Informal Education and Community

Child Labor 1912

RJ — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:48:50 -0500

The Child that Toileth Not. The Story of a Government Investigation that was Suppressed With one hundred and twenty-one illustrations by Thomas Robinson Dawley, Jr. Former Special Agent, Bureau of Labor, Department of Commerce and Labor, Washington D.C. New York: Gracia Publishers, 1913 (Second Edition).

A review that is somewhat belated, being 95 years after publication:

This book was uncovered recently in a old building in Birmingham, Alabama, one of many subject to severe moisture damage and possibly the object of a mouse's interest since a quarter-sized chunk has been eaten out of the spine. The book is hardly in condition to be sold, although the lowest price I could find for it was $150.00.

Why is the book so interesting - because it supposedly involves a suppressed government investigation? This is hardly the only reason. President Roosevelt signed a joint resolution by Congress to research the condition of working women and children employed in the United States, and the Commission of Labor sought researchers who would carry out this task. Our author, Thomas Robinson Dawley, fascinated by the issue, took the challenge to travel throughout the South, including parts of Tennessee, South and North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to see how people lived and to see what in particular was the effect of cotton mill employment on the lives of the white rural poor.

I really enjoy the wonderful detail provided in this book and the way in which it captures, not only in its 121 photographs but in words, the realities of daily life for rural people. Traveling by horse, under not always so comfortable conditions, facing difficult stream crossings, cold winter days, not always abundant food, Dawley managed to collect enough detail to give a living picture of life in the rural South. Staying in people's houses he had to a chance to see what people ate or didn't eat, what the children did or didn't do, how the houses were built, what clothes were worn, what health conditions were like, what work was done, how people paid for goods, what means of exchange were used.

Here is an example:

"I stopped for dinner with the postmaster at the mouth of Mine Fork. He lived in a roughly-built, but comfortable board house papered with old newspapers. He was a kindly man who kept a little store at the cross-roads. He owned forty acres of land, with a good barn, and necessary outhouses. His wife served us a dinner of salt pork in abundance, potatoes and "sour cabbage," with the usual corn-bread and biscuits." (p. 203)

On to the point of the book. Dawley argues shockingly for the view that children and women were by no means universally exploited, that, in fact, the local cotton mills in rural communities throughout the South provided white rural families with opportunities for self-development that were not associated with the hard-scrabble farming conditions where people grew corn on rocky hillsides, made moonshine and participated in murderous family feuds. Young children wanted to work and to contribute to the welfare of their families, Dawley demonstrates. A thirteen-year old worker could contribute substantially to the well-being of his family. Mill owners did not by any means typically force children to work beyond their capacity. Large families of women and children could improve their lives substantially this way. The welfare -- schools and health care -- sometimes associated with the local mills had a lot to do with the need to improve the conditions of people so they in turn could perform the tasks required of them. Among other things, the cotton mills successfully employed the group known then as "the feeble-minded," a group that a decade or two later were being institutionalized for their lack of productivity.

The following statement is made in the conclusion of the book, a statement implying misrepresentation of labor conditions in the South:

"While thousands of dollars were squandered by the Federal bureau of Labor, in its investigation of woman and child labor, to prove that the manufacturers are rascals; that they lie with respect to the ages of the children employed; that they hide them away when investigators are sent to report upon them and that they can get the same labor from adults; and finally that they compel them to work when they should be in school, and underfeed and underpay their employees generally--not a word of the revelations showing the misrepresentations of the agitators, reformers and other interests of the kind was allowed to go before the public in the reports." (481)

According to Dawley, the Child Labor Committees "condemn the business interests of the country, the men who make the wheels of industry go round and set the pace for real progress,..." (483), an example of which he finds in a Lanette, Alabama cotton mill manufacturer who had built a school costing $20,000.

Dawley explains that his research was repudiated and discredited, that he was removed from his position in the Bureau of Labor. In his last line of the book he explains his reason for writing up his research, namely, "because I had become convinced of the great wrong being done a class of very poor people, our own people, by the persistent agitation and misrepresentations of conditions effecting their welfare, and the ultimate aim to inhibit their further progress through the open doors of the industries that lead them to better things, even though in some instances their children are obliged to work." (490)

Reading this book led me to various thoughts about the child labor law, in particular, the thought that it throws the baby out with the bath water. The problem is with abuse in working conditions, not with employment as such. From the time children are quite young -- my experience suggests -- they can and want to work. Such work could materially contribute to their learning and to the well-being of their families, to their integration into the community, to their level of general skill. Today, child labor legislation and custom and culture have brought us to such a pass that children are not permitted to work when they want to, are then imprisoned in schools in order to "learn," which they clearly are not doing, while being frequently blamed for their lack of productivity. How many times have I heard people complain about the horrors of the teen years...years whose horrors sometimes don't seem to let up until the children are actually employed. While parents are vastly over-worked, why shouldn't children be permitted to contribute to the well being of their families, thereby helping everyone to acquire a measure of autonomy, each according to his or her needs and ability? It's a question worth asking.

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Miles College Library Shreds Books to Clear the 4th Floor of the Building

RJ — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 23:39:13 -0500

The library of Miles College, a Historically Black College dating back to 1905, put its law book collection in the dumpster today. I don't know what other lawbooks are available to the students at Miles College law school, but the 4th floor collection had to be cleared. Pleasant-tempered immigrant laborers with no knowledge of the language in which the books were written were hired to shuttle moving dumpster carts out to the larger dumpster in back of the library. Meanwhile, art books, music books, history books, language books and textbooks reflecting the history of Miles College were prepared for shredding by having the back covers ripped off. I found books of folk songs with illustrations, gilt lettering, and intact hardback covers prepared for mincing in this way. The employee available to discuss the issue said it had nothing to do with her. They were told to clear the 4th floor immediately.

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The Orphan Perspective: A Critique of Education and Society

RJ — Sat, 8 Mar 2008 10:45:22 -0600

The Orphan Perspective: A Critique of Society and Education

How many classic children’s stories tell the story of an abandoned, orphaned or outcast child! There is Peter Pan, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Jane Eyre, Mary in The Secret Garden, Sara in The Little Princess, Anne of Greene Gables, Heidi, Louisa May Alcott’s Rose or Fanny, or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, to name only a few. Orphans are prevalent in folktales and fairy tales, in popular literature (Harry Potter), cartoons (Little Orphan Annie) and movies (Star Wars). Why do orphans dominate children’s literature to such an extent? Recent comments on the subject suggest that the orphan’s deprivation, insecurity, and disempowerment show us how children struggle to grow and assert themselves. Philip Nel in his guide to Harry Potter wrote: “The literary orphan dramatizes the difficulty of being a child.” Melanie Kimball’s study of orphans in folktales and fiction (1999) supported this view: “Orphan characters in folktales and literature symbolize our isolation from one another and from society.” In a recent commentary on Harry Potter, Lammermann (2000) tried to link the condition of being an orphan with the loss of connectedness characteristic of modern society. The understanding is that these are stories about coming to terms with life and power on one’s own.

Stories of orphans are not only focused on loneliness and self-assertion. The orphan also functions to present the reader with a stark outsider-perspective, and these narratives tell us a great deal about the world around the child, giving the reader insight into life in the schoolroom, life with parents, life for the powerless. The following notes suggest that our interest in the orphan is not only due to his isolation, poverty, and apparent personal autonomy, but also to the unique perspective of an autonomous mind on the world around the child. The orphan’s perspective in the context of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature threw light on a period of rapid industrialization and the shocking changes it brought about, including the rise of compulsory schooling, non-traditional approaches to medical practice, smaller, more isolated families and an indoor urban lifestyle.

The condition of being an orphan in stories of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (roughly 1865–1920) is marked by the fact that the father is often a marginal character, in part because his role as a provider has collapsed. In most of these narratives, the father is chronically absent, incapacitated or insolvent, as in Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and David Copperfield. In spite of counter-examples such as Rose’s Uncle Alec and Heidi’s grandfather, many of the fathers depicted are conflicted, suffering emotionally, and feel compelled to give their children over to the care of a school or housekeeper. Colin’s father in The Secret Garden tries to keep his son a secret. E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children opens dramatically at the moment the father has been thrown into prison. Disempowered men in fiction are not new. They are also familiar from fairy tales such as Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White, in which they indulge or ignore the cruel whims of the step-mother. The father’s inability to protect his helpless child or children from a female caregiver results in near catastrophe from which the children save themselves by the skin of their teeth, thanks to their own initiative, ingenuity, capacity for expressiveness and courage.

The mother or mother-substitute in these tales, as in so many fairy tales, is more central and takes the form of a wicked stepmother, housekeeper, head teacher, guardian, or governess. This maternal figure belittles and deprives the child, physically as well as emotionally. The pinched Miss Minchin, principal of Sara’s school in The Little Princess, is hostile, and Mrs. Reed, in the episodes of cruelty and neglect that open Jane Eyre, is resentful of Jane and behaves abusively towards her. The appropriately named Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden and the fearful Miss Rottenmeier in Klara’s home in Vienna seem to put their charges in the center of their attention, but clearly seem to hate them as well. Miss Rottenmeier and Miss Medlock, with the support of the doctor, assume that the children in their care won’t ever thrive, contributing perhaps to the children’s apparent inability to do so. Aunt Marilla (Anne of Greene Gables) and Aunt Miranda (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm) may care a good deal about their charges, but their behavior is often critical and impatient. The mother figure regulates indoor urban life with pettiness and cruelty, and the fear that something might be damaged or stolen lurks over everyone in these orderly households, including those of Anne’s Aunt Marilla (the amber necklace!) and Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. Perhaps the predominance of the letter “M” in these names suggests we can interpret these women as horrific variations on the theme of motherhood. No wonder the first chapters of Tom Sawyer and of Huck Finn emphasize the need for escape from the physical constraint of a world dominated by housekeeping, as Huck tells us, explaining why he “lit out:”

“Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways;”

As in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom, where many Aunts offer different life directions for poor Rose in a somewhat didactic and allegorical view of the female influence in the household, these stories show us the female influence as complex, sometimes caring and attentive on the one hand, but often oppressive on the other.

Indoor life involves the suppression of energy, and this in turn leads to illness. The illness of children, a frequent theme in 19th century fiction, appears in orphan stories as the culminating result of various forms of oppression and suppression. This may take the form of a deep willingness to sacrifice, as in the case of Beth in Little Women. She has a great musical gift, but Louisa May Alcott’s story implies that she is too willing to subordinate herself to the care of others, as in nursing the Hummel baby, who has scarlet fever, at Christmas. The struggle to survive in body and soul, the struggle for self-expression – the musical voice of Beth, of Phoebe, and of Rapunzel – together with the whole idea of sacrifice is at the core of these stories. The four girls’ sacrifice of their Christmas money for the good of the poor and that of Jo’s hair, her pride and joy, to the war effort, prefigure the ultimate sacrifice of Beth herself. Of all the sisters, Beth most completely submerges herself in the care of others, and her death seems to be the consequence of this submission to duty.

Illness is also the narrative opportunity for a critique of the school system, as in Jane Eyre’s Lowell School, which suppressed and squandered the children’s vitality in part by neglecting their need for wholesome food and fresh air. At Lowell school, Jane’s friend, Helen died of consumption, due in part to the lack of sanitation, but also to a lack of autonomy for the spirit. Bronte’s Lowell school might be the Lowell textile mills in Massachusetts for all the deprivation its inmates endure. The schools in Dickens are also unhealthy, breeding divisiveness and petty cruelty. Dickens describes David Copperfield’s Salem House school in this way:

"I gazed upon the schoolroom into which he took me as the most forlorn and desolate place I had ever seen—a long room, with three long rows of desks and six of forms, and bristling all round with pegs for hats and slates. Scraps of old copy-books and exercises litter the dirty floor.”(Ch.5)

Teachers and administrators discourage autonomy of intellect in a school setting dominated by “old copy books and exercises.” Copperfield’s schoolmates humiliate him from the start of his school career, forcing him to wear a placard on his back that reads “Take care of him. He bites.” The bully Steerforth takes Copperfield’s money and slanders the only kind teacher, resulting in his dismissal. In this environment, bullying and cruel behavior goes unpunished. The dismal effects of schooling also appear in Hard Times in which the teacher Thomas Gradgrind favors the rule of fact over the imagination, signifying the suppression of autonomous thought. In adulthood Gradgrind’s own children turn out to have poor judgment, apparently a result of the suppressed drive for autonomy, whereas his adopted child, Sissie Jupe, survives emotionally. It’s important to realize that Sissie had proven hopelessly immune to instruction, which put her in a stronger position, emotionally. Offering an impoverished physical and emotional diet and crude methods of control, these schools were meant to show the horrors of a child’s forced march to adulthood. The authors of these narratives were not only writing about a child’s loneliness, poverty and isolation. They were also pointing to a situation of economic collapse, resulting in a father’s absence, a mother’s constraint, the deprivation of personal autonomy required by the school, and the cruel sacrifice involved with spiritual submission.

Poverty isn’t exactly the problem either, however. Poverty and the condition of being an orphan appear to provide the conditions in which a child can learn persistence and hard work, whereas in contrast the affluent children face a more serious kind of deprivation. The narrators portray affluent children as indulged, pampered and spoiled by excessive attention. The affluent children’s central position in the household deprives them of opportunities to serve and weakens their ability to take initiative and become autonomous themselves. As a result, affluent children look sick and the orphan looks healthy.

There are a couple of striking examples of this in David Copperfiel. Steerforth had always been the focus of his mother’s life. She absolved him of guilt for his own role in abusing others, and consequently the habit of abuse persists. His mother later on admits the tragic nature of her relationship with him, describing her son as “the object of my life, to whom its every thought has been devoted, whom I have gratified from a child in every wish, from whom I have had no separate existence since his birth…” (218-Chapter 32). In this faustian pact of parenting, the mother indulges the whims of the child at the expense of his soul. The lurid Uriah Heep, the other of David Copperfield’s two villains, is even more dangerously entangled with his mother than Steerforth. In both cases, the villain’s mother has stifled him by depriving him of the opportunities that autonomy would provide them, whereas the motherless David raises himself by his own bootstraps, his life grounded in ethical principles.

Indulged children in the books of this era are not always evil, but they are sometimes ill or aimless, passive and desperate. Examples include the lonely and wealthy Laurie in Little Women who never develops a strong sense of personal motivation, as well as Aunt Clara’s son in Eight Cousins, the handsome Charlie, who, like Steerforth is “wild”, and Colin in The Secret Garden, under the care of Miss Medlock and Dr. Craven. The landed upper-class household at Misselthwaite revolves around the needs of Colin, initially a physically incompetent child without independence, resourcefulness, or a sense of purpose. The struggles of Colin and Klara, in spite of the medical attention brought to bear on their cases, brings to mind the heroine’s unambiguous remarks about her husband, the doctor, in The Yellow Wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: “John is a physician, and perhaps – (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind) –perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.” Gilman privately lets us know that she believes “congenial work, with excitement and change,” would do her good, but the windows in “this atrocious nursery” in the “ancestral halls” her husband has rented are “barred for little children” as for her. Medical diagnosis has often entailed the warning to avoid work, change, excitement, even writing, but these authors tell us that the lack of useful work, freedom and autonomy impedes the health and development of constrained children, as well as constrained women.

Who are the true guides, helpers and teachers that foster the orphan child’s personal growth and development? The orphan child finds his true helper and model for ethical behavior in close association with the natural world, as in the case of Heidi’s grandfather, or Mary’s Dicken and Ben Weatherstaff’s robin redbreast, a bird that seemed to speak to Mary, telling her about the secret garden. As in fairy tales, these narratives link the natural with the supernatural, bearing out the magical relationship of effort and energy between love given and love returned, or the seeds of giving and the response of the universe. The Golden Age narratives of orphans also link work and effort with the magic of change and growth.

Perhaps this relationship between effort and the natural, work and the supernatural, accounts for the fact that in orphan stories of achievement, the helper or teacher also belongs to a lower social class than the hero. For one example, Cousin Rose, in Louisa May Alcott’s somewhat moralistic Eight Cousins, has a maidservant, Phoebe, who proves to be her role model. Phoebe has learned to sacrifice her own interests with humility and without resentment, and she works hard and selflessly. Phoebe is an orphan, like Rose, but she has no aunts or uncles to occupy themselves with her development. She does have a beautiful singing voice, and this helps her carve out a sphere of her own. Rose later matures and marries her intellectual cousin, Max, but does not, either literally or metaphorically speaking, acquire a voice like her friend, Phoebe.

In other orphan stories as well the abandoned child’s real teacher is often a servant. The Indian servant creates a bridge for Sara in The Little Princess between the poverty of her school existence and the wealth that changes her life and vindicates her as a human being. For Mary in The Secret Garden, the country boy Dicken, and his sister, the hard-working housemaid Martha, from a poor family of 12 children, show her a new way of looking at the world. The authors show us that Heidi’s friend Peter, the goatherd, his grandmother, and Heidi’s grandfather, who has returned from the excesses of urban life to a life of woodworking and farming, embody true values. Mrs. Reed’s young servant, Bessie Lee, who tends to Jane Eyre, is the only person in the child’s young life to treat her with affection, telling her stories, singing songs, providing good food. In David Copperfield, Peggoty, the young servant that tends David as a child, together with her family, provides David with support and a model for family strength, illustrating simplicity, honesty, deep humility, gratefulness and capacity for joy in the face of penury and tragedy. In other words, the lonely orphan usually finds his role models in the laboring class. The strongest influence on Tom Sawyer’s life is also the outcast, Huck Finn, and, in the most dynamic of all these examples of relationships spanning social classes, Huck Finn’s real teacher is Jim, a slave in ante-bellum Missouri. Huck learns more from this relationship than from his violent father or from school, or the Widow Douglas or Judge Thatcher. For example, Jim takes a “hair ball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox and he used to do magic with it,” and eloquently tells Huck’s “whole fortune” (Chapter 4). Jim’s friendship is unique in Huck’s life, providing Huck with the opportunity for the growth in moral character that is at the center of the book.

In addition to friendship, the health of the child appears to be the result of independence and resourcefulness. Heidi learns compassion and persistence from the care and feeding of a number of intractable goats, and Mary’s work clearing the ground for the green shoots introduces her to the cycle of life, teaching her the effort it takes to grow. The strong child contributes to the common good. Heidi, Dicken, eventually Mary, and Rebecca, unlike her mother and Aunt Miranda, are exuberantly healthy and willing to work. Health is closely linked with agricultural work, and ill-health is associated with an indoor and urban lifestyle. Health is the result of inner strength, entailing stubbornness and resistance to the unnatural order of things with which our heroes and heroines are in conflict. Within these books, the unnatural order of things is manifested in school and medical practice as well as in the absurdity of a ferocious house-keeping, appearing in such details as the thread Tom’s Aunt Polly uses to sew the boys’ shirts so they won’t go swimming. These petty details manifest the absurdity of arbitrary coercion and demonstrate the way constraint and suppression of energy works. No wonder Huck ends his story telling the readers: “But I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

Orphan children are marginalized and impoverished, but their lack of parents, lack of schooling and lack of medical care enables the author to contrast their condition with that of wealthy children who are at the center of the lives of their caregivers, subject to the petty tyranny of the household, lacking meaningful employment, apparently dependent and stifled by privilege and the subtlest forms of coercion. Sickness and paralysis of the limbs become the symbolic expression of their incapacity for initiative. The focus of these Golden Age books on the paralysis of children such as Klara (Heidi) and Colin (The Secret Garden) suggests that these are not only rags-to-riches stories about personal empowerment, or cases of exemplary children faced with hardships, but also adult books taking issue with the culture of a rapidly industrializing society as it disabled children and by implication, adults as well. Charlotte Perkins Gilman later sent a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper to the physician who had prescribed that she never pick up a pen in her life; she reported in a 1913 comment that while he never responded he did change his prescription for neurasthenia as a result of reading it.

Dickens and Twain have been accused of didacticism and propaganda, and moralism can be seen in Alcott, Wiggins, and Spyri, but these narrators all created an autonomous orphan child whose life served as a direct attack on public education, new forms of medical practice, urban life, and the compulsory suppression of imagination and autonomy apparently designed to ready children for life and work in an industrial society. The orphan linked urbanization didactically linked with moral depravity, dis-ability being the result of social conditions that suppressed the vitality and energy of the child and denied her a voice. In these books the recovery of a child’s health became the dramatic means of embodying the values of pre-industrial life in which children, spiritually connected with the earth, could find an autonomous voice, and prove able to heal themselves. The orphan perspective of the late 19th century, as far as it is from our world, can still remind us of our own aspirations.

Works Cited

Donahue, Deirdre. (2003, July 2). Orphans in literature empower children. USA Today. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/2003-07-02-bchat_x.htm

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1899). The Yellow Wallpaper. An Autobiography of Emotions.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1913). Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper.

Kimball, M. (1999, January 1). From folktales to fiction: Orphan characters in children’s literature. Library Trends. Retrieved February 24, 2007 from http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1387/is_3_47/ai_54836352

Lammermann, E. (2000, December 6). Harry Potter and the anomie within. Dorkk. Retrieved February 24, 2007

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Homeschooling in Europe - November 30, 2007 Update

RJ — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:36:38 -0600

Regarding homeschooling in Europe, the HSLDA and the WorldNet Daily are the most familiar and prominent conduits of information on the subject. However, the HSLDA website is by no means kept up-to-date, and much of the writing is very confusing and hard to follow. So if you go to the website and look up "homeschooling in Poland," you may find some information that is 4 years old and you may still not understand the issues.

There are websites that provide information about international homeschooling, but there too, information is not up-to-date. In Germany you can go to Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit, and that has pretty good information, although not always up-to-the-minute.

The Netzwerk Bildungsfreiheit did have a link to an article in the UK "Guardian" (October 18, 2007) on what they called a "ghost school" in Bremen, Germany, that was operating "under the table," as we would say. Although no one messed with the successful school in the past -- whose young pupils went on to government schools and performed successfully, by the way -- the Bremen government decided to crack down on this independent school around the same time that the Neubronners were charged with illegally homeschooling.

Speaking of the Neubronners, their accounts have been released (this occurred on November 24, 2007 or so), and they have been told they can have custody of their children at least until the next hearing. Perhaps, Germany will not adopt such a fearfully hard line approach.

In other good news, the Slovakian embassy in Vienna has acknowledged that homeschooling in the younger grades (Grades 1-4) will now be legalized "within certain limits," and I don't know what those limits are. Presumably this is also good news.

There is a website entitled hausunterricht.org (http://www.hausunterricht.org/html/rechtliches.html), which documents the legal situation throughout Europe. According to this information, homeschooling is not illegal anywhere in Europe.

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Homeschooling vs. the European Union

RJ — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:20:29 -0600

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Europeans who want to homeschool look to America as a place where it is legal to homeschool, and a place where homeschooling thrives. Certainly, some horror stories have come out of Europe (Germany, Belgium, Holland) about bans, crackdowns and prohibitions on homeschooling. A German federal court recently upheld the view that homeschooling constitutes child endangerment, leaving it possible for the state to deny custody to the parents of German homeschooling children, whether they are in Germany or not.

I suggested in my last blog that some homeschooling families have decided to make an issue of homeschooling, accounting for some of the publicity. However, another aspect of the problem is the fact that homeschooling and private education in general is not in accordance with European Union policy. EU thinktanks have proposed a 5-year plan (2007-2013) to “internationalize” education. These policy-making organizations claim to be concerned with freedom of education. However, the more important agenda is to “internationalize.” This means strengthening international networking in education throughout Europe, and carrying out such tasks as “funding (of) trans-national projects” and supporting “large manifestations, studies, communication and information events which are able to reach a large audience (to) make Europe more concrete for its citizen,” as well as creating a new European Union citizen. (This appears in a document entitled “Mapping European Union Policy” published by the Socires organization, which describes itself as a private Christian initiative (see http://www.socires.nl/downloads/EducationMappinEuropoe_Socires.pdf). This policy document also goes on to state that the European Union contains no programs which are designed to strengthen civil society. Maybe this is a mis-translation. If these programs don't strengthen civil society, then perhaps they should.

Here is a short list of some of the EU organizations promoting internationalization in education: The European Platform for Dutch Education (www.europeesplatform.nl) in the Netherlands which claims it has a mandate to internationalize. Not surprisingly, it is in the Netherlands that census lists are compared to school lists to ensure compliance with compulsory schooling requirements. The European Platform in turn belongs to a “national agency” called Lifelong Learning Program (LLP) (formerly known as Socrates and Leonardo). According to the website this is also the “national support centre for the eTwinning programme” which is related to a program entitled “Europe as a learning environment in schools” (Elos). Other related organizations are the “Free program for catholic education…at a European level,” (www.ceec.be) and The European Foundation for Freedom in Education, as well as BBO in the Netherlands. The website of BBO states that it is a private organization financed entirely through “commissions,” which “aims at impacting the whole process of policy making." An essential part of this strategy is the strengthening of the relations between civil society and the policy makers.” In addition, the European Council of National Associations of Independent Schools (ECNAIS) www.ecnais.org seeks to bring together independent schools of all faiths and confessions under its wing. Other organizations which would have on impact on education are, of course, the European Parliament and programs for creating “active European citizenship” such as “Europe for Citizens 2007-2013,” as well as the development of the European constitution.

What does the European Union’s constitution have to say about freedom of education? The European Union’s constitution promotes “freedom of education,” but it is a freedom of education that is given as a privilege by the EU government, and includes the privilege of receiving a “free compulsory education” and the privilege of founding private schools in accordance with national laws and policies. This would probably be in contrast with freedom as defined in the U.S. Constitution as an inalienable right. Dr. Ron Paul mentions the importance of a constitution which specifically through the 10th amendment leaves all issues that aren’t the province of the federal government to be determined by individuals and states: "Amendment 10 - Powers of the States and People. Ratified 12/15/1791.The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The European Constitution has not yet been ratified by European nations, but policy-makers are submitting a “Reformed” Constitution which would, according to the Wikipedia article I referenced, “superate” national laws, although technically not replacing them.
The word superate was new to me, so I looked it up in an online dictionary, but did not find it there. Further research showed me that the word derives from the Italian verb “superare” meaning to “overcome” and that it is sometimes in use in philosophy texts, for example, to mean “overcome” or “defeat.” The above-cited Socires article confirmed that even though the EU constitution has not yet been ratified by member states, it would still go into action as a kind of “soft law.”

In any case, the EU policy makers are to some extent succeeding in changing policy in Europe, and it is not clear to what extent national leaders are going along. In any case, some of the policies involve resistance to the rise of home and private education, and both lowering the age of compulsory school entrance, and sometimes raising the ages for leaving compulsory schooling. The plan can be seen at work, for example, in Norway, where only 9 years of schooling had been required prior to 1997 (now it’s 10), and children started school at 7 (now at 6). In addition, the first year of Norwegian school is now to involve an integration of traditional play school with academic instruction, whereas previously it had been more of a traditional play-oriented kindergarden. Many rural and local schools in Norway have been closed, supposedly for economic reasons, forcing parents to send their children to centralized or urban schools farther from home (hence some of the interest in homeschooling, which has seen a 400% rise in Norway just in the last two years.) In other words, this is part of the general pattern we see worldwide in attempts to consolidate schools.

We have seen developments like this in America as well, under Mike Huckabee’s 10-year governorship in Arkansas, for example, in which the compulsory school entrance age was lowered to age 6 and truancy laws were strengthened in such a way that more work was required to take one’s own child out of school. A number of states have considered legislation lowering school entrance age, and the prevailing long-term trends in elementary school and even pre-school education -- as promoted by various private initiatives calling themselves national organizations -- call for reduced play (in many cases minimal or no recess) and increasingly early work with letters and numbers, as well as, of course, general training in following orders.

The national laws themselves don’t seem to support these EU policies. Home education is still legal in nations throughout Europe. My research led me to a German homeschool information website updated in September of 2007 which documented laws pertaining to education in 16 countries. (http://www.hausunterricht.org/html/rechtliches.html) According to this information, homeschooling is not against the law in any of the 16 European countries under consideration, even in Germany. In a couple of cases, local authorities have jurisdiction, and in other cases the central government retains jurisdiction. Nevertheless, in no case, does the law actually forbid home education. In other words, the national laws go back to a recent time period in which home education was a private issue.

The fact that homeschooling is legal throughout Europe, while being stringently prohibited in places such as Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, suggests that European Union policy makers are working so fast it may not even be clear to anyone how much authority the local and national authorities have. In addition, local and national authorities haven’t even had a chance to develop a good game plan. A German spokesman’s much-publicized excuse for cracking down on a few harmless Baptist families is that the families by homeschooling threaten to constitute a “parallel society.” In view of the fact that 20% of Germany’s citizens are of non-German descent, a group including predominantly Turks and Poles, with 65% of the German population Christian and 4% practicing Islam, it’s hard to understand the concern with Christian parallel cultures unless a new “unity” is in the program.

Education is a crucial area within which a community, nation or union, develops attachment to its policies, programs and goals, and the EU policy makers have made their program clear. This program calls for internationalization under the wing of the EU, an emphasis on compulsory schooling, and a severe limitation of homeschooling. This appear to entail, as regards the child and the community, a reduced field for “play,” and increased emphasis on “early learning,” together with a weakening of family bonds, a weakening of national bonds, and possibly a general weakening of civil society.

To what extent do European nations plan to go along with this program? Some commentators, such as former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, warn that the new co-operation of the European Union and European nations is a “shotgun marriage” (interview in The Brussels Journal, Mon. 2006-02-27 22:13). Is this the case? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I do think it’s useful to consider the European resistance to homeschooling, historically a harmless, private issue, in the context of European Union policy-making. This is a good explanation for why there is such interest in Ron Paul all over Europe – thanks to a new response to my last blog, you can see below some useful sources of information on the enthusiasm for Ron Paul in Europe, including the Strasbourg Tea Party!

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/homeschooling-vs-eur-1161.html

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Homeschoolers Worldwide - for Ron Paul?

RJ — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 20:18:08 -0600

Wednesday, November 21, 2007 Homeschoolers Worldwide - for Ron Paul?

Homeschooling and the right of individual families to raise their children according to their own lights is presupposed in the constitutional right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a right whose champion is Ron Paul. The following notes suggest that homeschooling is on the rise. These notes are intended also to point to the interconnectedness of the homeschool movement worldwide as well as to the importance of supporting Ron Paul, so he can in turn support the homeschool movement.

Worldwide, homeschoolers should be supporting Ron Paul. Why should they? Well, because homeschoolers worldwide are basically facing the same issue, the issue of liberty.

Homeschooling is an international concern, even though my Microsoft Word spellcheck still won’t accept the word. Only 200 years ago, homeschooling was the norm throughout the western world, not to speak of the worlds beyond the “West.” Homeschooling in those days would be typically followed by apprenticeships or professional activity, or the continuation of productivity within the home.

Increasingly, government schools became an option. Today, the idea of government schooling has become associated with modernity and modernity with literacy and literacy with democracy. Government schooling is called “public education” in America, the underlying assumption being that this is education by the public and for the public, and that diversity consequently thrives under its wing. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The terms “government schooling” and “state-mandated compulsory schooling” are much more precise. Government schools are no longer an option: they are compulsory.

In addition, the connections between government schooling and democracy, literacy and modernity are tenuous, or even arbitrary. Both literacy and democracy can thrive and flourish without government schooling. Neither literacy nor democracy depends on schooling, and, going a bit further, I would say truthfully that government schooling, as it is presently organized, usually suppresses or even suffocates the seeds of democracy and the vital spirit that leads to active citizenship. The underlying goal of compulsory schooling is not to raise a citizen, but to eradicate the local, the ethnic, the national, the religious individual, to eliminate the bonding to family and community which underlies citizenship.

So what does all this have to do with Ron Paul? It has to do with the fact that homeschooling raises the fundamental issues that unite homeschooling families worldwide of any and all religions and persuasions: namely, the issue of liberty, the freedom to raise one’s own family according to one’s own lights, regardless of religious persuasion or cultural or ethnic background. It is impossible to erase the underlying reality that people are mammals; mammals raise their young in families and organize their affairs largely on the basis of deep and ineradicable intuitions, often with the aid of mothers; families, in turn, thrive in communities, and communities often find their strength in deities. This is true everywhere. The only question is how political, religious, or other self-appointed authorities can arrange to accommodate themselves to this fact.

In view of the tremendous amount of communication at work in our highly interconnected world, what generalizations can be made about homeschooling worldwide?

On the surface, it looks bad. German homeschooling families have recently been the object of special attention. Homeschoolers in Germany have been taken into custody or subjected to crippling fines, and some have lost of custody of their children. In August of 2006 a Baptist mother of 12 (!) was arrested for homeschooling, while her husband took the children and went to Austria., based on information from The Brussels Journal- http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1330. In another recent case, fathers of several German Baptist homeschooling children were held in coercive detention, and pressure was brought to bear on them for years; ultimately, they were permitted to form a private school. A 15 yr. old homeschooler (Melissa Busekros) was taken into the custody of the JugendAmt (Youth Office) in February of this year, although she was ultimately released, no psychological damage having been found as a result of homeschooling. Belgium was in the news in 2006 for harassing a prominent Belgian journalist and his wife, a member of the Belgian Federal Parliament, for homeschooling their children. Outside of Europe, the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa has also been the focus of attention for its repudiation of homeschooling. In sum, public attention has been drawn to the fact that the freedom to homeschool one’s own children is threatened. There are governments in Europe, but elsewhere as well, who consider it their right and duty to impose compulsory school attendance on children.

Much publicity has been devoted to these cases, and the publicity has been fanned by the Home School Legal Defense Association, under the direction of Mike Farris, and the WorldNet Daily, under the direction of Joseph Farah. These two organizations, sometimes in tandem, issue frequent urgent reports regarding the repression of homeschoolers. (See, for example, WorldNet Daily’s report referring to “Police state. Germany” at http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56946) WND has publicly condemned the harassment of homeschoolers with and without religious persuasion in Germany, for example.

While this type of publicity probably has benefits in terms of making people aware of specific instances of repression of homeschoolers, it appears to be much more confusing when it comes to providing guidance on what to do about it. The above-cited WND article opens by advising readers, for example, that “continuing legal challenges won’t work,” (according to an unidentified expert). Says who? Since when do “continuing legal challenges” of any kind not work? Whereas it is implied that Farris may be the expert who thinks legal challenges won’t work, he is later quoted as saying: "To win, a legislative solution is needed. And in order to convince a German legislative body to change the law in favor of homeschooling, public opinion in Germany will have to be changed." Mike Farris and the HSLDA provide a significant stream of advice on how, where, when and why to pose political or legal challenges to repression of homeschoolers and/or when to back down and hold off with the letter-writing, and when to just “pray” for a government to change its mind. Meanwhile, Mike Farris publicly condemns the United Nations Rights of the Child Convention, which he claims poses a threat to the rights of parents to homeschool their children. However, the United Nations also publicly condemns Germany for its repression of homeschoolers.

The result is that if homeschoolers look to the HSLDA or the WorldNet Daily or even the United Nations for their political marching orders, they will be in a more or less constant state of confusion. The case of H.R. 6, in which Mike Farris stirred up large numbers of homeschoolers to a campaign of political action regarding an issue that ultimately would not have affected them, resulting in over-reaction, is a case in point.

An additional problem with the above-cited ongoing publicity is that it could lead one to suppose that, as suggested above: “continuing legal challenges won’t work.” Underlying this supposition is the idea that repression is growing, unfortunate as we may feel it is, but that realities are realities, and we in the United States may end up having to be glad with what we have, even if it means increasing legal restrictions on homeschooling in the United States. In other words, whoever you want to believe, and whoever you want to take your marching orders from, the ongoing publicity on the part of WND and the HSLDA suggests that homeschoolers face a dim future.

Some careful research shows us a different picture. First of all, some of the repression, in Germany and elsewhere, as well as some of the increasing anti-homeschooling legislation in the U.S., are actually due in part to the simple fact that homeschooling is on the rise:

1. more and more parents want to homeschool;

2. more and more parents worldwide are homeschooling and are availing themselves of a multiplicity of homeschooling organizations to support them;

3. more and more publicity is appearing about the benefits of homeschooling, the possibilities of homeschooling, and the disadvantages of compulsory state education;

4. more and more legislative action is being successfully undertaken throughout the world to support the needs of homeschoolers; and finally,

5. a number of significant cases of repression are due to the fact that parents, empowered by the publicity and the international connectedness offered by e-mail and blogging (not to speak of text-messaging) have simply decided not to knuckle under any more, but rather to go public with their situations: the Neubronners have been quoted as saying that they have decided not to pay the exorbitant fine, not only because it is exorbitant, but also as a challenge to the very idea that they should be fined at all.

In other words, one significant cause of the recent repression is exactly the fact that homeschooling is on the rise. Parents worldwide no longer trust compulsory state-mandated schooling. By way of a few examples, in 2004, the Shanghai Star published an article pointing to the rise of interest in home schooling and the existence of a Shanghai homeschooling organization. Meanwhile, according to reports in a homeschool blog (http://hsblog.org/index.php/category/homeschool-legislation/) earlier this year (2007), the Czech ministry is now allowing 6th to 9th grade students to homeschool. In Alabama, legislation has been considered to enable homeschooled students to take part in public school activities, which would pave the way for an a la carte approach to schooling, as well as allow for mutual influence of public schooling and home schooling. In Nevada, for one example, and in Scotland, legislation has been considered that would make it easier to homeschool. These are just a few among many examples.

I would summarize my thoughts about Ron Paul and worldwide homeschooling as follows:

· homeschooling is on the rise, not on the wane;

· legal challenges may or may not work, but they may be valid and necessary approaches;

· to decide whether or not to undertake a particular legal challenge, one should depend on one’s own research, and one should not allow oneself to be overly influenced, panicked or driven by any particular call to action;

· the issue in the resistance to compulsory schooling is liberty -- freedom from government intervention is Ron Paul’s platform -- so work, donate, and vote for Ron Paul!

November 21, 2007

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/homeschoolers-worldw-1160.html

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HSLDA endorses Mike Huckabee: why not Ron Paul?

RJ — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:36:55 -0600

Friday, September 21, 2007 (http://www.homeschoolersforpaul.blogspot.com)
HSLDA endorses Huckabee: why not Ron Paul?

Since Mike Huckabee was recently endorsed by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) there has been some discussion about why it didn’t endorse Ron Paul. Why would HSLDA endorse Mike Huckabee? The question is: if you wanted to safeguard your right to homeschool, who would you vote for – Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul? The following is a summary of some explanations for this endorsement as suggested by members of a Homeschoolers for Ron Paul meetup group, together with some thoughts of my own, and an attempt to answer this question.

Among the suggestions made by the meetup group were as follows. It was suggested that the Home School Legal Defense Association believes Mike Huckabee, as previous Governor of Arkansas, would have a better chance of being elected, than Ron Paul, and that HSLDA, which has defined itself as a Christian organization, would support Mike Huckabee as a Christian pastor. It was also suggested that neither Huckabee nor the HSLDA share Ron Paul’s idea of liberty, in spite of the fact that they use the word.

My research indicates, first of all, that Huckabee is not as strong a supporter of homeschooling as his campaign might lead one to believe. It is true that he demonstrated his support for homeschooling in 1997 when he signed into law a House bill favoring homeschooling. Huckabee saw to it that a good deal of publicity surrounded this event. Prior to the 1997 legislation, home schooled students had been required to receive a passing grade on annual tests. Currently students are only required to take standardized tests along a schedule similar to that of the public schools, and they are not required to pass the tests. In addition parents are not asked to pay for the testing. In other words, the 1997 law provided relief for home schooling families, but didn’t represent a dramatic change.

However, this reform occurred only at the beginning of his governorship (1997-2007) and Arkansas laws pertaining to homeschooling were already very restrictive. In the following ten years no additional relief was provided to home schooling families, and in fact, more restrictions followed. Home schooling families who didn’t want to have their children tested could still be charged with truancy. In 1999, additional legislation was enacted in Arkansas and signed by Governor Huckabee that imposed greater rather than less restrictions on home schoolers. The restrictions could potentially cause problems for students whose families are undecided. The 1999 legislation called for a two-week advance statement of intent to home school or truancy charges would be filed. In addition the restrictions do not permit students to be withdrawn from school for the purpose of home schooling if the students are facing disciplinary violations. The compulsory attendance law was also revised during Huckabee’s governorship to require that attendance in school be required beginning at age 5, not 6, as previously. In an article entitled “Homeschoolers Lose Ground” of July 20, 2007, HSLDA itself stated its vigorous opposition to this legislation. In other words, Huckabee’s avowed support for homeschooling must be seriously questioned.

If Huckabee’s agenda doesn’t seem to be as forcefully pro-homeschooling as it looks at first, the HSLDA’s agenda and political activities are not entirely focused on home schooling issues either. HSLDA states that it is an explicitly Christian organization with a strong political orientation and interest in promoting certain candidates. The Patrick Henry School and Generation Joshua are involved in political activity. The HSLDA claims it is “organized as a 501 c 4,” which means that it is exempt from the rule that 501 c 3 non-profits are expressly forbidden to actively support political causes, and implies that it doesn’t have legal status as a non-profit anyway.

For example, currently the student teams associated with HSLDA's PAC, are organizing support for the candidacy of Bobby Jindal for Governor of Louisiana. Who is Bobby Jindal? Jindal is described as a social conservative, and his bio indicates that he converted from Hinduism to Catholicism while in college. Jindal has been given low ratings by environmentalists and, according to Wikipedia (September 19, 2007): "Jindal is an enthusiastic supporter of the war in Iraq." Since Jindal is not known to have any particular interest in home schooling, the Home School Legal Defense Fund appears to be focusing its attention on a candidate who has nothing to do with home school legal defense!

The above notes point to the fact that the agenda of both Huckabee and the HSDLA doesn’t manifest a strong orientation to the rights of home schoolers in general.

Does their agenda reflect a strong orientation to the freedom of the individual? Is freedom from government regulation really an underlying goal for Huckabee or for the HSLDA’s leadership?

Ned Ryun, Generation Joshua’s director and director of HSLDA’s federal political action committee thinks not. On his blog he recently wrote (September 19, 2007) that Mike Huckabee has a poor social and fiscal record, and in particular mentioned that he has recently introduced legislation to ban smoking in public places. Ned Ryun commented as follows: “In a free market/capitalistic society, and by the way, a free society, the government should not be regulating when and where people smoke.” I have recently received a report that Ned Ryun quit the directorship of Generation Joshua due to the HSLDA’s endorsement of Huckabee.

Another way to consider the question of whether Huckabee and the HSLDA are seriously interested in safeguarding individual freedoms would be to look at their analysis of other questions. It seems that both HSLDA and Huckabee would be willing to use the law in the service of a moral principle or moral truth as they saw this truth. Huckabee and HSLDA would consider legislation in the service of morality, possibly undermining the separation of church and state. Ron Paul, on the other hand, would insist that we are “endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights.”

In addition, the view of homeschooling described under descriptions of Generation Joshua on the HSLDA website strongly suggests a purposive orientation for homeschooling on the part of this organization: “However, few of us homeschool just for the sake of homeschooling. We homeschool our children because we believe it is the best path for their own future and for the impact that they can have on our nation and the generations that follow. Yes, we want our children to have excellent skills and godly character. But skills and character are designed to equip our children to accomplish great things for God and for the good of our nation.” In other words, according to the HSLDA homeschooling is not primarily a freedom, a right, with inherent value in itself as such. For HSLDA, homeschooling is mainly a value insofar as it is promotes a pre-defined and established good or truth. From a constitutionalist viewpoint, homeschooling is a value insofar as the right to school one’s children as one sees fit is entailed in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For the HSLDA there is a good greater than liberty –one truth, morals as they interpret morals; for Ron Paul, homeschooling is entailed in liberty.

My research can be summarized in the following way:

Neither Huckabee nor the HSLDA are strongly motivated to focus on the agenda of homeschoolers, although the endorsement is designed to advertise their concern with homeschoolers;
HSLDA and Huckabee would legislate to promote an agenda in spite of its impact on individual freedom, whereas Ron Paul would argue against the use of government restrictions to promote an agenda, regardless of how moral he considered the agenda to be;
The fact that homeschooling is considered a means to an end differs from the viewpoint that the right to home schooling, as other freedoms, is an end in itself; thus Ron Paul would protect the right to home school as a matter of principle; Huckabee and the HSLDA would protect their agenda first, quite possibly letting the principle of individual rights suffer;
Ron Paul has consistently proposed legislation which would give greater autonomy to home schoolers.

These points suggest that if you want to be homeschooling years from now and doing it your way, your best bet is to vote for Ron Paul (and not Mike Huckabee).

For those of you would like to do more research, please see the following:

http://www.taxhikemike.org/
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/2007/01/a_report_on_mike_huckabees_fis.ph
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmNjMmI1ODhjNGVlZWFmNTlmMGNiZTVjYTg1NTUzMTk=
http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2005/06/30/News/323746.html
http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2005/01/28/News/316347.html
http://edition.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/candidates/mike.huckabee.html
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/104629/
http://www.explorehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Issues.View&Issue_ID=7#Music_has
http://www.hslda.org/courtreport/v15n3/V15N3AR.asp?PrinterFriendly=True
http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/104629/

http://informaledcommunity.atom5.com/hslda-endorses-mike-1134.html

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"Homeschool, Sweet Homeschool: A Resource List for Progressive Learning"

RJ — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 15:31:12 -0600

Education has long been regarded as potentially liberating. The opportunity to learn to read can be linked to changes that shake the foundation of coercive power structures, as well as open up worlds of possibility for individuals. Because mandatory schooling is associated with opportunities for mobility and privilege, with social and economic progress, it is possible to look at the institution as a country's pledge to its citizens to enable such opportunity. In 19th-century America, public education appeared as an alternative to the brutality of child labor and, as such, as a benefit to children. Compulsory schooling is supposed to lead to literacy, once the special province of professionals and the wealthy and now intended for all members of society. Literacy, in turn, is associated with democracy. We believe there is a strong connection between literacy and knowledge or wisdom, between exposure to different cultures and tolerance, between academic learning and economic progress, between education and the formation of democratic citizens. Mandatory schooling is now a worldwide phenomenon associated with modernity, with the so-called economically developed world, and with social or political progress within a society.

Schooling is central to modernity and modern culture because it is focused on achievement and progress. It is assumed to teach children the skills they will need to be economically viable later in life, and it aims to socialize them by introducing them to the values of a larger community. Schooling removes children from the home and the workplace for the purpose of enabling economic productivity. The motto "no child left behind" supports the thinking that formal education means the opportunity to move forward. Underlying the practical function of education in society is a deep acceptance of school as a given and an absolute good, to which we deliver our children for their own benefit and for the benefit of society. The teacher is understood to mediate this benefit, playing a necessary role in structuring and funneling information for and to the child. The teacher is also assumed to be responsible for motivating the child to learn. It is understood that a good teacher responds to the child as an individual, and motivates that child with his or her own enthusiasm and by choosing inherently worthwhile and challenging problems for the child to address.

write_ads(2,1) The link between literacy and modern compulsory schooling, however, is complex, and should not be taken for granted. Increasing literacy and increases in the level of democracy are not necessarily the result of compulsory schooling. As a rich body of research has demonstrated, schools restrict physical liberty and personal autonomy; and from the point of view of children's rights, as well as the rights of parents and families, schools do not function along democratic lines. Parents of children in public schools are not asked to vote on textbooks or teachers, nor are children provided with administrative responsibility. State schooling is mandatory, despite the presence of a wide range of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups within American culture, not to mention the infinite variation in the needs of individual families and individual children. The tendency to resegregate along class and racial lines within communities has also limited the use of the school as a means for the teaching of tolerance, regardless of how thoughtful individual teachers may be. It may be problematic to assume that the public school system will bring about conditions of being that it does not succeed in practicing within its walls.

Compulsory public education in the US goes back to the middle of the 19th century, when it was admiringly patterned on the efficient Prussian model. Although it faced some resistance on the grounds that coercion would be incompatible with democratic ideals, this resistance soon largely evaporated. In the late 19th century, compulsory schooling served in part as a means of helping to integrate into American society massive numbers of immigrants. Truancy laws were enacted and administered, and an educational bureaucracy developed, increasingly following a model of business efficiency. But literacy rates did not always rise in tandem with these developments, and so-called discipline problems and academic problems continued to grow. Despite Americans' widespread faith in education, during the Depression the school system faced the same kinds of crises it faces today. Instances of violence, poverty, and overcrowding emerged, as well as discipline problems linked with issues of motivation and reading readiness, behavioral difficulties, absenteeism, and substandard test scores. In an attempt to solve such problems, Depression-era schools tried promoting children regardless of their achievements. Today, we see the widespread use of psychoactive drugs from early childhood on to minimize behavioral difficulties and stimulate academic progress.

The history of compulsory public education suggests that coercion and resistance go hand in hand, and that criticism of the use of restraint and coercion in the formal administration of learning is as old as schooling itself. Such criticism includes the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Leo Tolstoy, who argued that schools violated a child's nature. New developments in pedagogical thinking emerged in the 18th century, from the educational reformers Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). Pestalozzi's concern with nurturing the child was inspirational, and his work stimulated the creation of alternative schools in Europe and America. In 19th-century England, schooling practices were attacked by Charles Dickens in Hard Times (1854) and by George Bernard Shaw in his Treatise on Parents and Children. In the 20th century there emerged a tradition of Modern or progressive schools, many of them inspired by the work, and execution, of the Spanish anarchist Francisco Ferret y Guardia. In the US, criticism of education flowered between 1969 and 1971 in the name of social concerns, the failure of schools to address the human needs of the child, and the dominance of coercive policies.

Such criticism was carried on thereafter as well. Among those critics who lost faith in the public school system altogether were John Holt, who coined the term unschooling and promoted homeschooling, and the veteran New York City public school teacher John Taylor Gatto. Meanwhile, interest in free or democratic schools increased, especially in regard to A. S. Neill's Summerhill Summerhill, radical progressive school in Leiston, Suffolk, England, and the educational movement based on principles developed at the school. The school was founded (1924) by A. S. Neill, who headed the institution until his death in 1973. Students range between the ages of 6 and 17. The main principle behind the operation of the school is freedom. in England, Sudbury Valley in Framingham, Massachusetts, and many other such schools worldwide. The Waldorf schools, founded on the theories of Rudolf Steiner and associated with the anthroposophic tradition, have also emerged as alternatives to the public school system. The above-mentioned alternatives focus on the child's need for nurturing and continuity in human relationships, for play and imaginative activity, for physical activity and practical work with the hands, for freedom and personal autonomy. These concerns have also been a focus of interest for scholars and writers outside the field of education but interested in the rights of children; in childbirth, infancy, and nurturing; in aspects of psychological development within the family structure; and in the development of knowledge and the emotional and physiological foundations of children's learning processes. It is useful to understand the underlying links between figures distant in space and time, from Rousseau to Tolstoy, from the Modern School to the Free School.

The following resource list focuses on scholars, teachers, writers, and practitioners, as well as organizations interested in the emotional development of the child as a prerequisite for learning. Their work prioritizes play and the arts in their relation to learning, and the view that healthy intellectual and moral development requires a high degree of personal autonomy. Within this group is a wide spectrum of views regarding compulsory public education itself. The list includes some who continue to believe that schools, troubled as they may be, can be saved by good teachers and thoughtful administrators. For such observers, good formal education still remains a possibility, and a great hope for social change and personal liberation. On the other hand, some of the thinkers represented here argue that compulsory public schooling should be abolished, that the very structure of coercion is destructive and inevitably inhibits the development of the child.

Despite such a diversity of views and approaches, all resources represented here manifest a concern with nurturing, with experience and self-activity in the learning process, and with respect for the autonomy of the child. Hopefully, this brief list will provide the reader with opportunities to further pursue an interest in informal education. A more complete version of the list, including magazines and websites, is available on the Mothering magazine website (www.mothering.com).

David Albert. And the Skylark Sings With Me: Adventures in Homeschooling and Community-Based Education (New Society Publishers, 1999) and Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery: A Journey of Original Seeking (Common Courage Press, 2003). Albert's books begin with his experience homeschooling his daughters and deal with the nature of the learning process; his essays also appear in Home Education Magazine (www.skylarksings.com).

Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (Vintage, 1965). This scholarly book gives rare insight into the history of childhood and education in Europe, showing how, with the emergence of schools, children were separated from adults, as were the rich from the poor, which resulted in limiting the range of social relations.

Paul Avrich. The Modern School Movement: Anarchism anarchism (ăn`ərkĭzəm) [Gr.,=having no government], theory that equality and justice are to be sought through the abolition of the state and the substitution of free agreements between individuals. and Education in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1980). An in-depth study of the Modern School movement in America, which included institutions such as the Stelton School in Stelton, New Jersey.

Micki and David Colfax. Homeschooling for Excellence (Warner Books, 1988) and Hard Times in Paradise: An American Family's Struggle to Carve Out a Homestead in California's Redwood Mountains (Mountain House Press, 1992). The Colfaxes' experience of homeschooling their four children while homesteading in northern California; three of their children went on to Harvard.

David Elkind. The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, third ed. (Perseus Publishing, 2001) and Miseducation: Preschoolers at Risk (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). Elkind takes issue with academic acceleration, with reference to Pia·get (pand his stages of development; he points to the dangers of early maturity and the disappearance of a culture of childhood, to problems of stress, and to the effects of a technological culture on children's development.

John Taylor Gatto. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, rev. ed. (New Society Publishers, 2002) and The Underground History of American Education, rev. ed. (Oxford Village Press, 2003). A veteran of 25 years of teaching in the New York City public school system, Gatto launched a speaking career in school reform. His work is particularly interesting as a thorough and knowledgeable critique of learning within the framework of the public school system.

Daniel Greenberg. The Sudbury Valley School Experience and Legacy of Trust: Life After the Sudbury Valley School Experience (both Sudbury Valley School Press, 1992). Daniel and Hanna Greenberg are among the founders of the Sudbury Valley School, a democratic or so-called free school in Framingham, Massachusetts, that has been in operation since 1968. Greenberg's books discuss the democratic political model at the basis of the system, the lives and development of the students, and the ways in which the Sudbury free-school model prepares students for a postindustrial society.

John Holt. How Children Fail, rev. ed. (Perseus Publishing, 1995); How Children Learn, rev. ed. (Perseus Publishing, 1995); Freedom and Beyond, reprint ed. (Boynton/Cook, 1995); Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (Ballantine, 1975); Learning All the Time: How Small Children Begin to Read, Write, Count, and Investigate the World, Without Being Taught (Addison Wesley, 1990); Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling, by John Holt and Patrick Farenga (Perseus Publishing, 2003). John Holt was a teacher, critic of schooling, and founder of unschooling and of Growing Without Schooling magazine. His works document a transition in his thinking from a belief in alternative teaching methods and a more open classroom, to a commitment to schooling at home, and finally to an entirely learner-led approach to learning.

Grace Llewellyn. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education, rev. ed. (Lowry House Publishers, 1998); Real-Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Stories (Lowry House, 1993). Llewellyn's Handbook provides startling examples of what teenagers can do and have done when freed from the obligation to be schooled.

A.S. Neil. Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing (Hart Publishing Company, 1960). Tells the story of a school with noncompulsory lessons, founded in 1921. In 2000, Summerhill won a court battle to permit it to continue in operation as such.

Joseph Chilton Pearce. Magical Child: Rediscovering Nature's Plan for Our Children (Plume, 1992), Pearce lectures worldwide on human intelligence, creativity, and learning. He has developed a reputation for his special interest in the development of the "mind-brain" system in infants and young children, and for his critique of the impact of hospital birthing on this development.

Jean Piaget. To Understand Is to Invent (Grossmann, 1973; translations of Ou va l'education, 1996, and Le droit a l'education dans le monde actuel, 1957). Piaget's insight that knowledge is constructed autonomously on the basis of experience seems to strongly support the freedom and autonomy of the learner. Piaget resisted pressures to put his theory of learning stages to use for the purpose of accelerated learning.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Emile or On Education (1762). Rousseau advised parents to permit young children to move freely and to avoid formal instruction before the age of 12.

Nancy Wallace. Better Than School: One Family's Declaration of Independence (Larson Publishers, 1983) and Child's Work: Taking Children's Choices Seriously (Holt Associates, 1990). In these books, Wallace describes her experience homeschooling two musical children. Her books illustrate many important points about the nature of the learning process.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1991.

--.The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling. Oxford, NY: Oxford Village Press, 2001.

Goodman, Paul. Compulsory Mis-Education. New York: Horizon Press, 1964.

--. The Community of Scholars. New York: Random House, 1962.

Holt, John. Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children. Wakefield, MA: Holt Associates, 1996.

--. Freedom and Beyond. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1995.

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars boyars (bōyärz`), upper nobility in Russia from the 10th through the 17th cent. The boyars originally obtained influence and government posts through their military support of the Kievan princes. Their power and prestige, however, soon came to depend almost completely on landownership., 1999.

Rothbard, Murray Newton. Education: Free and Compulsory. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1999.

Emily Robin Jackson is a writer, teacher, and unschooling mother of four children ages 9, 10, 15, and 17. She lives with her husband and children in Birmingham, Alabama.

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