Friday 3 June 2011

Suppose my child rejects adult-led education, what do I do then as a home educating parent?

Somebody commenting here asked the above question a couple of times. I did not respond, because the question itself seems to me to be manifestly absurd. If the child rejects adult-led education, then you are doing something wrong. The child's best interests are not served by abandoning all attempts to direct the course of the education if this happens, but by asking yourself how you can improve the education which you are providing. Let's look at a practical example to see what I mean by this.


I am not a great fan of the idea of the global warming scare. The temperature of the planet has always fluctuated and the ice caps have grown and melted over time. However, if children are going to learn about this hypothesis, they should at least understand what it is they are being invited to believe. What most of them seem to believe, as a result of poor teaching in schools, is that the ice at the north pole will melt and that this will have the effect of raising sea levels and flooding coastal areas elsewhere in the world. They believe this because they are taught ineffectively by ignorant people who don't really understand the subject themselves. This is poor quality adult-led education as delivered in schools.


So, let's have a science lesson. Your child has not asked for a science lesson, but you feel she should have one anyway. Gosh, I hope she doesn't reject my adult-led learning! The reason that children cannot be expected to understand the mechanics of global warming and climate change is that they have had no direct experience of ice caps and tropical oceans. The thing is so far removed from their everyday life that it is pure abstraction. Tell your child that you are going to make some polar ice melt and ask them to guess what will happen. They don't need to do anything. You are not asking them to open a book or pick up a pen; just watch you make a fool of yourself. Take a large glass jug and fill it with water. Then put in a handful of ice cubes. This is our ocean and ice cap. Mark the level of the water on the side of the jug and ask your kid what will happen to the water level when the ice melts. Will it go up, down or remain the same. Der! it will go up of course. Why is my mother wasting my time asking silly questions? Of course, the water level remains the same. If your child shows any interest in why this should be, you can explain the mechanism involved and they will then see that if all the ice at the north pole melted, it would make no difference at all to sea levels.


Now you can demonstrate the real mechanism which could be implicated in rising sea levels. Fill the jug with boiling water and again mark the level. Ask your child what will happen as the water cools. The level falls. Explain that hot water takes up more space than cold water and that if the sea level did rise as a result of global warming it would be as a result of this thermal expansion and nothing to do with melting ice. If you are lucky, he will ask why hot things take up more space than cold things. This gives you a chance to explain that all matter is made up of little particles that are jiggling about. The more they jiggle about, the more room they need. Heat is just the molecules jiggling about more and more, thus needing more room.


You can go on to do things like put a glass of earth and a glass of water on a sunny windowsill and see which heats up more quickly and which retains the heat more effectively. This has implications for the whole global warming business. You can put a large glass bowl upside down on a sunny lawn and then see how dramatically the temperature inside will rise. You have demonstrated the greenhouse effect.


None of this science requires your child to ask any initial questions; you have chosen to teach science today, not her. If it is done in a lively way as a series of games, I cannot imagine any child free of pathological abnormalities of mind who would not be interested in watching what you are doing. They have all heard about global warming and are worried about the ice melting and the implications for polar bears; of course they will be interested. You can also grab their attention by explaining that everything they are hearing about the melting of the ice caps is quite wrong and this can start a wider discussion about the extent to which they should trust newspapers and textbooks. For the child who has been put off learning by a school, this will really catch his attention.


The above science lesson is suitable for any child over the age of eight or nine. I simply cannot imagine a child who would not gain something from it, always provided that you do not present it in terms of; 'Now we are going to learn science'. As part of a series of games in the kitchen, the kid will not even think of the word 'science'; it is just something really interesting that his mother is showing him. And it allows him to steal a march on his schooled friends by telling them that they have been taught a pack of nonsense in their lessons!

10 comments:

  1. At least one of my children would reject it instantly because she loathes science. She doesn't care why things happen and doesn't want/need(in her opinion) to know any of that to be a thriving human being. So I would have her sulking, shrugging and tutting throughout the entire thing. If she sat through it without walking off, she would go on to be completely nonplussed by it and would shrug and say 'whatever'.
    What you didn't do is answer your own question - what does a parent do if their child rejects adult-led learning?

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  2. 'What you didn't do is answer your own question - what does a parent do if their child rejects adult-led learning?'

    Well, I gave one answer to the question, which was to try a different type of adult-led learning. Obviously there are other approaches. I will never foret the time that i tried to engage a child's interest by asking brightly, 'Have you ever wondered why such and such happens?' He stared at me coldly and said 'No'. That was the end of that lesson. I suppose that for a child who rejects science determinedly, I would start through an activity which she herself enjoyed; perhaps baking. The changes which take place in eggs when they are heated are chemical changes, as opposed to the physical changes in water when it freezes and thaws. I have an idea that this might provide and opening.

    Simon.

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  3. Simon said "I would start through an activity which she herself enjoyed; perhaps baking. "

    But this is exactly what parents mean by child-led learning. The starting point is what the child enjoys or asks questions about, not what the adult decides they are going to learn. They don't see the child's interests or questions as 'providing an opening [for teaching the child things they ought to know/things on the GCSE syllabus]' but as an opportunity to extend the child's knowledge about the world they live in.

    Your approach was successful because it meshed well with the way your daughter liked to learn; for parents like C, the same approach would not be effective.

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  4. So you really can't imagine a child who does not want to follow an adult led approach.

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  5. "I would start through an activity which she herself enjoyed"

    My cooking loving child would not have been interested in the science behind cooking at all. They would have switched off very quickly! However, they were interested in the science behind earthquakes and we enjoyed researching that together.There isn't time to learn all there is to know about science in a lifetime let alone a childhood. Does it really matter which bits they learn as long as they are learning? In my experience they learn enough to make sense of the world they live in and to enable them to learn more in future.

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  6. Simon wrote,
    "What most of them seem to believe, as a result of poor teaching in schools, is that the ice at the north pole will melt and that this will have the effect of raising sea levels and flooding coastal areas elsewhere in the world."

    Maybe not the north pole but ice melting in other parts of the world could well have an effect on sea levels. Melting glaciers in New Zealand and Norway, Greenland's ice sheets along with with the 2.5km thick ice on Antarctica might be expected to have some effect, for instance.

    But however interesting you or I may find this, some children are just not interested in that particular issue no matter how you dress it up and disguise it. Sometimes children just have better things to be doing with their time (in their view).

    Simon wrote,
    "If the child rejects adult-led education, then you are doing something wrong."

    Just claiming that a parent is crap at teaching if they say it doesn't work for their child/family is a cop out. You could just as easily claim that a child who thinks their parents were wrong to beat them were just not beaten in the correct way. We both know that this claim has been made (the Pearl's daughter has made this claim, for instance) and it's no different to your theory. Just because you haven't experienced something doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

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  7. "The child's best interests are not served by abandoning all attempts to direct the course of the education if this happens, but by asking yourself how you can improve the education which you are providing."

    Why the automatic assumption that their education needs improving? A child-led education has enabled all of my children to gain entry to higher education on courses of their choice, continuing to follow interests that they have developed over the years. Why do you assume they would have done better if their education had been controlled by adults?

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  8. How about this for a theory of HE?

    Some adults are natural born teachers, able to inspire children even if the teacher is not particularly interested in the subject matter themselves because they are such good teachers (or maybe this ability includes an intense curiosity about the world such that most subjects interest them). However, not all adults can be natural born teachers (we only have to remember our own school days to know this). Even someone who loves their subject may not be able to inspire others. However, there are also adults that are great at organisation or facilitation of learning for others. Of course all adults will tend to have varying levels of skill in all these areas.

    Then we have children, some of whom love being presented with interesting/inspirational material, others who rebel against any such control of their time and many who have a mix of these, possibly varying depending on their level of interest in a subject, their mood on the day, their current age, their past experiences of education and learning, etc.

    When these two (or 3+ in larger families with more adults involved) variables mix you will get a wide range of approaches developing as they interact. Thus a natural born teacher with a child who thrives on being presented with interesting and inspirational material will probably gravitate naturally towards a parent-led approach. Whilst in families with an adult who tends towards organisation or facilitation and a child who rebels against control, the autonomous approach is more likely. The majority of parents and children probably fall somewhere between these two extremes accounting for the majority of home educators who follow a mixed approach.

    Attempting to suggest that a natural born teacher with a child who loves being presented with interesting and inspirational material should follow an autonomous approach or that a facilitating parent with a rebellious child should follow a parent-led approach seems doomed to failure or at least an impoverished experience for all involved. It would also be difficult for someone at one extreme to understand the experience of someone at the opposite end. If I can inspire my child, why can't you? If my child rebels against control of their learning/time, why doesn't yours?

    Does this ring true for anyone else?

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