Checkers

After Thing 1 learned to play chess, and actually has been enjoying the game, Thing 2 has become interested in checkers and starting to think strategically.

Why we are betting on Washington State charters

It is nice to see alternatives to the public school system coming from within, changing the nature of the schools through the charter concept, which has turned out to be more than just a good idea:

"Washington’s charter law, while not perfect, is surely one of the best any state has had coming out of the gate with new schools. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ survey of state charter laws, Washington’s comes in six out of forty-three states. This despite the law’s capping of schools at forty. Washington’s charters will operate in a policy environment where they have operational freedoms but are held accountable for student performance."

More:
http://edexcellence.net/articles/why-we-are-betting-on-washington-state-charters

Chess

Teaching my eight year old chess, she wipes the floor with me her first time out. I'm impressed, but I did handicap myself with libations. I didn't let her win, the porter distracted me.

Homeschool Scheduling vs Routine

One family's experiece with flexible routines versus rigid schedules:

http://www.hsclassroom.net/homeschool-scheduling

Self-ownership and Education: Homeschooling vs. Unschooling

Our daughter is in a charter school. While I recognize that these schools are still reliant upon the state for redistribution of wealth without consent, they do provide some flexibility in the curriculum and choice for parents. Our daughter likes it more than public school, and we know of another opening next year that focuses on the classical method. In the charter school, she has more involvement over the curriculum and the pace at which she learns. One of her biggest complaints was having to wait for the class to catch up in public school. Skyler at Everything-Voluntary.com raises some good questions on self-ownership and education:

Libertarians are quick to defend the "rights" of homeschooling parents against violations by the state. I can only half-heartedly get behind such a cause. Yes, the state should get out of the way of parents, but just as important, maybe even more important, is that parents should get out of the way of their children. Contrast Ron Paul's defense of homeschooling, that is parents controlling their children's education, with John Holt's defense of unschooling, or children controlling their own education. The relevant question for libertarians: which is more in line with the principles of self-ownership and non-aggression?

Everything-Voluntary.com: Homeschooling vs. Unschooling

Ahead of the Learning Curve

After a summer of homeschooling our daughter, we are getting ready for the beginning of a new school year in either public or a charter school. Homeschool is just not going to fit in to our busy lives right now, so it will be a long-term goal. We are continually teaching our children at every opportunity, as any parent should, and I am most impressed by eight year old's abilities in math. 

We are going to be supplementing her institutional studies with a variety of resources, including the Khan Academy. We are progressing through the lessons nicely, and she is really proud of her accomplishments. The system shows awards for mastered areas. She is doing three digit addition with carrying in her head fairly consistently. She will be going into third grade soon, but is already way ahead of her peers. Sometimes she jots down part of the problem on paper, but she is really proud to be challenging her parents on her mathematics ability. I couldn't be more proud. 

Growing headwinds for Common Core

I haven't been following the progress of PARCC....and I hadn't realized how central the idea of common assessments were to the Common Core undertaking, although I should have.  

Looks like things aren't going well on that front:

Yesterday, PARCC released the cost of its tests—and right on cue, another state, Georgia, dropped out of the testing consortia. This is a disaster.

At this point, I won’t be surprised if we end up with 20 or more different testing systems in 2014–15. So much for commonness, so much for comparability. Rigor and alignment with tough standards are likely the next to fall. 

That's how the consortia crumble

More: Growing headwinds for Common Core

Its not really that surprising. This is a social change, a defiance of top-down control over all aspects of society, we are simply recognizing the defiance of homogenization of the population in education in this setting, but these are all interconnected. Who knows better than parents and local communities what is better for our children?

True, we can have help from across the planet in teaching and raising our children, but to give up that right to educate our children to some distant whim of a career politician? Therein lies the failure in these collectivist efforts.

Teaching Children to Learn using the Classical Method

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? 

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves?  

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a "subject" remains a "subject," divided by watertight bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental connection between let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon--or, more generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics, or chemistry and art?

The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The second part--the Quadrivium--consisted of "subjects," and need not for the moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order. 

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. 

Obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if "the Middle Ages" is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we should not "go back" to it--with modifications--as we have already "gone back" with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote them, and not in the "modernized" versions of Cibber and Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.

Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern Trivium "with modifications" and we will see where we get to. 

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher. 

It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves. 

To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers–they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain. 

- from The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1947

Teaching the Trivium to Children - Trivium Education.com

Support Home Schooling…But

In the 1980s home schooling was still a concept with which most people were unfamiliar and with which many elected officials were not comfortable. In fact, I often quote former Texas Attorney General Jim Maddox, who said that he did not believe parents were qualified to raise their children, much less teach them at home. In that environment, home schoolers were very happy with an elected official who simply said he supported the right of a parent to home school.

That was then, and this is now. Almost any elected official or candidate for office today will say that they "support home schooling." Unfortunately, what that often translates to is not a supportive position on the home school political, legislative, or legal agenda. In fact, that phrase is often used just before the official tells us he opposes the parental rights or home school position.

I have been corresponding recently with the chief of police for the city of Euless regarding an incident in which Euless police officers stopped some home school children who were walking to their grandparents' home. These officers took the children into custody, took them back to their home, went inside to examine the home, asked to see their curriculum, and told their adult brother they were going to call CPS to report them. This was all done under the Daytime Curfew Ordinance of the city.

More: 

http://thsc.org/2013/07/support-home-schooling-but/

Assessment, Networked Learning, and the Old-school

From HYBRID PEDAGOGY:

Instruction does not equate to learning. This is the fundamental fly in the ointment of instructional design, and the epistemological failing of learning management systems and most MOOC platforms. Learning, unfortunately, is something no instruction has ever quite put its finger on, and something that no methodology or approach can guarantee. Instead, pedagogical praxis creates roads along which learning may take place (along with plenty of other experiences); and assessment is merely a system of checkpoints along the way to evaluate how well the road, the vehicle, and the driver are cooperating. In other words, assessment doesn’t measure learning. Assessment measures the design of the instruction. 

Does this mean that MOOCs are ineffective at aiding individuals in learning, or could it mean that traditional educational institutions are what does not fit into modern learning environments? 

According to old systems of instruction, massive open online courses are no different from other forms of online learning (which are no different from correspondence courses). They are click-to-read-the-next-lesson environments that guide readers/students down a specific path where information (in the guise of learning material) has been contained so that it may be mastered. Learning is meant to happen in coordinated steps, and as long as preconceived outcomes appear to be met, it’s a supposed win-win for students and teachers.

The idea that teaching and learning are not the same thing is not a new one, but to those entrenched in traditional school systems it is a scary premise. Much of the hesitation to embrace this change could be based on employment alone. Teachers unions, for example, exist solely to protect the interest of teachers, completely missing the idea that changes in how people learn could undermine the employment aspect of the learning process. 

Could the future of education exist without school? It is possible. Everyone is self-educated. Some learn through the assistance of teachers, while some learn through their own efforts, by doing rather than by listening to or watching someone else. This inherent uniqueness on the part of the learner in itself is reason enough to embrace such learning environments that recognize and cater to those customized experiences. School itself is not necessary to promote learning, it is only one vehicle through which learning is fostered, but should never be relied upon as the sole avenue. 

Fear and Schooling

From Seth Godin's Stop Stealing Dreams:

To efficiently run a school, amplify fear (and destroy passion) 

School's industrial, scaled-up, measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line. There's no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply, to process that many bodies, en masse, without simultaneous coordination. 

And the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed. There's no room for someone who wants to go faster, or someone who wants to do something else, or someone who cares about a particular issue. Move on. Write it in your notes; there will be a test later. A multiple-choice test. 

Do we need more fear? 

Less passion?

Its no coincidence that the Prussian paramilitary school system was the model on which the US education system was built, and it has long since served the purpose for which it was designed. Its time for something truly different. 

Education vs Schooling

From Seth Godin's "Stop Stealing Dreams," in which he describes how the Prussian school system was effectively applied in America in the 1800s, paving the way for the failure that we find our children being pummeled with today:

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults. 

Sure, there was some moral outrage about seven-year-olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work—they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place. 

Part of the rationale used to sell this major transformation to industrialists was the idea that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence—it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child-labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told. 

Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists. 

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Unschooling, a Beginning

After long consideration, we have finally decided to homeschool our eight year old, our oldest. We want to help her learn, but also want her desire to learn guide her studies. We will no doubt learn to be teachers as she learns to learn, and there may be some unschooling to break a few bad habits. Everyone is self-educated, after all. Teachers are simply there to assist, not responsible for cramming knowledge into the heads of children, but to show them a world worth exploring. This is the beginning of the next chapter in our education adventure.

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” - Isaac Asimov