November 16, 2009 On writing...and trust
"I have learned
that what I have not
d r a w n
I have never
r e a l l y
S E E N."
-frederick frank
I pen this on the first page of my journals now.
Since mostly what I draw are my kids, and as they're ever-changing, it's a good reminder to pay attention.
We homeschool our 4 kids, so I've got a lot of time to Really See them. People are always asking, "What's a day in your life like?" I'm learning that homeschooling is more living than I knew one could have in 24 hours, hence the "life-in-a-day" title. This journal attempts to answer that question.
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"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." - Cicero
Matt, I didn't think you were challenging me. But I can't answer your questions directly because we have different assumptions. You asked what seems to you a simple and fair question about applying homeschooling success to public schools. To me it's more complicated. Clearly my words offended you. I'm sorry. My thoughts aren't meant to be personal, but quite global. At this point I've had several years unofficial study on learning - because we began our experiment much like School at home - and it was failing.
Really, I don't have original answers to your questions, though I can direct you to some folks, with feet in both worlds, who could help you:
A Different Kind of Teacher - John Gatto
Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better - John Holt
Family Matters - David Gutterson
Gatto makes this interesting claim: "Genius is as common as dirt." It's from this that I'm starting. More of us can claim brilliance at our beginnings than get to blossom by the end of our schooling. Why is that? I've heard we only use 10% of our brains. I find it difficult to believe God equipped us with that much intended waste. Yet surely our social trend - as far as the sheer individual knowledge each of us totes - is on a rapid and steady decline.
Yup, Jon and I are public-schooled products - who both sigh at our misspent youth and wish we were less jacks-of-all-trades and more equipped to make livings and lives and some measure of influences off passions that held deeper meaning to ourselves and mankind at large. Cogs in the machine? Ask my attorney how he feels about that.
But you're right, it feels like some get out more alive. So what makes the difference? Is it the family we had to balance out the schooling? Is it the examples of Learning beyond the school walls that were set for us? Is it the time we had to be children? (Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood makes worthwhile note of the fading of this allowance.) These same scenarios are increasingly difficult to come by as children's time is claimed by more school hours and "enrichment" activities and tv/screen time than we ever faced. It's the kids who clearly don't have any counterpoise for whom my heart breaks. "Why Schools Don't Educate" helps explain why the system is so hard to fix.
Sure, there are folks on whom school seems to leave little negative impact. For the record, I don't completely count myself as one of them. My brother-in-law Avi is though. Raised by parents who know a tremendous amount and encouraged a socrates-style route to knowledge, this man was allowed the time and access to the tools and people that led him to develop interests that turned into passions. There is a time in our lives when we're ripe for the plunging into talents - and it's when most of us are bound into school. (While I'm throwing book titles around, Do Hard Things puts a spin on our cultural acceptance of the "teenager" as we know him.)
So, yes, I know it's possible for someone to have a good education out-of-home - though I'm not sure that necessarily points to school. Out-of-home suggests the chance for real apprenticeship and family/community participation - those paths, long the methods to well-rounded adulthood in our human history (and only a century out of the picture), seem to merit resurrection if public education wants to work in a more humane way than seems intended. I wonder if more actually couldn't homeschool. I know families with more children and less income or "higher education" than ours who do. Homeschooling's got a stigma attached to it - somewhat created by the Education Business - that suggests a parent needs some official level of competence to undertake the whole thing. By having so successfully removed the idea of education from the family's grasp, we've made parents somewhat afraid and incapable of what God designed us naturally to do.
What have I learned? Nothing put better than how John Holt summed it up: "What children need is not new and better curricula, but access to more and more of the real world; plenty of time and space to think over their experiences, and to use fantasy and play to make meaning out of them; and advice, road maps, guidebooks, to make it easier for them to get where they want to go (not where we think they ought to go) and to find out what they want to find out."
Matt, I wasn't considering your being working parents specifically, but that our general culture precludes what was once a natural passing-on of handy-to-sustaining knowledge, largely because we have cut up the world into tinier and tinier specialized fragments so that what father has to teach son is not only of little use, but there is little time in which to do it. I was, however, thinking of Jon. Yes, in many ways Jon would say that our children are less his to grasp. David Gutterson says it aptly:
"Ripped from the long-hallowed womb of Place and from the bosom of home and community, we no longer know where we are in relationship to anything else in the world. The tradition of parental and communal responsibility for the daily instruction of our own is denied us because teaching has become institutionalized, a convenience in a time of industry and profit when citizen-labors perform economic functions more efficiently without children present. Children suffer a loss of connectedness, a detachment from the web of communal affairs, a distance from the life and work of the tribe. Our instinct to nurture through passing down what we know is blunted because our children are elsewhere and what we know is too strange. If a parent can't share who he is and what he does with the child with whom he feels driven to share it, a hole grows in him rapidly. The circle of learning, a kind of womb, encloses everything else. Most parents don't have these moments often enough to gain sustenance, have quit looking to their children for emotional food, and have begun to search inwardly. The result: a dislike of their children on an order and of a scale that befuddles their instincts..."
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