - and yet the wish for the conversation to end as soon as possible was plain on the faces of so many people on the receiving end of their droning.
You’ve yet to tell us why you attribute being a bore to being homeschooled, Peter.
It’s a matter of personal experience correlating well with what many people quite plausibly claim. I’ve met a good few people who were homeschooled and their lack of social skills was obvious to vary degrees. If I met a dozen or so homeschooled people who were entirely socially adjusted, I’d have to revise my opinion, but I can’t ignore the fact that those I have met so far were all lacking in this way.
See, this is where I have to admit to finding the discussion tiresome: Peter, the idea that homeschoolers don’t, as part of what they call “homeschooling”, regularly go to meetings and groups and gatherings with the other homeschoolers in their area- that those things don’t count as “homeschooling”, but are instead “attempts to compensate for the unwanted effects of homeschooling”….
Don’t know what to say. It’s nuts.
We can call it what you want- “independent learning and education outside of institutional schools employing a variety of sources and places and people” is fine with me, but it’s a bit of a handful, isn’t it?
So, we say “homeschooling”. And then all activities outside the home don’t count as homeschooling, and have to be argued about.
This is why I gave up discussing homeschooling with people who have negative opinions about it.
Peter: think whatever you want, and good luck. Your arguments make no sense to me, as a long-time private schoolteacher and then homeschooler, but if that’s OK with you, no problem- your kids are your kids, and mine are mine, and so far parents still have the right to choose which form of legal education they believe to be best for their own families. Thank God.
[…] The comments on my post about homeschooling make me glad I brought comments back all those months ago. Peter Cuthbertson and Alice Bachini-Smith going ten rounds is something I could only have hoped for back then… Posted by Jackie Danicki | […]