GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING

Issue #14

GOOD NEWS FROM ONTARIO

From Mary Syrett:

…We experienced fantastic growth in the GWS movement in Canada in the last two years. GWS groups are starting in every province - some started by people in our group sub! Every few weeks I get a phone call from another mother who has got my name from your directory or from Wendy Priesnitz’s (Natural Life Magazine), or just through word of mouth. It feels like “new roots”!..

GETTING INTO COLLEGE . . .

From an article on home schooling in the Wall Street Journal, 9/13/79:

…University admissions officers confirm that a home education needn’t be a deficient education. Each year the University of California at Berkeley gets a half dozen or so applicants who are home educated and don’t have the traditional credentials, says Robert L. Bailey, director of admissions and records. “We give them proficiency tests, and if they pass them, we go ahead and take a chance on them,” he says. “They usually do very well.”…

. . . AND STAYING OUT

The reply by the Indians to the Virginia colonists who had proposed to educate six Indian boys at Williamsburg College in 1774:

We know that you highly esteem the kind of learning taught in those Colleges, and that the Maintenance of our young Men, while with you, would be very expensive to you. We are convinced, therefore, that you mean to do us Good by your Proposal; and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different Nations have different Conceptions of things; and you will therefore not take it amiss, if our Ideas of this kind of Education happen not to be the same with yours. We have had some Experience of it. Several of our young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but, when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the woods, … neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, nor Counsellors, they were totally good for nothing. We are, however, not the less oblig’d by your kind Offer, tho’ we decline accepting it; and, to show our grateful Sense of it, if the Gentlemen of Virginia will send us a Dozen of their Sons, we will take Care of their Education, instruct them in all we know, and make Men of them.

NEWS FROM IOWA

From the Des Moines Register, 1/18/80:

…According to Larry Bartlett an administrative consultant for the Iowa State Department of Public Instruction, between 600 and 800 Iowa pupils are enrolled in correspondence type instruction, and the numbers are growing…

CELEBRITY UNSCHOOLERS

From THE BOOK OF LISTS (by Wallechinsky, Wallace, & Wallace):

15 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER GRADUATED FROM GRADE SCHOOL: Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Buffalo Bill Cody, Noel Coward, Charles Dickens, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Edison, Samuel Gompers, Maksim Gorky, Claude Monet, Sean O’Casey, Alfred E. Smith, John Philip Sousa, Henry M. Stanley, Mark Twain.

20 FAMOUS HIGH-SCHOOL OR SECONDARY-SCHOOL DROPOUTS: Harry Belafonte, Cher, Mary Baker Eddy, Henry Ford, George Gershwin, D. W. Griffith, Adolf Hitler, Jack London, Dean Martin, Bill Mauldin, Rod McKuen, Steve McQueen, Amedeo Modigliani, Al Pacino, Will Rogers, William Saroyan, Frank Sinatra, Marshal Tito, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright.

20 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER ATTENDED COLLEGE: Joseph Chamberlain, Grover Cleveland, Joseph Conrad, Aaron Copland, Hart Crane, Eugene Debs, Amelia Earhart, Paul Gauguin, Kahlil Gibran, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Abraham Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harry S. Truman, George Washington, Virginia Woolf.

13 FAMOUS AMERICAN LAWYERS WHO NEVER WENT TO LAW SCHOOL: Patrick Henry, John Jay*, John Marshall*, William Wirt, Roger B. Taney*, Daniel Webster, Salmon P. Chase*, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Clarence Darrow (attended one year), Robert Storey, J. Strom Thurmond, James 0. Eastland. (* - Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.)

PEN PALs

…The GWS Directory has afforded our children the opportunity to practice their writing and communication skills, as well as to have fun getting to know others. Our oldest daughter received a letter from a young girl who had selectcd her name from the GWS listing. She asked our daughter to be a pen pal, and they now correspond eagerly and frequently.

Our six year old, spurred on by her sister’s example, has decided to write to several children in the Directory to see if they will be pen pals. She was delighted by a recent positive response.

So far, none of the children have brought up the subject of school in their letters. There certainly are more interesting things to talk about:…

A MUSLIM FAMILY

…Like many other families who are schooling their children at home, our main reason for wanting to make this move was a religious one. In our case, however, the religion is Islam, not Christianity. We are a very committed Muslim family, and it is of the greatest importance to us that our children grow up in an atmosphere which is not destructive to their religious orientation and values. For this reason, we are obviously in total disagreement with many social and moral values (or “unvalues”) which are being propagated in schools, as well as with the limited educational approaches. Moreover, in our faith religious and other learning is not to be approached as two separate matters since Islam does not acknowledge any schism between “sacred” and “secular” aspects of life.

Our three older children had grown up in public schools, with very serious consequences to their sense of self-worth and the rightness of their values, and above all on the integratedness of their personalities. They passed through the hands of a series of junior high and high school teachers and situations in which religion, and anyone who upholds high moral and ethical values, was viewed with contempt or at least stigmatized as being very, very strange and abnormal. When my son was in the first year of junior high, we had just come back from a year overseas and the boy was feeling very much at odds with the school atmosphere. I went to the principal and expressed my concern about him, saying that he was a very religious youngster with high values. Would it not be possible to form a club or association for youngsters of similar inclinations? The response of the principal was astonishing. He told me he would look into my son’s record and behavior and talk with his counselor to see if he was really normal and fit in. Of course, you can imagine how I felt after this encounter, and the club idea naturally died of its own accord although I tried without success to interest other people in the community in it. I felt and still do feel that such an organization would be very important and meaningful to young people who care about religion and values but have no support and are even afraid to voice their opinions under prevailing conditions.

When the fourth child, Y, was old enough for kindergarten, we enrolled him in a Catholic school, hoping it would be in some significant way an improvement over public school. But it was a total disappointment, in no real way different in atmosphere or approach. Thus, toward the end of Y’s kindergarten year, seeing that there was no workable solution except to teach the children at home, I went to discuss the matter with the local superintendent of instruction.

Although he made it clear that he is not in favor of home schooling, he was helpful and cooperative. We must, he said, submit a letter to him by early summer, which he would submit to the local school board, who would in turn submit it to the state board of education. My husband and I wrote a very brief statement that “because the religion of our family, Islam, is a complete way of life which requires that religious education go hand-in-hand with secular education, the educational needs of our children cannot be met in a normal school situation.” We also mentioned that we might be spending time outside the country and hence needed to have a method of schooling which could be continued wherever we might be residing. Permission for home schooling was given under the understanding that I would be using the Calvert materials, would teach 176 days a year, and would be under the general supervision of the local school principal (i.e., would submit the Calvert tests and confer with her once a quarter, and the child would have to take standard achievement tests and end-of-the-year tests, if any, annually.)

We enrolled Y in Calvert’s second grade program as it was clear that first grade would be a complete waste of time. He is an exceptionally motivated child who loves to study and learn. In the beginning, as I was very uncertain of my ability to “teach” since I had no teaching experience at all, the structuredness of the Calvert material was tremendously helpful and reassuring. However I have since left its method largely behind as it moves much too slowly for the child, who is now proceeding at his own pace. The younger child, H (3 1/2) was a bit of a problem in the beginning. She wanted a great deal of attention and was not satisfied to spend the school period simply playing. I began working with her very gradually, assisted ably by Y, who spent long periods teaching her out of pre-school workbooks. She is now learning to read and enjoying the experience greatly. I expect to start her “formal” education with second grade after working with her in a completely unstructured manner until she reaches that level. I spend the first part of the school time working on religious studies with Y. Afterwards I work with H while Y continues with the Calvert and supplementary material on his own. My role is as a resource person rather than as a teacher standing over a child to “teach” him what he can easily learn on his own.

The experience of teaching my children has given me endless new insights concerning the role of parents (especially mothers), both what it is for most of us and what it could and should be, and the nature and meaning of education. I cannot express what a satisfaction it is to see my children growing up with stable, integrated, happy personalities, especially after the struggle of watching the harmful effects of school on the three older children…

A WAY TO HELP

As most GWS readers know, Linda and Bob Sessions (IA), their children, and I were on the Phil Donahue show on Dec. 7, 1978. It was aired over various stations for the next two or three months. Because of the show, we received about 10,000 letters, which is about 100 times as great a response as we have ever had from any other article or TV show. Most of the people who have subscribed during this past year did so because of that program.

We still get letters now and then from people who say, “I just saw you on the Donahue show.” This tells us that certain local stations are repeating that particular program which suggests in turn that one thing people could do to help GWS would be to ask their local TV station to re-run that particular show.

We have a list of stations carrying the Donahue show, in case you have trouble finding the appropriate station in your area.

Please let us know what your local station says when you write or call them, and whether they decide to re-run the program. Thanks for what ever you can do.

SKILLED CHILDREN

Mary Bergman wrote in the cover story of the April 1980 Home Educators Newsletter:

…These children [of home schooling families] form an exclusive student body as they are each born into the school. They take their places according to ability rather than grade level. They listen to works far above their comprehension, just to be part of the present company. In our own instance, we have one child that keeps all vehicles in top running shape, another who provides milk, eggs, and meat for the table, another who displays beautiful art work, and another who enjoys gardening.

Katrina spends several hours morning and afternoon doing her farm work, but she is the beneficiary of her own labor, keeps all the records for feed, hay, and other purchases so that she can calculate her profit when animals are sold and what man hours and money have been expended to gain that profit. I personally am not the least interested in any type of farm work and yet I know that this is developing within Katrina an ability far beyond anything that I could teach her. How much barley will a pig eat in a week, a month, till time for the market? What animais have the quickest turnover? What type of labor hours are necessary to operate a farm? I couldn’t answer any of these questions, though Katrina can, and for an eleven-year-old girl I consider that quite an accomplishment. She has a reading assignment just like the other children of 200 pages per week plus a written paper every day. She generally turns in a paper that has to do with her present projects.

It is a rare occasion that I do not get the type of workmanship out of my children that I would get out of some adult. We are presently sectioning off a room in the basement and all the partitions will be built by the children. One startling fact is that John, at age seven, has all his own tools, including a power saw and drill. He builds beautiful miniature log cabins and will be in charge of measuring and cutting boards for the partition project. He is also planning on paneling his own room. …

Kevin has repaired all my major appliances since he was kindergarten age. Recently I had to hire a repair man to come and fix my furnace motor, which turned out to be shot and had to be replaced. This repairman hadn’t been here for several years and his first question was “Why can’t Kevin fix this?” When he discovered the problem he knew that the present motor was beyond repair and he went to get another. However, he brought the burned-out one back because he felt that Kevin could use parts for it.

My dishwasher has been child repaired, my bathroom was child paneled, my toilets were child plumbed. They enjoy developing their abilitles, it saves money, and we can use this gained savings for enjoyable activities.

One more wonder that was performed by a child is the light switch which regulates the living room and hall lights. One switch turns the living room lights on while it turns the hall light off and then turns the hall light on at night when the living room lights are not needed. An electrician noticed this strange arrangement and said it couldn’t be done, but it’s been working for a long time.

We have tours through our home occasionally and people never stop marveling at the many things our children know how to do. Kevin built his own motorized three wheel all terrain vehicle, as well as helping his dad build a one-man plane. He has developed one patent and is working on another.

People often ask me how I can tolerate the children doings things that are normally only done by adults, and professionals at that. Well, I watch the children carefully and never expect one to do a job which is over his head. I experiment constantly, finding natural abilities and letting them try their wings in harmless, inexpensive ways. If a child shows an ability in a certain area such as plumbing, I try them out taking apart an elbow and putting it back together without a leak. Next comes faucets, or setting a toilet. Next might come the installation of a shower unit, and finally the child is ready to plumb a bathroom. I would have no qualms about letting my thirteen-year-old plumb my entire house. After all, he wired it for D.C. electricity when he was only eight. Our daughter Cathy is remodeling her own home now (she’s nineteen), and she has done all her own plumbing, plastering, wallpapering and carpentry. Matter of fact, that’s how she helped pay for her college education. She worked as a carpenter in an all-male shop! …

EARNNG MONEY

From Pamela Feeney Jolly, 7210 SW Philomath Blvd, Corvallis OR 97330:

Recently I have had to settle how I feel about my children and money. Until now I didn’t feel they needed money of their own because they didn’t understand its real value. When they had money from relatives it seemed to be a burden to them. They would spend it on the first thing they saw. Not because it was something they wanted but to get rid of the money. I might add here that we rarely have more money than we need just to survive so we don’t spend money as a pastime.

We are now living with relatives whose son gets an allowance. I have never liked the idea of allowances but I was made aware that our children needed to have access to money. I found ways for them to earn it. NOT by doing things they should be responsible for anyway (like picking up their messes and washing themselves) but by doing extra kinds of jobs. Mostly seasonal work like raking leaves or picking fruit. (Things they will still do for enjoyment.) I pay them $3 an hour. I realize this may seem absurd to some but I think it is just. I have always been underpaid (or not paid at all) for the work I have done. It’s not good for the self-image. I don’t want to use or insult my children in that way. I feel that if they are to be paid for work at all, they should be paid at least minimum wage.

My five year old son spent 45 minutes washing the kitchen floor (not so appropriate) and raking leaves (better). They were jobs I could have done much more thoroughly in half the time. But that is not the point. The point is that he worked as hard as he could for that 45 minutes. Much harder than anyone I’ve worked with at any job for which we were paid.

I feel my son earned the $2.25 I paid him. It is his money to spend however he chooses. I have learned not to give helpful suggestions here and to thoroughly repress my judgement that what they buy isn’t worth it. To them it is worth it, and if it isn’t, that is something they have to learn for themselves.

I remember so well the guilt and anxiety I felt over every purchase until I was 26 years old! Every single time I bought something, I thought it was my last chance. I hope my children can grow up knowing that money is a tool that they can earn and use whenever they need to…

ART EXHBIT

Judy McCahill (Md.) writes from England:

…Here is a story I think you will like. Last Saturday for some thing to do, because Dennis was out of the country, I said to the boys, “Let’s go to the art exhibit.” Sean and Kevin thought it was a wonderful idea and began discussing what sort of art they would do there and what pictures (of their own) they might bring from home. Startled, I tried to explain to them what an art exhibit was all about and they were genuinely puzzled at my trying to tell them they were just going there to look at somebody else’s pictures. Puzzled, but not deterred, S gathered his supplies, two sets of paints a brush, some paper, and a jar full of water which he handed to me to carry; and K made us all wait while he finished a full color marker pen painting of an army tank.

When we got there, we strolled along the sidewalks near the craft shop that was hosting the exhibit, dutifully examining the works and passing several fully grown and wise looking artists sitting in portable lawn chairs, all the while S at my heels urging me to find out how he was supposed to enter the show and me ahead of S, stalling.

Finally an old man who works in the shop, who once told me a long story about his difficulties getting home to Cobham one night during the war when London was being bombed, greeted me. I introduced S to him and asked him to explain what an art exhibit was. He started to, but then he and his daughter, who also works in the shop, saw that S was ready to do some work and after a good laugh with a couple of customers over it, gave him a couple of nice big pieces of “card” to paint on. He sat on the doorstep of a small office building nearby and painted, while the rest of us strolled through the exhibit again, windowshopped, and ate ice cream cones.

When he had finished, it was a beautiful picture of a black dog, fur flying, running up a hill on a windy day, a glorious sun in the sky. It seemed to reflect his mood of magic. He took the picture into the shop, where the man said he would put it on sale for 50 pence (and confusedly explained about how the artists had to pay rent to the exhibit), and we went home.

A few days later, still full of the experience, S told a friend of mine about it. She promptly went out to buy the picture, and it was gone! When I suggested to S that he go and check to see if his painting had been sold, he replied that he already had, the next day (which of course was Sunday), and the shop was closed.

And that was that. He was too busy doing something else to give it another thought. Not to belabor this point, I must say that I’ve noticed this before in the children, that it’s the doing of a piece of work that matters, and not what happens to it afterwards…

THE BEST WORK

From Manas, 10/31/79:

…In a recent Ecologist Quarterly, Edward Goldsmith said: “Obviously the most satisfying work must be that which we are willing to do for nothing.” With all the sententious talk, these days, about the legitimacy and importance of profits, it becomes vital to point out that the best work is done by people who do it, not for money, but because it is right and good and necessary. They may get a little money, but barely enough to get by. The only sensible way to look at money is as an instrument of freedom to do what you care about and are determined to do anyway…

Q. & A.
Questions from a mother’s letter, and the answers I gave:

Q. My greatest concern is that I don’t want to slant my children’s view of life all through “mother colored” glasses…

A. If you mean, determine your children’s view of life, you couldn’t do it even if you wanted to. You are an influence on your children, and an important one, but by no means the only one, or even the only important one. How they later see the world is going to be determined by a great many things, many of them probably not to your liking, and most of them out of your control. On the other hand, it would be impossible, even if you wanted to, not to have some influence on your children’s view of life.

Q. I also wonder if I can have the thoroughness, the follow-through demanded, the patience, and the continuing enthusiasm for a diversity of interests they will undoubtedly have.

A. Well, who in any school would have more, or even as much? I was a good student in the “best” schools, and very few adults there were even slightly concerned with my interests. Beyond that, you may expect too much of yourself. Your children’s learning is not all going to come from you, but from them, and their interaction with the world around them, which of course includes you. You do not have to know everything they want to know, or be interested in everything they are interested in. As for patience, maybe you won’t have enough at first; like many home teaching parents, you may start by trying to do too much, know too much, control too much. But like the rest, you will learn from experience - mostly, to trust your children.

Q. I get the impression that most unschoolers live on farms growing their own vegetables (which I’d like) or have unique life styles in urban areas, and heavy father participation in children’s education. What about suburbanites with modern-convenienced homes and fathers who work for a company 10 to 12 hours a day away from home? What differences will this make? Will unschooling work as well?

A. Well enough. You and your children will have to find out as you go along what differences they make, and deal with them as best you can. Once, people said that the suburbs were the best of all possible worlds in which to bring up children; now it is the fashion to say they are the worst. Both views are exaggerated. In city, country, or suburb, there is more than enough to give young people an interesting world to grow up in, plenty of food for thought and action. You don’t have to have everything in the way of resources for your children, and if you did, they wouldn’t have enough time to make use of all of it.

Q. Is the father’s involvement crucial?

A. It can certainly be helpful, but it is not crucial. Some of the most successful unschoolers we know of are single mothers. And there may be many others we don’t know about.

Q. What if the children want to go to school?

A. This is a hard question. There is more than one good answer to it, and these often conflict. Parents could argue, and some do, that since they believe that school can and probably will do their children deep and lasting harm, they have as much right to keep them out, even if they want to go, as they would to tell them they could not play on a pile of radioactive wastes. This argument seems more weighty in the case of younger children, who could not be expected to understand how school might hurt them. If somewhat older children said determinedly and often, and for good reasons, that they really wanted to go to school, I would tend to say, let them go. How much older? What are good reasons? I don’t know. A bad reason might be, “The other kids tell me that at school lunch you can have chocolate milk.”

Q. Since people feel that as a religious group (Christian Scientists) we neglect our children (which is not the case), I’m concerned that someone might be eager to take us to court and take away our children.

A. The schools have in a number of cases tried - shamefully - to take children away from unschooling parents. I think there are legal counters to this, strategies which would make it highly unlikely that a court would take such action. And if worse came to worst, and a court said, “Put your children back in school or we’ll take them away,” you can always put them back in while you plan what to do next - which might simply be to move to another state or even school or judicial district.

Q. I don’t want to feel I’m sheltering my children or running away from adversity.

A. Why not? It is your right, and your proper business, as parents, to shelter your children and protect them from adversity, at least as much as you can. Many of the world’s children are starved or malnourished, but you would not starve your children so that they would know what this was like. You would not let your children play in the middle of a street full of high-speed traffic. Your business is, as far as you can, to help them realize their human potential, and to that end you put as much as you can of good into their lives, and keep out as much as you can of bad. If you think - as you do - that school is bad, then it is clear what you should do.

Q. I value their learning how to handle challenges or problems…

A. There will be plenty of these. Growing up was probably never easy, and it is particularly hard in a world as anxious, confused, and fear-ridden as ours. To learn to know oneself, and to find a life worth living and work worth doing, is problem and challenge enough, without having to waste time on the fake and unworthy challenges of school - pleasing the teacher, staying out of trouble, fitting in with the gang, being popular, doing what everyone else does.

Q. Will they have the opportunity to overcome or do things that they think they don’t want to do?

A. I’m not sure what this question means. If it means, will unschooled children know what it is to have to do difficult and demanding things in order to reach goals they have set for themselves, I would say, yes, life is full of such requirements. But this is not at all the same thing as doing something, and in the case of school usually something stupid and boring, simply because someone else tells you you’ll be punished if you don’t. Whether children resist such demands or yield to them, it is bad for them. Struggling with the inherent difficulties of a chosen or inescapable task builds character; merely submitting to superior force destroys it.

AT HOME IN CALIF.

From Shirley Chapman (CA):

…As you know, I am teaching Howard at home. …Howard is now very interested in raising and caring for house plants. As a result he is reading several books on the subject. Some are mine, some are from libraries, and some have been loaned to him by my friends.

…Howard wanted a schedule made. We do not follow it strictly. Howard reads a great deal at night and I also am busy reading, writing, etc. His home study program is very easy-going and flexible. He is: “interested, energetic, alert, attentive and LEARNING!” (from NEVER TOO LATE). Also, I might add, he is healthy and happy. What more could any parent possibly want for their child/children?

…When Howard is absorbed in a given subject or project, he doesn’t want to be interrupted. I endeavor to have materials and books and myself available. That is all. I leave the rest up to him.
When he was enrolled in school, he was depressed, had nightmares, headaches, upset stomach and was somewhat withdrawn. All that has reversed in this present school year: since he has been in a home-study program!!

…Howard does a great deal of writing in his journal which he says is private and personal so I am not allowed to read it. I grant him his complete right to privacy. He also makes cassette tapes of “radio shows” and his artistic, creative ability and verbal communication skills are outstanding. He finds writing slows him down so the cassette tapes enable him to create almost as fast as he can think. He is still composing music for his guitar. He switches from his house-plant project to music to reading to listening to records and tapes to making “radio shows” to drawing to hiking to eating and sleeping. He is very active and - again, let me emphasize: VERY HAPPY…

FROM WASHINGTON STATE

LeAnn Ellis (WA) writes:

…Since our names appeared in the GWS Directory several issues ago we have received about 5-6 letters from interested mothers here in Washington [State] wanting to know how we are staying out of trouble with the authorities. I love helping others in any way possible along these lines but it is very discouraging in this state. Washington absolutely requires a credentialed teacher in the class room on a daily basis, which makes it impossible for most mothers to teach their children legally. I was lucky to have a Calif. teaching credential when we moved here a year ago, but getting that switched to a Wash. credential has been a real hassle. The alternatives of having a credentialed person oversee your program or using an accredited correspondence program with your children are not acceptable to the Wash. State Dept. of Education. In typical bureaucratic style, all the emphasis is put on having the credential and then there is no follow-up at all to see if any instruction is taking place…

She later wrote that they had obtained approval as a private school.

Another reader wrote:

…Yes, Washington is a tough state for unschooling…

Although the law appears tight, it is cumbersome enough to provide real enforcement problems. I think the law is proving to be very impractical from the state’s point of view. The fine and penalty system is more complex than is indicated by these [enclosed] articles. Most prosecuting attorneys do not want to get into the area, specially on individual student-parent cases. They should have too much else to do, right?

At a time of severe school funding cut-backs here, most school districts are not staffed to spend much time in drawn out hassles. If the parent wants the student in school they are more apt to pursue the student, but if the parent is “un-cooperative” they are likely to lay off. Here in our town, for example, the attendance officer reports “un-cooperative” parents, who don’t try to get their youngster to school, to the State Department of Social and Health Services. There, according to him, the case gets buried in paper work. He told me that he has yet to hear back from them. What he was really saying, I think, is that this is an easy way for him to take care of what he thinks his responsibility is in such cases. He told me how expensive it is for the school district to pursue such cases and that it wasn’t worth it to the school district…

An editorial from Seattle:

…Tough new state legislation prescribing stiff penalties against parents whose children consistently skip school has been on the books for some months now, but nobody has been hauled into court yet.

Maybe it’s just as well.

School officials and local prosecutors who have been studying the 1979 amendments to the State Compulsory Attendance Law are discovering that the legislation is considerably looser than it looks.

It provides, for instance, that penalties cannot be imposed when parents or guardians can demonstrate that they have exercised “reasonable diligence” to compel their children’s classroom attendance.

And the law also says a school district must show it has done every thing possible to work with parents and students to solve truancy problems, even including adjustments in school programs, before fines are levied.

Given such limitations, it is little wonder that school officials and local prosecutors have taken a cautious attitude toward enforcement, recognizing that a court referral could prove unjust or even useless.

The potential financial penalties are severe. The law prescribes a fine of $25 for each day of unexcused absence. By the time a case came to trial, the fine could run into several hundred dollars.

Common sense dlctates that the fundamental responsibility for school attendance begins at home, and that school districts can help parents by making sure that something of value is available in classrooms once the student head count is completed.

The tough amendments enacted in the 1979 Legislature seem well-intentioned. But if they cannot be enforced or have no practical value in improving the truancy problem, they should be repealed…

SUPPORTIVE DISTRICT

Margaret De Rivera wrote in The New Family Newsletter:

…Six years ago when I approached the Worcester (Mass.) Public School authorities for permission to teach my youngest child at home, I was told that if I could find some recent precedent in the state for such a program, they would be willing to consider approving my request. I was not able to do this but hired a lawyer to draw up a legal brief arguing that a home study program could, in fact, comply with the state compulsory education laws. This reassured enough members of the school committee that the request was finally approved by a bare majority.

…The program runs from 9 to 3 week days and follows the calendar of the Worcester Public Schools.

At the beginning of each day, the children, with the help of the teacher, plan their activities for the day. The children work alone or together depending on their skills and interests. They share with each other frequently during the day.

Thirty minutes to an hour each day is given over to working on basic academic skills. Informal activities such as caring for gerbils, cooking, woodworking, starting collections of things, etc, provide opportunities for mathematical learning and understanding. The computational skills and mathematical notation that is learned in the academic period can be applied in these real situations.

The children do a great deal of reading and writing. They visit the library each week and keep records on the books they take out, when they are due, etc. They keep a daily log (as does the teacher) and write poems, stories, “books,” letters, notices, and labels.

Drawing is also an important and favorite activity which provides an opportunity to work out ideas and fantasies which often stimulate story writing. There are many opportunities for art work and the children are free to develop their own ideas and explore the possibilities of the materials. Emphasis is on the children’s own expression rather than on technique.

With such a small group, field trips are easy to arrange and happen almost weekly. In the past, the children have visited Sturbridge Village and the Art Museum frequently, and occasionally have gone to the Science Museum, the New England Aquarium, Higgins Armory, and the Children’s Museum in Boston.
Physical development and coordination are considered important so the children are active each day in 8 variety of ways: swimming once a week, playing basketball, baseball, tag, soccer, badminton, kickball, bike riding, jumprope, hiking, dancing, and jogging.

The teacher keeps a daily log of the activities and a summary of the child’s learning is written each year. This together with samples of each child’s work, the child’s log and the teacher’s log are the materials we share with the public school administration each year. The School Board approves the program on a yearly basis.

Since that fragile beginning, our home study program has been approved each year without difficulty, and the school administration has become a friendly support to the program.

…In the first three years, we hired teachers since I was worklng full time, people who were sympathetic to informal education and could be flexible in their teaching style and responsive to the needs and interests of the children. The first year, our daughter was the only pupil; the second year another child joined her, and the third year two more came. The addition of other children offered the obvious opportunities for social learning as well as reducing the financial costs.

Year four, we decided to make some more radical changes and enroll our daughter half time in the neighborhood public school. The other half of her program was still at home, this time alone with me as her teacher. This arrangement gave her the opportunity to meet the neighborhood children and to gain a sense of confidence that she could “do” public school as well as any of them, an important concern for many “middle aged” children. In addition, the time at home provided her continued opportunities for more informal, self-directed learning. Happily, the school was very cooperative in this arrangement and the children accepted her very well into their social life.

We feel that the successful operation of this home study program for the last five years constitutes a strong legal precedent so that other families in the state who wish to teach their children at home should feel confident that such a request should be considered reasonable. A petition that is respectfully worded and avoids criticisms of the public schools will have the best prospects of being approved without hassle. Describing sample learning activities and arranging these under curriculum headings help to reassure the school authorities that the program will be “equivalent” to the public school program…

EXCHANGE ON MATH

Donna Richoux asked Nancy Wallace about the math book she mentioned in GWS #13. Nancy replied:

…The math book is Patterns in Mathematics published by Laidlaw Brothers. l wouldn’t really recommend it though. It’s good for Ishmael because of its orientation towards language, but it might just as easily bog another kid down. Also, we do a lot of picking and choosing.

I’m very confused about math. The kids I’ve seen who really are “growing without schooling” are usually advanced in reading and vocabulary and can barely add or subtract. Does that mean that numbers are really unimportant to LIFE? Or unnecessary?

…I suppose my expectations are far too high. I mean, how often do we use algebra, geometry, calculus, etc, anyway? The important thing is that we aren’t totally freaked out by the thought of numbers so that we remain free to learn math when we are ready. And if all we can do is balance a checkbook (I can’t) and play cards by the time we’re 18, we can still get by fine. And when you take out a mortgage or get insurance itÕs just as well to have your head in the clouds. It’s not worth knowing how much you are going to have to pay! The truth is that I think better on paper. I guess my confusion is obvious.

We have a friend whose daughter was out of school last year and he said, “She didn’t do a damn thing all year.” “Not a thing?” I asked incredulously. “Well, she read almost constantly,” he replied, “but reading is CANDY. I wish I had time to read like that.” Reading IS candy, but why don’t most people feel the same about math?…

Donna wrote back:

…Maybe your questions about math were just meant to be rhetorical, but they sure hit a sympathetic nerve in me. Those sorts of frustrating questions are some of the reasons why I am no longer teaching math.

During the two years I taught at a technical school, I had access to a lot of people who had spent many years doing practical things - fixing cars, building houses, repairing electronics equipment, etc. I kept asking everybody, “What math do you need? What good is it all? When do you need it?” and so on. To my surprise, almost all the instructors were convinced that their students did need to know and use math, although they couldn’t always explain why. In the simpler fields (welding, for example) the instructors would worry or complain if their students couldn’t do arithmetic; in the more complex fields (electronics, machine shop) they would complain if they couldn’t solve equations. So there did seem to be some real need somewhere.

But it was almost impossible for me to grasp examples of how they used math. Every time they would start talking about gear ratios or frequency or some such thing, I would get lost. I simply had no practical, concrete images to relate to. So no way could I bring in realistic examples to my classroom.

But on the other hand, I couldn’t believe that teaching math as an abstract bunch of rules, which was all that was expected of me, was going to do any good. Many peopie who can get right answers to purely arithmetical problems can’t solve word problems. And not everybody who can do word problems can apply mathematics to the world [JH: or vice versa]. Part of the trouble is that “word problems” are artificial - nobody comes across a “word problem” in real life, they come across a real problem and they have to supply the words themselves. But in any case, word problems are as close as a math teacher can get to ever applying the procedures.

The only way for me to reconcile all this was to decide that math shouldn’t be taught abstractly at all, that all math should be taught on the spot by the instructor of the specific field. What good was it for me to teach and test a class about ratios in January (after which they promptly forgot it all, of course) when next October their own regular instructor would demonstrate graphically how essential ratios are to their field, and teach them how to solve ratios in a way they’d never forget?

…Numbers are important as they are used. If kids can’t add or subtract, it’s because they don’t have any reason to add or subtract.

I would say that arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, plus maybe decimals and percents) is held to be essential in our society because that’s basically all you need to deal with money, which of course is also held to be essential in our society. If you throw in fractions, you have enough to do almost all measuring, which is something a good many people use - people who do things (create, repair, etc) as opposed to those who merely observe, consume, etc.

The higher branches? Anybody who knows simple algebra can hardly imagine not knowing it - it is no more difficult than much of arithmetic (simpler than a lot of it, come to think of it) and it is such a basic language. Probably a lot of what you and Ishmael are doing is what I could consider simple algebra… A lot of geometry is not very hard either, and I tend to think of it as being necessary to be literate in math. The problem here is that high schools always get it confused with teaching deductive logic, which is something else altogether.

Any other stuff - quadratic equations, trigonometry, calculus, etc - I would just say, don’t worry about it. Those things are not all that hard in themselves, really, either, and they are useful to some people. Machinists use trig a lot, for example; not the highly abstract pre-calculus trig they give you in high school or college, but simple formulas for finding lengths of sides of triangles or the size of angles. In general, if you ever have to learn these things, you can.

…Arithmetic may be enough for ordinary measurements: the length of a board, the weight of a loaded truck. But how do you measure the distance between two stars, or the size of a molecule? How do you know whether a proposed bullding will collapse or not? When you deal with the invisible, intangible, far-away, or imaginary, the techniques of “higher” math are essential…

However, most of the math they do in college is garbage. The professors have lost all touch with reality and don’t care. They play with ideas for the sake of playing (and for tenure and money) and they can’t explain the use of anything they do. A good book on this is WHY THE PROFESSOR CAN’T TEACH by Morris Kline.

Having said all this, I find I still have some conflicting feelings. One is, I personally am glad I know a lot more math than just arithmetic and basic algebra and geometry. I have gotten a lot of pleasure solving prohlems - true, largely theoretical - that I couldnÕt have solved if I didn’t have a much better grasp of mathematical tools. But it is the same sort of pleasure as doing a jigsaw puzzle or solving a riddle. The delight of discovery, the satisfaction of getting everything to work. Perhaps if I had gone into a line of work like engineering or computer systems, I could get that kind of satisfaction out of a real, tangible problem. But you just don’t find that sort of thing washing the dishes or doing your taxes or even putting out a magazine.

Another important difficulty. As long as kids are going to be tested year after year, as long as they are supposed to be able to do long division by age nine, percents by age 11, equations by age 14 (or whatever - that’s off the top of my head), unschooling parents are going to be in a very big quandary. Do they struggle through all that abstract stuff in order to prove their klds aren’t dumb they can add and subtract like other kids their age? And meanwhile turn them off, leave them resentful and confused? Or do the parents leave them alone, hoping they’ll pick it up?

It’s the same sort of problem as teaching kids to read by timetable, but as you say, reading is candy. The parents read, the friends read, words are everywhere, good books lead you on and on to become a better and better reader. While none of this may be present for math.

I guess you have to work at a compromise - encouraging situations where math is used naturally. Letting the kids work with money (their own checking accounts, their own income from work they do, etc.). Encouraging things like the carpentry and celestial navigation you mention. Have you ever seen John’s WHAT DO I DO MONDAY? His chapters in there on measuring - suggesting really neat things to measure - are great.

…Only a small part of the population of the country right now has ever really grasped and enjoyed math, say at the algebra through calculus level. Whether that number of people would go up or down if all children learned arithmetic by practical means, I don’t know. On the one hand, I think that such children would have a love of numbers and a lack of fear that would allow them to keep going and going. But on the other hand, maybe they would be such capable, practical people that they would have too much else to do to ever bother with it…

Nancy responded:

…We enjoyed your letter a whole lot. My questions about math were rhetorical, mainly because I didn’t expect you or anyone to be able to answer them. Math is my weak point, to say the least - I can’t believe how ineptly I was taught.

…I have always been confused about what one needs to know to get along in life and what one needs to know to be happy. Of course everyone’s needs are different, and while one person is content to read soup labels, I’m glad I can read a whole lot more than that.

…Even if only a small portion of home-schooled kids go on to advanced math, at least the others won’t have wasted so much of their precious time; they will have been indulging their other interests - manual or intellectual.

As for Ishmael’s education, as long as he is conversant with the practical uses of numbers and aware that you can do so much more it you want to (MATHEMATICS, A HUMAN ENDEAVOR for example) I will be happy. But as for me, home-schooling has given me an excuse to continue my education and I am enjoying math more than anything (except music and maybe French) and by the time I’m 40 I should be pretty good…

Postscript from Donna to GWS readers: I’d love to hear others’ reactions to these letters, and to math in general. It seems to be a loaded subject, emotionally, and I’m sure many people have thoughts to share.

TEACHING IDEAS

From Jocelyn Kopel (OH):

…We bought the first grade materials from A BEKA Book Publications and they’re as good as any structured curriculum I’ve seen. Kim doesn’t follow any lesson plan. She’s just going through the books as her interest and ability dictate. She quits whenever it bores her or when the material is too difficult. I look at it as more of a record than anything else. I am repulsed by the need to produce some written work to prove learning is taking place. Instead am relying heavily on keeping a journal for both Kim and Burt. It’s a much better record of the rich education they’re receiving at home!

Our son is 4 and he loves to tell stories he makes up. One day he wanted to write his story down and make a book. He thought maybe a friend would draw pictures for his story, since the friend is quite a good artist. He was frustrated, though, since he can’t really spell a lot of words himself yet, so I suggested he tell his story and record it on the tape recorder. Then I would type it for him. It has been a great adventure for both the kids. Their favorite self-made story is “The Children Who Lived Underground.”

I’ve discovered two activities that Kim enjoys and which improve her ability and interest in reading. One thing I do is to write up a list of questions which can be answered with a “yes” or “no” and she loves figuring out what the question is asking. For example, “Do you have two eyes?” “Are you one year old?” “Are bananas green?” (Sometimes.) “Can a balloon break?” “Is purple your favorite color?” “Does a cow have five legs?” It’s amazing how many words she can read simply because she wants to find out whether what I’ve written is right or wrong, or because it’s a chance for her to tell what she likes and doesn’t like.

Another thing I’ve done is to write a little story about her or Burt or their adventures together. Naturally when they see their own names in a story, they want to find out what is being said about them.

I feel very strongly about not pushing the kids ahead. I find great satisfaction in seeing them do things over and over until they gain confidence. Then they move forward to something else. Security seems to be a major factor in their learning. I see this very clearly with Kim with respect to violin lessons. She loves to go over and over something she already knows. At times when I see her getting bogged down with a new piece (or in reading, a new word or sound - or in math, a new concept) I try to direct her back to the things she can already do. This seems to re-establish her confidence and give her strength to try again. It seems to me that whenever the kids get to the place where they’re straining to understand or do something, it’s time for them to take a break and give their mlnds a chance to think over new ideas and skills in peace, without the pressure to produce. This is just my personal observation. I think it’s dangerous for us to imagine that no learning occurs in those spaces between our concentrated efforts to learn or comprehend.

It seems many people are concerned that if their kids don’t “practice” every day, they’ll forget what they already know, whether it be a song, words, number facts, whatever. I have never seen my kids forget what they already knew. They always seem to be going forward, even if there are weeks between activities. It just proves to me that all those “spaces” are very productive. I consider it my responsibility to give them that space (without pressuring them for products of proof) and to be there when they’re ready to step forward to give whatever help they ask. Parenthood is an exciting adventure for me!…

When Lore Rasmussen was teaching math at the Miquon Lower School (near Pennsylvania), which she and her husband then ran, she made up a large number of varied and ingenious math work sheets. These were kept in a file cabinet, and children could go to the cabinet, get whatever sheets they wanted, do them, and hand them in. What Lore found, to her great interest (and mine), was that even after doing a particular work sheet completely correctly, a child might do that same work sheet half a dozen times or more before moving on to something else. Apparently the children got much pleasure and satisfaction from doing a second, third, etc, time, more easily and confidently each time, what they had to struggle to do the first time. Only when it became so easy that it was boring did they decide that they had enough - and they were the best judges of this. In other words, children are perfectly able to tell how much pure repetition - “drill” - they need to do in order to make a new plece of knowledge or skill secure.

READING ALOUD
From Jean Nosbisch-Smith (IL):
…When I was a child and older, I was petrified about reading aloud. I must have been very self-conscious and when I had to read, the words seemed to jump all over the page. I would read words from other lines and misread the ones that were there. Everyone kept saying, “Move your eyes ahead of what you’re reading. Look at the whole line at once.” I couldn’t do this. I read one word at a time. I would hide behind the person in front of me when the teacher called on people to read. Teachers used to say about me, “Straight A student, but the worst reader in the class.” I read fine silently.

I have only recently begun to read aloud and that is to my children. I am getting better though.

I think very often chlldren benefit more when they are left to read silently rather than aloud. When I was in college we had to tutor a problem reader for three months. I never once had the child read aloud. He read silently and I helped with the words he didn’t know. He had good comprehension. The school put him on 1st grade level. At the end of my sessions he was readlng “normally” at his 5th grade level…

“PRACTICING” MUSIC

A father asked how he could get his kids to practice their musical instruments. I wrote in reply:

…About “practice.” I think we ought to abolish the word. It only makes trouble. You say that your daughter likes to play the violin, but hates to practice. Why talk about “practice”? Why not just talk about playing the violin?

I entirely agree about making more music available than just her lesson book. I also believe very strongly in encouraging people to spend some of their time making up their own tunes on their instrument. Perhaps she might be interested in that. And I thlnk lt’s terrlbly lmportant for people to get into chamber music, playlng wlth one or more other people. This is almost always neglected in music instruction.

I’m really serious about gettlng rld of thls word “practlce.” For a professlonal performer, the dlstlnctlon between “playlng” and “practlclng” is perfectly clear. “Playlng” ls where you perform before other people, and “practlcing” is when you get ready to do it. But thls dlstlnctlon is nonsense for amateurs. What I do is, I play the cello. I don’t spend part of my tlme gettlng ready to play lt, and the rest of the tlme playlng lt. Some of the tlme I play scales or things like that; some of the tlme I play pleces that I am golng to play with other people; some of the tlme I read new muslc; some of the tlme I lmprovlse. But all the tlme I am playlng the cello.

One of the great things that my flrst teacher dld for me was to get me started playlng great muslc, even if it was much too hard for me. And one of my amusements now ls playlng the flrst dozen or so bars of SCHELOMO, whlch is a virtuoso piece, most of whlch I couldn’t even touch. But there are parts of lt I can play, and thls ls very exciting to me. Same goes for the Dvorak Cello Concerto. Your daughter ought to have a chance to play some of the great violin muslc, even if only some of the easler passages from it.

Let me know what you thlnk about this, and feel free to read thls letter to her, or tell her that I sald there was no such thing as “practice,” that when you play an instrument you play an instrument, and that’s all there is to it.

MUSIC TEACHER

From “Viollnist Par Excellence,” ln Muslc Magazlne, Feb. 1980:

Nathan Milstein says his own famlly ln Odessa was not particularly musical. “They became musical eventually,” he laughed. “But I don’t think a musical family makes much of a difference.” His mother wanted hlm to play violin not because she was musial, but because, as he said once, she “wanted to calm me down and she thought the violin would do it.”

Later, he taught hls younger brother how to play the cello. “It wasn’t difficult. If somebody’s smart and knows music, he can do it. I could teach him because I played the same famlly of lnstrument: vlolln, cello, lt’s the same, only you put your flngers further apart. People exaggerate everythlng.”

Llke many artlsts, Milstein sus ipects that even the role of teachers ls exaggerated. “A teacher doesn’t help much. Not many teachers do. Young people often thlnk that lf they go to a teacher, the teacher wlll tell them how to play. No! Nobody can tell you. A teacher may play very well ln one way, but hls student mlght not be able to play as well lf he ls taught to play the same way. That’s why I thlnk that the teacher’s buslness ls to explaln to the pupll, especlally the glfted ones, that the teacher can’t do very much except to try to open the pupll’s mlnd so that he can develop hls own thlnklng. The fact ls that the puplls have to do lt. They have to do the job; not the teacher.”

Looklng back, Milstein admlts that none of hls teachers were particularly helpful ln thls way. “But you see,” he explalns, “I was always very curlous and experlmentlng. Instinctively I thought that lf I will not help myself my teacher wlll not help me.”

…The worst teachers, ln Milstein’s oplnlon, are those who are not performers themselves. “Performers can glve students more than any professor who ls ln the Curtis Instltute or the Juilliard School,” he says vehemently. “Because you can only glve somethlng to a young person from your own experlence. Teachers who don’t perform, who never studled for a career, how do they know? I know of famous teachers ln Amerlca that are rulnlng young people. Ruining!” By contrast, Milstein does not think that a very glfted person wlll be rulned by not havlng a teacher…

USING CALVERT

Letters from two famllles:

…We did not tell Calvert that we intended to take the children out of public school by enrolling them with Calvert. To subscribe to their Advisory Teachlng Servlce for three children would not only have cost us an additional $210 - but also put a certain amount of pressure on all of us to “perform.” So we dld not do that. Also, that mlght have been a slgn to them for excluslve home teachlng and they mlght have asked for papers from the school system. On the enrollment form, we marked the boxes “enrlchment,” “travelling with parents,” and “living overseas.” … Calvert never asked a question, but sent us the materials upon receipt of the application and our check..

…How have thlngs gone wlth the klds out of school? …The Calvert materlals were delayed ln the post for several weeks. Glven the delay requlred for the Board’s approval as well, the chlldren started the school year a month or more behlnd schedule. They dldn’t mind at all, even relished the formlessness of those weeks.

…When the Calvert material arrived, the chlldren plunged ln wlth interest, tenacity - for a week or two… The regimen broke down by blts and pleces. The Calvert currlculum ls arranged for a dally lesson which required the child to do some-of-this, some-of-that, and some-of-all-that-dull-stuff-whlch-can-only-be-tolerated-ln-small-doses, e.g. spelllng. I could never work that way (still can’t) and the children exploited this “weakness” of mine. “Look, this history is really interesting. Why can’t I read it all now and catch up on the geography later?” Why, indeed? For this best of reasons, the orderliness of the Calvert curriculum broke down in our use.

Every 20th Calvert lesson is a test. This has proven quite useful as a point of review, a time to catch up on that deferred geography - at least those parts that are worth knowing about. In place of a daily scheduling of Calvert lesson, we have put a monthly schedule of Calvert-test-taking. It’s the children’s job to get ready, though we are willing to help as much and when they ask for it; we even remind them it’s coming. They seem to employ a cram-and-scram technique for coping with such demands. (Don’t most adults do so when they have the choice?) That is, they work hard near a deadline, then goof off as long as they can before the next deadline is on them. “Goof off” - the terminology shows the social prejudice none of us can escape: M has been reading all of Louisa May Alcott’s works; R has been building with his Legos some reasonably complicated machines with some of the great trains he saw in the basement of the Science Museum; my latest “goofing off” was observing him develop a dynamic model of the inner planets on a computer. None of this is serious compared to learning that “alright” is spelled “all right.”

This I suspect will be the steady state of our wary alliance with the Calvert regimen. For general information: when the children did the daily lessons as a whole, each lesson took them between 45 minutes and two hours; a major benefit has been the time left the children to do other things - some of which I approve and others I don’t… but they have the time and we have the freedom to disagree about how they spend it. I heard from a friend’s wife, a teacher, that third graders rarely do more than 45 minutes actual work in any given day.

The outstanding problem has been writing. My children do not write well, and they were not getting any better at it in school. Their greatest resistance has been to composition. When writing was required, either they refused to do it or did it poorly. It is no wonder that my daughter reports having confronted no writing requirements in her first two years in public school. My friend’s wife, the teacher, advised me that her most constructive activity with third graders was getting them to begin keeping a journal. I now require of my children that they write a page in their journal every day. The practical reason is to justify their un-schooling for the coming year - if I am to propose that they stay out of school next year, I must be able to explain to the Board of Education what they did this year and make a case that it was worth doing; for that I need detail what the children did and what they understood, imagined, read.

Thus I ask them to list their activities and what they read, then fill up the rest of the page with a composition about whatever theme they choose. My motive here is two-fold. The obvious one is that they write at all. The deeper one is that they come to write for themselves, to express what they think and feel at this time of their lives so that later, if they choose, they may recapture a sense of the persons they were before. If they get this intellectual habit, one that deepens their lives in time, they will be providing themselves a stability of personality against a world that is too eager to shape people…

DOMINOES

Bill Boerst (NY) writes:

…My children and I find dominoes a very enjoyable learning device. A double-six set works fine. For a lot of variety we use The Domino Book by Fredrick Barndt (Nashville, TN, 1974). This is an exhaustive explanation of the games’ origins and possibilities. It includes group games, solitaire games, and puzzles.

Here is one solitaire example that uses rote learning of the twelve sums. (It probably could be adapted to other sums as well.) It is called “Polka Dots.” Turn a double-six set (28 pieces) face down and shuffle. Select any six pieces from this stockpile and place in a row face up. From the row discard any two pieces that total twelve, and replenish the six-piece supply from the stockpile. Continue doing this until you can go no further. If you can exhaust your stockpile you win. If you are stopped before exhausting it, you lose. Don’t give up!

The book has many other challenges. One is an adaptation of “Concentration,” which uses memory recall. We would like to hear from others who find dominoes helpful with learning…

MORE GAMES

A reader in Alberta writes:

…A competitive game S (8) enjoys is chess. We both learned at the same time last year using a child’s chess set with the moves marked on the pieces. When we play we both play to win but I allow him to change his move if he realizes it was a mistake after removing his fingers. I nearly always win but he makes me think very hard in order to do so. He does not get upset about losing because he is not made to feel inferior because of it - I tell him he played a good game and that I enjoyed it.

Another competitive game S likes is Pick Up Sticks; this game we play on our honor, i.e., the player decides if he has moved a stick, not the opponent. However, if a person is cheating a great deal, the other player may refuse to play any more.

A card game he has enjoyed since the age of 4 is Slap Jack. Although all these games have a winner and a loser, we enjoy them because there isn’t a great deal of emphasis placed on whether or not you won - the main thing is playing the game.

A co-operative game we play is what we call tennis, only we don’t use a net or court, just a paved area. The object of the game is to see how long we can hit the ball back and forth without missing.

S enjoys mazes and designs his own. I have also taught him how to play Solitaire. A good game book is “Deal Me In” by Margie Golick (Jeffrey Norton Publishers, NY).

One advantage of schooling at home is better health. I feel that this is not only due to non-exposure to infection but also to a higher resistance because of lack of stress caused by tiredness and the stress of the classroom situation.

Another advantage is bedtime hours. S goes to bed when he tires and wakes up when he has had enough sleep. This year we have been going to bed at 2 a.m. and getting up around noon, mainly because we have noisy neighbors and it is hard to get to sleep earlier. Last year we went to bed around 11 p.m. These hours allow us to attend concerts in the evening…

BEDTIME

From Susan Ritch (ME):

…My husband and I have always been concerned with having ‘our’ time so our son, Jesse’s (4) bedtime was very important to us. Although he was very cooperative, Jesse did not enjoy the limited time he had with his father between his arrival and bedtime. This left everyone frustrated and unhappy.

One evening while I was reading GWS it occurred to me that he was perfectly capable of going to bed when he was tired. The next day we talked about being tired, how much sleep he needed, when to go to bed in order to wake up in time for playgroup, and about our need to talk with one another and have quiet times. The tension evaporated with his father, and he immediately assumed responsibility for getting dressed and brushing his teeth. Because of just this one letting go, our time alone and together follow a natural pattern that seems to satisfy everyone…

———-
I can’t help noting that no cultures in the world that I have ever heard of make such a fuss about children’s bedtimes, and no cultures have so many adults who find it so hard either to go to sleep or wake up. Could these social facts be connected? I strongly suspect they are.

TWO NEWSLETTERS

Many families may be interested in the New Family Newsletter (Box 186, Hardwick MA 01037; $4 for 6 issues). The subtitle says “for parents in central Massachusetts,” but I can imagine parents from all over the Northeast, and perhaps beyond, enjoying it. Each issue is about 8 pages and contains articles on family life, education, health, nutrition, work, and so on. A recent issue was devoted to a thorough survey of the services at major New England hospitals - can fathers be in the delivery room, are there play areas for child patients, etc. We’re reprinting another of their articles, Margaret de Rivera’s description of her home school. The newsletter is attractive and worth investigating.

Mary Bergman (see “Home School Guides,” GWS 9), now in Missouri, and Norma Luce in Utah are editing The Home Educators Newsletter (PO Box 623, Logan UT 84321.  Monthly, $17.50 per yr; single issue $2.50.) Issues are about 6 pages long. We’re reprinting elsewhere in GWS a marvelous story from a recent issue that Mary wrote about her very capable home schooled children. Like GWS, the news letter contains many letters contributed by readers. According to a box on page 2, the newsletter is a publication of the National Association of Home Educators, which also announced an April convention. Whether subscribing to the magazine is the same as belonging to the Association, I don’t know.

HIGH SCHOOL AT HOME

From James Augustyn of the Division of Continuing Studies, University of Nebraska, 511 Nebraska Hall, Lincoln NE 68588:

…Thank you for your recent request for information describing the University of Nebraska Independent High School. We are proud of the reputation of the program, and we are pleased at your interest.

The Independent Study High School has been in existence since 1929. The program is fully accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools and by the Nebraska State Department of Education. This accreditation allows us to grant a high school diploma upon the completion of specific requirements.

Students interested in completing a diploma through the Independent Study High School are asked to have official transcripts of previous high school work sent directly to me. Upon the receipt of such transcripts I will evaluate them and inform the student as to what additional courses would be required in order to earn a diploma.

Courses may also be taken for personal interest or to supplement the local school curriculum. The enclosed “bulletin” lists all courses available (Ed. - there are dozens), along with registration information. Please note that any registration from a student currently enrolled in a local high school, or under the compulsory attendance laws of his or her home state, must carry the signature of a school official approving the courses and the supervision.

Each student that enrolls in one of our courses must have a local supervisor. The supervisor is an important person in the student’s relationship with the Independent Study High School. I have enclosed a copy of “The Connecting Link” which outlines the duties of the supervisor. (Ed. - it says “Special permission must be obtained … for parents or relatives to serve as supervisors.”)

Please be assured that we look forward to working with any student. If there are additional questions concerning any of the information that I have enclosed, please do not hesitate to contact me…

COLLEGE BY EXAMS

An AP story from Bloomington, IN:

A 7-MONTH ZOOM THROUGH COLLEGE - Less than seven months after his high school graduation, Anthony L. May, 18, is about to become a college senior.

The 1979 co-valedictorian of Blue River Valley High School in central Indiana has made the three-year jump by testing out in 71 credit hours through the national College Level Examination Program (CLEP), the College Board’s Advanced Placement program, and departmental examinations here at Indiana University.

“I’m not smarter than the other students,” May said modestly. “It’s just that many of them are unaware of the opportunities and the many different ways to earn college credit through testing.”

He will have 91 credit hours - only 31 less than he needs to graduate - when he goes home for semester break on Dec. 22. Seventeen credit hours were earned in regular class room courses since he arrived here last September.

May started accumulating his credits by earning three hours between his junior and senior years in high school through the university’s collegiate credit program for high school students.

Then he began taking a battery of tests in English, history, political science, humanities, biology, economics, psychology, Latin, and English composition…

———

From several pamphlets that the College Entrance Examination Board (Box 1822, Princeton NJ 08541) sent us about their CLEP exams:

…No matter where or how you have learned, you can take CLEP tests. If the results are acceptable to your college, you can receive credit.

…Colleges and universities that award such credit are listed in “CLEP Test Centers and Other Participating Institutions [Ed - a pamphlet they also sent.] … Before you take tests for credit consult the college you wish to attend to learn its policy on CLEP scores and its other admissions requirements.

The General Examinations measure achievement in the liberal arts … The Subject Examinations measure achievement in specific college-level courses. Most are 90-minute multiple choice tests… A booklet of descriptions, with sample questions of all the examinations [is availabie.]

CLEP tests are administered during the third week of each month throughout the year at colleges and universities listed… If you live more than 150 miles from the nearest center, you may request a special administration at a more convenient location…

Four states offer external degree programs that enable individuals to earn degrees by passing examinations, including CLEP tests, and demonstrating in other ways that they have satisfied the educational requirements. No classroom attendance is required. Persons who live out-of-state as well as residents of the state are eligible. Prospective candidates should write before taking the examinations to the following addresses:

Board for State Academic Awards, 340 Capitol Av, Hartford CT 06115
Board of Governors BA Program, 544 Iles Park Place, Springfield IL 62706
Thomas A. Edison College, Forrestal Center, Forrestal Rd, Princeton NJ 08540.
Regents External Degrees Program, Cultural Education Center, Empire State Plaza, Albany NY 12230.

GODDARD COLLEGE . . .

…In “College at Home,” GWS #9, you have Goddard College of Vermont listed. I attend one of its four experimental pilot projects that offers a B.A. degree and/or teacher’s certification. It’s the “Goddard Experimental Program for Further Education” in Washington D.C. There are others - in Plainfield, Vermont, New York, and South Carolina.

We adults go to group studies and community meetings about every 3rd weekend. We talk with an advisor who is also a friend - our classes are facilitated (we pick our faculty) - not lectured. We do projects on our own at home. Our group studies (classes) are supportive, unique, totally more ideal than other colleges I have experienced, such as Antioch. I know people in the other branches, and the dean and others ln Vermont. They are all unique people seeking these ideals: self-direction; supportive re-source-sharing; mutual respect and equality; personal growth; various kinds of social change as part of college work; and students and faculty making decisions on college functions and regulations together, (whew!) as much as possible.

Write to Goddard Experimental Program for Further Education, 1757 “S” St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20009, or Goddard College, Plainfield, VT…

. . . & AMERICAN U.

From the Washington Post, 8/13/79:

…A program at American University (Washington DC) grants up to 30 semester hours (a full year’s work) for experience acquired on the job, in community or political activities, travel, hobbies or other learning activities. The program, beginning its fourth semester this fall at AU, is called Assessment of Prior Experiential Learning, or APEL (pronounced apple).

APEL is aimed at the growing number of over-25s who missed out on a college degree the first time around and who have over the years gained expertise in one field or another that relates to the academic world. Washington is full of accomplished people who don’t have a degree, says APEL director Lenore Saltman. Her students have included GS-12s and -13s [Ed-civil service ranks], responsible for large budgets and staffs.

“Most of them make more money than I do,” she says.

Around 300 colleges and universities nationwide have similar programs.

Under the AU program, students enroll for two semester-long courses that meet weekly. In the first, they
analyze their learning experiences and prepare extensive portfolios, later submitted to faculty members who determine the number of credits to be granted for them.

One student says his portfolio earned him 25 semester hours because of his technical training in electronics and the supervisory skills he developed as a foreman. Another earned the full 30, part for her design artistry and part for her managerial skills with the co-op. She also was advanced into a graduate-degree program, skipping her bachelor’s degree.

…Of the 142 who enrolled in APEL’s first three semesters, 22 per cent had no previous college experience and 38 percent had less than 10 semester hours. Only a few have been granted the full 30 hours of credit, and some, says Saltman, “have been disappointed not to earn what they thought they should.”…

LEARNING ABOUT THE SEA

From the Calypso Log Dispatch:

PROJECT OCEAN SEARCH - Ever since Captain Cousteau began his career exploring the ocean and relating his experiences to the public, we have been barraged with requests from people who wanted to be part of the Cousteau Experience. The most commonly asked questions have been: “May I join a Cousteau expedition?” “Is there a way to learn about the sea directly rather than in a classroom?” In 1973, Dr. Robert Gordon, Richard Murphy and Jean-Michel Cousteau decided to answer these questions and to create a unique educational experience. Our goal was to develop an understanding of the ocean, believing that such an understanding would create the will to fight for the protection of the sea.

PROJECT OCEAN SEARCH has … programs near civilization and programs far from civilization… It is avaiable to all people above the age of 16. The only criterion for embarking on the adventure is a sincere desire to learn about the sea and to help protect it. We consider the blend of varied backgrounds an essential ingredient to the program. We all learn from one another and within a short time there is no distinction between participant and staff. We have a very broad range of participants - teen-agers, college students, teachers, truck drivers, architects, medical doctors, homemakers, etc… They all have found POS a relevant experience: “All the things I read in books fell into place.” “A fantastic way to learn about so many things.” “The impressions I received on this trip will remain with me forever.” “So far superior to any other method of learning that no comparison can be made.”

For more information, write to The Cousteau Society, 777 Third Ave, New York NY 10017…

SMITHSONIAN

The Smithsonian magazine (900 Jefferson Dr, Washington DC 20560; $12 yr/US, $15.50 elsewhere), like National Geographic, is run as a “society” where subscribers are “members.” The fat issues (about 200 pages) cover a wide variety of subjects: history, geography, art, animals, science, and much more. The photographs are excellent. Last year they published a shot of a mother panda holding her cub, the most beguiling such picture I’ve ever seen, and offered it as a poster to members for $3. A good magazine to have around the house. We have a few copies available for samples; send 60¢ in stamps.

OHIO VICTORY

Judith Kovacs (OH) sent us this newspaper story:

JUDGE RULES IN CARROLL: HOME SCHOOL ‘ADEQUATE’ - The education of seven children at home is “very adequate” and “no neglect exists,” said Stark County Family Court Judge W. Don Reader in a possibly precedent-setting ruling today [2/29/80].

Reader ruled in favor of three Kensington families charged here with neglect for not sending their children to public schools.

The charges were brought by Carrollton Exempted Village School District.

The Robert Skaggs, Donald Miller, and Frederick Seikel families, each related by marriage, have educated their own children for the past four years, hiring a state-certified teacher. Classes were conducted in the Magnolia Rd. home of the Millers.

…The families maintained that they had constitutional rights to have a hand in the educational process. They also contended that teaching at home also protected the children from “filthy language, drugs and sex” before they were ready and provided them an environment in which there was no pressure to perform.

A licensed psychologist, Mary Villwock, gave achievement tests to the children on July 6, 1979 and the results showed the children were higher in every test from one to three years than children enrolled in the public school.

Her testimony was not rebutted, Reader noted.

Subjects taught included math, English, language, science and history, with the parents being final arbiter of what was taught and book selection.

Reader stated that according to the Ohio code, a neglected child is defined as one whose parents, guardian or custodian neglects or refuses to provide him with proper or necessary education, necessary for his health, morals or well-being.

Children, he said, can be taught at home if the superintendent grants the parents an exemption, if instruction is provided by a person qualified to teach the branches in which instruction is required and such additional branches as the advancement and needs of the child may require. No exemption was granted.

Reader said the violation of compulsory school laws does not “necessarily constitute neglect per se.

…”A neglected chlld is one whose parents are guilty of fault, unfitness or unsuitability…

“If minimal standards are to be construed as being a per se prohibition against the exemption from compulsory school attendance, then the statute is in grave danger of offending the free exercise clause.

“If it is determined that these parents in this particular instance and based upon all of the clrcumstances have an inherent right to teach their children and provide them with a qualified education, then the statute must be liberally construed so as to afford them this inherent constitutional right.

“Our forefathers in all likelihood never gave thought to the possibility that institutions created by law would pose a threat to the family, even inadvertently, since the family was thought of as being the un-written law and the basic unit of government.

“Although I may not share their belief to keep the children at home, the parents have gone to great expense and great involvement of their own time and the exhibits and testimony would indicate that their children are receiving a very adequate education.”…

NOT THE BEST WAY

From the Providence (R.I.) Sunday Journal:

Maynard Campbell says he would rather go to jail than send hls three chlldren to public schools. He says they can get a better education through a correspondence course.

Campbell’s two youngest children, Chuck, 8, and Becky, 6, have never attended public school. And he sald he took Barbara, [nowl 12, out of school in the third grade because “she knew nothing” even as a straight-A student.

On May 10 [1979], District Judge William Eakes ordered Campbell to prove that his three children are registered for public school or en-rolled in a state-approved home-education course. The judge warned Campbell he would be held in contempt of court if he failed to appear for an Aug. 30 hearing on the matter.

“There is no way I will comply with that order,” said Campbell in telephone interviews last week. “I’m ignoring it. Nobody’s going to take my kids.”

He said that after he took his daughter Barbara out of public schools in Texas, he enrolled her in an accredited national correspondence course operated by the Calvert School of Baltimore.

“It took a year and a half (in the correspondence course) to get her up to the speed of the third grade,” said Campbell.

So Campbell did not even bother sending Chuck and Becky to schools and instead enrolled them in the same correspondence course.

Campbell said authorities in New Mexico, where the family lived prior to coming to Colorado about a year ago, also were concerned about the children not going to school.

But when they checked out the correspondence course and found it was “excellent,” they gave their permission for the children to get their education that way, he said.

Campbell said he believes it is a violation of hls constitutional rights to require hlm to prove he is obeying the law.

“The bedrock issue behind all of this is the simple fact that you are not required to prove your innocence, but they’re demanding that we prove our innocence,” he said.

“They’re claiming that we’re not educating our children, but they have not proven that, they cannot prove that.”

———-

I hope Mr. Campbell has been able to unschool his children. But I fear that he did not go about it in quite the best way. My strong hunch is that judges don’t like what we might call “legal primitives,” people who come into court talking about the law without really knowing what it says.

In the first place, judges have spent a great many years studying the law, and people who have worked hard to understand something difficult don’t like to hear other people say that it is really very simple. Beyond this, any intelligent judge knows that to a large degree it is in the complexity of the law and its processes that lie many of the most important protections of our liberties. Many people think that these liberties would be more secure if the law were very simple. This is almost certainly not so.

The point of this is that if we are going to come into courtrooms talking about law, we had better know what the law actually says, both statutes and court rulings. Chances are that judges will be very favorably impressed, and in some cases even helpfully instructed, by parents who are able to cite and quote a great many such rulings. But they are likely to be prejudiced against people who say, in effect, “I haven’t got time to mess around with legal technicalities, but I know my rights.Ó They are likely to be still more prejudiced against people who announce to the newspapers that if they don’t like a court order they are simply going to ignore it. That is not a good way to get favorable rulings from the courts.

GWS AND SCHOOLS

The head of a small private school has just written me to say that he thinks that we should incorporate GWS into a publication that meets the needs of “good school” education (his quotes). In reply I wrote:

Thank you very much for your letter. From the very first issue we have printed in GWS, and will continue to print, much information that could be of great interest and value to all concerned with “good school” education. Thus, in GWS#l there was a short piece entitled “A Studying Trick.” It could be used at almost any grade level, under any kind of educational philosophy, in any course in which students had to learn disconnected pieces of information - language, math, science, history, etc. It could even be used to enable students to test themselves in spelling - I enclose a copy of a short piece in GWS #13 on that subject. No schools that I know of make use of this simple and inexpensive device, which I invented for myself when I was a student. I predict that any teachers who show their students how to use this study device will find their teaching efficiency greatly increased.

In GWS#4 and 6 we prlnted two short articles about Addition and Multiplication. The gist of them is that students would learn elementary arithmetic much more quickly if it was taught not as a collection of facts to be memorized, but as the study of the elementary properties of numbers. Again, I predict that any teachers or schools, of whatever educational philosophy, that adopt this approach will find that they greatly increase their effectiveness in teaching arithmetic.

This is only a small part of the information that we have already printed in GWS that could be profitably used in a school setting. I enclose a copy of the articles mentioned above, in case you don’t have your copies of GWS handy. I invite you to try out and put to use any one or all of these ideas. I would like you to tell me if you decide to do so. If you do, please tell me from time to time what results you get, or if you run into any difficulties, what these are. I will be glad to try to help you overcome them. Or, if you decide that none of these ideas are usable in your school, I’d be grateful if you’d tell me why. In either case I look forward to hearing from you again soon.

LIFE-SCHOOL

A young reader writes:

…I started going to public school right into the second grade and in every grade up to the sixth I was a straight A student. All the teachers were nice to me and I was praised and praised again for my work, and I got good grades for it too and thats what kept me going.
When I left school at the end of sixth grade to be out for two years, I learned a new realization. Grades are not what make you a good person. I have a pretty good memory so I remembered all the things I had to, to pass the tests that gave me A’s. But I’ve learned from experience that when I’m not interested in what I am supposed to be learning, I forget everything. Unfortunately, I wasn’t interested in anything that I was doing, so my second through sixth grade years of public schooling are pretty much blank.

During the two years without any public school contact, I learned a lot more than I had learned in five years of public school. I met many people, mostly adults, but the kids that we met told us things like “I’m smarter than you are, because I go to school,” and “You’ll grow up dumb because you don’t go to school.” It’s very hard not to get defensive when people say those kinds of things to you, and besides what are you to say to contradict them? They wouldn’t believe or understand (or even want to) if you told them that it wasn’t necessarily true. It’s just no use to try and convince people that it’s OK not to go to school, if their minds have already been programmed to believe that it’s not. When I say it’s no use, what I mean is that it’s a waste of energy. The way I feel is just let them think what they want, I know what I believe and that’s what’s important to me. I just tried to see why they all thought the way they did and it didn’t take me long to figure it out. It is their parents that program it into their minds, because it’s programmed into their parents’ minds, etc, etc. One goes back to thinking about why and when it all began.

In those two years, I learned how to live without grades and not to need someone to tell me “It’s good” every time I did something. It got so that grades didn’t mean anything any more. Basically, I learned that grades prove nothing. I also learned a lot of different things that I wouldn’t have, if I had been in public schools. Public schools can’t offer experience. I learned how to deal with and relate to adults better because I was around them so much - all the kids were in school! I learned many practical skills that I never would have learned in public school.

At first I wasn’t so sure about the idea of not being in school but I soon adjusted and found it fun. When I look at kids my age, it makes me glad that we did what we did. I am capable of doing so many more things it amazes me. And it’s all because I had the time to learn, and enjoy while I was learning. So things stuck in my mind and they are still there because I am still doing new things while these kids are doing things just to “get out” and then forgetting them in the meantime plus not enjoying much of it anyhow. Whew!

At L [Ed - the alternative school she attends now] the thing is that the kids don’t think they are learning as much as the kids in public schools because they don’t seem to do as much. I think that’s rather silly and I proved it to myself, by seeing that after being out of school for two years, I’m not any dumber than any other (supposed) ninth grader.

Now that I’m involved in L, I am runnlng into the same old thing. When I first went there I was so happy that I had finally found a school place where they didn’t believe in grades, etc. This was fairly true until the new high school began. They have this thing now about credits. All of the other students are there (at the high school) to get the diploma and get out. I am there to have fun learning and learn about the things that interest me. One of the main reasons I am there is for the social life. But in order to be there for that reason, I feel that I must do some of the things they want me to do.

I am already getting overdosed with “their stuff” and then my teacher says to me, “Your life school is becoming too important to you.” My life school should be more important to me than L; my life school is my home and family and if they shouldn’t be the most important then what should? But she doesn’t see that and one of my problems is not being able to tell them how I really feel. I have, sort of, but I never find the words when I’m faced with the questions directly.

I am caught between schooling and nonschooling. When I’m at home I am usually cheerful and doing things. At the end of the day, I always feel that I have accomplished a comfortable amount of whatever I did or that I did as much as I felt comfortable doing. On the other hand, when I am at school I usually don’t feel that I’ve accomplished much except that I have had fun with my friends. Then my teacher says to me, “I have no problem with you not coming every day, but you just don’t get anything done.” Oh, if only they knew! I get so much done. And I enjoy almost everything I do. When the teachers tells me that, they mean Algebra or Composition that I’m not getting enough of done. But as they see it, those are the important things.

I have such a neat home and life school! I consider myself to be very lucky to be who I am and to have the parents I have for believing in non schooling!..

CREDENTIAL CASE: MICH.

Here are excerpts from an important decision on Dec. 12, 1979. If you would like a copy of the complete ruling, try the Allegan County Courthouse, Allegan MI 49010; they sent our copy quickly and at no charge. If for some reason they won’t do the same for you, let us know.

STATE OF MICHIGAN - IN THE 57TH DISTRICT COURT FOR THE COUNTY OF ALLEGAN
PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN, Plaintiff vs. PETER NOBEL and RUTH NOBEL, Defendants
OPINION OF THE COURT - Mr. Peter Nobel and Mrs. Ruth Nobel are charged with a violation of the Compulsory Education Laws of the State of Michigan pursuant to 1976 Public Act 451, Sec. 1561, MCLA 390.1651; MSA 15.41561, for failure to send their minor children to public school. …

At the trial, the Defendants did not dispute the fact that they were not sending their children to public school or to a private school outside the Nobel home. However, the Nobels contend that they are not guilty of the offense charged because they were educating their children at home in a “satellite school” of the Christian Liberty Academy, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, pursuant to the dictates of their conscience and in furtherance of sincerely held religious beliefs. The Nobels assert for those reasons that the Statute in question as applied to the facts of this particular case is unconstitutional, insofar as it requires certification, for violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guaranteeing the free exercise of religious beliefs.

Peter and Ruth Nobel have been educating their children at home utilizing materials and assistance provided to them by the Christian Liberty Academy of Chicago, Illinois. The children had previously attended a private school, but that school no longer meets the religious standards of the Nobels.

Mrs. Nobel received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Calvin College in elementary education. Mrs. Nobel has had several years of teaching experience prior to September 1, 1978 and while she has never applied for a teacher’s certificate, did receive a provisional teaching certificate pursuant to her degree in elementary education at the time of her graduation.

Mrs. Nobel refuses to obtain a teaching certificate because of her religious beliefs. Mrs. Nobel testified that her daily life was governed by her understanding of the world of God as contained in the Bible and it is her firmly held religious belief that parents are responsible for the education and religious training of their children and that the parents must not delegate that role and authority to the government or any State, that for her to accept State certification would, according to her religious beliefs, be placing her responsibilities for education of her children in a position subservient to that of the State in violation of her religious beliefs. …

Testimony of Mrs. Nobel at trial indicated that her religious beliefs would prevent her from sending her children to the public schools because public school education directly conflicts with her belief in God and her interpretation of the teachings of the Bible and her religious beliefs in general.

Mrs. Nobel further testified that she could not send her children to any certified private school in the area because they too failed to meet her standards of religious training and education.

Pursuant to her religious beliefs, Mrs. Nobel began a program of home education which consisted of the same basic subject material as is taught in the public schools. … No evidence was offered or shown to indicate that this curriculum was deficient in any way.

Dr. George L. Hopkins of Florida, an educational psychologist, administered intelligence and psychological testing of the Nobel children. Dr. Hopkins’ qualification as a psychological and educational testing expert was stipulated to by the parties herein as were the findings of the test results.

Dr. Hopkins’ evaluations indicated that each of the five Nobel children are above average intelligence that each has obtained an educational level ahead of other children in their chronological age group. … In addition thereto, Mrs. Nobel was tested and found to possess the intelligence as well as the training and appropriate psychological makeup to perform well as a teacher.

The evaluations also indicate that the children were well-socialized and are emotionally and psychologically well adjusted. An “offer of proof” from the Reverend Paul Lindstrom of the Christian Liberty Academy was also read into the record indicating that the course of study which the children were engaged in through the Academy was geared to the religious convictions of the Nobels.

Professor Donald Erickson of the University of San Francisco testified as an expert witness. His testimony indicated that there was no evidence whatsoever that a teaching certificate proved teacher competence or that it has been empirically shown that a teacher’s certificate enhances the quality of the educational process received by the students. He indicated that students in private schools consistently do better on standardized tests than public school students even though many private schools do not require certification of their teachers.

Dr. Erickson indicated that very few parents would choose to educate their children at home and the expense to the State to insure that home education was adequate would not be an undue financial burden or other-wise on the State.

Pursuant to a hypothetical question using the facts of this case, Dr. Erickson was of the opinion that the education the children were receiving was adequate and that in his opinion the “certification” of Mrs. Nobel was unnecessary to meet any State interest in education of the children under the circumstances of this case…

The testimony established that the Nobel home was maintained in a neat and sanitary condition and that there was no objection on the part of the Nobels to any State inspection of the home or to State educational testing of her children…

The Attorney General of the State of Michigan in an Opinion dated September 27, 1979, being Opinion 5579, addressed the following question: Whether a parent may provide for his or her child’s education at home without having a certified teacher present. … In his Opinion he recognizes as an exception to the Statute private home schools that have a certified teacher or tutor present and concludes that any private home school must utilize certified teachers and that it is his opinion that a parent may not provide for his or her child’s education at home without having a certified teacher providing instruction and courses comparable to those offered in the public school district in which the child resides.

It should be noted, however, that the issue of religious freedom was not addressed by the Attorney General when such exercise of religious beliefs precluded the certification of the parent teacher. This Court must therefore address that issue.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise there of…” The free exercise clause was made applicable to the States, through the “concept of liberty” embodied in (the Fourteenth) Amendment. Cantwell v. Connecticut,  310 U.S. 296, 303 (1940). The United States Supreme Court has adopted a broad definition of what constitutes “religion” for the purposes of free exercise analysis. In United States v. Ballard, 322 U.S. 78 (1944), the Court indicated that proper inquiry is limited to whether or not the adherent was sincere in his or her beliefs.

The definition of religion is currently broad enough to include many beliefs which are not conventional, traditional theism. United States v. Seeger, 380 U.S. 163, 166 (1965). “Sincere and meaningful belief which occupies a place in the believer’s life parallel to that filled by orthodox belief in God.” Welsh v. United States, 398 U.S. 333 (1970). The Court has noted that nontraditional beliefs, including secular humanism, atheism, and nontheistic faiths, are all ‘religion’ for the purpose of free exercise analysis. The Supreme Court in Fowler v. Rhode Island, 345 U.S. 67 (1953), held that it was “no business of the courts to say that what is a religious practice or activity for one group is not religion under the protection of the First Amend ment.”

Mrs. Nobel refused to be certified even though she is clearly an experienced and otherwise qualified elementary school teacher because it would violate her religious beliefs.

Freedom of religion is, of course, a fundamental constitutional right which occupies a “preferred position” in our constitutional framework. Murdock v. Pennsvlvania, 319 U.S. 105, 115, (1943).

The government can only punish acts taken pursuant to sincerely held religious beliefs in extraordinary circumstances. Criminal or civil sanction of religious-based action must be based upon a compelling state interest. Furthermore, there must be no “less restrictive means” available to achieve the legitimate State interest while maintaining the integrity of the citizens’ religious beliefs. Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398, 407 (1963); Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205, 214 (1972).

Therefore, the State must have a compelling State interest, and no narrower alternatives, in applying the teacher certification requirement for home education to the Nobels under the facts of this particular case. The burden of proof in any criminal case is upon the State to demonstrate that there is a compelling State interest, and that no narrower alternative to the government action could be taken. (Sherbert v. Verner, 374 U.S. 398, 407 (1963).

No evidence has been introduced in this case that would demonstrate that the State has a compelling interest in applying teacher certification laws to the Nobels or that the education interest of the State could not be achieved by a requirement less restrictive on the religious beliefs of the Nobels…

The evidence indicates that the Nobel’s educational program is meeting all of the State compulsory education requirements except for the certification of the teacher therein.

The Kentucky Supreme Court in Hinton v. Kentucky State Board of Education, No. 70-SC-642-TG (1979) (citation unavilable) stated as follows:

“It cannot be said as an absolute that a teacher in a non-public school who is not certified under KRS 161.030(2) will be unable to instruct children to become intelligent citizens. Certainly, the receipt of a ‘bachelor’s degree from a standard college or university’ is an indicator of a level of achievement, but it is not a sine qua non the absence of which establishes that private and parochial school teachers are unable to teach their students to intelligently exercise the elective franchise.”

The Supreme Court of Kentucky found the certification procedure unnecessary as the State failed to show that there was any overriding State interest in such uniform requirements being applied without exception.

The State’s case here is based soley on the need for uniform application of the certification requirement for home instruction, not lack of teaching ability.

In State of Ohio v. Whisner, 47 Ohio St. 2d 181 (1976), the Ohio Supreme Court struck down state promulgated minimum standards relating to the operation of all schools, including church related private schools … Among the standards objected to was the “certification as a qualification for hiring a person as a teacher in one of these schools.” The Ohio Court at page 217-18 stated as follows:

“The state did not, either in this Court or in the lower courts, attempt to justify its interest in enforcing the ‘minimum standards’ as applied to a non-public religious school. In the face of the record before us, and in the light of the expert testimony … it is difficult to imagine … a state interest of sufficient magnitude to over-ride the interest claiming protection under the Free Exercise Clause … We will not, therefore, attempt to conjure up such an interest in order to sustain the application of the ‘minimum standards’ to these appellants.”

The State, in the case before this Court, has failed to produce any evidence whatsoever on the interests served by the requirement of teacher certification, and the Defendants’ experts to the contrary demonstrated there was no rational basis for such requirements …

In a New York decision, People v. Turner, 98 N.Y.S. 2d 886 (S. Ct. 1950), the Court stated as follows in discussing the purpose of a compulsory education statute:

“The object of a compulsory education law is to see that children are not left in ignorance, that from some source they will receive instruction that will fit them for their place in society. Provided the instruction given is adequate and the sole purpose of non-attendance at school is not to evade the statute, instruction given to a child at home by its parent, who is competent to teach, should satisfy the requirements of the compulsory education law.”

Returning to the Opinion of the Attorney General of the State of Michigan, and quoting from page 4, the Attorney General indicates as follows:

“The purposes of the Michigan compulsory education statute are plain. Parents are required to provide an education for their children…”

The evidence clearly establishes that the Nobels have met the purpose of the Statute as stated by the Attorney General. For her to accept certification would not make her a better teacher, nor would it make her children learn easier, nor would it make her children more intelligent, nor would it provide any additional benefits for her, her children, or the State, but it would, indeed, interfere with her freedom to exercise her religious beliefs…

The Nobels have a documented and sincere religious belief and this Court won’t and no Court should interfere with the free exercise of a religious belief on the facts of this case.

The interest of the State in requiring certification on the facts as contained in this particular case must give way to the free exercise of religious belief.

THEREFORE, the charges against the Nobels are dismissed and a Judgment of acquittal will enter.

[Signed] Gary Stewart, District Judge.

HOME-SCHOOL PLANS

…Last fall we helped a family start their own home school. We incorporated the school, composed the school plan and submitted it to the State Dept. of Education. So far the family has experienced no trouble and the fire dept. chief even established new guidelines for schools with less than 10 students.
Many people are intimidated by the State’s minimum standards for elementary schools, and I must admit that the people at the State Dept. are intimidating whenever they answer your questions over the phone. But when you show up in middle-class clothes and submit an intelligent plan, they seem to be quite accomodating. At least, that was our experience.

I should make it clear that the plan our friends submitted was for an actual school, with all the trimmings and no particular mention of home schooling. They simply neglected to tell anyone that enrollment in the school is limited to their family. So the State is actually left with the impression that this is destined to become a full-fledged school.

…My husband and I are in the process of writing our own plan to submit by May. We have decided this is our best option. The home education section in our state law has been twice interpreted by the courts as requiring instruction by a certified teacher, whereas schools (especially Christian schools) have no such requirement imposed on them. Another part of the home education section which makes me cringe is the responsibility of the local supt. and school board to judge and approve (or disapprove) the plan submitted by the parents. I seriously doubt their ability to fulfill this duty fairly without ending up in court to resolve it. In other words, were we to submit a plan to the local supt., we feel sure we would immediately end up in court. We prefer to take our chances with the State because 1) they are too busy to worry about us, and 2) they are more aware of their legal limitations and are basically playing laissez-faire.

I would definitely encourage people to consider starting their own school…  Should any legal action be taken, I feel (and this may be totally naive) that the judge/jury would be impressed with the fact that parents went to all the trouble of writing up a plan. It’s a great document to have on file with the state, and it has also proven to be a good exercise in clarifying and defining the wherefore, the why, and the how of our decision to educate our children this way. I should also add that we are not writing anything into our plan that we don’t intend to live up to or would be unable to stand up behind in court. We’ll mail you a copy of our plan as soon as we complete it.

…Our religious beliefs are an intricate part of our decisions about our children’s education. We have been criticized by some people for “taking that route of escape,” since the Christian schools have aiready “fought for their rights” in court. But we’re not interested in going to court to fight or win or prove anything. Of course, we will go to court if we must, but we prefer to avoid it as best we can without being denied our right to teach our kids at home. We prefer to put our energy, time, and money into the kids, not the courts. After we complete our school plan, we’re going to seek out an attorney, so that if we are challenged we’ll be prepared…

BABY ON THE JOB

The Boston Globe asked mothers who had found jobs that work well with their family’s needs to share their experiences. Here is one of the letters, printed 4/2/80:

I enjoyed my years as a secretary at Governor Dummer Academy (a private secondary school in Byfield, Mass.) and felt sad about leaving after my baby was born.  I arranged to switch jobs with a part-time worker at the school. My next step was to suggest that my baby would come back to work with me. My hushand and every one at school was very supportive but a bit skeptical. Although she was three weeks late, Meaghan was a good and healthy baby and we were back to work a month after she was born.

My job consists of posting mail, doing banking and errands in town and helping in the bookstore until 1 p.m.

My method was to nurse Meaghan just before I left for work at 9 a.m., carry her in a snugli (front or back pack) while I was running errands and banking, and use a good car seat in the van that could also serve as a sleeping bed while I was in the bookstore. She naps in the van while I drive to the post office and again on the way into town. As she outgrew the infant stage, she played in a bounce chair and playpen, which I kept in the bookstore, until she was10 months and walking.

Next week will be her first birthday. She is not shy because the students give her lots of attention. My pediatrician is also the school’s doctor so he is very supportive. He sees the experience as a good example for the students also. I feel satisfied because I have the peer contact with my fellow workers. I have my daughter with me, and I have a part time income. Other mothers could view each prospective job with the possibility of taking their child along. Talk to the employer. I took the initiative to suggest taking my baby with me. Try it. It can work.
- Johanna Lynch, Newburyport.

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We’d like to hear more accounts like this, about children of all ages who have fit in at work. Perhaps we can even start a list of workplaces that welcome children.

NEW BOOKS AVAILABLE HERE

TOMORROW IS OUR PERMANENT ADDRESS, by Nancy and John Todd.
This is the story of The New Alchemists, a group of people who, on a few acres of land on Cape Cod, are trying and learning to find how we human beings can get our food from the soil and our energy from the sun and wind, and live in modest but decent comfort in a gentle and stable relationship with the living earth. I don’t know any people in the world who are doing more important work - though there are also other groups working on the same problem. A very important and hopeful book, which I hope will inspire many young people (and not so young) to think about how they may become involved in this work themselves.

BORN TO LOVE, by Joann S. Grohman. Another very important book about the importance of close contact between babies and infants and their mothers - and also other people. A worthy companion to THE CONTINUUM CONCEPT. Though it is about the same general idea, it is also very much worth reading, as it comes at the subject in slightly different ways, and also makes some points that THE CONTINUUM CONCEPT does not make. Ms. Grohman stresses even more than Ms. Liedloff the importance of breastfeeding.

She also talks about the population problem, and insists that people who really love children and want to give them close nurturing should not feel that they have some kind of duty to have no more than two children. As much as the world needs fewer people, it has an even greater need for the kind of strength, kindness, and wisdom that people are likely to have who have had proper nurturing. A very important book.

BEFORE YOU WERE THREE, by Robie H. Harris and Elizabeth Levy. This book, illustrated with a great many of the most appealing black-and-white photos of babies that I have ever seen, is about the first three years of life: what babies are like, how they react, what they do. It is simply written - most second or third-graders could easily read it - but I think it would be most fun as a book to read aloud. Most four or five-year-olds will probably love hearing about what they were like when they were little. And the book should be particularly interesting and helpful to children who have or soon will have a baby sister or brother. It will help them understand better that small and seemingly unreasonable creature,  and it may make them a bit more patient to know that they were once just the same.

I note in passing that most of these babies, as nearly as I can tell, are being brought up in “modern” rather than “continuum” ways, so what the authors say about children’s “natural” behavior has to be read with that in mind. In any case, a most charming and informative book.

LIVES OF A CELL, by Lewis Thomas. These are short, clever, and altogether delightful essays about the mystery of life and living creatures, written for the general reader by a doctor. Dr. Thomas is as much a philosopher as physician. He thinks about the meaning of things, looks at them from unexpected angles. His book makes us laugh as it opens our minds. Even for those (like myself) who are somewhat more skeptical than he is about science and scientists, this is still a delight. And it will surely suggest to many young people that the study of living creatures would be fascinating work.

THE BEST OF FATHER BROWN, by G. K. Chesterton. Some of the new additions to our booklist are hard to classify - they were not written for children, yet any good reader from roughly age 10 or 12 on up can enjoy them. I was about ten when I first read a few of the Father Brown detective stories; I loved them, and in the next few years managed to find and read all of them. Since growing up I’ve read them again many times, always with the greatest pleasure. They are the best short detective stories I know; though I liked Sherlock Holmes when I was young, I liked Father Brown much better, and even more so now.

Chesterton is a wonderful writer, with a vivid sense of atmosphere, a great gift for description, a love of paradox, and a wit as sharp and delightful as G. B. Shaw’s. But the stories are much more than first rate entertainment. They are not just about crime but about human nature.

Father Brown, the short, dumpy commonplace-looking English priest is like Holmes a very clever man, but also much wiser, more understanding more compassionate. These qualities, more than his sharp eye for clues, enable him to solve the crimes he solves. He understands the mixtures of weakness and temptation that lead people to steal and kill.

THE BEST OF FATHER BROWN is a set of four books (THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN, THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN, THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN, THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN.) We will sell them as a set only, because we can’t get them any other way. You should probably read them in order; to a slight degree later stories depend on knowing the earlier ones. Good books for all ages.

THE BEST OF SAKI. Saki was the pen name of the British writer H. H. Munro, who was killed in World War I. He wrote one quite good novel, but mostly very short stories, ironic, sometimes grim, but always witty. This is a good collection of the best of them, including the famous “The Open Window,” and is the only volume of his works now in print in this country. Anyone over twelve or so should enjoy these stories immensely.

THE PALM WINE DRINKARD, by Amos Tutuola. This is an old favorite of mine, which I discovered when it was first published in the early 50’s. I had feared that it might long since have gone out of print, and was delighted to find it still on hand.

Tutuola is a Nigerian who had only six years of schooling, was later trained as a blacksmith, and, until he wrote this book, spent all his adult life doing manual work. At the age of 32 he wrote this extraordinary story, a mixture of fantasy, ghost story, and tale of adventure. The nearest thing I can compare it to is THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, for its great richness of invention. Like THE ARABIAN NIGHTS, it clearly comes from a culture in which people liked to spend many hours hearing someone tell a good story, and admired and honored those who could tell them best. But THE PALM WINE DRINKARD is as profoundly West African and pagan as THE ARABIAN NIGHTS was middle Eastern and Islamic.

A passage to give you the flavor of the book:

…But when it was night we sat down under a tree and laid down our loads; we were sitting down and sleeping under trees whenever it was night as a shelter. As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a “Spirit of Prey,” he was big as hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body. If this “Spirit of Prey” wanted to catch his prey, he would simply be looking at it and stand in one place, he was not chasing his prey about, and when he focused the prey well, then he would close his large eyes, but before he would open his eyes, his prey would be already dead and drag itself to him at the place that he stood. When this “Spirit of Prey” came nearer to the place where we slept on that night, he stood at about 80 yards away from us, and looked at us with his eyes which brought out a flood-light like mercury in colour…

I introduced this book to my ninth grade students in Colorado, and most of them loved it. I think most people of that age or older will feel the same.

THE BLACK ARROW, by Robert Louis Stevenson. When I was about ten (and a good reader) this was perhaps my favorite of all books. I must have read it a dozen times during that year. Then I put it aside, and never read it again until just a few weeks ago. Late one evening, just before going to bed, I thought I would take a quick look at the first chapter, to see how it began. Next thing I knew it was 3 AM and I had read the whole book.

It is a great tale, set in England during the Wars of the Roses, of treachery and loyalty, pursuit and escape, revenge, intrigue, and war. It is also, in small part, a very moving love story. At one point the hero, facing what looks like sure death, makes a declaration of love to the heroine that is hard to read with dry eye. Older readers may even envy them a little; it is easy to believe that only death will part them.

As in TREASURE ISLAND, even the villains are real people, worthy opponents, with many real virtues along with their vices. A wonderful book. I will read it again soon.

OTTO OF THE SILVER HAND, by Howard Pyle. Another exciting and moving story set in the Middle Ages, this time Germany. Otto is the only child of a fierce and cruel robber baron, feuding to the death with another baron much like himself. How the boy becomes caught up in this feud, and escapes it, and finally becomes the means of ending it, is the story of this book. Like THE BLACK ARROW, it is full of violence, but also courage, loyalty, and kindness; in the end, much more moral and hopeful than most modern fiction. Beautiful black-and-white illustrations by the author.

BEDTIME FOR FRANCES, by Russell and Lillian Hoban. This has long been one of my very favorite picture books for young children. Frances is a little badger. Like other little children, she doesn’t like going to bed at night, or sleeping alone in her room, and finds all kinds of excuses to go back and bother her parents. Eventually they persuade her to go back to sleep. The illustrations, by Garth Williams, are absolutely charming, enough to make you want to hug the next badger you meet (which would not be a good idea).

THE MYSTERIOUS TADPOLE, by Stephen Kellogg. A delightful picture book for young readers. Louis’s uncle in Scotland sends him a birthday gift, a tadpole, for his nature collection. Only it turns out not to be a tadpole. What it turns out to be instead, and what Louis does about it, is the subject of this delightful book. The illustrations will please the children and make grown-ups laugh - Stephen Kellogg has put many little private jokes into them.

UNDERGROUND, by David Macaulay. I don’t remember when a book has told me so many things I didn’t know, but had always wondered about. It is about what lies under the ground in our cities - foundations of buildings, subways, sewers, water pipes, steam pipes, gas pipes, electric cables, manholes. What are they for, how do they get there? Macaulay has illustrated the book with large fascinating pen-and-ink illustrations, with which he can do what no photograph could do - show us what we would see below street level if the earth itself were transparent. In some of these drawings we are actually underground, looking up past the foundations of the buildings, through the sidewalks, and up into the sky. A very beautiful as well as very informative book, as much fun for adults as children.

CASTLE, by David Macaulay. The form of the book is the same as UNDERGROUND, a short text with many beautiful illustrations. Here Macaulay shows us, from the very beginning in an open field, and in the greatest detail, exactly how people built the castles of the Middle Ages, and why they built them that way, and how they used them. It is full of the kind of detail about daily life and work that most history books leave out. Fascinating for all ages.

CHARLOTTEÕS WEB, by E.B. White. The funny and happy story about an eight-year-old girl, her pet pig Wilbur (a runt whom she saved from being killed), and Charlotte the spider who makes the pig famous. A reader who works in school libraries tells us that over the years, this book has had the steadiest circulation of any on the shelves. Lovely pencil illustrations, again by Garth Williams.

THE SECRET GARDEN, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This may be the best-known and best-loved of Frances H. Burnett’s children’s books. Chapter one begins, “When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. It was true, too.” But slowly, the cheerful Yorkshire characters who surround her, and the coming of spring to the mysterious secret garden, begin to soften Mary and show her new ways of dealing with the world. By the end she even manages to help someone unhappier than she had been.

In some ways this book resembles UNDERSTOOD BETSY: a “difficult” child moves to a new place and learns to take care of herself and be happy. (However, Betsy was merely timid, not cross.) I think I liked these books so much when I was younger because I could identify with those negative emotions - anger, loneliness, fear, embarrassment - which most children’s books don’t even admit exist. Futhermore, the main characters find that they aren’t (and by extension, I found I wasn’t) doomed forever to feel so awful, that there are ways to perceive and respond that are pleasanter and more effective. - DR

CONNIE’S NEW EYES, by Bernard Wolf. A true story about a young blind woman and her Seeing Eye dog. The story begins with Blythe, a golden retriever, being brought as a tiny puppy to the fifteen-year-old who will bring it up and train it for a year. Then we follow Blythe to the Seeing Eye school, where she meets Connie, her blind mistress. The two begin their training, learning how to work as a team, until they are ready to live and work in the world. A lovely story, not just about a woman and a dog, but about human courage, kindness, and resourcefulness. The many black-and-white photos will melt the hearts of dog lovers.

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND AND THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS, by Lewis Carroll. Its been many years since I read Alice, and I’m glad to find that I enjoy it as  much as ever - perhaps a little more, because I understand more of what Carroll put in it. When I first read it, as a small child, I enjoyed it for its adventure, for its foolish nonsense, and for its wonderful poetry - when I was grown up, and had not read Alice for many years, I found one day to my surprise that “The Walrus and the Carpenter” had stuck in my memory and could be coaxed to surface, a verse or two at a time. I later saw that Carroll (really the Reverand Dodgson), who as a mathematician was concerned with precise meanings of words, put into his book a lot of thought and arguement about what words really mean - which is very interesting to many children.

Knowing that Dodgson was very sentimental about little girls, I feared I might find on re-reading the book that Alice was a wishy-washy little heroine. Not a bit of it; though only seven, she is cool, collected, and brave, and though always polite, does not let herself be pushed around by the strange and rather quarrelsome characters among whom she finds herself. She cries a Pool of Tears when, early in the story, she thinks she is trapped for life in the narrow corridor, but then, who wouldn’t? After that, wherever she is, she is very much in control of the situation. A fine old tale. This edition has all the original Tenniel pen-and-ink illustrations, which are for me an indispensible part of the story.

Growing Without Schooling
308 Boylston Street
Boston MA 02116

Editor - John Holt
Managing Editor - Peg Durkee
Associate Editor - Donna Richoux

Copyright © 1977 Holt Associates, Inc.