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

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.

• Posted at Tuesday, November 13, 2007 03:31 PM
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