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