Wednesday 18 July 2012

Home education in the primary years

A couple of days ago I posted a bit about my daughter’s early years education and revealed that we never had any sort of timetable. Time now to make an even more shocking confession; during the years of her primary education, we had no curriculum either!


I have in the past been a little puzzled as to why I would need, with a child under the age of eleven, any sort of formal document or plan for her education. I worked instead according to the principle of a wholly individualised education. I observed the things the child said, identified gaps in her knowledge or faults in her thinking and then worked to rectify them.

In practice, this meant that some chance remark of my daughter might show a horrible ignorance about some aspect of the world about which any reasonable person should be well informed. When she was nine, I realised in this way that she had not the least idea where electricity came from or how it was generated.

The following week, I took her to visit the windmill in Wimbledon, south London. We looked at the machinery and thought about the idea of rotary power. This also tied in with a question she had asked about how people made things before there were proper factories. In other words, it connected with her interest in history. Over the next few weeks, as we explored the generation of electricity, we also visited a farm to see wheat growing, acquired some wheat, visited the British Museum to see how flour was ground between two large stones in prehistoric times, before there were windmills and also carried out this operation for ourselves. This led on to baking our own bread.

Back to electricity, we visited a power station in Edmonton, north London, which produced electricity by burning rubbish. Here, the child could see the fires, the turbines and the spinning generators. Later that week, we built a generator of our own and saw how it could light up an LED. We dammed a stream in the forest and then watched how the narrow jet of water we produced could spin a little plastic windmill. This tied in with the visit to the windmill. We were both always glad any way of an excuse to dam a stream. Later on that year, we went on holiday to north Wales and found that there was a hydro-electric power plant near Snowdon that we could visit. A month later, we went to Bradwell Nuclear power station on the Essex coast. This was combined with a day at the seaside.

Two things stand out from all this. The first is that there was nothing even remotely approaching a curriculum. I objected recently to the expression ‘school-at-home’; I am not even sure if I would describe this as ‘structured home education’. It wandered, seemingly at random, all over the place. We moved freely from science to history and then on to home baking, without any sharp division between the subjects. The whole course of the education could veer off at any moment into any unexpected direction.

The second thing that strikes me is that I cannot imagine any home educator not saying to her child, ‘Would you like to visit a windmill today?’ It seems to me to be such a natural thing to do, regardless of whether or not your child has specifically asked to learn about the generation of power. Surely, days out like that are part of all home education?

In this way, my daughter picked up a great deal of the knowledge which would be useful to her in later life. My wife tolerated these experiments quite stoically, although it meant that the house and garden were regularly trashed. She told me later that she grew seriously anxious when I was explaining to the child about nuclear power, as she was worried that I would get hold of some uranium from somewhere and build a nuclear reactor in the kitchen. None of these activities with my daughter followed any sort of curriculum, nor had as their aim an examination or anything of that sort. Of course, the knowledge which she acquired was useful when she took IGCSEs a few years later, but that was not the object of the exercise. An adult who does not know how a nuclear reactor works has no right to express an opinion on nuclear power. Unless you visit a windmill and a power station burning fossil fuels, you are unlikely fully to understand the debate about wind farms, and how wise a move it is to build them. The whole aim of my efforts before the child was twelve was to enable her to understand the world around her and make sense of the things which she saw in the newspaper. I cannot tell you how much fun we had and why anybody would think that you would need timetables and curricula to enjoy yourselves in that fashion is a bit of a mystery!

17 comments:

  1. Wow! You had some good times, didn't you? Do you think this was easier with just one child? We have explored interests in this way but it's different with two children (and, no doubt, different again with more) because you need to engage with different interests.

    When you post like this I'm left wondering about the breadth of my children's education because they've only been down one sort of mine...

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  2. I am inclined to think that this might have something to do with gender. Men become obsessed with things in a way that women just do not seem to do. They have weird hobbies, they learn everything about the American Civil War or the history of some football team. Others collect matchboxes or go trainspotting or bird watching. Behaviour of this sort is very common in men, but rare in women. I think that home education is the same. Ask somebody to name a famous home educator and you might hear of John Stuart Mill's father, or Harry Lawrence, father of Ruth. You might think of Judith Polgar's father. All these people are, like me, obsessives. They are men who took up home education the way that other men might become enthusiasts motorbikes or fishing.

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  3. When you describe your HE, I'm always bewildered at your attitude to autonomous education since there appear to be so few differences between our AE home education and your home education (except maybe the intensity - we probably managed about 2-3 trips to places of interest a month along with 4-5 HE meetings, visits to individual families, local parks, swimming, walking, visits to family, etc). Does it matter who directs the education if the results are essentially the same?

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  4. 'Does it matter who directs the education if the results are essentially the same?'

    Yes, I think it matters greatly. I, as an adult, knew that my daughter should know about nuclear power, the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century and so on. Otherwise, when she was an adult she would not understand the world in which she lived. As a simple example, many people are opposed to genetically modfied crops. Try asking one of these people a simple question, such as 'What is a gene?' I have tried this many times, and not one of those vehemently opposed to GM crops knew the answer. This is shocking. To be an adult in a modern western society, one must have a certain basic knowledge about science and history.

    Children are not at all the best ones to decide what knowledge to acquire. We had a great time exploring power stations and other places, but a child might rather spend his life learning the results of football matches going back twenty years or details about the lives of pop singers. I have seen this sort of thing a lot; children who know nothing about the generation of electricity, but every detail about the lives of 'celebrities'. It is up to us, as parents, to guide their thirst for knowledge.

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  5. Well I suppose if you can't imagine a child gaining a good general knowledge as a result of AE, this would explain your opposition. Luckily we don't have to imagine it because we've seen it.

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  6. "To be an adult in a modern western society, one must have a certain basic knowledge about science and history."

    But you don't need to know everything before you become an adult. In fact, this would be impossible. All of the information you mention is easily discoverable if a person has gained experience at researching information and has retained a natural thirst for knowledge. If my child, as a young adult now, became interested in the pros and cons of wind power, they would research the issue. They don't need to know all the ins and outs from their childhood. As it happens we did visit an electricity generating plant, but I doubt they can remember the details now, after 10 or so years. I certainly can't. But we could find out with a few minutes work.

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  7. 'Well I suppose if you can't imagine a child gaining a good general knowledge as a result of AE, this would explain your opposition. Luckily we don't have to imagine it because we've seen it.'

    On the contrary, I can easily imagine such a thing. I am suggesting though that the type and extent of that knowledge can be guided by a parent and that this is a good and desirable thing.

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  8. 'But you don't need to know everything before you become an adult. In fact, this would be impossible. All of the information you mention is easily discoverable if a person has gained experience at researching information and has retained a natural thirst for knowledge'

    All perfectly true. However, I see the role of the parent as that of guide, steering the child in the direction of useful knowledge and also guiding them away from nonsense. Unfortunately, many young adults already have fixed prejudices about things such as nuclear power and GM crops. They do not bother to investigate the subjects, because they already know where they stand. Often, their views have been acquired via their parents' prejudices or what they have seen on television and no attmept has been made to look further into the matter than this.

    I cannot see why I would avoid trying to furnish my daughter with as many facts and as much objective information as possible on important topics. Of course she can build on this as she gets older, but I see no harm in making sure that her opinionws are founded upon fact.

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  9. "I am suggesting though that the type and extent of that knowledge can be guided by a parent and that this is a good and desirable thing."

    It is surely only desirable and a good thing if the child takes these things in, and part of AE is the belief that they will absorb information far more efficiently if they actively choose to listen and learn about a particular topic. I was guided to lots of knowledge by my teachers, but have really only retained the bits that interested me at the time.

    "However, I see the role of the parent as that of guide, steering the child in the direction of useful knowledge and also guiding them away from nonsense."

    "I cannot see why I would avoid trying to furnish my daughter with as many facts and as much objective information as possible on important topics."

    AE doesn't rule this out, as long as the child is freely choosing to listen and learn and is actively interested in the information. AE requires the parent to provide good and useful information about learning and the world.

    "Unfortunately, many young adults already have fixed prejudices about things such as nuclear power and GM crops."

    I realise this happens, but there is more than one way to avoid this but I believe it has little to do with particular bodies of knowledge and far more to do with attitudes to discussion, knowledge and learning. Since most of the young people you describe were educated in schools, simply guiding people to a wide body of knowledge fails dismally as a preventative measure. I learnt to question my own assumptions and to see things from other people's points of view from my parents and this has inevitably been passed on. Our AE young adults attempt to view things from all points of view. They often offer one argument about an issue and follow this with a counter-argument with research as appropriate, whilst working out where they stand on an issue.

    I'm not suggesting that your approach doesn't work, but I am disputing that it's the only method. It worked for you but failed for us so we moved on. I suspect though that it was your questioning approach to knowledge and life in general that did more to open your daughter's mind than the particular bits of knowledge you decided to provide.

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  10. 'I'm not suggesting that your approach doesn't work, but I am disputing that it's the only method.'

    We may perhaps be talking at cross purposes. I was not putting forward an educational technique and recommending its general adoption by others! It is rather the case that several people lately have asked me to describe how I educated my daughter. I have done so and given the rationale behind what I did. It is not to be supposed that I am holding it up as a pattern to be emulated by others.

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  11. "We may perhaps be talking at cross purposes. I was not putting forward an educational technique and recommending its general adoption by others!"

    Maybe not in your original article, but when someone suggested that AE could provide just as good an education you disputed this. The ongoing discussion was a response to this - an attempt to discuss why you think this and how AE can provide an equivalent education. What in particular about an education approach actually provides the benefits you attribute to your style of HE. I thought the discussion related well to the original article.

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  12. I'm really enjoying the 'memoirs', Simon.

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  13. 'I'm really enjoying the 'memoirs', Simon'

    Thank you, Old Mum. I have to say that your nom de plume conjures up an image of a little, white haired old woman. I am sure that this is misleading; I suspect that you might actually be younger than I am!

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  14. I agree with Old Mum, these insights into your home education journey are really fascinating.
    I do feel exhausted reading them but I suspect that is more to do with my own inadequacies than anything else.
    Did you do formal bookwork alongside all these adventures? For example, maths and early English, did you use textbooks/wrkbooks or did you use oral/practial learning methods for all subjects?

    Also if possible, Id also be interested to know how you assessed whether your curriculum was 'broad and balanced' so to speak? Did you have to plan all sorts of visits in advance, or did you literally want for an interest then quickly find a trip to cover it.

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  15. Thanks for the recent posts. They seem to produce more amiable discussions as a result.

    I used to live opposite the incinerator in Edmonton.

    A

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  16. 'I used to live opposite the incinerator in Edmonton'

    Ah, we used to live in Tottenham. The day out at the incinerator was quite special!

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