Late Readers Close the Learning Gap

This study by New Zealand PhD psychology researcher Dr Sebastian Suggate, shows that the pressure for children to learn to read at the age of 5 is unnecessary. Late readers catch up with their peers by the age of 11.

“One theory for the finding that an earlier beginning does not lead to a later advantage is that the most important early factors for later reading achievement, for most children, are language and learning experiences that are gained without formal reading instruction,” says Dr Suggate.

“Because later starters at reading are still learning through play, language, and interactions with adults, their long-term learning is not disadvantaged. Instead, these activities prepare the soil well for later development of reading.”

“This research then raises the question; if there aren’t advantages to learning to read from the age of five, could there be disadvantages to starting teaching children to read earlier (at age 5). In other words, we could be putting them off,” he says.

This is just a small excerpt from an EXCELLENT article that I highly recommend reading.

Peter Gray: Children and Adolescents are More Anxious and Depressed Than Ever Before. Why?

As a research professor of psychology at Boston College and writer for Psychology Today, Peter Gray is single-handedly giving me all the ‘proof’ I need about autonomous education. His latest article The Dramatic Rise of Anxiety and Depression in Children and Adolescents: Is It Connected to the Decline in Play and Rise in Schooling? is a must read. Here are some excerpts:

One thing we know about anxiety and depression is that they correlate significantly with people’s sense of control or lack of control over their own lives. People who believe that they are in charge of their own fate are less likely to become anxious or depressed than are those who believe that they are victims of circumstances beyond their control. You might think that the sense of personal control would have increased over the last several decades. Real progress has occurred in our ability to prevent and treat diseases; the old prejudices that limited people’s options because of race, gender, or sexual orientation have diminished; and the average person is wealthier today than in decades past. Yet, the data indicate that young people’s belief that they have control over their own destinies has declined sharply over the decades.

Twenge’s own theory is that the generational increases in anxiety and depressionare related to a shift from “intrinsic” to “extrinsic” goals.[1] Intrinsic goals are those that have to do with one’s own development as a person–such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life. Extrinsic goals, on the other hand, are those that have to do with material rewards and other people’s judgments. They include goals of high income, status, and good looks. Twenge cites evidence that young people today are, on average, more oriented toward extrinsic goals and less oriented toward intrinsic goals than they were in the past. For example, a poll conducted annually of college freshmen shows that most students today list “being well off financially” as more important to them than “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” while the reverse was true in the 1960s and ’70s.

To the extent that my emotional sense of satisfaction comes from progress toward intrinsic goals I can control my emotional wellbeing. To the extent that my satisfaction comes from others’ judgments and rewards, I have much less control over my emotional state.

Children’s freedom to play and explore on their own, independent of direct adult guidance and direction, has declined greatly in recent decades. Free play and exploration are, historically, the means by which children learn to solve their own problems, control their own lives, develop their own interests, and become competent in pursuit of their own interests. By depriving children of opportunities to play on their own, away from direct adult supervision and control, we are depriving them of opportunities to learn how to take control of their own lives. We may think we are protecting them, but in fact we are diminishing their joy, diminishing their sense of self-control, preventing them from discovering and exploring the endeavors they would most love, and increasing the chance that they will suffer from anxiety, depression, and various other mental disorders.

During the same half-century or more that free play has declined, school and school-like activities (such as lessons out of school and adult-directed sports) have risen continuously in their prominence. Children today spend more hours per day, days per year, and years of their life in school than ever before. More weight is given to tests and grades than ever before. Outside of school children spend more time than ever before in settings where they are directed, protected, catered to, ranked, judged, and rewarded by adults. In all of these settings adults are in control, not children.

In school, children learn quickly that their own choices of activities and their own judgments of competence don’t count; what matters are the teachers’ choices and judgments. Teachers are not entirely predictable. You may study hard and still get a poor grade, because you didn’t figure out just exactly what the teacher wanted you to study or guess correctly what questions he or she would ask. The goal in class, in the minds of the great majority of students, is not competence but good grades. Given a choice between really learning a subject and getting an A, the great majority of students would, without hesitation, pick the latter. That is true at every stage in the educational process, at least up to the level of graduate school. That’s not the fault of students; that’s our fault. We’ve set it up that way. Our system of constant testing and evaluation in school–which becomes increasingly intense with every passing year–is a system that very clearly substitutes extrinsic rewards and goals for intrinsic ones. It is a system that is almost designed to produce anxiety and depression.

Another Way

Anyone who looks honestly at the experiences of students at Sudbury model democratic schools and of unschoolers–where freedom, play, and self-directed exploration prevail–knows that there is another way. We don’t need to drive kids crazy to educate them. Given freedom and opportunity, without coercion, young people educate themselves. They do so joyfully, and in the process they develop intrinsic values, personal self-control, and emotional wellbeing. That’s the overriding message of the whole series of essays in this blog. It’s time for society to take an honest look.

Curfews

I love Idzie’s blog, I’m Unschooled. Yes I Can Write. Today she’s blogging about curfews. Those of you who have been reading my blog for a while know how I feel about too many parental controls, such as restricting what children eat as well as lying. Idzie’s family is a perfect example of a well functioning teen/parent relationship where mutual respect and trust is the norm. From her post:

We like to know where a family member is when they aren’t here.  We like to know how late someone will be back.  When Emi heads out, for instance (I’ll use my sister as an example, since she’s the one who’s out late most often!), one of us will ask “when do you plan on being home?”.  She’ll give an answer, and our policy is that whatever time is given, you should be home by, or call by, that time.  That is the easiest possible way.  Whoever is at home doesn’t worry, and whoever is out isn’t resentful because they “have” to be home by an externally imposed time.  And in case you were wondering, we’re all pretty good about calling to let HQ know where we are and how we’re doing.  I also ask my mother and father that question when they go out at night, and I expect to get a call if they’re going to be late!  This isn’t just something for the younger people in our house.

And:

My experience has been that the more controlled teens are, the more likely they are to do exactly the things their parents are worried about them doing! Me and Emi have talked about the fact that neither of us have ever “rebelled”, and we really don’t know what we would rebel against, anyway! And both of us are far more level-headed and aware of our limits than many, many other much more tightly controlled kids our age because of that freedom. Control just creates resentment and dishonesty, it doesn’t actually stop people from doing anything! I wish more of the parents I know could realize that.

Connections eZine

Connections eZine was published by OrganicLearning.org. It is no longer being published, but the archives are available free and it is well worth reading. It featured many talented writers and some very insightful articles. Here are some clips from an excellent one by Danielle Conger titled Empiricist Passions.

“Children are natural empiricists, arriving in this world programmed to learn about it through experiment and observation. So what happens when, instead of having their empiricist passion quashed because it’s too messy, too dangerous, too loud, too delicate or too wasteful, that passion is not only encouraged but joined by someone who shares the same passion? A whole lot of learning and fun, that’s what—coupled with an amazing zest for life and an ingenious view of the world and all its possibilities!”

“Asking questions, pursuing knowledge, experimenting, observing, reformulating questions, reworking experiments—empiricists at heart. I’ve watched my kids take a garden hose into a tree and transform it from jungle vines into a swing and finally into a rudimentary pulley system to raise and lower themselves. Given a nurturing atmosphere, encouragement, freedom, partnership, kids do incredible things. At so many little points along the way, an adult could have stopped learning from happening because their experiments were too messy or wasteful or any number of other adult-type reasons. But, when instead of stepping in and becoming roadblocks to our children’s learning, we learn ourselves to share their passion and excitement and to connect with them, amazing things happen.”

The Education of Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison, the famous inventor of the light bulb, phonograph, stock ticker and the motion picture camera,  was never formally educated, and self-directed his own home education.

“Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.” – [His employee] Martin Andre Rosanoff

Here is his story: The Education of Thomas Edison by Jim Powell

How Unschooling is Changing How We Think of Learning

Here’s another great post from An Unschooling Life. It’s an article titled How Unschooling is Changing How We Think About Learning written by Rachel Tennenbaum. It’s a must read! Here’s a quick clip:

Dr. Ron Glass is a philosopher and an associate professor in UCSC’s education department. Much of his research focuses on the moral and political philosophy of education and the ideology of education.

“The notion that learning should somehow follow human nature has been around since the time of Rousseau,” Glass said. But the schooling we’re all now familiar with, he explained, is relatively new. “The school system that we have now was invented in the late 19th century and had very explicit models: factories, railroads and the army,” Glass said. “So they took features from each of those areas and created a school system. The school was designed to basically rank and sort people into the economic, social, ideological order.” But the 21st century is a very different time than the Industrial Revolution, with few remaining factories. “Before there was all this standardized curriculum and testing — all that began in the late 19th century — there was no such thing as school failure,” Glass said. “People just went to school or they didn’t.” Now that the curriculum has become more rigid, it has begun to create problems. Glass said, “It’s the system that produces winners, losers, those who pass, those who fail, those who count as somebody and those who count as nobody.

You have got to be kidding me

Testing Kindergarten: Young Children Produce Data — Lots of Data, an article published by Rethinking Schools, enlightens us on the tests that these 5 year olds are subjected to. I had no idea! Here is a clip from the article:

When I brought the MPS Student Reading Portfolio to the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association’s (MTEA) Early Childhood Committee, the members were surprised and disgusted. This new reading portfolio asks kindergarten students to define terms like Venn diagram, sound out, understand, poetry, tracking, sight word, expression,and describe; it also expects kindergartners to produce 20 different sounds, including the blending and digraph sounds ch, qu, sh, th, anding at a proficient level. This developmentally inappropriate assessment tool was designed without the input of early childhood educators. The MTEA Early Childhood Committee submitted our comments and recommendations for proposed changes to both the MPS Reading and Early Childhood Departments. We have yet to hear a response.

How One Teacher Came to Unschooling

This wonderful blog post on Plaza Creativa describes how the author Brooke, came to be an unschooling mother after being a teacher for 15 years. I am always amazed at the sheer number of unschooling parents who were previously teachers! Tons. Here is an excerpt:

Those years teaching convinced me that there are many more negatives than positives within the educational system. Even the most dedicated and caring of teachers cannot possibly possess the ability to relate to, appreciate, care for, guide, and understand her students the way a parent does. I felt that I had to be 25 different people for twenty five different children, sometimes more. One child required a firm, confident, guiding hand, while another needed very soft, delicate, and gentle encouragement. One needed to romp and sing and express himself, while another needed a quiet corner, where he could think and dream. Satisfying all those individual needs within the constraints of a system based on blocks of time and test scores and group management always left me feeling inadequate, stressed, and unsatisfied at the end of the day. I was fighting a losing battle because there is no way to provide what each child needs, only what the system needs.

Geography

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

My husband and I did this together and got less than half correct. Looks like we need to brush up on our geography, something I find fascinating.

‘Boy Scientist Sent for Counseling’ (via Free-Range Kids)

You’ve got to love Lenore at Free-Range Kids. Check out her latest blog post about a boy who did a science experiment outside of school hours:

Boy Scientist Sent for Counseling

Music and Life: Alan Watts Video

Homeschool wisdom from Will Smith & Jada Pinkett Smith (yes, really.)

An excerpt from this article: Celebrities Who Homeschool Their Kids

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith:

Jada told ESSENCE magazine that they homeschooled their kids for “flexibility” and “they can stay with us when we travel.”  She said another reason for their choice to homeschool was because “…the school system in this country – public and private is designed for the industrial age.  We’re in a technological age. We don’t want our kids to memorise. We want them to learn.”

Will told Reader’s Digest, “The date of the Boston Tea Party does not matter. I know how to learn anything I want to learn. I absolutely know that I could learn how to fly the space shuttle because someone else knows how to fly it, and they put it in a book. Give me the book, and I do not need somebody to stand up in front of the class.”

John Taylor Gatto Excerpt

This John Taylor Gatto excerpt has been modified to shorten it appropriately for blog post length. The full version is here.

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn’t go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. Ariel Durant co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will. Who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of “success” as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn’t true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.” But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that “efficiency” is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era – marketing.

Elwood P. Cubberley, author of Public Education in the United States, dean of Stanford’s School of Education, and textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: “Our schools are … factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned …. And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.”

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

John Holt Interview

Thanks to An Unschooling Life for this great John Holt interview. I hope it’s okay to quote it here; please let me know if not. This is the best I’ve read of John Holt.

John Holt was a teacher when he wrote How Children Fail and How Children Learn. He eventually quit teaching and became a speaker and supporter of education reform and went on to write several more books. Deciding that schools could not be reformed, he focused his energies on alternatives to conventional schooling. He founded Growing Without Schooling, America’s first homeschooling magazine and continued writing until his death in 1985.

A Conversation with John Holt (1980)
Interviewer: Marlene Bumgarner

In 1980, Marlene Bumgarner, a homeschooling parent, hosted author John Holt in her home while he was in California for a lecture tour. While he played in the garden with her two children, John and Dona Ana, she interviewed him for the bimonthly magazine Mothering.

What is your philosophy of learning?
Basically that the human animal is a learning animal; we like to learn; we need to learn; we are good at it; we don’t need to be shown how or made to do it. What kills the processes are the people interfering with it or trying to regulate it or control it.

Why homeschooling?
That’s a big question. The great advantage is intimacy, control of your time, flexibility of schedule, and the ability to respond to the needs of the child, and to the inclinations. If the child is feeling kind of tired or out of sorts, or a little bit sick, or kind of droopy in spirits, okay, we take it easy, and things go along very calmly and easily. When the child is full of energy and rambunctious, then we tackle big projects, we try tough stuff, we look at hard books. And I think schools could do much more than they do in this kind of flexibility, but in fact they don’t. I want to make it clear that I don’t see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were. The proper relationship of the schools to home is the relationship of the library to home, or the skating rink to home. It is a supplementary resource.But the school is a kind of artificial institution, and the home is a very natural one. There are lots of societies without schools, but never any without homes. Home is the center of the circle from which you move out in all directions, so there is no conceivable improvement in schools that would change my mind about that.

What does one do at a homeschool?
That’s what Growing Without Schooling is about, of course. What one can do depends a lot on what one’s own life is. A lot of families have small businesses or subsistence farms or crafts, or various kinds of activities that the parents are involved in, which the children are also very involved in. The children just partake in the life of the adults wherever they are,and then questions are answered as they come up. Other people may live at home and work somewhere else; they may have a more conventional kind of existence.I don’t believe in formal fixed curriculums, but it may very well be that when parents and children start off, they’re both a little nervous. They’re both wondering what they should be doing. If it makes people feel happier to have a little schedule, and to work with a correspondence school for a year or so, kind of as a security blanket, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a starting place.My advice is always to let the interests and the inclinations of the children determine what happens and to give children access to as much of the parents’ lives and the world around them as possible, given your own circumstances, so that children have the widest possible range of things to look at and think about. See which things interest them most, and help them to go down that particular road.How that’s done depends very much on the family’s circumstances and their interests, and the particular interests of the children. Some kids are bookish, some children like to build things, some are more mathematical or computerish, or artistic, or musical, or whatever.The mix is never going to be exactly the same.

Does homeschooling require that the parents spend a great deal of structured time with their children in a formal learning situation?
Homeschooling doesn’t require that parents spend a great deal of structured time. I think as parents get into this they tend to spend less time. How much time they spend with their kids depends a little on the circumstances in their own lives. Sometimes they spend a lot of time in company together just because it’s fun. Other times that’s harder for them to do. The children, though they may enjoy a lot of their parents’ company during the day,don’t need it once they get past 7 or 8.

Is the parent without background in education or experience as a teacher at a disadvantage in a homeschooling situation?
I’d say they have a very great advantage. I wouldn’t say that a person was disqualified from doing it because they had had training in education, but I would have to say that practically everything they taught you at that school of education is just plain wrong. You have to unlearn it all. I never had any of that educational training. The most exclusive, selective, demanding private schools in this country do not hire people who have education degrees. If you look through their faculties – degrees in history, mathematics, English, French, whatever – you will not see degrees in education. I think for the most prestigious private schools you could almost set it down as a fact that to have a teacher’s certificate, to have had that kind of training, would disqualify you.

Are parents talented or knowledgeable enough to teach physics or math?
Oh, well, the children don’t have to learn physics or math from you. There are plenty of people to learn from; there are plenty of books; there are plenty of extension courses. GWS will have information on that. There are plenty of other people to answer your questions. And the children don’t have to get it all from Mom and Pop. There are people who have only high schooling, or may not even have finished that, who are now teaching their children at home and doing a very good job of it.

What about the child’s social life?
As for friends – you’re not going to lock your kids in the house. I think the socializing aspects of school are ten times as likely to be harmful as helpful. The human virtues – kindness, patience, generosity, etc. are learned by children in intimate relationships, maybe groups of two or three. By and large, human beings tend to behave worse in large groups, like you find in school. There they learn something quite different – popularity, conformity, bullying, teasing, things like that. They can make friends after school hours, during vacations, at the library, in church.

What about the opportunity for youths to meet members of other backgrounds, other socioeconomic classes?
Most of the schools that I know anything about are tracked – there would be a college track, and a business track, and a vocational track. Studies have shown over the years that these tracks correlate perfectly with economic class. I think I know enough about most high schools in this country to say there is very little mingling of people from different backgrounds, different religious groups. The rich kids hang out with the rich kids, the jocks hang out with the jocks, the pointy heads hang out with the pointy heads, the greasers hang out with the greasers. Maybe there are some exceptions to that but the idea of school as a social melting pot where people of all kinds of backgrounds get together – pure mythology, folks.

What is your philosophy about teaching reading?
I think the teaching of reading is mostly what prevents reading. Different children learn different ways. I think reading aloud is fun, but I would never read aloud to a kid so that the kid would learn to read. You read aloud because it’s fun and companionable. You hold a child, sitting next to you or on your lap, reading this story that you’re having fun with, and if it isn’t a cozy, happy, warm, friendly, loving experience, then you shouldn’t do it. It isn’t going to do any good.I think children are attracted toward the adult world. It’s nice to have children’s books, but far too many of them have too much in the way of pictures. When children see books, as they do in the family where the adults read, with pages and pages and pages of print, it becomes pretty clear that if you’re going to find out what’s in those books, you’re going to have to read from that print. I don’t think there’s any way to make reading interesting to children in a family in which it isn’t interesting to adults.

What your philosophy about math?
My approach to math is to say, What do we adults use numbers for? We use them to measure things. And we measure things so that having measured them we can do things with them, or make certain judgments about them. And so I say let children do with numbers what we do with numbers. I’m a great believer in many kinds of measuring instruments – tapes (centimeter tape, inch tapes, rolls of tapes), rulers, scales, thermometers, barometers, metronomes, electric metronomes with lights flashing on and off that you can make go faster and slower, stopwatches, things for time.Another thing is money. Kids are fascinated by money. We all say: “We’ll have to teach them all this arithmetic so that some day they can deal with money.” I think dealing with money is inherently interesting to children. I say family finances ought to be out on the table, charts on the wall: expenses, food, taxes, insurance, health care, how much this costs, how much it cost last year. I think actually, like typing, double-entry bookkeeping and basic accounting are fascinating skills, and if you’re talking about basics, those are basics.The fundamental idea of double-entry bookkeeping, the distinction between your income and expenses and assets and liabilities is one of the really beautiful inventions of the human mind. It’s fabulous the way it works, and I think families should do their finances as if they were a little teeny corporation with income and expenses and assets and liabilities and depreciation.Some kids might get to the point where they would want to be the family treasurer and keep the family books and balance the checkbook. This is all really “big adult stuff.” Let the child write out the checks that are paying the bills, instead of the harassed picture, you know, of father with his tie untied, sitting at the desk and papers all over the place. Why? This is inherently interesting, so let’s at least make this part of our life – like every other part – accessible to children. The best way to meet numbers is in real life, as everything else. It’s embedded in the context of reality, and what schooling does is to try to take everything out of the context of reality. So everything appears like some little thing floating around in space, and it’s a terrible mistake. You know, there are numbers in building; there are numbers in construction; there are numbers in business;there are numbers in photography; there are numbers in music; there are fractions incooking. So wherever numbers are in real life, then let’s go and meet them and work with them.

What subject matter do you see as essential?
None.

What about the parent who works outside of the home?
One question which often comes up is “How am I going to teach my kids six hours a day?” And I respond to that by saying, “Who’s teaching your kids six hours a day now?” I was a good student in supposedly the best schools and it was a rare day that I got five minutes of teaching… that’s five minutes of somebody’s serious attention to my personal needs, interests, concerns, difficulties, problems. Like most other kids in school, I learned that if you don’t understand what’s going on, for heaven’s sake, keep your mouth shut.

What happens when children become ill, or have an injury, etc.?
Home teachers come in for three to five hours a week. It has been found that this is perfectly sufficient. These children don’t fall behind. No child needs, or should stand, six hours of teaching a day, even if a parent were of a mind to give it. It would drive them up the wall!

How are homeschoolers evaluated when they go to enroll at the university level?
Just like anyone else. You know, there are these tests you can take… the College Boards, the SAT, and so forth. Actually, homeschoolers do exceptionally well on these things. They’re more motivated to learn what areas will be covered, and prepare for them.

Does it sometimes happen that a homeschooling student will express a desire to go to or return to traditional schooling? How do parents handle this?
Various ways. Sometimes parents have to decide (we’re the grownups) that we don’t want them to go back to that school, and then stick with it. But other times, if the children want to go, then that means they’re immune to the manipulation the schools can do with the children who don’t have a choice about whether they have to be there or not. The school loses some of its power when the children know they can quit if they want.

School vs Unschool: A Teenager’s Experience

I just came across this blog post written by a 14 year old who had always unschooled, then tried public school for his freshmen year in high school. It is an amazingly well written, thought provoking and insightful essay. Highly recommend reading this one!

Preschool Genius Won’t Listen: Abraham Hicks

Thanks to Sunny Day to Day Mama for this great post

Part 1

Part 2

New Blog: Food for Vitality

Check out Nicole’s great new blog: Food For Vitality.

Easy family friendly healthy recipes such as these delicious blueberry banana muffins. Yum!

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves

The Hole-In-The-Wall project in the slums of India has proven that children become computer literate without instruction from adults. Here is a brief CNN video report which mentions that the research was inspiration for the Slumdog Millionaire movie.  Researcher Dr. Sugata Mitra does a video talk about how kids teach themselves. I found the most relevant part to be a 10 minute section between minutes 7:30 – 17:40 if you have limited time and you want to fast forward.

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in the wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other. They also learned English via the internet. In the video talk, at about the 15 minute point, Dr. Mitra says:

“We found that 6-13 year olds can self instruct in a connected environment irrespective of anything that we could measure. If they have access to a computer, they will teach themselves, including intelligence. But, it had to be in groups. Here is proof of the power of what a group of children can do if you lift the adult intervention. We took standard statistical techniques. We got a clean learning curve almost exactly the same as what you would get in the schools. So the conclusion over 6 years of work was that primary education can happen on its own. It does not have to be imposed from the top downwards. It could perhaps be a self-organizing system. Children can self-organize and obtain an educational objective.

So, what’s so bad about ‘time-out’? part 3

Many have written quite eloquently about why ‘time-out’ is not good for people over the long term. Part 1 was by Naomi Aldort. Part 2 was by Alfie Kohn. This is part 3 of 3; excerpts from Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen.

Cohen starts Chapter 13: Rethink The Way We Discipline with a quote:

“There are many terrible things in this world. But the worst is when a child is afraid of his father, mother or teacher. He fears them, instead of loving and trusting them.” ~Janusz Korczak

Playful parenting is based on an attitude of respect toward children and an attitude of wonder toward their world. If children are happy and we are, too, that respectfulness is pretty easy. It’s harder when they’re miserable or making us miserable. Something must be done when children yank the cat’s tail or hit their friend on the head or don’t do their homework or come home drunk. I am as opposed to letting things like this slide as I am to harsh punishment. Something indeed must be done, but punishment and threats are not it. When punishment falls short–and it always does–there are a variety of alternatives that work better. Taking a fresh look at discipline and children’s behavior, we can see that closeness, playfulness and emotional understanding are better bets than punishment, behavior modification, and too much permissiveness.

Make a connection. I see most “misbehavior” as really just a matter of disconnection. Children who feel connected also feel inclined to be cooperative and thoughtful. So instead of punishment, which tends to create an even bigger disconnection between parent and child, try thinking about how to reestablish a connection. Most punishments involve exerting power over a child, which just increases his or her sense of isolation and powerlessness. Meetings on the couch build connection and empower children. At the same time, they give us an effective way to provide real discipline: the teaching of our values and principles.

I hope it’s clear how this technique differs from a time-out. There’s no power struggle about how many minutes are left, no dragging children kicking and screaming to their room. Best of all, it is something that parent and child do together–unlike punishments, which are things adults do to children.

When I talk to parents about punishment, they are often shocked when I say that I am also opposed to time-outs. But with the emphasis in Playful Parenting on connecting, it really shouldn’t be a surprise. Time-outs were supposed to be a humane alternative to whacking children, but they have somehow become the ultimate “positive parenting” tool. The main problem with time-outs is that they enforce isolation on children who are probably already feeling isolated and disconnected.

A few years ago I was sitting in my car while I waited for my friend Lena to come out of her apartment. I was listening to a show on the radio, a call-in show about handling children’s behavior problems. The “expert” on the radio was saying that young children who want to come in to their parents’ room at night should be locked out, and kept out no matter how much they cry, even if it means they eventually fall asleep curled up outside the door. Lena got in the car, hearing just the end of this advice. She said, “Oh, is this that show about dogs?” No. Most dog experts are more understanding of the animal’s need for comfort and contact when they are feeling sad and lonely.

In most homes and schools, time-out is used as a punishment or as a way to control children’s behavior. But look at how the term is used in sports. You take a time-out for yourself or your own team. You don’t give a time-out to the other team. This type of time-out, a break for everyone, is an excellent idea. At my daughter’s preschool, Susan Engels, the head teacher, would say, “Time-out! Break in the action!” Everyone would freeze, and she could step in to redirect the play, get close to someone who was about to explode, stop a conflict before it got out of hand, or tone down the activity level. This type of time-out is nonpunishing and non-isolating. In fact, it is a way of joining in children’s play and making a connection. Another way time-outs can work in a positive way is if children have a cozy place where they can go to calm down or feel comforted when they choose to go, not when we choose to send them.

For most children, I think time-out is just a nuisance. For a few, it may even help them settle down or think about what they are doing before they do it. For certain children, though, it’s a torture. These children want and need contact, they are afraid of separation, and they see time-outs, or being sent to their room, as banishment. They will create more trouble resisting time-out than they were causing in the first place. They will make pathetic promises to be better, to behave, to do anything you ask, but they will not be able to keep these promises. They were made out of fear, and the behaviors may not actually be under these children’s control. For these children especially, a meeting on the couch is a much better bet.

I said above that most punishments disrupt the connection between parent and child, although it does get the child’s attention. Perhaps it goes without saying, but in order to connect with someone, you have to have their attention first. With all the obstacles to connection, and especially with all the distractions available today, that can be hard. Children may need to hear a louder tone in our voice, or to feel a hand on their shoulder, or to see us look right in their eyes, in order to tune in to us. Remember, the goal is to get their attention in order to make a connection, not to scare them or show them who’s boss. If we focus on getting their attention, we can probably think of more effective ways than yelling or threatening or hurting them. Sometimes we go to far, and after we get their attention, we lose it again by going overboard. When children are sitting resentfully in their rooms after being hit or grounded, we’d like them to be thinking about what they’ve done. Instead, they are more likely to be plotting how to make our life miserable in revenge, or how to make sure they don’t get caught next time. Once you have their attention, and you use it as the basis for a real connection, you will get real cooperation, not resentful (and temporary) obedience.

So, what’s so bad about ‘time-out’? part 1

I’ve mentioned in a previous post about ‘the couch meeting’ as the “discipline” strategy we will be using. We know enough about ‘time-out’ that it’s definitely not for us. Many have written quite eloquently about why time-out is not good over the long term, so I’ll let the experts do the talking. This is part 1 of 3; excerpts from Naomi Aldort (emphasis added):

“Refuse to resort to punishments, time-outs, consequences, bribes and threats. No matter what name we give these strategies, no matter how gently they are applied or how well intended they may be, their purpose is to control children’s behavior. Therefore, they induce fear and get in the way of trust between parent and child and lead to the behaviors they intend to prevent.

Although some parents claim that methods of control provide a structure that encourages youngsters to behave well and even seem content, keep in mind that seemingly peaceful, cooperative and happy children may not actually be feeling serenity and joy, but may instead be striving to please or live up to expectations. Beneath their actions, they may be afraid to express themselves. When they comply and behave in pleasing ways, these children are only happy to please their parents, not happy to be doing what they are doing (helping, studying, sharing.) The apparent “happiness” makes it hard for parents to notice the shriveling of the child’s authentic way of being.

For example, a mother said to me, “When I send my daughter to her room or when I spank her, she calms down and seems to do better.”  The question is, “Better for whom?” The child who complies out of fear is not doing better but worse. She has given up on her own direction in favor of keeping herself safe and satisfying her parents.

No matter how gently or “cooperatively” one establishes punishments, time-outs, or consequences, each method incurs a cost–one we are often unaware of until, sometimes years later, the child demonstrates a lack of authenticity or assertiveness, depression, addictions, violence, or self-destructive behavior. A child cannot experience the parent’s love while being controlled by him/her. Instead, she becomes dependent yet isolated and will later need to control others in passive or active ways.

Assertiveness (sometimes interpreted as ‘defiance’) is a demonstration of will and therefore of emotional strength. The giving up of the will by the obedient child is a demonstration of fear and of an emotional handicap. As the Russian educator L.S. Vygotsky writes, “People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds, people who possess strong feelings, people with great minds and a strong personality rarely come out of good little boys and girls.”

Gentle ways of controlling fool both the parent and the child. A child who cooperates with consequences, a time-out, or any variation of such measures with ease or even smiles is too insecure to voice her hurt and often out of touch with her own feelings. She must believe that her parents are doing the right thing and so she concludes that her sense of wrongness is a mistake not to be trusted.”