This teacher is quite rightly questioning the whole rationale behind this child being in her class in the first place, as well as the things she is still supposed to do — and not do.  For instance, she asks, “Why do I need to give a final exam to a child who is severely disabled and is simply here for “socialization?”"

Ah, the S-word.  Immediately, my homeschool-issues radar perks up.  A teacher is complaining about a child who is not suited to this particular class and is there for ’socialization’.  Interesting.

And it continues: “Why do I have a young person in my room, a room already filled with twenty-five other people, who is here strictly for socialization?”

Well, now.  From the criticisms and questions usually aimed at homeschoolers, I had just assumed, you know, that school was indeed where kids are supposed to get socialization.

The reader comments shed some light on this: “… the primary purpose of a core academic classroom is learning, not socialization.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhh…. really?  Is that so?  Funny, that’s not what they tell the homeschoolers, is it?

“There are plenty of opportunities for socialization in other, non-academic settings that will not disrupt instruction and handicap the general education learners.”

Ya know, I think the homeschoolers have been saying this all along…

Oh, and while we’re at it, this post is also highly illuminating about the troubles frequently encountered in typical schools beyond the “socialization” issue.  Here are some highlights:

“Why does the caseworker not comprehend this obvious failure in strategy?”

” I have long since learned that the administration doesn’t care if my kid is terrrorized because she doesn’t have a diagnosis.”

“…no one in power cares about the ordinary kids.”

“….in my own 6th grade classroom…. [one child is] so consistently disruptive that if he’s not isolated in a far corner of the room he’ll completely disrupt the learning of those around him. He still manages to whack kids with rulers, or burst out crying (a 12 year old!) when you tell him to do the same assignment everyone else is doing…  I spend so much more time thinking about [him] than about how to get nice quiet little Susie to speak up in a literature discussion…”

“As a regular ed teacher with an ineffective co-teacher (he doesn’t SEE anything going on in the room and focuses on the working kids who talk not the non-working kids throwing things) – I feel your pain. I write up the offenders and work to get them out of my class so I can teach the rest.”

“It’s just a matter of time before we have lawsuits against teachers for not teaching their students. Also, tons of lawsuits against school districts for denying their children the education they’re entitled to due to the few who make it difficult.”

“It took 1 1/2 years for me to get my daughter out of a classroom that has a violent disturbed child.”

“[My daughter's] behavior is also deteriorating. Starting about this time of the year we have regular conversations about how just because you can behave that way at school doesn’t make it acceptable at home.”

“We currently have a second grader that is mentally disturbed and not getting any sort of treatment or medication. He is constantly making death threats toward his classmates and teachers.”

“It would also be nice if the kids could learn something every day, but that is probably asking WAY too much.”

I love that last one in particular.  Follows right along with my post on “Unschooling and Holes“… Homeschoolers who are not radical unschoolers, but follow at least some sort of schedule or curriculum plan, often get worried or feel guilty if we “miss school” for a day, or skip a particular topic once in awhile, or don’t get through everything we’d meant to.  Once again, we are reminded that it is no better in a typical public school classroom.

Oh, and lest anyone think that this issue is discriminatory towards kids with special needs, this comment clarifies that it is not:

“As a special ed teacher and the parent of a kid with learning disabilities, I do believe in inclusion for children who are capable of doing grade-level work with additional academic support… Students who are incapable of learning in this environment, even with special education support, should not be placed in these classrooms.”

Photo Credit:  Chris Campbell via Creative Commons Licence

There is very little that we have actually ‘taught’ her.  She knows lots of things, of course, including some “academics,” but for the most part it is things she has simply absorbed.  Things that we have more directly “taught” are always under her direction — repeated as she insists, dropped when she wants to move on.  And so she is learning the alphabet and numbers from wooden puzzles (and still identifies the digit ‘3′ as “cat!” since the puzzle shows 3 cats under the puzzle piece), and can count ‘by rote’ to 10, and count groups of objects accurately up to about 4.

But most of her “learning” is in practical areas, and this is most definitely from following her lead.  She demands to learn how to do things.

Following Montessori’s admonitions of letting children do things and not interfering, she is allowed to do many things not normally thought of as toddler activities.  I have learned to allow for the extra time for her to accomplish something, rather than feel a need to hurry her along by helping out.  I have also learned to stand back and let her make mistakes, and watch amazed as she figures it out without my diving in to ’save’ her… or, if she cannot yet puzzle it out, she will calmly come to me and ask for my help.  And so I meet her only where she needs help, and not just where I assume she needs help.

And so before she was 26 months old, she was able to almost completely dress herself.  She sometimes gets her pants on backwards, and has a little trouble with shirts sometimes.  But she can pick out a complete outfit, underwear, socks, and all, and get herself ready independently.  And if you dare try to help her before she’s truly in need — watch out!

Some of her non-typical toddler activities include household things like vaccuuming, folding laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and drying dishes.  She is allowed to cut paper with scissors and slice cheese.  And she even helps me at the stove, stirring macaroni, turning hot dogs, mixing scrambled eggs.  Before we even get to the stove, she insists on helping to measure and pour ingredients, mixing and stirring it together… and cracking eggs!

So I’m sharing this video I took of her cracking eggs into a bowl the other day when we were making a white chocolate layer cake.  She actually cracked 3 eggs this time, I only caught the 3rd on video.  The first few times she helped with the eggs, a few weeks ago, she got a few little bits of shell.  Now she’s perfect every time.  She even puts away the empty shells and returns the carton to the fridge when we’re done. 

I was very impressed in the first week, when they quoted from Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn-Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less.  Not only quoted from, but actually interviewed with the author.

This week they’ve drawn from the classic book The Hurried Child
by David Elkind.  I confess I haven’t read this one, I’m going to add it to my reading list though.

I also will confess that I haven’t listened with 100% rapt attention to the entire broadcast.  I’m finding it’s mostly information that I am already aware of — thanks to having already read these books, or from my research into unschooling, and my forays into the ‘free range kids’ internet subculture.  This isn’t news to me.  In fact, it still makes me a bit annoyed and angry to think that a program like this has to be made, that it is still news to a great many parents out there.  It’s just so much… common sense.

But I try to be understanding, because I was there once, myself.  Just as I once fed my first child cereals and purées for his first foods, and how I kept him in diapers until he was 3, and yet baby-led finger-food solids and going diaper-free are just so obvious and common sense to me now.  Oh, and how about the fact that I thought slings were “too hippie” when my first was an infant?  We all have to start from where we are in our society’s paradigm and our own biases, and go from there.

So I am BEYOND ecstatic that this scathing rebuke of our educational myths is being played on mainstream radio.  And in such a rational, calm, non-sensationalist, investigative and factual manner.  I can only hope that it begins to clear the rubble in the minds of a few listeners, starting them down this path to “academic enlightenment” for their children.

If you missed it, don’t panic — you can listen online at the CBC website.

My reply garnered an “excellent post” response… so I thought I’d clean it up a bit and offer it here as well.

Here’s a worst case scenario.

You were unschooled and never learned division.  Now you’re 25 years old and you find that there’s something you can’t do because you need to divide some numbers.

You’re probably already recognizing that this is a pretty unlikely scenario, to make it to 25 years old and to have never encountered a situation where you’d have to figure out how to divide something.  But this is, as I said, a worst case scenario.

So, just for the sake of argument, you’re 25 years old and you realize that you have to divide something. You’ve never done it before.  Now think about this… Do you really think you’re not going to be able to figure it out, to learn how to do it now?

Or do you think that you’ll just open up an elementary math textbook, or ask someone who knows, and learn how to divide in like 10 minutes?

Yeah, I thought so.  Voila, problem solved.

One of the biases we all have to overcome as homeschooling parents, because most of us were traditionally schooled ourselves, is the notion that children must be carefully fed bite-sized bits of information, little by little, in carefully graduated and incremented portions, and this must be done at certain ages and in a certain prescribed sequence. Or else…

Or else what?  “Or else they never will learn it” is the unspoken conclusion.  But that’s just illogical.  The real answer is “Or else they learn it later.”  And learn it faster, and all in one go rather than spread out in tiny bits over years, because their brains are now more mature and because they have the self-motivation to want to learn it now.

There’s a great difference between “learning” something because it’s being fed to you in a classroom, and regurgitating on a test, for the purpose of attaining a passing grade… and learning something because you want to know more about it, because you have an interest in it, or because you need a particular skill to accomplish a particular task.

When you stop and think about it, how much of what you “learned” in elementary school has actually stuck with you?  I know I can remember about a half-dozen things from grade one:

• “Ça va très bien merci et toi?”
• French for crutch is “béquille”
• “Le bon roi Dagobert a mit sa culotte a l’envers”
• Our gym teacher could make a hula hoop roll backwards.
• French for ladybug is “coccinelle” and they drink dew off the rose petals and we made puppet masks and took turns playing the different parts in this cute little play about it.
• Véri-tech puzzles are awesome, they make cool patterns.
• I loved Rémi et Aline books.

And…. that’s about it.  My memories from grade two at least include a few “academic” things but they are just as scanty:

• I learned about < and > and they were graphically demonstrated on the wall as the mouths of alligators.
• We played a dictionary game where we’d have to look up a word and race to the blackboard to write down the page number.
• We learned about multiplication and I was humiliated that I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time.
• I loved Dinomir books.
• French for “factory” is “usine”, I learned that from a 2-part puzzle card.
• I listed very definitely which boys in the class I would marry and which were just yucky.
• I played Santa Claus in the class Christmas play and got my picture in the paper and had to bring in ice skates to use as prop presents.
• Our music teacher was awesome, he’d turn around and play the piano with his butt during “Trois petits chats” which would get me laughing so hard I couldn’t finish the song.
• I actually probably remember more just from music class — all the french folk songs, etc — than from the rest of the years’ “subjects” combined.

You’d be hard-pressed to say that those were all essential skills and knowledge that, if neglected or delayed, would have imperiled my eventual success.  I did have some fun times, but I did not learn anything that I could not have learned equally well — or better — later.

There’s a famous case, where formal math was not taught to an experimental group of students until grade 6.  Instead, they read, wrote, and talked, and any math was incidental and in context.  When they started formal math in grade 6, they were completely caught up to the “control group” kids within 4 months.  And all of that time which the “normal” kids had spent working on math lessons, assignments, homework, and problems for six years, the “experimental” kids had spent reading, writing, and thinking.

So there’s my first major point.  Delaying the teaching of a particular concept until a child is developmentally able to understand it more easily, will not irreversibly handicap them forever. Even if they do not end up learning this particular fact or skill until adulthood, they will still be able to learn it.  Did you stop being able to learn new things when you left school?  So why do we fuss and fret and worry that our children will be utterly helpless if they don’t learn everything when they are still very young??

Here’s another major point. Yeah, an unschooled kid might end up with “holes” in their education. But find me just ONE public schooled child who does NOT. All kids have some holes, they’re just in different places. If a child has a love of learning and self-motivation and has learned HOW to learn, then as they uncover their holes they will fill them. A child who has only been passively ’spoonfed’ factoids and test-fodder might not.

After saying all this, of course I must say that unschooling isn’t the best fit for all families. We ourselves are hardly radical unschoolers.

But I will say this — I know of more cases of families who started off doing strict “school at home” curriculums, who gradually over time, as they gained the wisdom of experience, became more eclectic, relaxed, child-led and “unschooley”… than those who start off as radical unschoolers and added more and more curriculum. Of course the latter does happen, especially as kids get older and more mature and start wanting to enrich their knowledge in a more structured way — but just from my own anecdotal observations, it’s far less common.

I would venture to say that the majority of homeschoolers (again just my anecdotal observations) are eclectic, with lots of unschooley-child-led stuff (I’ve recently heard this called “rabbit trails”), but with a few curriculum-based subjects for whatever areas they personally felt were too important to leave to “chance” or did not believe their children would take to on their own, etc.

And that’s what we’re like, in fact. I do a certain amount of planning and guiding for “core” subject work, even more carefully planned lately as we’ve shifted into some Charlotte Mason-inspired ideas.  I have learned that my son lacks inner motivation and drive, he does need a minimum amount of structure. But it’s just ‘minimum’… beyond the few things that I structure, the rest of the time is his own, and he learns just as much that way too.

I’m trying to ensure he has a good, broad foundation to build upon… but I’m not stressing about the “holes.”  We all have holes.  I still have holes.  He already knows more about dolphins and whales than I ever did.  As we’re gearing up for a couple sessions on Ancient Egypt and Greece, I’m learning just as much as he is… I certainly never learned that stuff when I was a kid.  Even as an adult my knowledge is limited to a few Discovery Channel specials and “Stargate SG-1″.

Final moral:  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  And elementary curriculum?  It’s all small stuff.

When you get curious about something and come to a place like How Stuff Works to learn about it, you are participating in a form of homeschooling. This is sometimes called interest-motivated education or self-motivated education. You get interested in something for whatever reason, that interest motivates you to learn about it, and you do learn about it by doing your own research.

The article makes the point that ’school-at-home’ is one kind of homeschooling, but not the only kind.  Following one’s own interest leads to knowledge in a variety of areas, such that:

Over time, all of the topics covered in “normal” schooling get covered, but they happen in a much different order and at the child’s own pace.

The author was at one time a college professor in computer science, who while not a homeschooler himself, has encountered homeschooled children in his profession.  In one notable instance, he tutored a 12-year-old homeschooled boy who wanted to learn computer program, while also teaching a class of 300 freshmen.  He found that:

… this 12-year-old learned the material faster and better than the majority of the 18-year-old students in the class did. The reason for that is obvious: the 12-year-old really wanted to learn the material and was ready for it, while many of the freshman were being forced to take the class and had absolutely no desire to learn computer programming at that point in their lives.

The article closes with a letter from that young boy, tracked down 8 years later as a successful college student, with his reflections on growing up homeschooled:

Speaking from personal experience, as a homeschooler I consider myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to pursue an alternative form of education. I was able to become involved in quite a wide range of activities, which has helped define who I am as a person. I think many of these things would not have been possible if I were in a traditional school environment simply because of time constraints.

Not a bad endorsement at all!