Sunday 27 December 2009

Schooling versus home education

I have been reading with interest what Tania Berlow has to say on the subject of the supplementary data which Graham Badman solicited from local authorities in September. On the matter of full-time education she says;

"many Home Educators cannot and do not segment their children's learning experiences into time units nor is it timetabled – However many Home Educators consider their children to be learning 24/7."

Presumably many parents of schoolchildren feel the same way and believe that their children too are learning all the time. Why would their education stop promptly when school ends in the afternoon? I have been mulling this over in my mind apropos of the horrifying statistic that a sixth of boys in secondary school score lower for reading at the age of fourteen than they did when they left primary school at eleven. In other words, three years of full-time education seems to have harmed their literacy skills! Is the situation any different with those educated at home? Is it better, worse or pretty much the same?

Of course, children taught at home do not have to do the SATS or take GCSEs and so there is no objective measure of their ability at reading, writing or anything else. We do know however, that the educational attainment of children and young people is inextricably linked with the amount and quality of teaching which they receive. This is why children in good schools with good teachers tend to do better than those being taught poorly in bad schools. The quality of the teaching being the key factor in whether children do badly or well when they are at school.

We also know of course that in many home educating families, teaching is not routinely provided; it is available "on demand" as it were, if and when the child specifically requests it. This means that structured education for such children is likely to be sporadic and intermittent. The onus really is on home educators to demonstrate that this type of on and off instruction is more effective than the steady, day after day teaching which is given to children in schools. It may be a more efficient way of educating children, but this is by no means certain.

A number of local authorities use as their yardstick a figure of twenty hours teaching each week and they categorise those children not receiving this amount as not being in receipt of a full-time education. Is this fair? In her commentary on the statistics, Ms. Berlow claims that many home educating parents cannot segment their children's learning into time units. I am guessing that by time units, she means hours. If so, I am a little puzzled as to why any parent able to count to ten or twenty should be unable to calculate the number of hours spent by their child on various activities. After all, most of us could easily count the hours spent by our children watching television or writing or reading. It might not be precise down to the minute, but it would surely be possible to the nearest hour. This reluctance to count the number of hours spent in various ways is curious.

It seems reasonable to me that local authorities should expect a certain amount of teaching each week for children, whether schooled or home educated. As I say, the quality of teaching seems to be the most important factor in children's educational progress at school and it is difficult to see why this should be any different for children being taught at home. few people would disagree with the proposition that twenty hours or more of high quality teaching each week for a child would be a good thing for the child's education!

27 comments:

  1. "The onus really is on home educators to demonstrate that this type of on and off instruction is more effective than the steady, day after day teaching which is given to children in schools."

    Why *more* efficient?

    "A number of local authorities use as their yardstick a figure of twenty hours teaching each week and they categorise those children not receiving this amount as not being in receipt of a full-time education. "

    But that's class teaching. How many LAs provide 20 hours of one-to-one tuition when a child must be taught by the LA at home? I believe they aim for 5 hours a week though many provide less, some providing as little as one hour per week and parents often have to fight for that much! I've just read that Cambridgeshire offers *up to* 5 hours home tuition per week to children who cannot attend school for more than 3 weeks.

    Why should home educators have to provide a better education for longer than the LA does when it provides the education?

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  2. I don't know how to draw a distinction between an 'educational' activity and one that isn't 'educational' and I suspect I'm not alone in this.

    Clearly, if a child acquires new knowledge or a new skill, that would be classed as educational by most people - unless of course, it's something illegal, immoral or possibly fattening. What about learning to play a new computer game - is that educational? Or, re-reading a book. Or re-visiting a favourite museum. Or going for a walk? We've had some very informative conversations whilst walking. Then there are the times when the child appears to be doing nothing, but is actually engaged in deep reflection, as in Darwin pacing up and down his gravel path.

    My son does a great deal of deep reflection. He needs that time to rehearse and assimilate new information, but it often looks as if he is only dangling from the sofa upside down whilst twiddling a lego brick. He will then trounce this misperception by coming out with his version of string theory, or a coherent explanation of why Shakespeare might have seen Gertrude's marriage to her husband's brother as incestuous.

    Then of course, there's the issue of how long children in school are spending actually being taught, never mind educated. Is lining up for assembly educational? Or twiddling your thumbs whilst your teacher goes over something for the third time for the benefit of a class member who happened to be otherwise engaged the first and second times? Or going round the class reading out scores in a maths test? I dunno. You tell me.

    And since most school practices appear to have arisen by accidents of history anyway - school hours determined by teachers' workload, public holidays and the need for helping hands at harvest time, rather than the optimum learning conditions for children, I can't see why 20 hours is such a magic figure.

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  3. The internet has changed all the rules, Simon. Teaching a class of 20, 30 or 40 students is hard work compared to the educational efficiency of a self-motivated individual learning immersively at the speed of thought through digital technology as I've watched my son doing for the past seven years.

    There's no "on and off" instruction with that at all. There's never a case of, "Oh, now we ought to study this particular topic" or whatever. The flood of informational input from using the technology as we go about our daily lives is too intense for old fashioned ideas such as categorisation. Learn first, observe what's been learned second. And categorise it by topic if you really can't resist the urge, but that's not crucial in my experience. To think about giving attention to specific subjects at specific times would slow down the learning. Schools are good at that. I won't have it.

    The 'big issue', as far as I'm concerned, is who gets to decide exactly what it is that my child learns. Should that be left entirely to him? Certainly he leads and I follow, but I also suggest and recommend, with a willingness to take no for an answer, and thoughts on adult life and society are always up for discussion. Others do it differently. Should it ultimately be determined by what's needed to acquire a desired qualification? Should what my son learns be imposed on us by a representative of an educational system that my son opted out of in 2002 and which has since ceased to exist as far as our personal awareness is concerned? Absolutely not. What on earth has my son's life got to do with that? That these people I read about but have never met are wetting their pants because OMG everybody could be learning different things (including perhaps all the stuff so many adults complain that they never learned at school but subsequently discovered they needed to function successfully in adult society) and OMG if we can't measure something how can it be real? - that's their problem.

    Schools have become the laggards of the education world and the antithesis of everything the digital revolution has gifted the world in the way of unprecedented educational opportunities. For schoolists to believe in 2010 that what they do is the standard against which we should all measure how we educate our children is laughable.

    And as long as schoolists continue to insist on educating children by gathering mobs of them into a single physical location and telling them what to be interested in and what to not be interested in their way of doing things will continue to fall further behind what's happening in the real world of education, where individualised learning any where any time in whatever way it suits the individual is inexorably becoming the norm.

    A way of learning that, as one person I read recently put it, has been pioneered by those parents who have allowed their children to follow the path of autonomous education.

    Who'da thunk it ten years ago? Not me.

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  4. All that has been said about school is perfectly true. I have never been a fan of this method of education, which is why I did not send my daughter to school! From agreeing that school is a wasteful and inefficient means of education, to asserting that teaching is unnecessary is too great a leap for me though. I believe that children do need to know certain things. They need to know the framework of history, with particular reference to the country in which they live. They need to have the basics of science and the ability to carry out arithmetical operations. They may, it is true, stumble across much of this on the Internet. The problem is with this approach though, that the Internet is such a vast place, with so many time wasting distractions, that a child let loose there might not focus upon the framework of history. He might instead wish to play games or read up about movie stars and footballers. It is a bit too much of a gamble to hope that they will acquire an education in this way, simply becuase it is possible to do so. So while I do not really think schools the best places for education, they are better than many of the alternatives.

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  5. "From agreeing that school is a wasteful and inefficient means of education, to asserting that teaching is unnecessary is too great a leap for me though. I believe that children do need to know certain things. They need to know the framework of history, with particular reference to the country in which they live."

    Not believing in an externally imposed curriculum (your second point in the above quote), isn't related to your first point (teaching being unnecessary). You constantly seem to link the two for no apparent reason. Plenty, if not all autonomous educators teach (at their child's request). I find it difficult to believe that any inquisitive child wouldn't get a basic grounding in all the areas you mention. This has certainly been the case in my experience. Maybe I would feel differently about autonomous eduction if my observations and experiences had been different?

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  6. In this case I link the idea of teaching with the idea of schooling because both Bob and Suzieg seem to agree that school is not effective, but neither of them say that they teach their children. The impressiona I get is that their children are learning independently, without teaching unless it has specifically been requested by the child. I am not in favour of schooling, but very much in favour of teaching intensively and cannot make out whether this is also the case with Bob and Suzieg.

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  7. "The impressiona I get is that their children are learning independently, without teaching unless it has specifically been requested by the child."

    A child asking to be taught something is exactly what I meant. Are you assuming that the child will not ask for teaching, or does this not count as teaching? Every autonomously home educated child I know (20+) has asked to be taught by others at various times throughout their education.

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  8. As far as my son's education is concerned, I don't do any teaching at all. Nor does his mother, though she's a university lecturer and tutor and very used to teaching. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that my son doesn't have formal lessons. I'm sure he's had many informal experiences that might qualify as a "lesson" or as "being taught". Who knows? I think differently to schoolists about these concepts these days.

    I could say that my son spends his time doing what he likes and not doing what he doesn't like, and chooses for himself what to be interested in and what to not be interested in, but it's never been a case of, "Oh just go off on your own and do your own thing". Or of not noticing what he does or doesn't do, what he knows or doesn't know. I usually refer to my son as "self-educated under my supervision". I share most of the adventure and I pay attention to feedback.

    Fundamentally, my son has a "learning" lifestyle. He learns constantly. About himself, about the society he lives in, about the world. It's incredibly easy to do in this day and age when we're surrounded by opportunities to acquire knowledge 24/7/365. At 14, my son is clearly far better educated for a successful adulthood than I was at his age whether self-appointed guardians of schoolism like it or not. And a "successful adulthood", however it may be defined from one person to the next, is what it's all about.

    I have found the experience most enlightening.

    But for the vast majority of people still, the idea of a child obtaining an education through a process that's "not school" - that ISN'T schooling - it's a big blank space in their minds, and blank spaces in people's understanding of the world they live in are scary places to be. They cause alarm and panic, as we've seen with Mr. Badman & Co.

    I don't have the blank spaces because I've "been there and done that" and I know what I know and that everything is just fine.

    What the majority needs to fill those scary blank spaces is, of course, education, is it not?

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  9. "Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that my son doesn't have formal lessons. I'm sure he's had many informal experiences that might qualify as a "lesson" or as "being taught". Who knows?"

    Maybe this is where some of the confusion stems from. If your son mentions something he has read and you discuss it with him, adding additional information in the process, or if you son asks you to explain something he is having trouble understanding (even if it only takes seconds or a few minutes), or mentions he is having trouble finding some information and you help him find it ('teaching' him how to do the same for himself in future almost as a by-product), I would call this teaching. Maybe others would only count sitting down for an hour to teach something pre-planned, decided and directed by the adult such as calculus or the influence of navigable waterways on the industrial revolution in the UK for instance, as 'teaching'?

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