Education

Home education in Britain

Most home educators in Britain favour autonomous curiosity-driven learning, vs formal homeschooling.

In praise of ignorance

Innocence, properly conceived, is a positive attribute. It is the ignorance that comes from a voluntary decision not to engage (or not to engage yet) with a particular area of complex knowledge. Innocence in that sense is essential for all genuine learning. Compulsory teaching is the destruction of innocence, forcing the victims to waste the opportunity, which comes only once in each lifetime, to encounter that knowledge for the first time.

The Keeping-One’s-Options-Open mentality

For any human being who is not actually facing death by starvation or the firing squad, the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want—far from it—it is finding out (or rather, creating) what you want. That is what we deprive children of when we channel them into ‘keeping their options open’. It looks as though they are keeping their options open, but at each stage they are actually presented with only one option—the option where you do the standardized thing: something you can do without being human, by sacrificing the human part of yourself, the individual part.

When my view changed, our lives changed

When your view suddenly shifts, like when viewing the Gestalt two-face image, it can feel as if Taking Children Seriously has suddenly come into focus—and this paradigm shift creates a virtuous circle of positive change.

The dark side of John Holt

John Holt was so critical of school that sometimes he appeared to suggest that even children who want to go to school should not do so.

What about Sudbury Valley School?

In a family it is just about possible to reach an agreement that all the family members are happy with, with maybe five people. In a school there are hundreds of pupils to satisfy, and it becomes totally impractical. So their democratic model is no more than a method of deciding who is going to be coerced. It is not a way of finding real solutions.

Are schools inherently coercive?

Can there be such a thing as a non-coercive school? The existing institution that comes closest to a non-coercive school is the entire town (or city, or society, or internet) that the children have access to, including their homes, and their friends’ homes, and excluding only the existing schools.

Home education law—Phillips v Brown

Every Education Act since 1870 has clearly intended to place upon parents a substantive duty to educate their children. Therefore, if it were ever found that some legal loophole made that duty vacuous or unenforceable, Parliament would rush to plug the loophole.

Children who prefer to go to school

The assumption that there are things all children must know provides the justification for the provision of standard academic subjects and their non-curricular counterparts. As soon as a child is expected to devote time and attention to those, there is coercion.

Children learning science without doing experiments

Learning science could include conversations, reading, thinking. It might or might not include experiments. Experiments are tests of theories—so first you need a theory to test. Theoretical physicists do no experiments at all. They think. The same could be true of a child.

Coerciveness vs non-coerciveness

What distinguishes families taking children seriously from those in which the parents favour coercion, and why compulsory school is necessarily coercive.

Punished by Rewards

Kohn has a gut feeling that behaviourist dog training techniques are bad, and he is quite right about that. But he has no explanation of why they are and how they are. All he has is (worthless) ‘evidence’ that they are.

Doing nothing academically?

It is a mistake to seek evidence of children’s learning, because that can have a significant destructive effect upon the learning that is going on. They are then highly likely to switch from addressing the problem they were addressing, to the new problem the teacher has introduced, of how to perform and provide evidence for the teacher.

Unschooling and Karl Popper

Popper’s work provides an epistemological critique of the teacher-directed learning model, although it appears that Popper himself never made this connection.

Philosophical theories are refuted by argument, not empirical tests

There is no point demanding testability of an educational theory. What one can do with philosophical theories, is refute them by argument. Empirical testing is just one of a number of types of intersubjective criticism, and the vast majority of all criticism is by argument, even in science. Most scientific theories are refuted before they even get to the stage of empirical testing.

Why bother with the philosophy?

How you think people learn informs all your interactions with your children. If you view learning as a creative act in a critical-rational process, you will value highly the idea of consent in decision-making. If you believe people learn through divine revelation or by having knowledge poured into them, that will inform your interactions in a different way from if you think that they learn through conjectures and refutations: you may well think coercion necessary.

Unschooling and schooling as a continuum

The Unschoolers’ ‘child-led to directed’ continuum does not distinguish between ‘child-led’ and neglect (which is coercive), and it also does not distinguish between what some unschoolers categorise as ‘directed’, but which is noncoercive—lots of welcome suggestions by the parent.