DCSF Review - ICT and exams (Rec. 12)

Recommendation 12
This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.8

BECTA considers the needs of the home educating community in the national roll out of the home access initiative

Becta is "the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning." It used to stand for British Educational Communications and Technology Agency but so many people knew who they were that they dropped the acronym and use the name independently of it. Hm. They say "Our work cuts across a wide range of priority areas and key themes. These include enabling people to have equal opportunity and access to learning resources, creating links between schools and the home, ensuring the safety of all learners, personalising learning to enable learners and practitioners to interact and inspire each other, helping providers to plan effective investment in technology in building or refurbishment work, and using technology to ensure efficiency and value for money."

I don't know what "considers the needs" means.

That local authorities consider what support and access to ICT facilities could be given to home educating children and young people through the existing school networks and the use of school based materials

Does this go beyond people using the internet access in their local library? Perhaps home educators will have access to super sekrit educationalists web resources? That would be good - the easily accessible free public resources are so extensive I can't imagine what might be beyond them, but we haven't really felt the need to look yet.

That the QCA should consider the use of ICT in the testing and exam process with regard to its impact on home educated children and young

Young what? I assume it means young people; another proofreading error, or something. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority should consider (not sure what is meant by consider) that ICT could make things more accessible? Less so, because of homes without computer access? Not sure. In the review itself he says "This could be a report in itself but suffice it to say that the importance of ICT in learning, access to knowledge and information, communication and employment is self evident." which leaves me assuming that the people he's talking to already agree with him, so he doesn't need to provide any real information. Irritating. I can't form an opinion on this because the position stated is too vague to hold an informed opinion on!

DCSF Review - what the LA offers Home Ed (Rec. 9, 10 & 11)

Recommendation 9
Comes after 5.6

That all local authority officers and others engaged in the monitoring and support of elective home education must be suitably trained. This training must include awareness of safeguarding issues and a full understanding of the essential difference, variation and diversity in home education practice, as compared to schools. Wherever possible and appropriate, representatives of the home educating community should be involved in the development and/or provision of such training. It is recommended that all officers be trained in the use of the Common Assessment Framework.

The Common Assessment Framework appears to be a fairly recent thing, too, but for all I know it's very good. At least they want people trained - at the moment the people interacting with home educators on behalf of the local authority might be experts or complete novices, almost at random, it seems.

I like the sound of "a full understanding of the essential difference, variation and diversity in home education practice, as compared to schools" except that a lot of the base assumptions evident throughout the document make it clear that autonomous education is not considered at all. I wouldn't be in the least surprised if academic achievement was the main consideration, in fact.

Recommendation 10
This comes after 5.7, which says, among other things, "it seems to me perverse to articulate concern about thousands of young people yet cut them off from services that would be rightfully theirs if they attended school."

That all local authorities should offer a menu of support to home educating families in accord with the requirements placed upon them by the power of wellbeing, extended schools and community engagement and other legislation. To that end local authorities must provide support for home educating children and young people to find appropriate examination centres and provide entries free to all home educated candidates who have demonstrated sufficiently their preparedness through routine monitoring, for aII DCSF funded qualifications.

That all sounds fine - provide and access and menu are not the same as enforce and uptake and instructions.

(I kind of wish they'd used lower case l for the word "all" instead of aII, unless aII is some educational jargon with which neither I nor Google are familiar - am I being ignorant or pedantic here?)

Recommendation 11
This comes immediately after Recommendation 10 in section 5.

That in addition to Recommendation 10 above, local authorities should, in collaboration with schools and colleges:

Extend and make available the opportunities of flexi-schooling.

Extend access to school libraries, sports facilities, school visits, specialist facilities and key stage assessment.

Provide access to specialist music tuition on the same cost basis.

Provide access to work experience.

Provide access to post 14 vocational opportunities.

Signpost to third sector support where they have specialist experience and knowledge, for example, provision for bullied children.

All of 11 sounds lovely. If all that stuff was available (not compulsory) it would really benefit children and their families. If it wasn't for some of the other stuff in the recommendations, I'd probably be sitting here clapping my hands in glee. Though I can't see us actually availing of any of it except perhaps the music and post-14 vocational opportunities if the children turn out so inclined. Perhaps labs would be involved? I can see access to labs being helpful for some things.

DCSF Review - authorities' access to the home and child (Rec. 7 & 8)

Recommendation 7
This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.4, and is mentioned in the Conclusion - "To that end, I urge the DCSF to respond to recommendations 1, 7, 23 and 24 as summarised in the next chapter, at the next available opportunity."

The DCSF should bring forward proposals to change the current regulatory and statutory basis to ensure that in monitoring the efficiency and suitability of elective home education:

That designated local authority officers should:
– have the right of access to the home;
– have the right to speak with each child alone if deemed appropriate or, if a child is particularly vulnerable or has particular communication needs, in the company of a trusted person who is not the home educator or the parent/carer.

On what planet will a child tell the truth to strangers introduced to them by their abusers, even if they're left alone with the strangers? Maybe if the child is suicidal. But often not even then. How will they get abused children to speak up under such circumstances? What will they do if they do? I'm reminded of my school medical in fifth class. Hah. Or the custody case. How can a child tell the truth when they know the adults are listening?

And then, there are all the people who have happy, cheerful, viciously untidy homes, who may or may not have the confidence to have their children assessed for signs of abuse without stressing for days cleaning up and so on.

In so doing, officers will be able to satisfy themselves that the child is safe and well.

I hope to goodness vulnerable children are being dealt with by more specialist experts than any of this implies. And let's not go into the idea that "well" implies "safe" or vice versa.

That a requirement is placed upon local authorities to secure the monitoring of the effectiveness of elective home education as determined in Recommendation 1.

This seems sensible, again. If the whole thing happens, the LAs have to be required to do it, and to do it properly.

That parents be required to allow the child through exhibition or other means to demonstrate both attainment and progress in accord with the statement of intent lodged at the time of registration.

Setting aside what I think of the statement at the time of registration, I have no idea how anyone can set guidelines for this. My children may or may not choose, at any given time, to demonstrate kindness, emotional maturity, a thorough and inventive knowledge of the various forms of "sudden pinch with the fingernails," some or all of the alphabet, and a dislike of being tested.

Or they might want to show off.

Recommendation 8
This comes in section 5, after 5.5, which says "Such new powers will still depend upon, and be more effective, where there are good relationships and mutual trust, respect and open communication between the home educating family and the local authority. The home may well become the place of education but it is first and foremost a home [...]"

That reasonable warning of intended visit and invitation to exhibit should be given to home educators, parents and carers, not less than two weeks in advance. A written report of each visit must be filed within 21 days and copied to the home educating parent and child. A suitable process for factual correction and challenge to the content must be in place and made known to all parties.

That part is sound. If they have to come to the educating home at all (and I don't see why they do, honestly) then it's in the child's best interests for no-one to be completely surprised by it.

But I do not believe that this will protect children who are at risk. I don't see how. Abusers and abused children alike are very skilled, very early on, at hiding abuse. Annual visits from relative strangers won't help.

DCSF Review - Quis custodiet custodiens? (Rec. 3, 4, 5 & 6)

Recommendation 3
This comes in the middle of section 4, "Elective Home Education in Context – the Views of Home Educators and Others."

That all local authorities analyse the reasons why parents or carers chose elective home education and report those findings to the Children’s Trust Board, ensuring that this analysis contributes to the debate that determines the Children and Young People’s Plan.

I think this could be really good and might significantly improve schools if it's done by people with open minds and moderate intelligence. Which it might well be.

Recommendation 4
This comes at the end of section 4.

That the local authority should establish a Consultative Forum for home educating parents to secure their views and representative opinion. Such a body could be constituted as a sub-group of the Children’s Trust with a role in supporting the development of the Children’s Trust, and the intentions of the local authority with regard to elective home education.

If any of this - the broader "The Review" recommendations - is going to happen, this part is completely essential.

Recommendation 5
This comes in section 5, "The Current and Future Role of Local Authorities and Children’s Trusts," after 5.2

That the DCSF should bring forward proposals requiring all local authorities to report to the Children’s Trust Board making clear how it intends to monitor and support children and young people being educated at home, in accord with Recommendation 1.

Wait, what have the Children's Trust Board got to do with this? (Not to be confused with The Children's Trust - the CTB was announced as An Initiative (see this BBC article with photos of Baby P) though many local councils seem to have had their own branches or versions of it since 2006 or earlier, according to the results of a quick google).

The part before this, in the main body of the review, had some examples of Lovely Things Certain LAs Do To Make Friends With Home Educators, including offering support, making advice available, facilitating meeting other home educators, all of which incidentally makes it easy to keep an unintrusive eye on the families and the children. I rather approve. I mean, I might not go to such groups, because we have a lot on, but if I lived in an area with less going on all the time, they might be brilliant.

But what the Children's Trust Board are doing in here I do not know.

Recommendation 6
This comes in section 5, after 5.3

That local authorities should where appropriate commission the monitoring and support of home education through the local Children’s Trust Board, thereby securing a multidisciplinary approach and the likely use of expertise from other agencies and organisations including the voluntary sector.

... ah, money. Voluntary Sector. Yay. OK, that makes a certain amount of sense. I can't find a clear and consistent explanation of what a CTB is or does, anywhere, but since they were only announced in a few months ago that's not surprising; the wheels grind exceeding slow, after all. They seem to involve an awful lot of branches, so I do hope they've got their interdepartmental communications sorted out.

DCSF Review - defining education (Rec. 2)

Recommendation 2
This also comes at the end of section 3, "Current Legislation and Regulation."

That the DCSF review the current statutory definition of what constitutes a “suitable” and “efficient” education in the light of the Rose review of the primary curriculum, and other changes to curriculum assessment and definition throughout statutory school age.

Well, if they're going to demand plans and curricula and specific goals and targets, re-evaluating what constitutes suitable and efficient education is something they really, really need to do - and they also need to make sure they're not asking parents to do better than they ask schools to do. But if they're going to demand curricula they are ignoring the educational and emotional needs and philosophical principles of lots of people anyway. People he claims to have taken into account, if you read the body of the review as well as the summary of recommendations.

Such a review should take account of the five Every Child Matters outcomes determined by the 2004 Children Act, should not be overly prescriptive but be sufficiently defined to secure a broad, balanced, relevant and differentiated curriculum that would allow children and young people educated at home to have sufficient information to enable them to expand their talents and make choices about likely careers.

I can't even tell whether they are talking about the needs of three-year-olds or sixteen-year-olds. They're talking about people who have a likely expectation of a career, though, rather than people who just do jobs to earn a living and change what they do to suit themselves. The current economic climate seems to be an odd place to talk about careers, to me.

Though it does perhaps mean that [an eleven-year-old I know] can cease educating himself forthwith since he has sufficient qualifications to teach in his area of expertise, without further training, in several countries. He could be earning his living now but it seems to be illegal for him to do so where he lives.

The outcome of this review should further inform guidance on registration.

Home educators should be engaged in this process.

No kidding.

DCSF Review - registration (Rec. 1)

Recommendation 1

This comes at the end of section 3, "Current Legislation and Regulation," and is mentioned in the Conclusion - "To that end, I urge the DCSF to respond to recommendations 1, 7, 23 and 24 as summarised in the next chapter, at the next available opportunity."

That the DCSF establishes a compulsory national registration scheme, locally administered, for all children of statutory school age, who are, or become, electively home educated.

That sounds fine so far.

This scheme should be common to all local authorities.

That makes sense and would do away with the "it's ok in Anytown but constant authoritarian hassle in Otherplace" thing that happens now, if properly administered.

Registration should be renewed annually.

I have no idea why but presumably this would be automated somehow.

Those who are registering for the first time should be visited by the appropriate local authority officer within one month of registration.

To prove what? that the child is still alive? The reason for and format of this visit needs to be made explicit (must try to read main document again). I'm thinking of a family with young children who were repeatedly hassled in the fortnight after the mother died of cancer, here - it turned out to be a bureaucratic mistake and the authorities were very sorry, but it doesn't do much to give one faith in their ability to do these things sensitively and carefully.

Local authorities should ensure that all home educated children and young people already known to them are registered on the new scheme within one month of its inception and visited over the following twelve months, following the commencement of any new legislation.

Register within a month of its inception, and then visit within a month as per previous line or within twelve months, presumably because of staffing issues. I wonder how they'll decide whom to visit when?

Provision should be made to allow registration at a local school, children’s centre or other public building as determined by the local authority.

Allow? Or require? Will families be required to traipse along to some central building and queue up to register? It's later made clear that the information about registration should be available online as well as at specific venues but not whether registration itself can be done otherwise.

When parents are thinking of deregistering their child/children from school to home educate, schools should retain such pupils on roll for a period of 20 school days so that should there be a change in circumstances, the child could be readmitted to the school.

When parents, having considered the matter and decided to deregister their child/children from school, actually formally do so, the school should disregard this for twenty days, making the children legally truant and the parents criminals, in case the parents change their mind. I am not loving this idea.

This period would also allow for the resolution of such difficulties that may have prompted the decision to remove the child from school.

Then there needs to be another list - like "The Not on the roll, but on the Definitely Got A Place Until Such-A-Date List." I mean, the period of reflection is not a bad idea, but if the child is on the roll and is not at school and is not ill and has not been granted special leave of absence by the head teacher, the parents are criminals.

National guidance should be issued on the requirements of registration and be made available online and at appropriate public buildings. Such guidance must include a clear statement of the statutory basis of elective home education and the rights and responsibilities of parents.

This guidance (information) should be available online or by post, surely? I understand that this might mean a print-and-postage cost but parents could be required to pay it. I can phone up and ask for information about my child benefits to be posted to me for nothing, and that's often a fairly hefty booklet.

At the time of registration parents/carers/guardians must provide a clear statement of their educational approach, intent and desired/planned outcomes for the child over the following twelve months.

This is ridiculous. It's not possible for anyone practicing autonomous education, for a start, and it's also inappropriate for a huge number of traumatised, bullied children who are being taken out of school for their emotional and mental wellbeing as well as because of the educational deficiency of the school. Lots of families need six to twelve months to get over the laziness and coasting, self-doubt and refusal, or other manifestations of trauma which even bright children develop. They've ignored deschooling and de-institutionalising entirely, here.

Guidance should be issued to support parents in this task with an opportunity to meet local authority officers to discuss the planned approach to home education and develop the plan before it is finalised. The plan should be finalised within eight weeks of first registration.

Ridiculous. Meeting, fine - or phonecalls; it would be good to get something like "Hi, this is Alex from the LA again, just checking you and little Sam are still ok - have you thought of any questions or anything you need from us since we last spoke?". Plans and structures, no, wholly inappropriate to vast numbers of children and should not be a legal requirement, especially in the very early stages.

As well as written guidance, support should encompass advice from a range of advisers and organisations, including schools. Schools should regard this support as a part of their commitment to extended schooling.

It would be nice to be able to get advice and support from lots of people, yes.

Where a child is removed from a school roll to be home educated, the school must provide to the appropriate officer of the local authority a record of the child’s achievement to date and expected achievement, within 20 school days of the registration, together with any other school records.

Presumably copies of this will go to the parents, too. I don't see how it helps anyone, though, since people removing children from the school system aren't usually doing it because the school system has worked so well for them that they believe the basic assumptions behind it to be invaluable.

Local authorities must ensure that there are mechanisms/systems in place to record and review registrations annually.

That makes sense, if it's going to happen at all.

DCSF Review on Home Education (Prequel)

The Department for Children, Schools and Families recently published a Review containing 28 Recommendations. The full thing in PDF form is available for download from their website; I'm going to go through the recommendations and jot down my thoughts on them. The quotes I'm responding to are taken from Section 12, Summary of Recommendations.

My response is broken into ten posts, but they refer to each other a little, which is why I'm posting them all at once.

---

Overview
In general, I found the review internally consistent (the points followed each other logically, without direct internal contradictions), but vague and full of unsupported assumptions - some of which I agreed with, but that's not the point. In particular, I don't see how even one child would be made safer by the proposed registration and monitoring. I can think of several ways which might work better, though I don't see why they are necessary.

It is a cause of concern that although approximately 20,000 home educated children and young people are known to local authorities, estimates vary as to the real number which could be in excess of 80,000. [Section 1.3]

Our own data concurred with the DfES (2007) report, that there
are around 20,000 children and young people currently registered with local authorities. We know that to be an underestimate and agree it is likely to be double that figure, if not more, possibly up to 80,000 children.[Section 6.1]

That is, in a country of about 60 million people, there might be 60 thousand children wholly unknown to the authorities. Hidden. Given that these children are not registered for child benefit, NHS services, family tax credit, passports, or anything else, how on earth will a register of home educators help? And how did the authorities lose track of 60,000 children between their birth and their reaching age 5 (school age)? This seems to me like tabloid scaremongering.

6.2 ContactPoint will record the place where a child is being educated, where that is known, including where a child is being educated at home.

6.3 Registration proposed within this report should complete the picture and offer further evidence of their wellbeing and educational progress.

Why is Contact Point so inadequate? Can't they cross-reference anything? and if they can't, why are they proposing so many different committees, departments, boards and bodies to deal with this? Either inter-departmental communication is something they are good at, in which case most of this new stuff isn't necessary, or it isn't, in which case most of this new stuff will have the same problems the old stuff has.

I find it very hard to believe that the most effective way of spending whatever money is allocated to education, or ensuring children are not being abused at home, or both, is to create an entirely new system based on unavailable evidence, assumptions, unsupported conclusions, and carefully making sure to link home educators and child abusers together in the minds of the general public.

Badman's Review

I'm working on a series of posts about it - mainly just what I think of the recommendations - but it looks like it's going to be eleven posts, so it will be a while.

I'm also really worried about the feedback I'm likely to get on my posts, but I suppose that's something one has to deal with. Anyone I actually know in person will be polite, at least, and assume I am not personally advocating child abuse.

Le sigh.

(The children continue charming).

Please stop, you're making your brain too tired

On Thursday Linnea played with the Cuisenaire rods for an hour and then spotted the Nrich website over my shoulder, usurped my place at the computer, and spent two hours doing puzzles, sometimes with the Cuisenaire rods to help her.

She wouldn't stop. When we made her stop she played her chocolate game instead, which isn't much different, really. In total, she spent about three and a half hours doing sums and logic puzzles with shapes and patterns.

Afterwards she was tired and cranky, but she's also getting her six-year molars, so that's not proof of anything.

On Friday she didn't start until closer to four, so she stopped naturally when her daddy came home at five.

Criminy.

Comparison of Learnings

The above link is offered without comment.

(But I may comment later - talk among yourselves).

Answers to questions

But what if you miss stuff?

Every system of education misses stuff. I'll miss stuff. I don't think I'll miss much important, though.

What about the things they teach in school that you can't teach at home?

I've never worked out what these are. What is impossible to teach at home? And why?

What about learning to socialise with large age-sorted groups?

I can't say this is something I think is useful or necessary. In fact, for a lot of people, it's actively harmful, as far as I can see. Learning to socialise within large groups of any kind is a useful skill, and there are lots of places where people can learn to do that. I learned to do it fairly well aged about 25, myself, after unlearning a lot of what school situations taught me was "normal behaviour".

Doesn't anyone check?

Not as much as I do, no, but there are circumstances under which various state-sanctioned individuals or bodies can and do check up on whether one is fulfilling one's legal obligation to provide a child with an education. One could wish they were as rigorous in schools but obviously the sheer numbers make that impossible.

How will you know whether you're covering the whole curriculum?

Whose curriculum, and why would I want to cover it? Many curriculums(a?) are available for free or for sale, so I could just look it up, if I decided that a curriculum was the best thing for my children, or that that was a useful way to guide my own work.

What if you don't want to teach her long division because she'll never use it in real life?

Basic practical skills which are used in real life are kind of automatic. Things which are no useful in real life might be learned for sheer joy of them, and if not, does it really matter?

Are you really allowed?

It's legal, if that's what you mean.

How will you know you're doing it right?

How does anyone? How do teachers, schools, examining boards, anyone?

What if she's not normal?

What's normal?

Representational art

This morning before breakfast Emer drew a BIG bider with eyes which had pupils. She has now made the change to deciding what to draw first and then representing it in ever-increasing detail on paper.

When other people say "But what about...?" with genuine concern

But what if you miss stuff?

What about the things they teach in school that you can't teach at home?

What about learning to socialise with large age-sorted groups?

Doesn't anyone check?

How will you know whether you're covering the whole curriculum?

What if you don't want to teach her long division because she'll never use it in real life?

Are you really allowed?

How will you know you're doing it right?

What if she's not normal?

Games

Linnea will be five soon, and Emer is two and a half. So today's trip to Eclectic Games was more interesting than they were when both children were much younger.

Linnea played with Chocolate Fix and did the first six puzzles quickly enough to surprise the properietor, and Emer played with a Rattlesnake game involving magnets. Magnets are marvellous toys.

I was interested enough by Linnea's concentration on Chocolate Fix that I really want to buy it for her, now. But will I wait and give it as a birthday present, or just get it right now for her immediate gratification?!

They also had a go at learning to use a vending machine, and Linnea condescended to write some letters on a card for me, though they didn't make much sense to me. (AXIA, if anyone is wondering. She really likes an X).

New Year!

Linnea is four years eight months old now, apparently. I find it hard to believe, myself. And
what is she doing?

She's definitely learning to be more conciliating in her interpersonal relationships - children who cry or shout at her are very likely to get their way unless she's totally confident that they will still be her friend tomorrow. She clearly offers compromises and gets upset when they aren't listened to.

Her favourite protest at home is "You are a Gnoring me!" and her favourite insult is "Now you are nuis-less," (also "Don't be so nuis-less.") She's toying with "You're a stinky poo," too, but that's for fun rather than to express unhappiness or frustration.

She's more and more interested in learning to read and write but still not interested in being Taught. Similar with maths - she's adding, subtracting and multiplying single-digit numbers all the time, but doesn't like us initiating a session of it, though we're expected to drop everything and answer "what is seven nines?" at her lightest whim.

I gave her window crayons recently and she drew some lovely stuff on the bay window. I must brave the cold without my gloves and photograph it. It's very bold and confident; there's a house and a snail and a sun and some waves.

She'd like to learn to knit but doesn't like how fiddly and difficult it is. She has short needles and lovely mixed-colours yarn, thanks to Nana, but hasn't stuck it out as far as knitting a whole stitch yet.

Her grasp of anatomy surprises us sometimes - she told us over Christmas that her ribs are the bones which protect her heart and lungs because her heart and lungs are soft and squashy and bones are hard. Presumably that was in a book or on telly but I didn't know she knew it.

I said "I like spending time with you, Linnea," today, and she responded, thoughtfully, "But not when you're cross."

True enough. Don't like much when I'm cross.

Testing times

Linnea is four-and-a-half now and we met the woman who used to be our local librarian, before the library closed for refurbishments. We met her at the rehomed Singalong session in the church next door to the library, and she was delighted to see us. She sat down to chat to Linnea and very quickly she asked "How old are you?" and "How high can you count? Can you count up to twenty?"

Linnea, brilliantly, said "No, I don't have twenty fingers. I only have ten."

Some discussion of toes ensued.

Then the librarian asked "Are you going to teach her her times tables?" to which I said "I'm sure she'll learn them when she sees they're useful." "Oh, because I learned mine and I can still remember instantly - instantly! - any of them."

All I could come up with in response to that was "I can't."

Oh, and I showed her how to do the nine times tables on her fingers.

And then Linnea borrowed her fingers to make more sets of three and did some multiplying.

(Linnea is very focussed on three times four and four times three at the moment.)

I was struck by academic-testing-as-conversation, indeed.

Gory Stories

I just realised I left the bit about reading scary, gory sections (to Linnea, 4y6m) from books hanging. The pig-butchering and headcheese-making scene in Little House in the Big Woods went down well, but the book got incredibly boring at the sugaring-off dance, so we've left it for now. We'll come back to it again, later, I think - she likes to flick through it and look at the illustrations of the parts we've read and "read" them to Emer (2y3m).

When my naughty little sister was good has no scary bits.

We are now in another phase of no-no-don't-read-to-me-mummy. She has also decided that she can't write her name - and has never been able to write her name - this has always been so, this will always be so - perhaps we'll read 1984 next.

Along with not being able to read again comes a leap in personal hygiene and grooming. And more begging for a bruvva.

To market, to market

We help out at a local travelling cooperative market (local, organic and/or fair trade foods) from time to time. This morning we went to help them set up in their town centre location; Rob and Emer went first and Linnea and I came along later.
Emer helped face the goods forwards on the shelves, largely off her own bat (no, we don't ask much of a two-year-old, but she tends to offer a great deal) and Linnea put out scoops for the dry goods, set paper bags out by the various sets of weighing scales, and even priced things with the price-gun, very carefully and effectively.

Usually when we shop Linnea selects foods and brings them to me to weigh, or counts eggs into half-dozen boxes for me to put in the bag. Emer carries things around.

I don't know what they are learning from this, but it's valuable, useful work, so they must be learning something. And they like doing it.

Sums

After buying shoes, and arguing about snacks, while walking through the centre of town, Linnea to me: "Two and five is seven, Mum."

Me: Yes.
Linnea: And three and four is seven.
Me: Yes.
Linnea: And six and one, that's seven too.
Me: Yes, it is. Six and one is seven.

---

Much later, I realised that this adding up to a number in lots of different ways is something I've seen mentioned in books and magazines as a stage in learning maths. Which is fine.

I'm not sure which stage it is.

But at least now I know she's learning something I can call maths when people ask.

EdPhil: Draft document, please comment!

"The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable to his age ability and aptitude and to any special needs he may have either by regular attendance at school or otherwise."

Educational Philosophy

(1) Children are born learners. They learn to self-feed, to walk, to talk, with no teaching at all - all that's needed is example and opportunity to practice.

(2) People remember the things they wanted to learn, the things which interested them. Someone whose Bachelors degree was in mathematics might have difficulty with simple arithmetic (as far as I can tell, they all use calculators), but be happy with complex equations, and cheerfully able to rattle off the time and location of the world's most impressive stegosaurus fossil finds.

(3) People learn what they want to learn and what they need to learn. Many adults leave home and learn to manage a washing machine, write a CV, balance a budget, ask for and decline social or sexual favours, all without being told how by a teacher or parent - when it becomes necessary, they teach themselves to do it.

(4) People acquire skills at different ages and different stages. Some people learn to negotiate social boundaries first, others learn to multiply fractions first. Some people learn to sing before they learn to compose rhyming couplets, others can't hold a tune until long after they can recite their own poetry for hours on end. Some skills are never acquired by some people. Some are usually acquired by most.

(5) "Skills to be learned" is a very broad category. "Being friendly" is a skill. "Self-knowledge" is a skill. Literacy, hopscotch, numeracy, representational drawing, an eye for colour, plumbing, horse-riding, poetry recital, poetry composition, playing a musical instrument, designing a spaceship, washing the dust of ages from recently-uncovered bone combs, guaging the colour of the grass the cattle are eating and choosing whether to move them on or not, cooking, house-cleaning, grocery shopping, tying bootlaces, ballet, typing, handwriting, sign-painting, pottery, accountancy, graphic design, computer programming, rugby, goalkeeping, teaching - all skills. All learnable. Very few people have them all.

(6) Information to be absorbed is usually absorbed as part of skill acquisition or from sheer delight in the information itself.

(7) Who my child wants to be and who I hoped she'd be before she existed are not the same person. She is her own person. I do not own her. I have responsibilities towards her. These are not the same thing.

(8) My responsibilities towards my child are to provide her with the opportunity to learn what she wants and needs to learn (usually the same thing), to facilitate her learning when she cannot do that herself (which may include taking her places, finding classes or groups, acquiring equipment, etc) and to teach her when she needs me to. An important responsibility is to leave her time and space to just get on with things when she needs to do that.

(9) If the plan doesn't work, we can always change the plan.

Fools in old-time hats and coats

Well, it was all my own issue. Linnea was quiet and attentive during the description of killing and eating deer, then more involved - active - something - for the description of building and using a smokehouse. The part which really disturbed me, as a child, is the pig-butchering, and that's coming up soon. We Shall See.

Linnea is very pleased that they had a dog to protect them from the wolves.

Growing accustomed

The children around us are getting used to being at school six hours a day. I'm not, but they are settling down ok.

And we're working out what is best for us, too. We need to go out less, I think; my children want to spend hours at home playing with lego and reading books and dancing.

I'm trying to make a handy to-read pile for the four-year-old as we can get through fairly large chunks in one go. Someone else I know is reading "Little House In The Big Woods" to a much younger child and I am going to flick through it to see how bad the butchering / beestings incidents are, because Linnea will notice if I skip whole chapters. She tends to hand me the book open at the page we were last on (presumably using the numbers?) when it's time to start reading again.

Edit: On page four she looks out her window to see two dead deer, and the butchering goes from there to the end of the pig bit, on and off. Now, she knows about meat-eating animals, and that people are made of meat, but me and my ex-vegetarian sensibilities are a little concerned that she'll react more or less like I did when I learned where meat comes from. I was a terrible, tedious bore, but at least I could eat dairy products. A vegetarian four-year-old would really complicate things on us here.

On the other hand, looking at the very first illustration, a Garth Whatsisname one of Laura skipping along waving her bonnet, and Mary walking primly along with an armful of flowers, I
see that I was set up from the very beginning to want to hit Mary in the face with a lump of green, stringy, slimy seaweed and stuff some crabs down her dress.

School is starting

My eldest child is four years, four months and three weeks old. The babies who were "in" our antenatal class have all started school - some of them are two months older but they are all about her age.

And this week many of them are on full days.


That's thirty hours a week.

Half days were exhausting enough - one child was too tired to play with us after her second or third week of half-days at school. She was tired and cranky and cried with disappointment. Full days mean thirty hours a week.

Today my eldest daughter slept until 10 am. I have no idea why she slept so long. She just did. If she'd been at school, I'd have had to wake her a full two hours earlier to have any hope of getting there on time. She'd have been cranky and uncooperative - she is, when she's woken up rather than allowed to wake naturally - and we'd have been late. And then, because she's tired, she'd find it harder to get to sleep in the evening and be worse the next day.

And all this just as the sun comes out during the day - we had a miserable summer - and the mornings are getting darker and the evenings are drawing in.

I am so glad we'd already made this decision because I think I'd have made it in a hurry this autumn otherwise, and wouldn't be so comfortable with it.

We're hoping to go to Oxford to a museum on Thursday. Assuming I can work out how to get there. It's cheaper than train tickets to London.

Looks like summer!

The weather is warmer and drier than it's been for weeks. So on Friday Linnea ran out of ERAPA to head to the bus-stop, looked at the leaves on the ground, and said "LOOK, Mum, it's AUTUMN!"

I love autumn, I truly do, but I wanted summer.

---

Since then, however, the weather has been lovely and warm and bright and dry, and not only have I done a ton of laundry but we've played outdoors (even me!) and had a picnic and
done all sorts of things.

---

We're planning a museum visit. The days are filling up. September still feels like a beginning to me, even though I haven't been in a school for um. 13 years? More?

Well, I certainly didn't teach her THAT!

We were negotiating pocketmoney. I said, "How many is twenty?"

She held up her hands, fingers spread out, looked at them, and said, "Two tens."

---

Sometime, I will scan in the diagram she drew for us to make her a baby brother. I think my favourite bit is the pubic hair; her father really likes the egg in one colour with the swirls of a contrasting colour around it to symbolise the baby growing bigger and bigger.

---

She likes to write her name and her sister's name, in secret. She doesn't like doing it when I suggest it. That seems reasonable...

Motivation

My daughter has absolutely ZERO motivation to write her own name. Her friend's name? THAT she needs to learn.

So there you go.

Book larnin

I realised as I was updating my livejournal that today contained a wealth of education which looks like education, rather than the usual kinds which don't. Linnea is 4 years old. I quote and paraphrase:

On the bus, Linnea was quite verbose about threading the various parts of Reading together, which streets go where and lead to where and what happened in which buildings. She doesn't often talk to me about what's going on in her mind so that was lovely. She also has a better grasp of the geography of the other side of town than I knew.

This morning both girls did sticking and gluing. Linnea also dictated a postcard inviting a friend over, so I wrote that out (and later Rob posted it). After lunch I needed to go to hospital for a blood test. Linnea decided she did not want to come and watch me having blood taken; she at first said she would cover her eyes but I asked if she would prefer to wait in the waiting room and that was a much better option for her, so I checked with staff and that's what we did. And she gave me a little lecture on not leaving rubbish lying around and made sure to put her drink and packet in the buggy when she was finished with them, for whatever reason.

On the way home we went to a cafe with a layered jigsaw of boy - clothes, muscles, internal organs, skeleton - and we talked about what kidneys are and how they are connected to the bits she already knows about (bladder, wee, tubes, etc). She found it strange that they are easier to feel at the back than the front.

And then very late in the day there was a complicated conversation about time, and how we can't make it go faster than it does. We have friends arriving in four days. This is not the day after tomorrow, no matter what we do. How sad :(

All about...

Dinosaurs. We are all about dinosaurs at the moment. Rob and Linnea both know 67 times more than I do about them. I don't think either of them would be terribly impressed by the cardboard pterodactyl costume in which I once incarcerated my sister.

And Linnea still swears up and down that she cannot read. Nope. Can't. I don't mind much since she has conceded that she can keep her underwear dry all day and all night. The whole reading thing is so emotionally loaded - it's like I have a responsibility, as an early-reading bright parent, to have an early-reading and bright child; early reading is in fact often used as evidence of brightness, and its lack implies... Hmph.

I do realise that number two daughter is getting far less art input than number one daughter, presumably because I have less time to keep the house clear enough - hopefully the new wipe-clean flooring (replacing, of all things, acrylic-mix beige fitted carpet!) will help me allow them more messy art. Though I will never become reconciled to washable (hah!) markers.

Outgrowing Nursery: A Very Negative Child

Well! We were ill the week before half term and then it was half term, so L was away from her two-days-a-week nursery for two weeks. The change was striking. She relaxed. She started to admit to knowledge again. She got really interested in dinosaurs and boasted about her knowledge. She started to draw again, and draw well, not at the peculiar regressive standard she had been at for a few months. She asked me to help her with a complicate dinosaur collage.

So the first Monday of the new term rolled around and she said she didn't want to go, so I phoned the nursery and asked to speak to her key worker, because I wasn't sure nursery was still the best place for her. I ended up speaking to someone I don't know at all whom I was assured was The Manager. She told me that Linnea doesn't do anything she's asked to do, doesn't use any of the offered opportunities, doesn't join in the group activities, doesn't socialise, and "is very negative - I don't know if she gets it from you."

That seemed fairly clear cut. The child I live with is outgoing, sociable, friendly, and definitely not negative unless provoked.

So she hasn't been to nursery and she's thriving on it. She's doing her maths book and reading to herself and generally being lovely. She's friendlier and less stressed. And I'm happier, too.

It's sad, because I really liked that nursery and I loved her key worker, but she outgrew it quite quickly, I think, and it wasn't good for her any more.

I'm so pleased the L I love is living with us again. And that we have so much more free unscheduled time. We've been painting again!

Doubts

Since she's four, I've been hearing more and more than she ought to be at nursery. And that shemust start school soon. More and more and more. And I'm also hearing about friends' children who are reading, writing, hang-gliding etc, at the same age and younger.


It's hard to remember that Linnea responds badly to being tested and prefers to keep anything she's ever been tested on a secret. I know she can read because she's done both word recognition and letter sounding out - but she swears now she can't do it. And it seems to be true. Part of me thinks I've failed and part of me thinks she's working on some new skill to do with reading, where before she did rote shape-recognition and guesswork, she's now trying to figure it out from individual letters and she doesn't quite like it as well because she can see the bits she doesn't understand.

Praise is hard to navigate. It makes her fail on purpose.

All of this makes me think school would be a bad idea for her. But also that I'm a total failure, because goodness, a four-year-old who can't read! I could read at four. Loads of my acquaintances children can and do read at four. Where have I gone wrong?

And let's not discuss bladder control.

Chuffa chuffa chuffa CHOOO CHOOOOOO

For the last, oh, ages - months and months - Oisín has been following an almost exclusively locomotive-based curriculum. It's been wall-to-wall railways - often literally, in fact, in our living room. Last week he watched Michael Palin's Great Railway Journeys on DVD perhaps ten times. His father got him some model rail magazines a while ago, and we've all been drafted in to read him the text and help him recreate layouts from the photographs. Last month we travelled to Kerry (and back) on Iarnród Éireann, which sparked a fierce interest in real railways (as opposed to bloody Thomas). Since then, he and his father have been on two Luas adventures, where they saw Heuston Station and the tram depot at the Red Cow Roundabout.

The complexity of his track layouts has developed hugely following these trips - rather than being pleasing routes for his toy trains to run on, they now tend either to reflect what he's seen in real life (e.g. parallel tracks with trains that pass each other in opposite directions, or a station layout with a bundle of lines feeding into a complex junction cluster) or to show that he's thinking about questions of structure and pattern (beautiful symmetrical arrangements of loops and junctions).

He can speak knowledgeably about most of the Irish rail network (including main lines, the Enterprise service, local lines such as the Dart and Luas (including proposed extensions), bog lines, and defunct lines such as the Lartigue Monorail and the Tralee & Dingle line) and can tell you the difference between a commuter train and an Intercity; he also has views on transport policy. (Why are there fewer goods trains in these days? Lorries are worse for the environment!)

He's very interested in foreign trains - the Eurostar, the Trans-Siberian railway, the Japanese bullet train, the Amsterdam light rail system, and so on - which has got him into geography in a big way. Many of his layouts and games now feature tracks running from (e.g.) Killarney to Berlin, or Dublin to Africa (or to North America, which is populated exclusively by dinosaurs). The other day he had a game featuring railway journeys to countries called Buffleteen and Shuffleteen, which he pointed out to me on the globe (they were unaccountably mislabelled Singapore and Borneo); they are very hot countries because they're at the equator. Rail travel between continents will be greatly facilitated by his plans for a bridge over the Atlantic Ocean. (Today, mind you, this was a pedestrian bridge, made out of Lego-equivalent. But it didn't have lifts, so I had to carry the buggy up the steps when I used it.) He's careful to specify whether he's talking about Heuston Station in Dublin or Euston Station in London.

The distinction between steam-, diesel-, and electric-powered trains has led him a little way into history (aka "the olding days"). He was interested to learn that we still use buildings that were built in the olding days, such as Killarney Station. He's looking at buildings quite carefully now, noting how many entrances and exits they have, asking about their structure. Famous old trains like the Flying Scotsman and the lesser-known City of Truro feature commonly in his games, as does the Rail Museum in York, where we plan to go in August. (His interest in history isn't confined to trains, by any means, but like everything else at the moment, it's connected.)

It's brilliant to see it all working the way I felt it would. And he's only three - I suspect it'll be even more fun when he's older.

************************

In non-train news, it appears he can add a bit. Biscuits, anyway. This afternoon I gave him three gingerbread biscuits (the ones made of oats and apple juice and stuff); he ate them and then asked for two alphabet biscuits.
"How many will that make?" he asked, semi-automatically.
"How many?" I countered, suddenly curious. "Do you know how to work it out?"
*eyeroll, sigh* "Fiiiive."
OK, OK, point taken. He's not partial to being tested. I got him the biscuits.

Me and My Big Ideas, part 3

OK, last one. Promise. (I originally meant to make these posts at decorous intervals, but that was back in November before I had my baby, and he's asleep now, so, well, I'm carping diem.)

This final post was written in response to someone who asked what values homeschoolers were so afraid of having their kids exposed to in school.

In case it needs to be spelled out, I speak from my experience (based on having served fourteen years in the Irish school system (1978-1992), and on what I know about that system now from teacher friends, other parents, and the media), and from my feelings relating to school ("feelings", specifically, since the question mentions "afraid").

What I'm "so afraid of" is not a set of pernicious personal values that I fear a given teacher might hold (e.g. homophobia, violent nationalism, ultra-Catholicism) - children encounter people all the time whose values conflict with each other's and with those of their immediate circle: it's part of life. Instead, I'm afraid of a set of values that I feel are, sadly, implicit in a system wherein large(ish) groups of children are taught by (at any one time) a single adult, and where children do not have any genuine power. I am not in any way suggesting that these values are deliberately asserted in the school system, but I believe that (in Ireland, at least) they are rooted very deeply. Teachers within the system cannot totally avoid working within these value frameworks, whatever their own convictions might be.

In no particular order, then, here are some lessons that I would quite like my children not to have to learn - or at least, not at the impressionable age at which I learnt them:

* What you are interested in at this moment is less important than what I am instructing you to focus on.

* You are powerless; the rules are the rules; the adults in charge here have essentially arbitrary authority over you. (Corollary: might is right.)

* Your passions are irrelevant to your education; they must be indulged either furtively (risking punishment) or only after your school duties have been discharged.

* If a teacher tells you to do something, no matter how absurd or pointless it may seem, you must do it or face punishment.

* Conform. It's safer.

* Boredom and fear (chiefly of adult retribution or disapproval) are part of the package, not something you are entitled to do anything about. If you are bored and attempt to alleviate this state, expect trouble.

* Mistakes are bad.

* Proving to someone else that you can do something is more important than doing it to a level that you find satisfactory (e.g. sufficient to accomplish a related personal goal).

* In general, the measurable takes precedence over the unmeasurable.

I could go on, but I suspect you get the gist. Please don't anyone take this as a personal attack!

Me and My Big Ideas, part 2

More from the discussion I mentioned in my last post: a description of unschooling, written for a broadly skeptical audience.

The basic premise of unschooling is that children - indeed, all people - are naturally curious, and that if they are allowed to pursue their (often intense) desires to acquire information and master skills, they will, if you like, "arrange" to learn everything they need. Adherents of unschooling believe that learning in the context of an immediate desire - often to do something, i.e. to apply the knowledge acquired - is most likely to be effective and lasting.

The key point of contention here, obviously, is in that phrase "everything they need". Unschooling is a child-centred approach, based on granting intellectual autonomy even to very young people. The idea is to refrain from disrupting the course of a person's curiosity-driven exploration of the world through the imposition of a curriculum, a timetable, and a schedule of academic milestones. Instead, unschooling families facilitate that exploration by providing a stimulating intellectual, social, and cultural environment - and, indeed, by providing or arranging for any formal instruction that the child requests.

That's where I'll have lost a lot of you, I suspect. Most people believe that there are certain things that all children must be taught. But opponents of non-traditional education models, in my (limited) experience, have a tendency to beg the question of whether it is, in fact, possible to define a set of information and skills to which it is desirable that all members of a society be exposed before a given (and ascertainable) age. They further beg the question of whether teaching methods arising from the traditional school model are, in fact, the best way to achieve this aim. [I repeat my plea from my previous post: if you know of any writing addressing these questions from first principles, please point me at it!]

I'm neither a logician nor a trained educator (though my parents are both academics, as are my aunt, my uncle, and many more living relatives, as were three grandparents, a step-grandparent, and at least one great-grandparent, so I'm pretty familiar with the education world, at least in Ireland), but my reading and observation have led me to conclude that there is another way of looking at it. In the first place, if it is indeed essential to know something, can we in fact avoid exposure to it - or at least to its importance? If we could trust children to identify what skills and knowledge are important to them, and facilitate them in acquiring these, would they not necessarily cover all the genuinely essential material?

In the second place, even if we agree that there is such a set of knowledge and skills, how can we be sure that traditionally based teaching methods are the only/best way of making sure that everyone gets it? Let's leave aside the fact that a proportion of children, despite attending school, never acquire basic literacy and numeracy - which I think most people would agree are about as "essential" as it gets. That's a clear social problem, to which some fairly clear remedies can be applied after the fact. But more subtly, I believe that many, many children leave school without in truth having mastered the curriculum. I'm not talking about failing exams - that's the obvious example - I'm contending that a significant proportion of students in a traditional school environment will tend to acquire not the skills and knowledge on the curriculum, but rather a set of more or less effective strategies for passing the various scrutinies and tests and getting out of there. (This applies less to students whose personal interests mesh well with the curriculum on offer, but as one of those students, I can testify that it's a factor.) These students, having passed the tests, are considered to be successfully educated. If you pause to consider your least favourite subject at school, and ask yourself what proportion of what you learnt during those classes has stayed learnt, you may get what I mean.

(A personal example: I was reasonably "good" at maths. I took Honours maths in the Leaving Certificate, which (certainly at the time, and I believe still) is generally considered one of the "hardest" subjects. I did well at it - better than I expected. However, I had only the sketchiest understanding of complex maths, then or now. I rote-learned enough to be able to approach most exam questions and left it at that. Maths, as an intellectual field, wasn't where my interest lay. Meanwhile, I have a very good grasp of the "simpler" subdivisions of maths, most of which I learnt by osmosis while indulging my passion for needlecraft: creating sewing, embroidery, patchwork and knitting patterns from scratch, which I did obsessively from the age of 6 or so, involves a fair bit of tricky calculation, percentages, geometry, as well as spatial awareness, technical drawing, and so on. Point is, if I were into, I don't know, aerodynamics - designing the perfect paper aeroplane, say - I'd probably have absorbed and retained more calculus.)

So, if for the sake of argument we were to propose that neither (a) a pre-ordained curriculum nor (b) curriculum-based, age-segregated, timetabled, scheduled, regularly tested instruction is necessarily the best way of a given child's acquiring an adequate education, well ... what's the alternative?

To which I say, go and read your John Holt and unschooling.info and the essays on the Sudbury Valley School site, and then get back to me if you have any questions :-)

I fully accept that there are people for whom the "guided" curricular experience is a positive one - one poster to [this discussion] spoke of being grateful that she was "forced" to read ... was it Shakespeare? That's not my personal experience: I viscerally resent what school did to me both intellectually and emotionally (there - cards on the table time - but please bear in mind that this is the Irish education system in the 1980s/90s - of which terms like "monolithic", "lockstep", "one size fits all", etc. are, I'd argue, ENTIRELY appropriate!). Further, the unschooling approach clearly works best when parents are educated and committed themselves. As I said in my previous post, there are surely children for whom the traditional school system is the best option available. It seems to me, though, that rather than engaging in holy war over pedagogical principles, we should be striving to ensure that each child has an opportunity to access the optimal educational model for that child.

There's also the question of parental values. Frankly, I can't see my husband and myself being able to be "good", supportive traditional-school parents, given how we feel about traditional school (again, please note, this is the Irish system I'm talking about: your mileage almost definitely varies). Children pick up on these things, and it couldn't but cause tension, which wouldn't be fair. If there were a Sudbury-model school in Dublin, we'd have enrolled our foetuses. As it stands, we'll be unschooling them (um ... not the foetuses ... you know what I mean) unless and until they ask for a different model, and we'll be trusting them to know what works best for them.

So (if anyone's still with me), how does unschooling work in practice?

Well, take reading, for instance - which is usually one of the first topics to come up in discussions of unschooling. It is the case that children frequently learn to read without ever being formally taught. The way it usually works is that either they realise at a certain point that the ability to read would be of enormous benefit to them generally, or they encounter a specific obstacle to their pursuit of another passion that would be solved by knowing how to read. Either way, they become passionate about acquiring the skill. (Supporters of unschooling, as I've said, argue that the point at which that passion strikes the child is the time at which learning will be most effective. Anyone who's watched a very young child really working at a new skill must give at least some credence to the effectiveness of this approach.) Children use several strategies to acquire the skill of reading, ranging from asking someone to teach them to picking up clues from context and working out what a handful of words mean, then building it up from there.

Oisín, our [43]-month-old, has learnt, by himself and by asking questions, to read most letters and numbers up to about [10] or so. (We had a long discussion about zero at the dinner table one evening, which quickly got very complicated.) He can read some words - the Google logo on Niall's T-shirts, for instance, his own name, and the names of some characters from Thomas the Tank Engine. I suspect he can read more than I'm aware of, but as I have no investment in his learning to read at this point (except inasmuch as it'll mean I don't have to read the Reverend W. Awdry's turgid and reactionary oeuvre!), I've no desire to test his skills. I don't know how I'd feel if I had one of those children who don't decide to apply themselves to reading until they're nine or ten. That might be trickier.

Unschooled children - certainly the younger ones - don't generally study traditional subjects, on the grounds that the world is not divided into discrete packages. Instead, an eight-year-old's interest in (say) knights and castles might lead to explorations in social history (how Medieval people lived), archaeology/palaeography (how we know about these things), politics (feudalism vs. democracy), architecture/engineering/military strategy (how they built for optimal defensibility), and so on. Meanwhile, her six-year-old brother might be into gardening - exploring botany, crop rotation, common local insects, and flower arranging (not to mention getting gloriously mucky).

As children mature, of course, their interests and desires for knowledge become more and more complex. In later years, organised learning, classes, curricula, etc. become more appropriate - provided the child can access them freely. Children who want to attend university can arrange to take the necessary tests - there are plenty of correspondence courses available, for instance.

It's noteworthy to me that most of the people who hold that children need guided instruction, timetables, etc. deal virtually exclusively with "schooled" children. Many adherents of unschooling believe that it's possible to "kill", or at least seriously derail, a child's natural curiosity and love of learning, through injudicious application of traditional teaching methods (e.g. the implicit demonisation of mistakes and failure - see John Holt on this). If that's true, then it very possibly follows that the children these people encounter do require such traditional approaches if they are to learn anything useful. But I'm not convinced that they are the only way.

I have no conclusion [...] but I hope I've provided some handle on the subject of unschooling and managed to avoid offence or overweening intellectual arrogance. None of either was intended, I assure you.

Me and My Big Ideas, part 1

This is a post about me. A while ago, I participated in a lively discussion elsewhere online about home-education, and someone asked about unschooling. I found I had ... quite a lot to say on the subject, and I've decided to repost some of my thoughts here.

This first post is about why I have reservations about the mainstream school model.

I was traditionally schooled, and according to the traditional paradigm I was a very successful student. For complex reasons, though, I wasn't great at fitting in socially. Unfortunately, I didn't complain about this situation. Instead, it's not exaggerating to say that I more or less "removed" myself from school, emotionally, at the age of around eight, and thereafter participated only to the extent required to wring optimal academic approval from the authorities. Because I was consistently top of the class at most things, and not too bad at faking what passes for "normal" peer interaction in the peculiar atmosphere of the school day, nobody - as far as I know - attempted to address what was, in retrospect, really quite a serious psychological/social problem.

In recent years I've read Ivan Illich (Deschooling Society) and John Holt (How Children Fail and How Children Learn), among others, and I've become enthusiastic about the Unschooling movement (see this Wikipedia article for an overview, or the unschooling.info site for some rather more polemical approaches).

I don't dismiss school out of hand - for many children, in many contexts, it may present the best available opportunity to learn - but certain fundamentals of the currently mainstream model simply don't make pedagogical sense to me. Segregation by age, rigid timetabling, imposed curricula (as opposed to curricula negotiated between learners and teachers), a schedule of academic milestones: all of these things carry clear logistical advantages, given the spoken and unspoken goals of the institution, but I can't see that they are in the best interests of a person's education, per se. I can't make a case for it actually mattering if a person understands quadratic equations before or after memorising the principal rivers of South America, or reads Hamlet before or after discussing the causes of the First World War. And yet, in the context of school, it is made to matter. That strikes me as twisted.

(I like Ivan Illich's phrase "irrational consistency". You take a shaky premise - e.g., "it is vital that every seven-year-old can subtract" - and you behave as though it is true, and you make it a rule, with consequences for breaching it, and you do this over and over again with different premises, and gradually, you drift away from any kind of reality-based moorings. And you don't allow the powerless subjects of this experiment to make any kind of effective complaint about the situation; instead, you make it clear to them, whether explicitly or implicitly, that this is the only way things can be, and that mental pain, fear, intense boredom and OH GOD the GUT-SCRUNCHING waste of TIME are just part of the deal, so get used to it. *pant, pant, froth* Excuse me, am I ranting?)

For many people, these factors are not deal-breakers (and let me say, I have enormous respect for anyone who enters the system with eyes open and a mission to change it for the better). For me and my husband, for all sorts of reasons related to our own negative experiences in school, they are. We won't be sending our children to school as a matter of course, and we are (well, I am) seriously considering trying to set up a school on a radically alternative model - something along the lines of Sudbury Valley (my goodness, that's a spiffier site than the one that blew my mind open in late 2000!) - which, given the homogeneity of the Irish education system, will be no small undertaking.

All that said, I'm a naturally equivocal person, and I'm oddly uneasy about holding such a one-sided opinion. Therefore, if you read the above screed and thought, "How can she say that? She'd never say that if she'd read X!", can you please let me know what X is?

(For completeness of this record, I'll add that a participant in the discussion I'm referring to directed people's attention to the Framework of Educational Standards and Learning Opportunities in the state of Vermont. My initial response: I don't necessarily dispute the value of such standards in principle, but I'm very antsy about the likely institutional response to a child who fails to meet them to the desired schedule. If I learn (for example) to describe words in terms of categories when I am three, not six, I am likely to be bored and switched off in English class; if I don't learn it until I am seven, I am likely to sense from the adults around me that there is a problem - to experience "failure" where no failure actually exists, and possibly to identify myself as "bad at English". I realise it's not as simple as that, and that educators may even have thought about this issue and developed strategies to address it , but both of these negative outcomes seem to me, nonetheless, a clear risk inherent in the system as it stands.)

They teach each other

Emer is learning make-believe much faster than Linnea did, and it's because she watches Linnea doing it. She copies what Linnea does - hard-legged plastic animals prickle their way up my shin and down my thigh and across the vast plain of my abdomen. Emer says her animals stop for mama milk; Linnea tells me to stop talking and be a lake.

Emer went from half a dozen words in daily use to thirty or more in less than a fortnight. She's experimenting with little two-word sentences. She has hauled out all her old words (she used to learn a word, use it for a week or so, then put it away while she learned a new one) and is working on some more.

Linnea likes to read signs, when we're out, and responds incredibly badly to criticism - correction or criticism (sometimes it's hard to work out which I've perpetrated) can result in a total lockdown and refusal to attempt further academic-type work.

Emer doesn't always want to learn what Linnea wants to teach. Linnea is learning to cope with this.

I don't WANT holes in my eyes

[crossposted from elsewhere because I initially forgot this existed]
Today I had to make Linnea a model of the human eyeball and demonstrate pupil dilation in different light levels. I made a ring of my hands and showed how the iris works, and looked at "the dark inside my hands" and the light outside the window so she could see different pupil sizes. She was interested, made her own models, drew some diagrams, and said she didn't WANT a pupil any more because she wanted eyes with no holes in.

Right.

Nursery school

I have a difficult attitude to school, it seems. Recently we visited the local Montessori nursery
and it was so gorgeous that I decided to let Linnea go for her free place, one afternoon a week. We sorted out all the paperwork and after the half-term break, she had her first day.

That was Monday - it's Wednesday now.

First, I was afraid we were going to be late, so I chivvied her along. Then I was afraid we were too early, until I saw some other mothers. Then I was worried I'd done something wrong, like hung her coat on the wrong hook, and then I didn't know how to say goodbye appropriately.

Luckily, none of this fazed her in the least.

Then when it was time to pick her up I had to phone ahead to make sure I had the right time, and when I did pick her up I was anxious about going to fetch her from wherever she was.


She enjoyed herself enormously, I think, and everything is fine. But I need to work on my issues. I called my mother, and she says she felt the same when we were in school.

Not yet, we need a 3 first!

We were adding up - I must get workbooks soon, I am running out of ideas - and suddenly Linnea decided to stop using the little Cuisenaire blocks and skip straight to writing the numbers in, filling the blocks in afterwards.

She finds it frustrating that she can't write her numbers accurately enough.

I think I need to design or obtain worksheets with dot-to-dot numbers and letters, and do something about worksheets for doing sums. As I was drawing little boxes for her to fill in I vaguely remembered having something similar for school but I'm not sure where to get it; none of what I've seen in high street stores hereabouts is appropriate.

Twenty-five minutes of solid sums is as much as she wanted to do today. That seemed like a lot to me - I was getting tired of facilitating her.

Bounded

It's easy to see from the three-year-old's behaviour that she's happy with firm, reliable rules, clear boundaries, and regular mealtimes.

And now the one-year-old is getting in on the act; she visibly tests boundaries, is confused when they're not enforced, and depends on their being there for her physical safety (stairgates, for one).

The kids need reliability, it seems. And freedom. And boundaries. And open spaces.

And sometimes, a mother who will just close her eyes, wait, and quietly go grey while they learn something new, like how to climb the swing-set without dropping the teddy or the carton of juice, or how to get down an 18-inch precipice hands-first.

Make me another number game!

So, real live schooly learning is happening, but we haven't called it that yet. It's playing numbers. Me and my new laminator are making worksheets with number games; I'm going to rope Daddy in for the shapes one. Counting, writing numbers, reading numbers, linking counted items to written numbers, place value...

I can't work out how to do place value without some tools. Rods, bricks, that sort of thing. I must find a source.

Oh - and the name of the number 0 is "Zero-nothing." I find this almost as cute as "The dark is brilliant, isn't it, Mammy?"

Teaching moments

Without my meaning to, O and I seem to have picked up the habit of teacher/learner-style interactions. I'm not entirely certain where the impetus comes from, but my feeling is that it's from him. I'm running with it (though trying to avoid being too teachery - rereading How Children Learn at the moment).

O is really into facts. He loves geographical stuff, placenames, where people live, looking at maps, his globe, and so on. His obsession with farms and animals has given way to an equally intense interest in trains (thanks, Thomas and Friends). He asks questions constantly when we're reading, and just randomly when things occur to him. I think he's realised (a) that there's an awful lot of interesting information out there, and (b) that one of the most efficient means of accessing it is to ask us. "Look it up on the Internet!" he's taken to saying.

So, in the past couple of days, I've looked up beavers (carefully!), planets, "do pigs have chins?" and "what do mice eat?" (he wasn't at all interested in the results of the first two searches, I think because too much time elapsed between his request and the first opportunity to get to a computer). At bedtime tonight I agreed that we'd look up hot air balloons tomorrow, and possibly Mount Rushmore as well. (We were being the stone faces of George Washington (him) and Thomas Jefferson (me) at the time. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.)

It's not all one-way information. Yesterday we had a discussion at dinner about the distinction between pasta and noodles, during which we found Italy and east Asia on the globe. Regarding Asia, and how far away it is from Ireland, he remarked, "Aeroplanes can fly anywhere, so you could use an aeroplane to go there."

I think I'm recording this because it seems to be a new phase, and one that's closer to what the mainstream might think of as "learning" than most of what's gone before. I can see the shape of an unschooling life more clearly from here.

It looks good to me.

All the big kids go to school

This morning, Linnea informed Rob that Ernest and Buttercup go to school. No, they don't. But she's sure that all Big Kids do, and they are both bigger'n she is, so...

Thing is, they're our main contact with the Home Education community! Also an excellent source of childcare and isopropanol.

There's a lot out there about school.

Lately, I 'ave mostly been...

Learning, obv.

Mainly, learning stuff I didn't know my kid could do. Like rearranging the jumbled letters of words to get the right spellings. She did "apple" for a friend recently.

And she counts. And plays complicated role-play games with numbers. And draws eyes with pupils, irises, and lashes. She repeats words accurately when asking strangers to explain themselves (today's word was "concentrating" as in "Look! Look at my am concentrating!") and likes to help women dress and undress their (usually sleeping) babies.

The baby kid - minnaun, máis é do thoil é - is learning to signal aye and nay, and said "Hello" to me today. It's a word she hears often enough, I suppose.

Restraint

I'm thoroughly committed to unschooling, but my own upbringing (academic household, interaction with children very focussed on teaching and testing - though I doubt they'd put it in precisely that way) and rampant perfectionism (working on that) occasionally undermine my practice. Over the past few weeks I've been finding it hard to ignore the Oyster's latest phase in pronunciation, whereby he speaks much less clearly than he was doing a couple of months ago. He swallows syllables, drops consonants and homogenises vowels. We still understand him (most of the time), and so I don't consider it defensible to try to persuade him to speak more distinctly.

Defensible or not, however, I've cracked a few times. For instance, "tell a story about..." is currently pronounced (approximately) dalladawbow, and I've once or twice found myself trying to pretend I don't understand, or stalling over starting the story until he says it "properly".

Doesn't work. It doesn't achieve its (ostensible) primary aim, which is to make him realise that he's speaking indistinctly and correct himself; it also doesn't achieve its (ostensible) secondary aim, which is to make me feel better. Instead, he gets frustrated, and I concede that I know what he's saying. Oh well.

(I'm reminded of an incident from my mother's childhood, when at the age of six or so she suddenly developed a lisp. My grandmother - not the world's most laid-back parent - was terribly worried by this, and had my mother Seen At Once by the finest speech specialist in the land. Whereupon it turned out that a girl in her class had a lisp, and she thought it was really cool.)

Anyway. At dinner this evening, we had a genuine misunderstanding. We'd been talking about a book, and the Oyster, at a pause in the conversation, said, "Mama help O. with vweeding."

"Yes, I'll help you with reading when you're going to bed," I said.

A few minutes later, he repeated, "Mama help O. with vweeding."

This time, I wasn't so sure that I knew what he meant. I asked him if he meant "reading", and he said, "No, vweeding."

Then I got it. "Oh, feeding! Sorry, love, I thought you meant reading."

"Feeding," he said - perfectly enunciated. It was the first time I'd heard him do a successful initial "f".

So I fed him a few forkfuls of not very cohesive quiche.

Then at bedtime, we were settling down to read The Snail and the Whale, and the Oyster remarked, "O. says ’nail."

"Yes, that's right," I said. "You find it easier to say ’nail than snail."

"Snail," he said. "Snail." He grinned, clearly very pleased. We congratulated him.

I'll be interested to see how this one unfolds.

Propaganda

We've joined the Irish Home Education Network, and I was sitting on the sofa today reading an article in the newsletter that was making me unexpectedly rageous about the idiocies of mainstream schooling.¹ I came to the end of the article, and N. caught my eye and raised an eyebrow, and I said, "So, school, yeah? It's all bad."

Whereupon the Oyster, who is two and seven months, exclaimed, "School is not all bad!"

Radzer: OK, no, it's not all bad, all the time, but I don't like school.
Oyster: Mama doesn't like school. N. likes school.
Radzer: No, N. doesn't like school either.
Oyster: He does.
Radzer: N., do you like school?
N. (who happens to be the most equivocal person in the history of humankind; expecting him to make a definitive statement - much less a condemnation - is a non-starter): Hmmm. Well, I'd have to say that, on the whole, I find myself unable to enjoy a positive relationship with it in all its aspects.
Radzer: That means he doesn't like school.
Oyster: Tell a story about O. was on the school bus with all the other children, and Eddie was driving it!

So I did.

I wouldn't mind,² only this is a boy who watches next to no TV, and whose pro-school book collection is (as far as I know - there have been a few grandmother imports recently) limited to I Am Too Absolutely Small for School (featuring Charlie and Lola), which makes me gnash somewhat because it's about the older male teaching the younger female that she's All Wrong, so I don't read it much.

And yet somehow, the propaganda has found a way in. Already. Sigh.

¹ It was about a trip by a group of home-educated children to an exhibition called "Planet Aqua", where the staff spiel was clearly designed to disguise the educational material so that the children would learn something in spite of themselves, and about how this view - that you need to trick children if you want them to learn - is endemic and unquestioned in our society. Full of anecdotes about people saying "X is great - they don't even realise it's educational". Nothing startling or new, but it pushed my buttons in a big way.
² Lie.

What did you learn on the Beeb today, dear little child of mine?

"There was food in the kitchen of our rocket, and there was plates, and a table, and a bathroom, and a other room, and a dining room. Oh no! You agotten your space boots! There! Now, Emer's space boots. There! There. That's a only thing for a frog."

Dressed in saggy, soggy nappy, and a sleeveless vest (undershirt for Americans): "You watcha me do my ballet?" Then she held her arms out in fourth position and her legs were - well, sort of like a plie from second position but with the left foot raised, very Indian Dance looking. Then she did roly-poly arms, then a drumming move. "My have two - three moves!" she declared.

We cruelly made her have a new nappy anyway.

In The Night Garden is a new CBeebies TV show, made by Ragdoll, who also made the Teletubbies. It is entirely incomprehensible, impenetrable, and dreamlike, and Linnea adores it so much that I have managed to find time to have her watch it four times in a day. Twice.

It contains the phrase "Isn't that a pip?" which is apparently good, though in my lexicon to give someone the pip is bad.

Growing Girls

We are teaching Linnea femininity. Not quite the submissive, learn-to-be-a-devoted-wife-and-helpmeet kind of femininity, but she's definitely keen on being a girl and on all things girlish.

It's all about hair. She doesn't have a great deal of hair - she has almost none, in fact, three years old at the end of April and never a haircut needed - but what she has she wants girlified. Her cousins have blonde curls in bunches, wispy fringes held out of their eyes with clips, cute and feminine and utterly impossible for Linnea.

I got her some little snappy clips, but they slid out of her fringe. I got her some smaller ones which worked a little better. I figured out how to achieve bunches that last long enough for her to admire them in the mirror - twizzle the hair into a bunch over her ear by swirling my finger in it, then use toothed, bulldog-style clips (with little flowers on) to hold them in place. Cute.

Today she had a birthday party to go to, so I tried one last thing. I got her a narrow little hairband, the horseshoe-shaped kind covered in fabric.

Frankly, it looks dreadful. But she feels so girly!

Home education as distinct from home-schooling

I don't like the phrase "home-schooling" because I don't like the verb school unless it's applied to fish. I don't much like "training" either, applied to children.

I home-educate. That is, I offer my children opportunities for learning, and sure enough they learn. Linnea finds opportunities to learn that I hadn't seen coming; that's what being two is all about! I provide a safe environment, up to a point, and plenty of interactions with people who are not exactly the same as us. We have books, a kitchen, a garden, and pets. We have television and radio and art materials.

When my two-years-ten-months-old daughter, just the other day, walked into the room with a sippy cup of water, with the lid on, I asked my guest "Did you fill that for her?"

No, he hadn't.

Later she walked in with some bread and butter. The butter was not exactly spread, more daubed; we discovered that that was because there were no knives readily available and she used the handle of a teaspoon.

I am so proud I might die.

Elastics

I learned to play elastics at school. We had two games: infants played "England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, inside, outside, off the rails" and older children played "Frenchies," which had no rhyme but a series of jumps up to ten. Both were played on two parallel elastics, usually made by having a child stand legs-apart at each end of a loop.

One: Straddle the nearest elastic. Do not jump off. This is the only number where you don't jump off afterwards.
Two: Jump in place (one) then straddle the other elastic (two).
Three: Both feet in the middle, both feet on an elastic, both feet outside.

Four: One foot on the nearest one, one foot on the other one, both in the middle, both outside.

Five: First jump onto the nearest elastic so that your right foot is underneath and your left foot is standing on the elastic. Then jump forwards to the other elastic, left foot underneath and right foot standing on the elastic. That's one and two. Jump back (three), forwards (four), and back again (five).

Six: Straddle the near elastic. Jump up and cross your legs and land. Turn without raising your feet. Repeat on the other elastic. This one has a mini-rhyme; it's "hot cross buns."

Seven: Stand with your back to the elastics. Put your right leg back, hooking the near elastic with your ankle so that as you step back it slides up to your knee. Put your right foot behind the other elastic, so one is behind your knee and the other is in front of your ankle. That's one. Now jump and swap legs repeatedly for two 'til seven.

Eight: As for three, it's centre, on top, outside - each jump to the centre is counted. NO pausing allowed.

Nine: As five, start by jumping to the near elastic with right foot under, left foot over. Jump to the far elastic while turning 180 degrees, but you'll be glad to know that you don't also have to swap feet. Always jumping in the same direction, do nine of 'em! Pausing is frowned upon.

Ten: Looks very simple. Straddle the near elastic, then jump 180 degrees to straddle it again. Count ten jumps, either always jumping in the same direction or changing direction after 3, 6, and 9.

We used to play these alone, too, using chairlegs to hold the elastics. And there were degres of difficulty; the elastics moved up from ankles to knees to thighs - even waists for some people - and then started again at ankles on a narrower guage.

If anyone over 12 can do them all, please let me know.

Square-Eyes

She's been watching "A Bug's Life" over and over and over - sometimes twice a day. She talks about it, in little snatches. She refuses to let me skip the scary parts. We discuss them as best we can later on, never in the middle of the night when she wakes homesick and ill, but often in the daytime when we're out walking or indoors playing or reading or doing boring household stuff.

It's got some pretty big themes; it's fairly obviously about The Oppressed Majority, which is nice because I've been reading various books about South Africa lately, and my aunt has just come back from Zimbabwe. There's also a little bit about small weak children growing up into big strong adults; she's not sure she wants Emer to get big but she's intermittently keen on the idea that she will herself. And she likes it when the grasshoppers (oppressive minority) get their come-uppance but doesn't like the grasshopper-on-grasshopper violence one leetle bit. She'd prefer honour among thieves.

The biggest thing, of course, is violent death - squishing and being eaten by birds. I'm never sure how I feel about her watching things with or about explicit death.

It's strange that something I feel so guilty about - parking her in front of a screen for hours so that I can cope with the rest of life - is so obviously interesting and stretching for her.

Small narcoleptic

I heard a sad story recently. Some friends of ours - part of my husband's old college gang - have a five-year-old daughter, who went to school last September. At a party, I asked her mother how it was going, and got a long and worried response.

I don't know this child well at all, but I gather she's always been extremely shy. Indeed, her parents decided, for this reason, to wait until she turned five to send her to school. She has a more outgoing younger brother, and in situations like playgroup she's been able to rely on him, to some extent, to get by socially.

Now she's at a standard-model school. Academically, she's fine. But a few months into the term, the teacher came to her parents, worried. Every time the class is asked to do less structured group activities, such as art or PE, she falls asleep. Her parents had noticed that she seemed more than usually tired, all right, and prone to sleeping during the day. But they'd put it down to the big change, and they hadn't realised that it had become so frequent at school.

And what are they to do? It's genuine sleep, not put on. Her mother, telling me about it, used language like "it took us a while to figure out what she was up to" - apparently thinking of it as a trick, more or less. She didn't have a solution.

I said vague things about being sure that it would sort itself out eventually, and how actually, when you think about it, it's a perfectly natural reaction to an overwhelming situation, and how she obviously isn't comfortable with full-on peer-group interaction, and really what you'd need would be a very small class, where she might be better able to get used to it at her own pace, but sure, where would you find something like that, and so forth.

It seems obvious to me that a mainstream, age-segregated, thirty-strong class is the wrong place for this child - and equally obvious that it would take a lot more than strategic sleepiness to make her parents consider any alternative. All I can think is that she's come up with a strikingly intelligent short-term response to her problem. Falling asleep is such a total, personal withdrawal - and such an (essentially) unobjectionable thing for a small child to do. But of course it will do her no good at all in the long term, because of the situation in which she has been placed. She will just have to learn to cope, somehow. I'm sure she will. But I wish she didn't have to.

Secret Skills: Games

One of the things that really makes me believe in child-led education is how much stuff she knows that I haven't taught her and was unaware she knew. The reading is one thing (she's never let me catch her at it again but has occasionally known things I only knew because I read, eg, a sign) and another is playing Jenga.

Yup, my 2-years-9-months-old plays Jenga, removing bricks from low down on the stack and putting them carefully on top in order. She's quite good at it. She also plays Snap, but doesn't believe that the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Diamonds are a pair. She thought the Ace and Two of Hearts might be, but wasn't happy about it. Perhaps we'll stick to her TV character cards in future.

Jigsaws are, of course, old hat, but we haven't allowed her to try Rob's World's Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzle (Clownfish) yet. She lost interest in Snakes and Ladders quite quickly, so a really tough jigsaw mightn't be her style. She's keen on Mousetrap. I often find traces of complicated games set up - she makes gardens of her Lego and builds animals and people to live in them, for example, or buildings.

And then there are the voices. She has several, enough for a whole host of characters, and she doesn't do any of them if she knows I'm listening.

Secrets!

Books to investigate: Máire Mullarney

My mother remembered her name, we searched Amazon, and lo and behold we have a copy of Anything School Can Do You Can Do Better (The story of a family who learned at home) (ISBN 0006369316) which I am reading with great interest. She used a lot of Montessori stuff - I really must investigate Montessori at some point - but found that her children were too far ahead to take advantage of Montessori schools when they were old enough to attend them.

(Another interesting thing that happened recently is that Linnea was spotted by Radegund reading aloud from a book of Oyster's. Apparently she was slowly reading the common words, a repeated phrase along the lines of "Yes, if you're not too [loud, hoppy]" etc. Now I need to replicate this somewhere I can observe it myself, but preliminary questioning indicates that no-one had read the book to Linnea in the time, so it does seem like she recognises some words, at least.

She'll be three in only four months' time.