Daniel

There is a boy in the class I teach every Wednesday, who I will refer to as Daniel. He is a tall, thin boy with delicate features and blond hair. He stands and walks with a stoop and his head bowed as if he is not happy to be standing so tall. He is intelligent and curious and sensitive, and always has his head in a book. He is a great fan of Michael Morpurgo and has read many of his books several times.

At the start of the maths lessons, when I am waiting for everyone to get ready, he wastes not a minute, his head in his book.

He has a wonderful way with words and writes the most amazing poetry that would not be out of place in a published book.

He writes long, elaborate stories in a mature style. However, they can sometimes be a little gritty or dark. I have noticed that Michael Morpurgo has written dark and 'realistic' episodes in the two recent books I have read; 'Private Peaceful' and 'Alone on the Wide, Wide Sea'. I would not be comfortable if my 10 year old were to read these books. I think they are more suitable for someone of say, 14. Daniel's latest story, written for an assessment, ended with the main character committing suicide because his father and all his friends had perished.

Although Daniel has several siblings, he prefers the company of adults. He does not have any close friends among his classmates even though they have all been together since they were four. When the class went on an adventure holiday together he preferred to sit with the teachers rather than the other children. This was not welcomed by them and they engineered the going-into-the-dining-room so he would have no chance to do this. This ageism attitude is a shame because I expect Daniel would hold his own in most adult conversations.

He never enjoys going outside at playtime. Unfortunately the staff at the school still insist on him going out to play because 'he has got to learn to play with the other children'. He has had the opportunity to learn to play with them twice a day for 6 years but has not managed it yet. I wonder why adults insist that all children should play with other children? It seems to me that Daniel does not have much in common with the children in his school. This does not mean that there is anything wrong with him, anything that needs fixing, just that he is different from the others around him.

As you can imagine, he does not like playing football. (English football.) Or hockey, or I expect tag rugby, which is the next game of the PE curriculum. He does, however enjoy cricket, he tells me, but sorry Daniel, that is not on the National Curriculum at this time. It is not just that he does not like playing football, he uses the 'h' word for it. Because he does not like these games he is not very good at them. Therefore the other children in the class do not want to be his partner, be in his group or have him on his team.

We have been recently doing hockey and I made a big mistake during the last lesson. I decided to let Daniel be the captain and pick his team, because we were going to play a game. I don't usually do this picking teams business, as I usually give each child number. Somehow I thought by having him pick teams it would give him a bit of kudos. But I was wrong. What happened was that when he picked someone for his team they would make a face/noise to show their displeasure. When he was deciding who to pick, some of them would be visibly 'willing' him to not pick them. I felt really bad that I had put him in this position, and he had to endure this until all children were in a team.

At the moment Daniel attends a small, friendly Roman Catholic Primary school that has a family atmosphere. I dread to think how he will fare when he goes to the state secondary school next year!

It seems to me that he is a perfect candidate for being home educated. I can almost hear those people, who do not know much about home education, say, "but he has to learn to get on with people" and "how will he become socialised staying at home all the time?" Well, if he was home educated he would be meeting more people in the community, at the library, museum, shops etc. And it is likely that he would find a kindred spirit amongst the other home educated children who meet together regularly for various activities.

What Does Autonomous Learning at Home Look Like?

Well, to answer that question here is post by Bernadette, a mother of 4 children who learn at home. She is describing a day at her house.
You can find this post here

Yesterday, Isobel was sitting playing with our Connect Four set, making patterns with the counters. She told me "When you start a row with red and do alternate colours, you finish with red, that's how I know it's an odd number. There are four reds and three yellows in this row and four yellows and three reds in the next row, so there are the same number of each colour in two rows and there are six rows so there are the same number of each colour in all of it. that means there must be a red one missing because I have two yellows left and only one red". Then she counted them and told me she had been right, there were 22 reds and 23 yellows, a red counter wwas definitely missing.

A little while later David was sitting playing with a plastic carrier bag, when he suddenly leapt to his feet and said "The more air is in a parachute the more slowly it goes!". He then rushed off try making a parachute to test his theory.

Emily spent some time playing Wii Sports as usual, beating me at a game of tennis; she also spent a long time singing a song from a TV programme she's watched a couple of times and gradually evolving a dance to go with it as she repeated it over and over again.

At bedtime Charlotte came and asked me a question about the Great Barrier Reef so I found her some videos online. She watched them with me, identifying most of the fish she saw and telling me interesting things about them.

I love the way Isobel notices things and works out logical proofs for her observations. I love that David can figure out how parachutes work just from messing around with a bag, and that he gets so excited by his discoveries that he has to test them straight away. I love that Emily learns songs so easily, even though she can't pronounce the words properly yet. I love the way Charlotte can acquire and retain such huge amounts of knowledge about the subjects she finds interesting.

I love love love autonomous education and the effect it has had on our lives.

The Value of Lazy

I was very interested to read this entry in a blog I follow called Life Without School

Becky wrote about a conversation she had with friends on how our culture views laziness.

The sentence I like best from the piece is

"Why isn't reading a book all day as valuable as attending a compulsory class?"

You can see the whole post here but I have pasted most of it here for ease.

"Webster's says that the definition of lazy is: averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent. Sounds pretty negative, huh? Particularly because we live in a culture which values work and productivity above many other things. We've created a system of pay-offs and incentives to train children to become workers so that we can continue making more, being more, doing more, and then we hurry up and do a little bit more so that we can finally relax when we're 70. Interesting system, I think. And not very supportive of creativity, mindfulness, or letting things unfold in a gentle manner.

As we sat around the table and debated, a visiting grandfather insisted that his skepticism of unschooling stems from the belief that structure and discipline must be taught, and that said structure and discipline are necessary in order to achieve future success. He was educated in England, and when he looks back on his childhood, he is certain that if he had not been required to go to school, he would have been completely and totally lazy. He also believes that he would never have accomplished the things in life that he has, had it not been for his education. When I asked him about the word lazy, he explained that he probably would have laid on his bed and read most days, and would never have been motivated to explore or learn anything new on his own. And here lies the question: What does it mean to learn something new? Why isn't reading a book all day as valuable as attending a compulsory class?

This fascinates me. And I'm also not surprised to hear it. If you've been educated by a system from a very early age which maps out your learning and schedules your time for you, of course you are going to wonder whether it is possible to do anything of your own accord. Many of us who are raising unschooled children were not unschooled ourselves and have had to work hard to re-train our brains in this way. What I realize now, of course, is that a child who chooses to "laze around" and read all day is learning a whole lot. To some it may look like laziness, to me it looks like an education.

Chances are good that folks like this particular grandfather may indeed have never become lawyers or accountants or physicians, had it not been for the gold stars and incentives handed out in school. But the bigger question to me is certainly, what else would they have accomplished at their own pace and in their own time? The external motivation that school places on kids to work hard for future success is tempting. However it involves handing over our children's internal motivation to a team of adults who may or may not have their best interests at heart.

And what about success? Why can our culture not value the success of the child who chooses to become as juggler as highly as the one who chooses to study law? Imagine the possibilities in a community where a child's internally motivated choices are valued regardless of standardized test scores, future earning potential, or eventual retirement benefits. Imagine the sense of health and well-being that would radiate from a community of people following their internally motivated passions freely, pursuing lifestyles in alignment with their interests and talents. Quite possibly, road rage, stomach ulcers, and ridiculously jam-packed schedules would become a thing of the past. People would become human beings, not human doings.

From the outside looking in, I suppose our unschooling lifestyle could be considered lazy, by conventional standards. We go to bed when we're tired. We wake up when we're not. We eat when we're hungry and we read or play and take adventures when we feel like it. Some days we're busy and some days we're not. Some days just not killing each other is the best we can do. But it's rarely about productivity and it's never about anyone else's agenda but our own. We focus on ourselves, each other and our place in our community as well as the world. We build relationships and explore possibilities. We don't call it lazy, we call it our unschooled life."

My Home Education Story

I've been interested in home education for many years.

We moved house to a different area 11 years ago when Claire was about nine. She was struggling at her old school and I thought I would 'catch her up with some 1:1 time'. I was a single parent on income support with my other daughter just starting boarding school.

What! you say? Isn't that incongruous? Home education for one child, boarding school for another, income support too? Yes, well I've never been 'normal'.

Those were the days when the government paid tuition fees for deserving cases. It was a Quaker girls' boarding school. We needed to find an alternative because she was being bullied at her local state school and they did nothing about it. We looked at several brochures of schools nearby in Newcastle but none appealed to her. Then I saw an entry in a book in the library about The Mount School in York. And I remembered when she was a baby, holding her on my knee at a Quaker meeting, thinking that one day she would go to that very school.

We went to visit and she felt immediately at home. She said to me "Mummy the girls are just like me!" - She was a girl behind the times because at 11 years old she was not interested in pop music, fashion or boys.

So she passed the scholarship and I obtained a bursary for her boarding and she went to the school. Unfortunately we lived too far away for her to come home each day. We lived in a council house at the time and I swapped to a place as near as I could. No-one wanted to move out of York so I moved to Wakefield,40 miles away. She still had to board but at least she could come home at weekends. I tell you I hated Sunday evenings when I had to take her back!

It didn't occur to me to educate her at home. I only home educated Claire because I wanted to help her 'catch up'.

Claire had just completed her First School and we moved the summer before she went to the Middle School.

Home educating Claire was not a success. This was before we had the internet, and the support it brings.

The person who we swapped with had been a chain smoker and the house was decorated with brown nicotine. So we camped in the least awful room and gradually expanded our living space as I decorated the rooms. So I was busy doing this and feeling guilty because I wasn't teaching Claire. But Claire did not want to be taught by her mum! We had a rocky time of it I can tell you. I had not heard then of autonomous learning.

I could not find anyone else who was homes educating in the area and Claire was lonely. She did not make friends easily and she became very unhappy. So things came to a head, especially when I realised that the money I had borrowed to pay for Helen's school uniform and to help with the move ran out and I had to pay that back plus £100 a week as my contribution to Helen' schooling. (You think I would have worked all this out but I've never been very good managing money.) So I had to do some supply teaching to earn some money.

Well that is tricky when you have a child who is being home educated (or not, as the case seemed to be then). So, much to Claire's relief and trepidation she went to the new school.

Well, that was the start of my interest in home education.

A few years later I got a proper job and a computer and learned more about the subject. And kept up my interest to this day. I now know where I went wrong although at the time I did the best I could with the knowledge and resources I had.

I have been one of those rare teachers who have encouraged people to educate their children at home. A lone voice in that environment.

Well my children are grown and I realise that autonomous learning is an excellent way for the nation's children to be educated. I am still teaching in schools, doing supply again because I resent using my personal time on doing all the paperwork - marking, planning, assessment etc.

However it pains me that I am still part of the system that tells children whether they can visit the loo, or talk to their friend, or get out of their seat. Now I say to the children, "I'm sorry you have a hurt finger. I can kiss it better for you if you want but there are 30 of you and I can do no more than that because we need to finish this." or "I know you are not interested in muscles, and that's OK, but the government says you need to learn this. If you were home educated you could learn whatever you liked when you liked, but your parents chose to send you to school so please be quite so we can get on with the lesson." I want the children to go home and ask why they are not being home educated. I may get into trouble one of these days!

The reason why I moved to this large house was so that I would have space to facilitate children's education here. I know the best teachers are the parents but the reality is, not all parents think they can, or want to facilitate their children's learning each day. Anyway it has not happened yet because I'm really not sure how to go about it. I do know that many children are being harmed by being in the school environment. I see them each time I go to work. They are classed as disruptive or naughty when really they just don't want to sit and listen to a teacher going on about something that does not interest them. And why should they?

An alternative would be to be a governess in someone's home but I have not seen any openings for that yet either.

So I had thought of opening my own school along the lines of The Little School

I am also thinking about fostering. I think this time next year, something will be happening but I'm not sure what at the moment.