Wednesday 1 June 2011

Better teaching for home educated children or no teaching at all


I recently spent the evening with an old friend. We have broadly similar backgrounds and outlooks on life, in fact we went to school together. He is a militant atheist, whereas I go to church every Sunday. It struck me, not for the first time, how curious it is that two people can both have access to exactly the same information and examine the same evidence and then come to diametrically opposed opinions about what it all means. I look at the world and see the work of a benevolent Creator-God; he looks at the same world and sees a complete absence of the numinous and divine. I cannot help but notice a similarity between this and the situation with the methods people use for educating their children at home.


Here is the common ground which I share with many people who eschew formal teaching and systematic instruction of their home educated children. We agree that schools often make learning a stultifyingly dull task and that this has the effect of making many children reject education. We think that schools are a pretty bad way of educating our children and prefer to assume responsibility for the job ourselves. We find that teachers at schools often manage to make even the most interesting topic boring and that their teaching methods are not very effective. We want our children to have more time to explore aspects of the world that they find interesting; for them to be free to pursue their own enthusiasms. We do not like the regimentation at school and have an idea that the teaching there is geared to the lowest level and neglects those of greater intellectual ability.


My conclusion from all this is that my daughter deserved better and more effective teaching than that available at the local maintained school. The conclusion which some other parents draw is that their children should not be taught at all.


To me, when a system or machine is not working well, the obvious solution is to improve it and try to make it work better. If the teaching is not working properly, I assume that something is wrong with it and that one must try and make it better. Others seem to think that the answer is to abandon it entirely! It appears to me so obvious that if something is defective or not working as best it could, then the first step would be to try and mend it, to see if it can be improved with a little tinkering. My first impulse is definitely not scrap it without trying to fix it and then try and make do without the thing completely! This though seems to me to be precisely what some home educating parents are up to when they rail against formal teaching and structured education by the use of a syllabus. Having found one system of teaching which does not work very well, their answer is apparently to say to themselves: 'This method of teaching does not work; therefore I shall reject teaching'. This is a bit rummy and I can't help but think that either they or I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

9 comments:

  1. From your last paragraph, I guess your decision would depend on your preference for machine-tooled or handcrafted products. Or indeed, ones that are crafted by their natural environments with no human manipulation whatsoever.

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  2. 'Or indeed, ones that are crafted by their natural environments with no human manipulation whatsoever.'

    Which is fine for trees, bunny rabbits, clouds and so on. Not so good for manufactured goods in general and particularly not human beings. How, I cannot help but wonder, would a parent go about raising a child with no human manipulation whatsoever? Presumably by never saying to the kid, clean your teeth now or time to eat; let alone 'happy Birthday' or 'well done'.
    Simon.

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  3. Simon wrote,
    "Here is the common ground which I share with many people who eschew formal teaching and systematic instruction of their home educated children."

    Are there many home educators that eschew all formal teaching and systematic instruction, especially of older children? We autonomously educate but this includes formal teaching and systematic instruction. I've only really heard of home educators who only use informal child-led learning for quite young children. All child-led and parent-led home educating families I know with older children include at least some formal teaching and systematic instruction within their approach. I can imagine that a completely informal education can work well for young children, I think you've said you used this approach a lot yourself when Simone was young. But I'm not so sure it would work so well when a child is older. All of ours have chosen a more formal approach for at least some topics when older. For instance, one child was particularly interested in biology so they worked through a biology text book (with help from parents) because this seemed the best way to cover the material to them.

    "It appears to me so obvious that if something is defective or not working as best it could, then the first step would be to try and mend it, to see if it can be improved with a little tinkering. My first impulse is definitely not scrap it without trying to fix it and then try and make do without the thing completely!"

    This was my first approach too. However, after lots of tinkering and experimentation we learnt from our children that a parent-led approach did not work for them but a child-led approach did. As I've said though, this included formal learning from text books and teachers along with more informal learning, so maybe you are not talking about us or autonomous educators in general?

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  4. 'so maybe you are not talking about us or autonomous educators in general?'

    I could hardly have been talking about you, since I do not know who your are! There certainly are home edcuating parents who avoid teaching their children unless the kids actually want it. It was such parents who I had in mind.
    Simon.

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  5. "There certainly are home edcuating parents who avoid teaching their children unless the kids actually want it."

    That would be us then. But as I say, we didn't abandon the school model without first attempting to tinker and experiment in order to improve it. However, no amount of tinkering seemed to work if we stuck to a parent-led approach. The child-led approach worked really well but did include teaching and structured learning all through.

    As I say, I've not met any home educator that has not include any teaching or structured learning within their approach whether they are completely parent-led, use a mixed approach or are completely child-led (autonomous) except possibly when the children are very young, and we've probably met nearly 100 home educators over the years at various groups and camps. How many home educators do you think there are that have NEVER used a structured or teaching approach?

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  6. Simon, what would you have done if your initial tinkering had not worked? How long would you have continued tinkering and failing your child before you tried a completely different approach? A few months, a year, a few years? Of can you not imagine a situation where tinkering would have failed to produce a method that looks similar to the school model but works well for your child?

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  7. 'Of can you not imagine a situation where tinkering would have failed to produce a method that looks similar to the school model but works well for your child?'

    I have no liking at all for the school model and do not for amoment suppose that this is the best model for most children. The answer to your question is that I tried all sorts of different approaches. Some worked better than others and I tended to use the ones which worked. I did not start from an ideological viewpoint. I have known parents who would not even attempt to teach their child to read because: 'We're autonomous'.
    Simon.

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  8. "I have no liking at all for the school model and do not for amoment suppose that this is the best model for most children."

    The school model is adult-led education. Your approach was parent-led education. How was your approach so different from the school model? You say yourself that you 'tinkered' with the standard teaching model, which implies that you didn't change it much.

    "I have known parents who would not even attempt to teach their child to read because: 'We're autonomous'."

    That would have been us, at least until they wanted to be taught to read. If a child wants to be taught to read and the parent refuses ('because we're autonomous') they are obviously not autonomous! Our children all learnt to read at various ages (3-14) by their own choice and are all in higher education or are starting soon. Why do you think our approach is faulty or wrong?

    We started out from a position where teacher-led education had failed and parent-led teaching was failing. If you can call wanting to find an approach that works, ideological, then I suppose we were. Should we have continued just 'tinkering' with this approach despite a lack of success? How long for?

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  9. "That would have been us, at least until they wanted to be taught to read. If a child wants to be taught to read and the parent refuses ('because we're autonomous') they are obviously not autonomous!"

    Obviously this would have been in a resource rich environment where they would have had books read to them often (I don't know any child who doesn't enjoy being read to), hundreds of books available, reading being modelled by elders and siblings, educational trips, games and activities, etc, etc as I'm sure all home educators provide. Children are not raised in a vacuum.

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