Who initiates what

After a really interesting Facebook conversation last night (sorry can't link it's a closed group) about who initiates what activity within an unschooling framework, I thought I'd really take notice today of what happens in a normal day for us and where the ideas come from.

We had a couple of things planned for today, either swimming or taking the skateboard to the park, both our (the parents) ideas which we suggested to the boys and they were happy with. This was yesterday... Isaac burnt his hand last night (luckily this only resulted in a small blister this morning) on the stove so we had a rather sleepless fidgety night (we all sleep together). So this morning I didn't feel up to taking them swimming but I didn't say anything, I waited to see what they wanted to do.
As we got up (all at different times...) I went about my normal tasks of getting breakfast, catching up with emails and tidying up. During the morning the boys made some paper aliens, played with their railway track, the garage and cars and the waterplay canals, played with dolls and dinosaurs in the bath, went outside to fly their aliens, dressed up and played with a board game. It is now 12.20 and they are having a sandwich while watching something on the ipad. All this was completely self initiated, I did not suggest or prepare anything for them, they often asked me for help or just to play with them and I am completely available to them when they do but I find that if I interfere or show them things unprompted they do not like it! So respect is the name of the game.

After lunch as the sun is shining I will suggest the park again and if we all agree that's where we'll go, I think that the suggestion is motivated by the fact that I personally wish to go out for a walk, if the boys don't want to come I can always ask Martin (who luckily is at home a lot now) to look after them so I can go out for a stroll. As the boys are generally exposed to a lot of information, people and materials it is very rare that I feel there is something they "should know" and introduce it unprompted. A simple visit to a museum can produce months of activities, and they ask to go to museums a lot. The world is so full of wonderful things for them to explore and learn about, I try to be agenda-free when it comes to their education as I trust that they are acquiring the knowledge they need. We all love to travel and plan to do more in the future so that will provide with us all with even more learning opportunities.

Ipad, fairies and swimwear

Be the change you wish to see in your children

This sentence means so much to me!! The banner was designed by Lauren Fisher at Sparkling Adventures, see here for the original post. You can download it from her post and she will also send you a sticker if you send her an email.
In her words: Whenever I see behaviour in our own children that I don’t like, I stop and examine myself to see where I model it in the first instance. I can’t necessarily change my children, but I can change myself.
I also liked: Let’s not waste any more time blaming others, our environment or our life circumstances. We can improve the world today, simply by first improving ourselves. For the sakes of our children, let’s start changing today.

A few thoughts on autonomy

After a few difficult situations I have found myself in, in these last few months, I thought it would be useful to write some of my thoughts down on the topic of autonomous learning.
I did not wake up one morning and decided: I will home educate! In fact I will eliminate any sort of structure and go for this groovy thing called Radical Unschooling!! This has been a very long and laborious process with a lot of thinking, reading and living involved. What I have at the moment is an outlook on life and my fellow humans that seems to work and helps to make us happy, creative and productive people.

So what are we doing exactly? My journey started with a very valuable book called The Continuum Concept, it argued that we have lost our connection to our basic human continuum and that the way we relate to babies and small children is extremely important, it is not up to us to decide what the baby needs, the baby knows, we just have to tune in. So breastfeeding, carrying in a sling or in arms, cosleeping, are all things a newborn human will expect. This idea of trusting my children (opposed to trusting a book from Waterstones) was so obvious and so revolutionary for someone like me who grew up relatively unattached from her parents. So attachment parenting was the next step but this didn't seem to go far enough. Why trust a baby but not a toddler? When my eldest was 2 I started feeling really panicky about sending him to school. He would still be so little, who would hug him if he was upset? Would anyone care? And by the age of 2 it was clear that Reuben was extremely self motivated, creative and very very sharp!! What were they going to do with him anyway? I looked at the curriculum for the reception year and he knew it all by the time he was 3. But this is not really relevant to my choices, it was just the spark the started the fire.

So we decided to home educate, from my experience as an English teacher for the British Council I knew I wouldn't write lesson plans or decide what the children were going to learn. The wonderful books by John Holt were very helpful and introduced me to the idea of Unschooling, trusting in the children's natural love of learning and giving them the space to pursue their own interests in their own time.
And this led to more thinking and reading... Alfie Kohn had made me think about unconditional love, about giving the children the respect they deserve and have a (human) right to. Jan Fortune-Wood made me think that this respect is all encompassing, that non coercion is the true way to go if I want to nurture free spirited children.
So every day I watch them, listen to them, feel with them and find solutions where everybody wins. I am trying to move away from a family unit where one (or both) parents holds all the power, in fact I am trying to move away from power struggles altogether. A problem comes up and we say: how can we solve it? What would make us all happy? Everyone's wishes are listened to, if Isaac doesn't want to take his pyjamas off, he can put a jumper over them and go out regardless. If Reuben wants to eat at a different time from the others, he should have the freedom to do so. If the children have their clothes on back to front I won't say anything as not to detract from the joy of having dressed themselves. If the biscuits are not shaped "properly" I will bake them as they are, because what is "properly" anyway? I feel a deep respect for all they say and do, if they ask me for an opinion or for help I will happily give it to them but I don't force my experience and opinions on them.

So it goes well beyond education, I didn't see how I could trust the children to know best when it comes to reading and writing and not know best with basic human functions like eating or sleeping. Or for anything else for that matter.

Punished by Rewards, by Alfie Kohn

This is not a strictly home education book, in fact I think it just mentions it in passing. But it was an extremely influential book for us, a sort of slap-in-the-face at every page turn book.

Alfie Kohn is an American author and lecturer who has explored a number of topics in education, parenting, and human behaviour. He is considered a leading figure in progressive education and has also offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research.
Kohn's challenges to widely accepted theories and practises have made him a controversial figure, particularly with behaviourists, conservatives, and those who defend the specific practises he calls into question, such as the use of competition, incentive programs, conventional discipline, standardised testing, grades, homework, and traditional schooling.

The premise is that the reward system is a very flawed one, as I had strongly disliked the behaviourist ideas when I studied them in my psychology degree course, this book offered a mirror to my own feelings. It is not just punishment that is harmful, but rewarding children (and people in general) for doing a task, reading a chapter in a book, solving a maths problem, etc. greatly detracts from the enjoyment of the task itself. It moves the person from intrinsic motivation (and a love of learning) to an extrinsic motivator (I will learn because I have been promised a reward, who cares what it is I am learning... I will probably forget it all after I have received my prize).

The book looks at the punishment and reward system in parenting (he is also the author of Unconditional Parenting, another huge eye opener of a book), education and the work place. Kohn offers ideas and solutions to the problem and advocates a respectful approach towards children and workers alike. These ideas are very controversial as they ask us to question our whole culture and the way we do things, but I think that our strength as human beings comes from a drive to question and better the world around us, just because things have been done in the same way for generations does not mean these things are right for us, now.

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Dumbing us down, by John Taylor Gatto

I had wanted to read this book for a long time as it is a classic critique of compulsory schooling, a few months ago I finally managed it and it was a sobering read.

John Taylor Gatto is a retired schoolteacher who taught in New York for 30 years, more than once winning the teacher of the year award. Surprisingly (or not...) he was (and is) a strong critic of mass compulsory schooling, even expressing his views (strongly) while accepting the awards.

The book was written in the first months after John Taylor Gatto left schoolteaching, it is a hard-hitting reflection on the significance of schools and schoolteaching, the difference between networks and communities, and what lies at the heart of being congregationally American as opposed to corporatively American.
These are the main points, what mainstream American (but it can be applied to the UK and most countries I can think of) school does to children:

1. It makes the children confused. It presents an incoherent ensemble of information that the child needs to memorise to stay in school. Apart from the tests and trials that programming is similar to the television, it fills almost all the "free" time of children. One sees and hears something, only to forget it again.
2. It teaches them to accept their class affiliation.
3. It makes them indifferent.
4. It makes them emotionally dependent.
5. It makes them intellectually dependent.
6. It teaches them a kind of self-confidence that requires constant confirmation by experts (provisional self-esteem).
7. It makes it clear to them that they cannot hide, because they are always supervised

As an ex-teacher myself I recognise the truth in his words. We had already decided to home educate but this book made me very angry at all the wasted talent, creativity and joy of learning that is daily being eroded in children around the globe.

Ken Robinson lectures

Ken Robinson has been very influential in our household regarding philosophies of education and an overview of why schools are the way they are. We decided to opt out of the system for our children as we agree wholeheartedly with his point of view and feel that the boys have a better change to be creative and follow their individual calling outside of the classroom.

A bit about him: Sir Kenneth Robinson (Liverpool, 4 March 1950) is an English author, speaker, and international advisor on education in the arts to government, non-profits, education, and arts bodies. He was Director of The Arts in Schools Project (1985–89), Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (1989–2001), and was knighted in 2003 for services to education.
Originally from a working-class Liverpool family, Robinson now lives in Los Angeles with his wife Marie-Therese and children James and Kate.

The lectures we enjoyed were the ones he gave for the TED conference, the first one is called Do schools kill creativity? Pretty much self explanatory...



And then we really liked the RSA animate version of his talk, Changing Education Paradigms (I often feel I'm in a completely different paradigm, not to say parallel universe from most people)



I would also recommend his book Out of our minds, learning to be creative. It gives us hope that we can put passion and creativity in our lives and show the boys that these are a fundamental part of being human.