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CHAPTER ELEVEN of Alan Thomas’s book “Educating Children at Home” |
A DIFFERENT KIND OF EDUCATION |
| At the very least the research described in this book confirms
that education at home is a viable alternative to school. Parents
or carers do not need any special training or qualifications. Moreover,
they often educate their children with very limited resources and
with little or no professional guidance. This is radical enough in
itself, but it goes much further than this. As parents come to grips
with the task of educating their children at home they make educational
discoveries which do not reveal themselves in the classroom, some
of which directly challenge received wisdom and practice. When educational professionals visit home educators their main concern, from their perspective, is whether the parents or carers are able to provide their children with an educational experience on a par with what they would experience in school. There is an assumption, based on accumulated professional expertise, that educational methods and procedures used in school must be the yardstick against which to measure the effectiveness of home education. This is perfectly reasonable, if only because education has taken place in classrooms over such a long period of time. It is natural that home educators should intend to implement these school methods at home. Yet, when parents embark on their task they generally find that it does not turn out as they envisaged. Standard educational methods do not transfer into the home. As the parents fashion a pedagogy suitable to their circumstances, they find themselves trying out approaches which would be impossible even to attempt in school. In so doing, their experiences provide us with new and sometimes striking insights into education and child development. Different approaches to teaching There is a great deal of debate about whether the quality of classroom teaching and learning have improved, certainly during the second half of the twentieth century. Whatever the case, all attempts to gauge improvement are restricted because any comparisons are with other kinds of classroom teaching and learning. Up to a point this is fair enough because education is almost always a classroom activity. The drawback is that we fail to appreciate that most of the existing body of knowledge, logically, only applies to the population of classroom educated children, thereby confining our understanding of the nature of teaching and learning. This limited perspective influences home educators too. When parents start out, the obvious path to follow is that of "doing school" at home. With experience, however, virtually all the parents gravitate away from school methods. The approaches they eventually adopt range from relatively formal and structured, through to completely informal. During the course of the research it became possible to appreciate each family's philosophy and the way it had evolved with experience. With regard to educational progress and achievement, the method used may not matter. The overriding advantage is probably the individual attention that children get, whatever the approach. Most people, when they try to visualise home education, generally see it as an imitation of school, with children working at desks or the kitchen table, for the equivalent of the school day, in front of their teacher-parents who teach carefully prepared lessons which cover the school curriculum - ensuring their children are kept on task, asking questions, regularly marking their work and assessing progress. Few conform to this image. The greater flexibility which home education allows means that a timetable is unnecessary and is usually dropped altogether. Moreover, lessons can be put off for another time if a child is obviously not learning effectively for whatever reason. Parents are able to take advantage of those times when their children are most receptive, including the evenings and week ends. At home, lessons are concentrated and intensive. This is mainly due to extra individual attention and also because very little time is spent on the kind of peripheral activities which take up much of classroom time. In consequence, lessons are short and so is the working day, generally restricted to the morning or part of it. This is in stark contrast with the current educational fashion of more and more homework in addition to school and more and more school for children who are failing, including school in the holidays. By far the most important difference between more formal, structured learning at home and in school though, is that learning at home becomes an interactive process rather than a series of tasks to be tackled. Parents repeatedly refer to being able to strike while the iron's hot, to deal with problems as they arise, not going on to something new until the prerequisite knowledge or concepts have been acquired. If children get stuck they do not proceed until the problem has been dealt with. In fact, any mistakes they make, rather than creating barriers to learning, simply inform their parents of their thinking processes. Errors, therefore, simply become steps on the route to enlightenment. Because they experience little failure, children become confident in their ability to learn. This is in marked contrast with the classroom where the majority of children are constantly being unfavourably graded and measured against their peers, however subtly. A more fundamental pedagogical change occurs as parents gradually discover the potential of informal teaching and learning. There is nothing in the way children learn in school to suggest how powerful informal learning might be. Two influences impel parents toward informal styles of learning. The first is the result of their own observations. They find themselves talking a lot with their children, following through their interests, answering questions, drawing their attention to things which might arouse their curiosity, even during more formal learning sessions. A second, possibly more potent influence, is the way in which some children resist more formal teaching. If they lose interest or do not understand, they stop listening. Because it is in a one-to- one situation, the feedback for the parent is immediate and acute. Dogged persistence is fruitless. What is the point of explaining something to someone who is patently not taking it in? Children in school who resist learning or do not pay attention must somehow be cajoled into compliance, or at least a pretence of it. There is no other option. If a child persists in not learning or attending, the fault is located in the child or his or her background. At home, on the other hand, parents begin to see that their children are not necessarily being lazy or uncooperative. They just want to learn in a different way, though they may not be able to articulate how. Children's implicit and unacknowledged theory of learning From birth, children apply themselves rigorously to becoming competent members of their culture. Most of what they learn during the early years is acquired informally, through everyday interaction with their parents/carers. There is no reason, a priori, why this optimally effective cultural apprenticeship cannot be extended through the primary school years and beyond. Nevertheless, the proposition that children might acquire an education, well into the secondary years, simply through an apprenticeship in everyday living is, on the face of it, implausible. As an idea though, it is certainly not new. Before universal schooling, most cultural knowledge was transmitted in this way. Nearer our time, George Eliot had given it some thought... “Mary... gave the boys little formal teaching, so that Mrs Garth was alarmed lest they should never be well grounded in grammar and geography. Nevertheless, they were found quite forward enough when they went to school; perhaps, because they had liked nothing so well as being with their mother” (Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872, p. 834). Informal learning, piecemeal though it might be, somehow or other fuses into a coherent body of cultural knowledge, including acquisition of the appropriate levels of conceptual and cognitive understanding, like "growing leaves on trees" as one parent put it [77]. Or another: “School seems unnatural. With a huge effort and cost and sometimes pain, you try to get something into the children which would happen anyway” [18] A small number of parents, recognising their children had been progressing intellectually throughout the first few years of life, simply continued and extended on what they were already doing. Most others reduced formal learning; a few abandoned it altogether. By no means does this mean that learning is left to chance. Parents still have the role they have had since their children were born, of inducting them into the culture. They accomplish this by extending on what their children already know, introducing new topics and responding to their children's interests. Much of this occurs incidentally through everyday conversation which, on the surface at least, is perceived more as social rather than a means to intellectual growth. Because the conversation is with an adult, the children are able to hone their thinking skills, improve their expression and increase their vocabulary and general knowledge. It is simply cultural transmission by osmosis rather than through deliberate teaching. Of course, informal learning is not restricted to childhood. Throughout life we are constantly learning informally in the context of everyday activities, at work, socially and at home, again with little awareness that we are actually learning anything. What are the characteristics of the child’s theory of learning? First, there is a general lack of awareness that any specific learning is taking place. Concepts are acquired, skills improved and new knowledge gained during the course of concrete, everyday activities or through other topics which have captured the child's interest. An activity, from the child's point of view, may be helping to make cakes, going for a walk, shopping, going out in the car, reading a book, making a house out of a cardboard box, and so on. Any learning episodes, in maths, language, science, geography or whatever, are not differentiated but are simply part and parcel of the concrete activity. They may be integral to the activity, such as maths in shopping and science in cooking, or incidental to it, occurring through social conversation during a walk, in the car or at mealtimes. Whatever the case, from the child's point of view it is the activity which is paramount. The intellectual element goes unnoticed. Learning is therefore contextualised in a way it rarely is in formal lessons. The culture of the home obviously has to be conducive to informal learning. Parents must be actively committed guides and mentors for their children, leading them ever onwards towards becoming fully-fledged members of the culture. Not much informal learning is going to occur if children are left to their own devices. Informal learning is not licence. Parents must have, at the back of their minds, a general mental picture of what they want their children to achieve: literacy, numeracy, a good general knowledge etcetera. This is their informal curriculum. Parents have a more crucial role to play than is the case with formal learning in which children do at least have graded curriculum material to work with. They have to be attuned to what their children know and what interests them. They have to be ready to introduce them to new knowledge at the right moment, when it is likely to be assimilated. What makes informal learning so difficult to pin down is that parents themselves are for the most part unaware of what their children are learning. As some parents remarked, it was only when they looked back over what they had done, or kept a careful record that they could see how much learning had taken place. Informal learning is obviously not ordered or sequential in the sense that it is in school. A curriculum or a programme of learning would be deemed very poor indeed if it were not logically developed and graded into digestible morsels. But it does not follow that children can only learn effectively by following such carefully predetermined steps. When they learn informally, children impose their own sequence on what they learn. Curriculum logic and psychological logic do not necessarily equate. Psychological sequence is determined by the complex and dynamic interaction between the child's level of knowledge, interest, motivation etcetera, and the parent's ability to dovetail her "teaching" accordingly, depending on her intuitive appraisal of the situation. There is even an informal timetable, a psychological one, determined by the child's level of motivation, interest and conceptual preparedness. "Lessons" occur when they are most likely to be learned, so that knowledge or understanding is most easily assimilated. If the material being processed goes beyond the child's understanding or capacity for attending, it ceases to be assimilated. The "lesson" is over. Informal learning is highly efficient. It must be if one is largely unaware of it happening. From an information processing standpoint, it is only meaningful incoming information which is processed, that which extends existing knowledge, arouses interest or curiosity, or serves to consolidate or rehearse what is already partly known. Any incoming information which does none of these things is filtered out, discarded. These processes are controlled metacognitively by the child. Of course there are times when a learning opportunity will be lost. But these will be more than compensated by the efficiency with which learning takes place when the child is attentive. Increments in learning are extremely difficult to pin down. Fortuitously, one parent provided a very detailed record of her child's informal learning over a number of years, one very small part of which is described in Chapter Eight, demonstrating in great detail how it is feasible to acquire an education informally. We were able, for the first time, to "see" actual increments in learning in maths, even though the child in question did not really "do" maths, certainly not in the formal sense. She helped with cooking and shopping, went on car journeys, collected supermarket "trolley money" and came to appreciate the value of material goods, all of which included maths, but she did not see it like that. She saw only the concrete activity. If she did count money on occasion, or did "sums" in her head, it was her decision, sparked by her emerging understanding or simple curiosity about number. Incidentally, there is very little maths qua maths in everyday life though it is an essential part of many everyday activities. The point is that maths, certainly most of what is acquired at the primary level, can be learned as an integral part of everyday concrete activities. In school, maths has to be divorced from the dynamic realities of everyday life. To reiterate a point made in Chapter 8, children in school learn maths by doing maths. This child learned most of her maths when she was doing something else. Informal learning is not confined to children educated at home. Children who go to school no doubt learn a great deal informally outside school hours. It would be interesting to know just how much academic progress charted in school might actually be attributed to learning informally outside school when many children have the opportunity to put their own theories of learning into practice. As well as teaching
and learning in general, home educators offer different perspectives
on literacy. Their experiences suggest that the debate about methods
of teaching children to read may be important when it is necessary
to teach a large number of children at the same time, but is largely
irrelevant when teaching is at an individual level. Home educated
children learn to read at different ages, through a great variety
of methods, even within the same family. The finding that some children
learn to read "late", without apparent disadvantage, leads
one to question the urgency with which schools try to get all children
to read acceptably by the age of seven. It may be necessary in school
because learning from the age of seven is heavily dependent on the
ability to read and write acceptably. The consequence of such pressure
may to alienate many children from reading for enjoyment and the
contribution such reading makes to the further development of literacy
and general knowledge. |
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