GROWING WITHOUT SCHOOLING #53, Vol. 9 No. 5.
Date of Issue, October 1, 1986.

After three years with us, Steve Rupprecht is leaving to work for another company.  Steve has done a fine job handling all the complex details and problems involved in running our book order and subscription department, and we will miss him.  Wendy Baruch will take on that role, with the help this fall of Elsa Haas, who had been working here as a volunteer, and occasionally Sandy Kendall.  Between now and Christmas is our busiest time and we’ll work hard to keep on top of things.

Sandy, by the way, has just returned from England, where her rowing team won first place in this year’s World Championships, women’s lightweight division.

Lots of radio show activity.  Wendy spoke for a few minutes on a local show, which brought several dozen inquiries and led to Susannah Sheffer speaking on another show.  Wendy and Susannah sent a press release to 50-60 talk stations around the country, which so far has resulted in six interviews.
New England Monthly interviewed us for a 3-page story in their September issue, and Becky Rupp’s article is scheduled for an upcoming Country Journal (November?).  We were pleased to see Penny Barker’s piece, "the Homeschooled Teenager Grows Up," in the Summer issue of Mothering, and hope that others of you will write for other magazines.

Our friend and Board member Nancy Wallace says that her book BETTER THAN SCHOOL is being translated into Japanese!  The translator is a Japanese homeschooler who is married to an American and lives in the Midwest.  Larson Publications has signed a contract with a Japanese publishing house.  Nancy’s son Ishmael, by the way, recently performed for a program of music from the Yellow Barn Festival on National Public Radio.
Our full catalog is contained in this issue, including many new titles not yet reviewed in GWS, and some old favorites, like THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE, that are now back in print.  Please order early and avoid disappointment. — Donna Richoux

SELLING A MAILING LIST

In our constant search to find ways to break even financially, some of our Board members suggested selling our mailing list to other companies and organizations.  Apparently there is quite a brisk business among mail-order firms in buying and selling mailing lists; also, non-profit organizations sometimes trade lists in order to reach possible new members.

Whenever others - usually suppliers of educational materials or children’s items - have asked us to sell our mailing list to them, we have always refused, out of respect of the privacy of our subscribers.  And we feel strongly that this privacy should continue to be guarded.  However, it does seem probable that some of you would like to get catalogs and literature from these outfits; and it would be relatively easy for us to distinguish, on our mailing-house computer records, those of you who are willing from those who are not.
So, we will start putting this question on our renewal clip-out and other order forms.  If you are willing to help us raise money by selling or exchanging your name, please send in the clip-out form on the back page, or tell us when you renew or move.  Please include your subscription label or a copy of it.  We will code this information on your records, and only make available those names that are so coded.
If you do no wish your name to be made available, do nothing.

For group subscriptions, the question only applies to the name on the label, as the others are not entered on the computer. - DR

HOW MANY HOMESCHOOLERS?

An article in the Raleigh, NC News and Observer 7/27/86 about the Suttles family home school says it is "one of 400 home schools that have sprouted across North Carolina since the state Supreme Court declared them legal in May 1985."  The story goes on to say, "All but 13 counties have registered home schools.  In all, about 1,000 to 1,500 Tar Heel children may be getting their educations at home, out of 58,000 private-school students statewide."
_____

From the MS Clarion-Ledger:

A 31 percent increase last year in the number of 6- through 9- year olds who received education at home may lead to a push for more strict home education laws in 1987, say state education leaders.
…According to year-end reports filed by the state’s 98 school attendance officers, 209 children ages 6 through 9 were listed as receiving their education at home, said Alfrenett Johnson, special project officer of the governor’s commission on Children and Youth.  That’s up 31% from the 159 listed in home instruction programs in September 1985.

However, Boyd [state Supt. of Ed.] isn’t sure how significant the increase really is.
"It’s a case of you don’t know if it jumps because people keep better records than they did before," he said…
_____

Wendy Priesnitz wrote in Child’s Play, the newly-revived newsletter of the CANADIAN ALLIANCE OF HOMESCHOOLERS:

…The Director of Publication and Reference for the Nova Scotia Department of Education reports that there are likely around 30 "home scholars" in that province, with "12 to 15 in the Halifax-Dartmouth area."  New Brunswick’s Assistant Deputy Minister of Education reports approximately 38 children receiving their education at home in 1985-86.  During that same school year, P.E.I. had about 25 home educated students, according to the Deputy Minister of Education.

Reports from B.C. indicate about 2,000 deschoolers.  If these figures are accurate, they have doubled in two years, from the 1,000 estimated by the Director of the Correspondence Education Branch in August of 1984.
In Ontario, the Ministry of Education estimates are in the 500 student range, again much increased over the past few years…

L.D. BOOKLET IN THE WORKS

Pat Farenga and I have decided to put together a booklet on the myth of learning disabilities.  Many conversations and letters have convinced us that there is a need for such a collection of stories.  We plan to use material that has already appeared in GWS, but we’re eager to hear new stories too.  We welcome anything you have to say about your child’s experiences in or out of school, and we’re especially interested in examples of children who turn out not to be "disabled" after all.  We’ll be putting this together just after you receive this issue, so write soon if you’d like to be included. - Susannah Sheffer

DONATING HOLT BOOKS IN GA.

From Rebecca McGhee, Waleska GA :

… Realizing I had waited long enough, I decided to start running the Georgia campaign for John Holt’s books to be in every public library.  I’m very excited about it.  I’ve already put an announcement in Connie Shaw’s GEORGIANS FOR FREEDOM IN EDUCATION newsletter…  I’m going on what I’ve read in GWS #48-51 on following through with the ideas, making checks payable to GFE (Holt books)… Am also asking owners of John Holt books who would like to donate to coordinate so we know which libraries…

GWS NOTES

GWS Tapes for the Blind:  Naomi Rice has heard from eight readers who volunteered to record GWS for her and possibly other blind people.  So far she has received three tapes; it turns out that a 60-minute cassette holds roughly 12 pages of GWS.  Naomi was discouraged to find that the National Library Service will only list publications whose tapes are professionally recorded in a studio, but she is looking into other ways of alerting the blind community about us.  If you are willing to make a tape, contact Naomi at 503-287-1828 for instructions.- DR

HOW MUCH PARENTAL DIRECTION?

From Madalene Murphy (PA):

…Your response to Ruth McCutchen’s and Mike Kearn’s comments about a school-like approach vs. a more relaxed approach to learning at home (GWS #52) interested me a great deal because it is an issue that Tom and I have been discussing a lot with each other and with other homeschooling families that we know.  One thing that often bothers me about some discussions of this topic is that it is taken for granted that it is an either-or situation: either one maintains a highly regulated "school" at home with parents firmly in charge directing the day or one "relaxes" and, for some, a "relaxed" approach means no interference at all in the child’s experiencing of life and the automatic rejection of any materials that might be remotely connected with a traditional school experience.  I have found that, while a very few can and do maintain these extremes for several years, for the majority of homeschoolers, going to extremes in either direction can result in the parents or the kids giving up and the kids returning to school.

I know of one family where the parents felt that they didn’t have to do anything with the children, that they would just absorb all sorts of wonderful things from life even though it was not convenient to involve them in the parents’ busy world.  After the couple of years the children were so bored they begged to go back to school.  This, of course, is an extreme example of an extreme, and I know John never believed parents should just step out of their children’s lives and let them grow up on their own.

…Emily’s school experience had evidently been so negative in the area of writing that she actively avoided even writing her own name and would automatically reject getting involved in an activity if it meant having to write at all.  And so, after two years of writing what she dictated to us, offering gentle suggestions and providing lots of good examples on our part, we began to feel something had to be done to help her break through this artificial barrier.  The problem was not that she was not ready to write but that she had been actively taught that writing was a horrible exercise.  We didn’t care whether or not she ever made writing a major part of her life but we wanted her to do enough writing to see that it was not something that somebody would immediately swoop down upon with comments about sloppy handwriting and other self-esteem destroying statements, so that she was not cutting herself off from a valuable tool.  We insisted that she write several nights a week - while Tome wrote, too, so that it was not as if we were laying some kind of punishment upon her, but more like she was participating in a family activity…  It seemed to us that in this instance, firmly insisting was the best way and, although it was a slow process, Emily does write without difficulty now.
We have found that there is an ebb and flow to the amount of structure and to the amount of direction we provide in our children’s learning, but we are always involved.  Many times we simply follow the children’s interests, supporting them by driving the kids to the library to look up books on the subject or buying batteries for an electrical investigation.  And sometimes those interests are based on things we introduced into their world.  Years ago, when we saw Shakespeare plays being offered on PBS we asked Emily if she wanted to watch one and then prepare her for it by sitting down with her and reading through part of the first act, each taking a couple of different roles, to get her used to the language and the plot.  She loves Shakespeare now and we have even been able to take her to see some live performances.

And we also try to respond to particular needs.  Clare (now 7) was moving gradually and naturally toward reading but was interrupted thoroughly by our move a year ago.  Her interest revived when Tom and I made sure we found tome to have her read something to one or both of us each day (while we told her any words she didn’t know or didn’t want to take a guess at).  Reading aloud seems to be a necessary part of her learning to read.
And we do use textbooks sometimes.  Christian (10) is beginning a geometry textbook that we had picked up as a possibility for Emily.  It is really tough going at times but he loves it.  At the same time, I have to be available to work with him on it and so this brings up the topic of weekly - sometimes daily - goals.
…For a number of years, we have gotten together with each child at some point on the weekends and have made goals for the week.  Now during these years, there have been many times when we dropped the goal-making for a while, but we have always returned to it because we have found the goals to be very useful reminders among the clothes-washing, meal preparations, telephone calls, craft projects, bike riding, reading, that there are other aspects of life that need to be attended to…

FULL-TIME JOBS & HOMESCHOOLING

From New Hampshire:

…Even as John encouraged me that it WAS possible to home school and work full time, I want to encourage others, now that we have done it for a couple years and I know that it is indeed possible.  The key, for us, has been to find jobs that are not regular.  Not the 9-5 office workplace where children aren’t allowed (although I have done that for a few months).  Jobs which work for children, too, are in places such as a ski touring center, an apple orchard, evening office cleaning, and interior house painting.

Of course, being in a friendly school district is very important, also.  You have time and energy to homeschool when the officials aren’t threatening, bothering, and testing you all the time.  We have moved away from two unfriendly school districts, but now we are happy and feel at home.  It IS possible…

FROM SINGLE PARENTS

From Veronique Laliberte (MD):

…Our homeschooling story may be helpful to other single parents…  When I finally was given "approval" to homeschool, it remained for my children and me to decide how we would make an income.  I could either work at night and hire a babysitter or we could be child-care providers if the children would be willing to help (for a small salary, of course).  They opted for the latter.

We have been homeschooling since January and babysitting since March, and everything is working out better than I had expected.  My daughter’s reading has improved 100% due to the natural process of development…  Most importantly, both my children are learning how to nurture the children for whom we care.  As a result, they are also learning about money - how to budget and save for what they want…

HOW INTERESTS DEVELOP

From Kathleen Hatley:

…In February, my husband had a difficult surgery and was out of commission for a couple of months…  I had to take a very active role in our business, while Steve (13) and Shaman (9) took over much of the household work and younger child care.  "School" was very unstructured as real life took over!
I thought I might outline the pattern of learning that Shaman followed last year, as some of your readers seem interested in how interests develop, and this seems a good example of how a small spark can set off a real flame.  We borrowed a wonderful mythology board game called "By Jove" from our educational enrichment co-op.  It had a 64-page booklet of Greek myths with it.  We played the game and Shaman read the myths, I gave him three different volumes of myths that I had, which he read cover to cover, and enjoyed comparing the different versions.  he then checked out every book on mythology at the public library.  I gave him a hardcover edition of BULLFINCH’S MYTHOLOGY, which he devoured.  At a college bookstore, he picked out classic versions of the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aenead, all of which he has read at least twice.  And very unexpectedly, he picked the collected plays of Aeschylus, Euripedes, and Sophocles to read.  The interest branched into a study of Charlemagne, Welsh mythology, King Arthur myths, and some of the roman emperors.  Best of all, were the many detailed historical drawings of warriors and battles (especially the Trojan War) depicting accurate (as described in the texts) armor, weapons, and architecture.  The younger children, Ram (70 and Chris (4), were happily drawn into this passion as Shaman spent hours making them tunics, helmets, and capes from the scrap box; shields out of cardboard, foil, and duct tape; swords and lances whittled out of cedar branches.  The art work, as well as the fantasy play, of my younger boys took on an exciting dimension as they made drawings about the myths that Shaman and I read them - Medusa, Hercules and the Hydra, Theseus and the Minotaur, Cupid and Psyche.  This was all 100% child-directed activity.

Steve developed a strong interest in freshwater fish.  Aside from actually going fishing, which is his very favorite thing to do, he managed to read every available book in the library, including five volumes of a fish encyclopedia.  He worked out a deal with a friend who is a graduate student in fisheries, to supply him with worms and perch fillets for his specimens.  In return, Steve received a large, fully-equipped aquarium, in which to keep his own specimens.  A highlight of the year was when he got to "seine" a local river (drag the river with huge nets to bring up small fish to study) with the curator of the University Life Sciences Museum.  Next week, he starts an apprenticeship with the ranger at a nearby lake (who happens to be one of the most knowledgeable naturalists around).  He will be learning, among other things, how to manage a camping and fishing facility.  This interest in fish led into many other areas, as a real interest always does - climate, pond and stream ecology, life cycles of insects, etc.

My older children continually reinforce my belief that when a child has an interest in something, they have a real need to plunge much deeper into the subject than a normal school curriculum ever allows…
_____

And from Alison McKee (WI):

…I also, like many readers, wonder how it is that so many people have kids who do such wonderful things all of the time.  I have always wondered why it is that other children seem to accomplish so much and our children seem to just "go along" being kids.

…I was busy thinking about Christopher’s (8) present interest in King Tut and like a bolt of lightning everything fell into place.  A few years ago Christopher’s favorite babysitter was doing a scene about King Tut for a social studies project.  Christopher was very interested in her work and when she was done he had the honor of being one of the first to see the project in its completed form.  It was quite something!  He wanted to do one just like it!  I persuaded him to do a scene about something he was working on and familiar with (Ben Franklin).  He eventually did a very nice scene of Ben Franklin flying his kite.

This past summer I took the kids to Denver for about five weeks to house sit for my cousin.  She is an Egyptologist.  Her house, needless to say, was full of wonderful picture books of Egypt.  Christopher browsed through these books fro time to time.  I figured he was reading the captions under the pictures.  I did not try to get him to read the text at all as the books were not for children although the pictures were excellent.
One evening while we were going down to my cousin’s basement he pointed to some posters from the King Tut exhibit on the wall.  He said, "That mummy is from a king of the Upper Nile and that mummy is from a king of the Lower Nile.  Do you know how I know?"  I didn’t.  He explained that the crowns they wore designated where they were from.

That night I made a note in my notebook to some books on Egypt from the library when we got back to Madison.  On our first trip to our library I managed to find quite a few books that he could read or that we could read to him.  I didn’t say anything but just put them on the living room table.  He found them and began studying them, one in particular.  I later read one to him that he was interested in but was intimidated by because it was such an adult looking book…

After finishing Wrapped for Eternity, Christopher wanted to make a scene of King Tut’s tomb.  He planned it carefully, tracing pictures of books and making a list of things he wanted to include.  I helped him gather materials.  He measured out and drew up his plans.  We learned, together, about cutting balsa wood and he was off and running.  One day I left him for an hour while I did a few errands, and when I came home, he was beaming because he had managed to build all of the walls of the tomb in my absence.  He is now busy working on all of the treasure that will go in the tomb.

I guess what I’m saying is that sometimes the projects that our children do are not always completed in one step.  I now feel much better about Christopher’s work habits as I have discovered a pattern that holds true for him in other areas as well.  He comes to something many different times and works it over.  At any one time you might think he is not completing much, yet in the long run something is being worked on…

COUNTING HER FRIENDS

Katie was very disappointed when she realized we weren’t going to send her to kindergarten…  She said she didn’t have very many friends and she could meet some new kids there.  So I suggested we count her friends; it didn’t matter how old they were.  As we counted and passed 20 she began to smile.  She just didn’t realize she had so many.  That was two years ago and the last time she really talked about school. - MARY MACHANOFF (TN)

GERMAN CHALLENGES SCHOOL LAW

Margy Walter (Germany) writes:

…I want to send on this Der Spiegel article (7/14/86) on compulsory schooling here in Germany, along with a quick translation I made of the text.  It’s one of the first times I’ve seen anything printed on the subject here:

MENTAL FORCED FEEDING
Can parents be compelled to send their children to school, if necessary by force?
Michael Bartmann of Regensberg turned 6 on January 13th, 1985.  He should have been registered for school by May 7th.  Instead, his parents, both teachers, refused to comply with Bavarian school law, giving detailed explanations.

In answer to the official summons, the father wrote that his son, Michael, had declared "of his own accord that he didn’t want to go to school."  Further, the father wrote, "I feel I’m not in the position to forcefully oppose my son in this."

The state government sent the uncooperative parents and extended deadline of May 24th - without success.  Six months later the Regensburg court imposed a penalty of DM 200 (ca. $100) each against mother and father.  Since June the case has been turned over to the German Supreme Court in Karlsruhe.
The parents argue that it is unconstitutional that compulsory school laws do not provide for any exception allowing individual supervision, as desired for their older son.  However, they add, they are not against public schools in principle and have registered their younger son Alexander, "according to his own desire," for the 1986 school year.

The refusal of the parents and child to comply with compulsory school raises questions which have up to now not been addressed by the highest courts in Germany.  It is uncontested that the constitutionally protected dignity of man also applies to children.  But it must be now clarified whether and to what extent this basic right can be infringed for children.

Up to now, authorities such as courts have got around the question of whether or not minors can be put under moral constraint or their basic human dignity offended.  The problem arises often - for instance, when children of divorced marriages refuse to comply with the court-imposed ruling concerning time spent with the parent who was not granted custody.

In such cases it is not of primary importance whether children arrive at such negative attitudes all on their own or under the influence of their parents.   When they don’t want something, for whatever reason, the question arises whether their will many be broken or not.
The authorities used to resort to drastic measures.  Children became the objects of court decisions which were carried out by the court marshal, if necessary with police force.  There were scandalous scenes, for which the sensitized officials no longer wanted to take responsibility.

For some time now the authorities employ a more subtle device: they compel the parents themselves to use force, thus keeping their hands clean in the process.

This means that regarding visiting rights, and in this case compulsory schooling, the parents are compelled to force their children to do things which they possibly do not approve of themselves.  The teacher, Bernard Bartmann, considers himself brought to a "real crisis of conscience" here.  Last week the Regensburg court raised the penalty fine to DM 500 (ca. $240) and has threatened a further increase.
Bartmann argues that he would have had to employ "shameful pedagogical methods" which were "furthermore legally forbidden," in order to force his older son to attend school.  He faces the conflict of either harming his son’s basic human dignity or disobeying compulsory school laws.

Bartmann, who strives for "a new kind of man" as pedagogue and who considers today’s compulsory school laws as "mental forced-feeding," makes it clear that his basic right of free conscience is severely infringed when the state in turn compels him to use force against his children.

His experience as special (slow-learner) teacher has convinced Bartmann that today’s schools represent a "profound infringement to and harmful influence on healthy, mentally-balanced development."  As evidence for his thesis he cites the steadily increasing phenomena of "student failures" and student suicides.
"The public school monopoly takes the responsibility for these cases of children maltreatment," claims Bartmann.  But of course, he adds, many young people "go the public school path without any problem."
A large portion of students suffer, though, since they cannot fulfill the required achievement standards.  This results in "negative selection down to the Sonderschule" (special schools for "slow learners").  Bartmann would like to establish some sort of free school along the lines of Waldorf schools.

This teacher, who is thinking of an "educational system free from state monopolies" and a "free learning culture," strives to get away from the old pedagogical vision of man, which he defines as "authority-subject, male supremacy-female adjustment, teacher-pupil, command-obedience."  He claims with his constitutional grievance that "the state must step back when a task can be fulfilled by a smaller social unity, particularly by the family."

Bartmann and his wife have hired an unemployed colleague to tutor Michael.  Both parents lay claim to their right of judging best, along with their son, "in what form the child will confront educational concepts, from the personal as well as the professional point of view."

The theories of this teacher-father are neither absurd nor new.  After all, aristocratic and wealthy families have long exercised the privilege of educating their children at home with a tutor - up until well into this century…
_____

Margy Walter continues in her letter to us:

…I wrote a brief note to the German fellow, Bernhard Bartmann, and just yesterday I received a flyer from a group which has recently formed, called "Friends of B. Bartmann," to support him financially and otherwise in his attempt to bring his suit against compulsory schooling to the German Supreme Court.  Apparently he quit his job as a teacher and is working full-time on this ground-breaking project.  I sent a little donation to their fund and ordered a set of copied material which he used in his lawsuit.  And since the flyer mentioned, among other things, that one of the group’s goals was to "contact foreign groups or organizations with similar philosophies in order to share ideas and experience," I offered to be a kind of "contact person" for the USA…  I wrote a bit about John Holt (and photocopies GWS #44 for their perusal) and his books and about GWS, and offered to take out a gift subscription of GWS for them if they think this makes sense, i.e., if enough of them in the initiating group can read English fluently - which I suspect they can…  I’ll keep you posted on developments…

Our oldest child, Carrie (5), eagerly started morning kindergarten (the German equivalent to nursery school - noncompulsory for ages 3-6, but everyone goes) last fall, and enjoyed the first few months.  Then around Christmas, she rapidly began to fade on it ("I went to kindergarten to learn better German, and now I speak fine and don’t need to go anymore.") and soon declared she "hated" going: too many children, too noisy, too boring, not enough "time to do anything."  We were distressed but encouraged and even insisted she keep going.  Finally, it became a great daily battle, with tears and constant stomach cramps, and I began to realize that I was sticking with the pain, not just because her teacher insisted Carrie seemed to have a good time while actually there, but mostly due to "peer pressure" - my peers of German mothers/friends in the neighborhood - and my carpool duties.

I had a good excuse to let her stop going when our baby Steven was born in May, and she hasn’t gone since, and she’s delighted.  What an enormous relief for all of us to trust our child’s own strong feelings.  Carrie plays and works on her own projects marvelously by herself or with her brother Ingo in the mornings, is darling with the baby, and thoroughly enjoys intense, usually outdoor play with one of her several good German friends in the afternoon.  We are continuing to pay the kindergarten fee to keep her place open at the kindergarten should she choose to return there, but it’s going to be her own decision and no one is going to talk us into insisting on regularity!  Our child has blossomed again, the paleness and stomach cramps have disappeared, and that’s what is important.

It’s interesting how many others comment, "Yes, well I suppose it’s all right to be lenient now, but then again she has to learn self-discipline at school soon, so shouldn’t you get her used to the routine well ahead of time?"  But even her sweet young teacher mentioned that Carrie got terribly upset when "handicrafts time" was stopped after 20 minutes (here at home she sometimes works at one table project for two hours at a time) and she was always eager for more read-aloud sessions than could be offered…
I can well imagine homeschooling working out well for us, and I’ve come to the point of feeling I’d like to try it if we could do so legally…  At least we have two more years before Carrie reaches school age!  My husband is more skeptical than I about the whole issue, and is afraid I’ve become "too easily convinced by a lot of gushy anecdotes," although with time and tact he has softened up a lot, and he’s always impressed by anything I’ve read aloud to him by John Holt.  It’s been comforting to me to hear that other mothers have experienced similar hurdles; it’s clear to me that homeschooling must be a family affair, and I’d never push it all alone.
…For the present, we’ve registered Carrie for eventual entrance at the nearby Waldorf school, which is certainly better than the strictly structured public school…

If any GWS readers ever make it to Germany and happen to be in the Stuttgart area, they are welcome to stop over with us - we’d love to have more contact with families with actual homeschooling experience…

PROGRESS IN CALIF. COUNTY…

[DR:] In GWS  #52, we reported that the Superintendent of Schools of Alameda County, CA declared that private schools in homes are not legitimate and that such students would be considered truant.  Here’s the latest progress on the situation, as reported by Elizabeth Hamill (CA) in the September newsletter of CONTRA COSTA HOME EDUCATORS:

On August 23, the ALAMEDA COUNTY HOME EDUCATION ASSOCIATION met to discuss the need for homeschooling legislation…  Dr. William Berck, the county Superintendent of Education, said in a letter to some parents:
"…Seeking a legislative resolution on the matter of home schooling has the greatest potential for success…"
…On August 25, six Alameda County homeschooling parents met with Dr. Berck to discuss the current legal situation.  He said at the meeting that he would not be distributing the affidavit forms to private schools with an enrollment of four or less.  However, two days later, Dr. Berck called me to say he had consulted again with the county counsel and since the forms are a public document, he has no right to withhold them.
…Dr. Berck advised us that if we want our districts to offer Independent Study Programs, we should work through the school  boards, preferably by identifying one sympathetic board member to sponsor a proposal.
We asked Dr. Berck if the county considered a legal option to enroll children in the independent study programs of private schools.  He admitted that he did not have enough information to give us an answer.  We gave him what information we had (e.g., the 1983 Hackett case in L.A.) and asked him to contact us when he has consulted with his legal advisors on this questions.

…On Sept. 3, Ginny Schwingel, Connie Pfeil, and I met with Dr. Fred Fernandez of the Office of Non-Public Schools at the Dept. of Education in Sacramento.  Dr. Fernandez said he hoped Dr. Berck would indeed mail out the affidavits, but if not, his office would supply us with a stack of the forms.  He said he had seen many instances of zealous superintendents deciding to "take you folks to court," and that he usually tried to warn them that it wouldn’t be as simple as they thought.  He explained that before a family is turned over to the District attorney for prosecution, they attend a hearing before the School Attendance Review Board.  If the SAR Board determines that the children are being educated in  a satisfactory manner, the D.A. most likely will not prosecute…

Dr. Fernandez offered to speak at one of our meetings, and also advised us to contact State Superintendent Bill Honig, who has made private schools a priority on his agenda.  We asked again about the option of enrolling in a private school independent study program, and Dr. Fernandez said that although he is concerned about parents being defrauded by "fly-by-night" programs, he did not think that such and action was against the law.  Like Dr. Berck, Dr. Fernandez felt that a legislative resolution clarifying the legality of home education would make his job easier.

After the two-hour meeting with Dr. Fernandez, we went to the Capitol and hand-delivered basic information packets on home education, and the problems we are having with the vagueness of the law, to the 24 members of the legislature’s Education Committee.  None of the legislators was available to meet with us since the end of the session has been extended, but several expressed support or interest.
We met with Dede Heitman, an aide to Assemblyman Bob Campbell.  She felt that a simple resolution might not be enough to protect us, and suggested we try to set up a task force to study the issues of home education (this seemed to work well in Washington State) before drafting a new law…  The legislature will not open the next session until December…

At this point, it seems most important for home educators in Alameda County to let the school officials see that we are active, organized, informed, and determined…  We hope that any family who is contacted or threatened by school authorities will notify us immediately so we can help…
_____
[DR:] Nancy Wallace (NY) told us that the Oakland Tribune’s editorial in support of homeschoolers (GWS #52) was written by her brother!
Also, Margaret Arighi (CA) told us of her solution to the Alameda County problem;

…I have applied and been accepted by the Mt. Diablo Home Study Program (GWS #52) in neighboring Contra Costa County.  My initial request was refused, but that led to research which proved indeed that such a program was not offered in Oakland…

…AND STRUGGLE IN ANOTHER

From Cecile Van Hudson,
 Gerber, CA

…After much struggle 1 1/2 years ago (and continuing), Tehama County reluctantly provided a Home Study Program as an alternative.  The teacher visits every two weeks or once a month, depending on how rural the student.  All school supplies, books, and field trips are provided.
Twice now, the home teachers’ contracts have not been renewed.  The teachers worked hard to make the program what it should be…
Please help get the word out that it is here as I am tired of the struggle to help this grow…  We need more students and dedicated parents or the program will fade away and die…  The newspaper in the area is not interested…

OTHER LOCAL NEWS

For addresses of state and local organizations, see GWS #48, or our "Homeschooling Resource List," $1.
ARKANSAS: The ARKANSAS CHRISTIAN HOME EDUCATION ASSOCIATION reports that the State Dept. of Ed. recently released the results of standardized tests given to homeschoolers, but that it gave so little information that the results may be misleading.  The state said that 88% of the 317 homeschoolers in grades 1-6 "passed" as did 61% of students in grades 7-12.  ACHEA complained that no mention was made of the unusual definition of "passing", the high average scores, progress from last year’s tests, or comparison to public school scores.
COLORADO: From the August Colorado Homeschooling Network Newsletter: "The St. Vrain school board has turned down the requests of all 18 members of Master Studies [home school program] in an attempt to force the CO state board to take a look at its ‘liberal’ stance on homeschooling.  Director of Master Studies, Mike Moore, plans to appeal to the state board of education, where all requests are expected to be approved."

FLORIDA:  The newsletter of the FLORIDA PARENT-EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION  reports that the ‘85-’86 year was relatively trouble-free for homeschoolers in the state.  Few who complied with the ‘85 Home Education Act had their portfolios examined, and of those who did, none were judged inadequate.  No superintendent judged a homeschooled child’s progress inadequate during this year, and no family who did not comply with the ‘85 Act was taken to court, either.

Some superintendents tried to impose "extralegal requirements" on the families’ end-of-the-year evaluations, such as having them consist only of standardized test scores, but when challenged, all superintendents withdrew these requests.

The FPEA is collecting Florida end-of-the-year evaluations to use as evidence that homeschooling works.  Send a copy of your child’s annual evaluation to Dr. Larry Walker, 9245 Woodrun Rd, Pensacola 32514.
GEORGIA: Homeschooling parents in Clayton County have been sent a letter telling them to bring their diplomas to the Dept. of Ed. to be xeroxed and placed on file.  The Dept. will not give families the forms for filing the annual declaration of intent unless they comply with this request, according to the June/July issue of Georgians for Freedom in Education.  GFE adds:  "Anyone in this county needing assistance should call Jenny Henderson at 471-4719.  The GA compulsory attendance law does not require diplomas to be shown to the Dept. of Ed…  The Attorney General is looking into the matter."

In GWS #51, we reported that the state was considering toughening the recent homeschool law because of a "large number of complaints" from county superintendents.  The "large number" is actually a total of two according to the Governor’s office!

IOWA:  Gregory Nichols wrote in the IOWA LOBBY FOR CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY newsletter that three state groups have joined to work for new legislation.  They have appointed a "legislative liaison" who will act as a full-time lobbyist, coordinate homeschoolers’ efforts, and teach educational seminars.  The group plans to raise $10,000 to pay this liaison.

The ILCL decided they needed this liaison during the past legislative session, according to Gregory Nichols, when "Senator Taylor’s amendment to the Senate Education committee bill, an amendment that would have lined the bill up with the Governor’s task force proposal, failed by four votes.  Senator Taylor told us that, had we had someone there that week, that amendment would probably have passed, because some of those who voted against it were Senators we had counted on, but the education lobby got to them and they changed their minds.  We cannot afford for this to happen again!"

MARYLAND: Manfred Smith wrote in the summer MARYLAND HOME EDUCATION ASSOCIATION newsletter that although home education legislation recently failed to pass, a local delegate told him that "never in recent years has there been a grassroots movement with as much energy and effort as the home education effort.  One influential Senator was heard saying that he had never seen a more well-organized and well-lobbied grassroots bill…"

MICHIGAN: Pat Montgomery of CLONLARA says that Rep. Walberg’s HB 5356 (GWS #52) is in the final stages of public hearings.  Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Public schools and a committee of five Intermediate Superintendents proposed that home schools be considered private schools and be subject to the same regulations, including strict curriculum requirements and a certified teacher present every day.  Pat Montgomery, Rep. Walberg and several homeschoolers gave testimony against this proposal at a meeting in September.

NORTH DAKOTA: A bill which the NORTH DAKOTA HOME SCHOOL ASSOCIATION called "unacceptable" was killed in committee.   NDHSA credited the defeat to "the strong showing in attendance of our home school supporters, coupled with the impressive testimony of Mr. Michael Farris" of the HOME SCHOOL LEGAL DEFENSE ASSOCIATION.

OREGON: Peggy Sawyer, a homeschooling parent, writes that because the new OR law requires testing of homeschool students, homeschooling families might want to register instead with the OAK MEADOW SCHOOL of Ojai, CA.  OAK MEADOW has become a certified private school in OR, and OR private schools are not subject to testing requirements.

PENNSYLVANIA: The state School Board passed new regulations applying to home study students.  The regulations list the subjects that must be taught and state that the tutoring "shall be subject to the annual approval of the district superintendent."  They go on to say that the approval will be based on "acceptable evidence of the tutor’s ability to teach such program to the pupil and by written assurance from the parent that the instructional requirements listed above shall be met.  If approval is granted, the superintendent may afterwards also require such evidence as is deemed necessary to demonstrate that the pupil is making satisfactory progress…"

Howard Richman wrote in the PENNSYLVANIA  HOMESCHOOLERS newsletter that hearings had been held on the new regulations and that homeschoolers objected to them on three grounds: "(1) superintendents could require home-educated children to take achievement tests, (2) there was no clarification of whether parents had to be certificated tutors… (3) there was no provision for due process hearings if parents are arbitrarily denied permission…  Several homeschooling parents spoke against the regulations and the testimony went on for several hours.  The regulatory commission was amazed to hear that the present law governing private tutoring provides for no due-process hearings or administrative appeal…"

SOUTH CAROLINA: SC permits homeschooling if it is "substantially equivalent" to classroom education.  Homeschooling parent Anne Johnson told us that the State Board of Education proposed regulations which would define "substantially equivalent."  On the day of the hearing concerning these regulations last May, "the room was packed with several hundred homeschooling families, who had come in opposition to the regulation.  Dr. Raymond Moore had flown in to make a presentation, and many other parents also spoke…  They voiced strongest opposition to Section II, Teacher Qualifications, which would require the teacher have a college degree.  The chairman of the School Board committee…  asked for a show of hands from those who would be prohibited from homeschooling by Section III and my impression was that at least one third of the families raised a hand."  Anne says the proposed regulations will probably be sent to the legislature in January.

VIRGINIA: In a few states, including VA, new home school laws were interpreted strictly to mean that if a home school family failed to notify the authorities of its intentions at the beginning of the school year, it could not start to homeschool until the following year.  Now Cathy Myers of NORTHERN VA HOMESCHOOLERS sends us this memo from the Superintendent of Public Instruction to all Division Superintendents: "Previously it was our understanding that an August deadline for filing notice of intent to teach a child at home would preclude acceptance of such notices from parents at mid-term or other times during the school year.  The Attorney General has now issued an opinion which indicates that, in appropriate cases, failure to file such notice in August prior to the school year does not necessarily preclude home instruction…"

WEST VIRGINIA: Deirdre Purdy of ALTERNATIVES IN EDUCATION tells us that homeschoolers have filed the "friendly suit" (GWS #51) in Circuit Court and then asked the state superintendent to forbid county superintendents from prosecuting exemption K schools. (Exemption K allows schools to form with minimal state oversight.)  The state superintendent agreed to do this, so homeschoolers are safe for the ‘86-’86 year, but Deirdre says that WEST VIRGINIA HOME EDUCATORS and WEST VIRGINIANS FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM plan to work to make homeschools clearly private schools under the law.

WISCONSIN:  The  WISCONSIN PARENTS ASSOCIATION newsletter reports that the Sparta Public School Board, which had drafted a restrictive policy regarding the entry or re-entry of homeschoolers into public schools (GWS #51), adopted a significantly more lenient policy.  In the adopted version, "students from home-based programs are not restricted to entry/re-entry at the ninth grade or below, and the ’social maturity’ and ‘appropriate social interaction with his/her peers’ are no longer criteria for grade placement.  Also, language concerning the use of standardized tests appears now to cover other private school students, and, though, less clear, public school students…"  WPA adds that this more reasonable policy came about because "parents, friends, concerned persons, and a lawyer worked diplomatically, constructively and persistently over three to four months with the local school board." - SS

COURT NEWS

For many months, we heard that a group of Texas families, under attorney Shelby Sharpe, had a homeschool suit pending.  On August 7, the judge issued a preliminary judgment in the case (Leeper et al, 17th Judicial District).  Homeschoolers we’ve heard from appear mixed in their opinions as to whether this judgment is a step forward or backward.
The ruling says:

…The Court declares that a school-aged child residing in the State of Texas who is regularly and diligently pursuing in the child’s home a written curriculum of either a private or parochial school in which the child is enrolled which exists from the child’s home or which has been obtained from other sources, said curriculum following a regular plan of instruction designed to meet basic educational goals of reading, language arts, mathematics and a study of good citizenship, is considered to be in attendance upon a private or parochial schools…   The Court further finds that the current curricula of CALVERT SCHOOL, FIRST BAPTIST ACADEMY OF DALLAS, CHRISTIAN LIBERTY ACADEMY SATELLITE SCHOOLS, REFORM PUBLICATIONS, and AMERICAN CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS are written curricula [which satisfy the above requirements].

…The court also finds that if parents or those standing in the parental relationship to such a child furnish to any public school attendance officer upon his written request the results of a nationally normed standard achievement test which was given in accordance with the instructions accompanying the test and was taken within the preceding 12 months of the written request showing that the child is making reasonable academic progress for that child, then this furnishing shall establish that the child is regularly and diligently pursuing the curriculum being taken…
_____
[DR:] This may be fine for families who want to use a Christian correspondence course and give standardized achievement tests, but as one GWS reader writes:

…Many - possibly a majority of homeschoolers are finding it difficult to accept this proposal…  It would seem to give over a power to the state which they never had in the first place.
The August 7th hearing brought homeschoolers from across the state; some were ready to accept the proposal, many stated that the 15 families in Arlington did not represent a majority of homeschoolers in Texas.   After hearing testimonies of protest, the judge ordered attorneys for each side to rewrite the proposal clarifying any statements which would be misleading to homeschoolers and school districts.
Apparently this whole thing will come up again October 1 for a final ruling by the judge…
_____

Other court news:
ALABAMA: In a July trial, Don O’Brien of Jefferson County successfully defended his family.  The judge dismissed the criminal charges because the state failed to prove that the O’Briens even had a child of school age!  Civil charges are still pending.  (Source: ALABAMA HOME EDUCATORS.)

HAWAII: Educational neglect charges against Jeff and Sandy Baczynski were dropped in July.  The judge chastised the state for their sloppy presentation and little investigation into the case, and felt that Mr. Baczynski was conscientious in the attempt to educate his son.  (Source: HAWAII HOMESCHOOLERS ASSOCIATION.)

PENNSYLVANIA: Judge Joseph McCoskey found Rev. Robert Jacoby and his wife not guilty of the criminal charges of truancy in the Schuylkill County courthouse on August 4th.  Tom Eldredge of PENNSYLVANIA HOMESCHOOLERS says, "The significance of this case is twofold: First, neither parent is a college graduate; however they could clearly demonstrate that they were educating their children.  Second, the judge expressed grave concerns about the law, which he said did not give any guidelines for superintendents to follow…"

TEEN RUNS PHONE BUSINESS

From the Oakland, CA Tribune:

He installed 25 business telephone systems, organized his own company, grossed $20,000 and graduated from junior high school - all in 1986.

It’s been a busy half-year for Jason Mills, age 14.
One of his customers, insurance agent Jim Jarnagin of Pleasanton, says Mills is better than his previous telephone installer.

"Jason was sent to me by someone he had just worked for in our insurance building,"  Jarnagin explains.  "So in walks this kid, who looked to be about 13.  I thought it was a joke.  But he went on to pull our old telephone system and put in a new one.  and he did a terrific job."

Mills also installed a computer system for Jarnagin and business telephones for his wife’s office in Oakland.
"The boy’s phenomenal," says Jarnagin.

Jason Mills runs the one-man - or rather, boy - Livermore Telephone Co.  He installs telephone sets, control equipment and key service units that interconnect with the telephone dial tone provided by companies such as Pacific Bell.

Mills, who was educated at home until the seventh grade, learned about installing telephone systems observing a few veteran technicians.  He had just turned 13, he recalls, when his parents hired contractor Harold Puckeylow of San Leandro "to install radios in our trucks.  My mom told me to watch him.

"Well, we started talking and soon Puckeylow was telling me how he installs business phone systems.  I said I was interested in learning.  Later, he introduced me to John LaRue, president of Pac West Telecom of Stockton."
Both Puckeylow and LaRue saw a special talent in Mills and began teaching the rangy teenager.
"I’m still learning.  I even go on job sites with LaRue’s workers," Mills explains.  "I also help and observe him at his office.  I’ll visit him on weekends, and during vacation, studying the new telephone business installations.’

LaRue and Puckeylow, friends for 25 years, also enjoy handing out telephone equipment to their eager student "so he can practice on it."

…When he goes out on a job and "gets hung up," Puckeylow says, "he phones either LaRue or myself and we bail him out.  It’s fun.  We remember back when we were Jason’s age and how difficult it was to get information from anybody.  We sympathize with his problems."

…Jason’s mother, Jeri, says she drives her son to his jobs and handles his finances, such as sales of telephone equipment.  "Jason has the ability to learn anything he wants to learn - and an incredible knack for not knowing how to do anything he doesn’t want to do," she laughs.

She kept him out of school, she says, because of the "unrest" in the California school system.  "We felt a little heat from the educators.  but we took the proper steps by enrolling Jason in a correspondence school."
He mainly taught himself, she says.  "He learned how to read and write at 5 and mastered our computer at age 9.  He was able to pick up lessons in geography, math, spelling, literature, social studies from the computer, spending 12 hours a day on it."

Jeri and Jim Mills finally allowed Jason to attend the East Avenue Middle School in 1984, where he recently graduated from the eighth grade with a 3.5 grade-point average.  Jason  will enter Livermore High School in the fall.

AUDUBON EXPEDITIONS

From a letter that Elsa Haas wrote us, shortly before she came to work in our office:

…After two years of high school, depressed and fed up, I joined the AUDUBON EXPEDITION, a travelling school run by the National Audubon Society.  We camped out every night for nine months; travelled through New England, Florida, and the Southwest; studied on Indian reservations, rivers, mountains, mesas, an archaeological dig, a Mennonite farm, and in museums, national parks, biological research stations, and government offices.
From this description you’ll probably think that I was set free to explore and learn without pressure and fear.  I wasn’t.  Our Expedition guides told us that in this group of 20, everyone was equal, and we would make all our decisions together.  One guide, in particular, insisted that he had no authority to force us to do anything, and said he would always refuse to act as though he did, even if we wanted a leader.

But I remember the day that most of us were lounging around the sun on the grass next to the Old Sturbridge Village parking lot.  We’d finished eating lunch half an hour or so before, and we had no more appointments or commitments that day.  No one had called a meeting to decide that we would sit around and do nothing for a while - it had just happened that way.  Suddenly our guide came around the side of the bus and said angrily, "I get so sick of always having to be the one that gets this group moving."

So we learned in time to get ourselves moving - mainly because of the expectation that we would all behave in the enthusiastic, energetic, busy, busy manner that befitted the Expedition.  All year long, every discussion we had with a "resource person" (park naturalist, politician, astronomer, coal miner, etc.) was followed by a meeting about who hadn’t asked any questions, and who had looked bored, and how their low level of participation had affected every other member of the group and probably future members of the Expedition as well.
…The Expedition did demand of me that I talk for the first time to people outside my family about family problems, and to a point that was beneficial.  But the Expedition certainly also reinforced the low self-esteem I had been schooled in for years, both at home and in the classroom.  It was a more subtle form of authoritarianism, and probably more powerful for precisely that reason.  By making enthusiasm, and not just achievement, a criterion for success, it killed much of what little enthusiasm I had left…
[For a letter from a participant who enjoyed AEI, see GWS #46.]
_____

From Frank Trocco, Director of the AUDUBON EXPEDITION INSTITUTE, Sharon  CT:

…I’ve just had forwarded to me a letter to the editor that appeared in your publication [GWS #49] entitled, "Leery of Audubon Travel" by Merritt Clifton…

Mr. Clifton writes, "Many of the more bizarre guest speakers [at an Audubon symposium] had been expedition leaders or had other affiliations with AEI…"  In fact, and I have been with the Expedition Institute for fifteen years, previously to arriving at the symposium I knew exactly two of the speakers (out of over 80 individuals from across the U.S. and Europe): Jim Swan, the symposium coordinator and Mike Cohen, one of the directors of AEI…

I found Clifton’s letter patently offensive, and written with a vindictiveness I cannot comprehend… [Clifton said:]  "If anyone else there was actively, seriously engaged in environmental work, I didn’t meet him or her."  Most of the symposium speakers have spent their lives doing their best to help the planet…

WORK & TRAVEL RESOURCES

A WORKING VISIT

From the Meyers, Levering, MI:

…In GWS #48 we advertised for help on our diversified, horse-powered, organic farm in northern Michigan, in exchange for room, board and experience.  Through this ad, we enjoyed a visit by the Stone family - mother Mary, and sons Tyler (10) and Travis (12) - who traveled all the way form Oregon very economically via Amtrak and Greyhound, for a three-week stay to assist us with the maple-syruping season.  The weather didn’t cooperate and so it was a poor year for syruping, but we believe that they were able to learn and experience much about our way of life here, from coping with winter storms, log skidding, syruping, livestock care including dairy goat kidding, etc.  We in turn enjoyed the assistance from all of them with these various farm projects.  This arrangement also afforded an opportunity for our families to discuss over an extended period the many concerns and issues that come to mind for many isolated homeschooling families, and gave us inspiration, new ideas, and support for our beliefs…

We would really like to encourage other homeschooling families to consider opening up their homes and lives to share their knowledge, lifestyles and skills with other homeschoolers, perhaps through the existing GWS Travel Directory network, or through more extended work-exchange type visits such as we do…  Our family looks forward to our trip this fall to Minnesota and Wisconsin where we will be meeting and staying with fellow GWS Travel Directory Families.  Lastly, I would like to extend an invitation to other families to contact us for visits during any season…
_____

OFFICE ASSISTANT AT 9

When I was living in Pennsylvania and editing the PENCIL Sharpener newsletter, Amanda Bergson-Shilcock, then 9, helped out as office assistant.  From this experience I learned a great deal about how to let a child participate in adult work.

Amanda’s father, Peter, was general coordinator of the PENCIL group at the time, and the office we used to put out the newsletter was right in Amanda’s home, making it easy for her to come in and help when she felt so inclined.  This meant that whenever Amanda did decide to "report for work," as she jokingly called it, I knew that she was truly in the mood to help .  But it sometimes meant that when she was ready and willing, I had nothing for her to do, or that when I had a job I needed done, she wasn’t around.  Amanda was used to work situations in which she had to be at a certain place at a certain time - she was the youngest of the volunteer staff at the local nature center during this time - so I didn’t feel that I had to give her that particular challenge during our work together.  I had instead to see my work in terms of jobs which she might be able to do, so that when she came into the office eagerly I didn’t have to turn away her enthusiasm, and I had to be able to feel that sometimes, when we had to do a big mailing, for example, and really needed everyone’s hands, I could count on her to help.

In time we did indeed work out this balance.  I believe Amanda came to feel sufficiently part of the PENCIL Sharpener so that when it was time to mail it out, she wanted to help.  In fact, she was often more conscious of the need to "earn" her office assistant title than I was.
As I learned to break down the tasks that needed doing into parts with which she could help, Amanda made this easier by telling me her limits clearly.  Early on, she said that she didn’t want to type the perfect.  Once I knew that, I never asked her to do that job.  Instead, I gave her the short replies, the brief postcards.  Because I genuinely didn’t care how the handwriting on such cards looked, I didn’t have to worry about how Amanda was doing it.

Often, having Amanda around meant jobs got done that Peter and I might not have gotten around to.  For example, one day we realized how helpful it would be to have the locations of our group’s families plotted on a map.  Helpful, sure, but neither of us had time to do it.  Amanda did.  She spread a big map of Pennsylvania on the floor and, working from our computer list of subscribers, found each town and marked it with a pin.  Hard to imagine a use for school’s "map skills" in the real world, but this was one.
On another day, I thought of how for weeks I’d wanted to organize a roundtable discussion of some of the older homeschoolers in the area, but hadn’t found time to make the necessary phone calls.  I asked Amanda if phone calls were something she felt she could do, and she said yes, if I wrote down an outline of what had to be said.  Here again I appreciated her self-knowledge; she figured out what she needed to know before  plunging into the job, so that when she was off doing it, I could turn my attention to something else.  Amanda made the calls, found a time which fit the schedules of four other families, and helped a very enjoyable event take place.

I learned, with Amanda, how much more helpful help is if it truly frees you to work on another task.  If I’d had to think about Amanda’s work the whole time she was doing it, I could have saved time by doing it myself.  But because we chose jobs which both she and I felt comfortable having her do, we eliminated what might have been a big source of tension and were able to enjoy the pleasure of working together. - SS

HIGH G.E.D. SCORE

From the Baldwin, MS News, 2/17/86:

Jeff Larson, like many other young men his age, has hopes of enrolling in college and pursuing one of the science related fields.  What sets him apart from more 18-year-olds, however, is that he has never attended public school.

…"[At home my sister and I] studied many of the textbooks that were being used in the school system, acquired books from book companies and pursued our natural interests.  When we had questions, we went to our parents for help," Jeff explained.

The system was no doubt successful for Jeff.  He recently completed the GED, high school equivalency exam… with the highest score of any completer in the state for 1985.  Of a possible perfect score of 394, Jeff scored 361.  The five-part test consists of questions on math, social studies, science, English and reading skills.  He has now been nominated for the national top scorer award.

"I attribute a lot of my doing well on the GED to the home environment my parents worked to create for me," Jeff said…

TEEN STUDIES, MOM WORKS

Marilyn Munsey (MA) writes:

…You will remember that Mike was very unhappy with the junior high school situation from the beginning.  By mid-eighth grade he was absolutely miserable and flatly refused to attend school anymore.  We finally got permission to homeschool through the American School Correspondence Course in June, 1982, after Mike took an I.Q. test which in essence fulfilled school requirements, and he was "tested out" of eighth grade.
Mike then started his college course with the American School in September, 1982, working completely independently through such subjects as algebra, trig., physics, geometry, etc.  During that time he was not tested by the Newton school system, the only requirement being that quarterly reports of grades and progress were sent from the American school to the attendance department.  The American School high school course was completed within three years.  Mike had his diploma by September of 1985, with grades of mostly all A’s and a few B’s.  I know that he has gained such confidence in his own ability that it can only serve him well through life.

Mike’s study habits during this time were unstructured or self-paced, but he did study and work every day while I was out of the house at work.  He followed the school calendar for the most part, but set his own variable daily hours.  For example, many afternoons he would prefer to watch the House of Representatives in session on Channel 44.  On other days, he might work on a project of his own such as electronics.  Within those three years he had a lot of time to grow, and to learn about his capabilities and his own interests.  Almost every day he was out of the house when the public school day was over, seeing friends or visiting the many stores at West Newton square and getting to know the bicycle repairman, post office clerk, computer store operator - even buying lottery tickets!…  I saw his self-confidence return once again.

Somewhere along the way, when Mike saw how rapidly he was progressing toward completion of the American School graduation requirements, he decided that he would complete his normal senior year at Newton North High School.  He has always been a serious student, and thought that he would have an easier time at college if he took calculus and experienced some hands-on lab work.  So, Mike started back at Newton North High School in September, 1985, after wrapping up at the last minute his American School requirements.  He went as a full time student, carrying five subjects: chemistry, physics, calculus, English literature, and an engineering course.
This new experience was immensely enjoyable for him.  It did work out well, in spite of my apprehensions.  He especially enjoyed the companionship of his peers again…  I have asked him if he feels that he has missed out on high school life because he homeschooled.  Apparently, he doesn’t.  He said that he really enjoyed his one year at public high school because he knew that it would only last for one year.  he has no regrets about his choice.

In September, Mike will be attending Boston University.  He has been accepted into the School of Engineering.
…Reader Janey Smith (MO) (GWS #43) once wrote that she was not impressed with the American School because of its brochures and its public school tone.  Yes, I do agree that the informational literature from the American School is not impressive, might even be considered tacky, and could do with some updating.  However, I am glad that I didn’t judge the book by its cover because there was a solid educational opportunity inside.  Yes, the tone is definitely public school, but choices are offered, and the schedule can be flexible according to each homeschooler’s needs.  This means plenty of time to leisurely pursue one’s own interests, not like public school at all.

…In my case, I was corresponding wit the superintendent so that homeschooling could be approved, meanwhile insisting that I would not send my son back to school during the interim.  The truant officer did visit my home…  The American School came to my rescue, sending curriculum information, book lists, etc., to the school department.  When the department saw that many of the texts used at the American School were the same texts which were used in the city schools, approval was given…
[The address of AMERICAN SCHOOL is 850 E 58th, Chicago IL  60637.]

HOMESCHOOLING AN ONLY CHILD

From Jenny Wright (NH):

…Here is an answer to the query about homeschooling an only child.  In a nutshell: make the most of your neighborhood, extended family, work situation, and any other ties you have with others.
Vanessa (17 1/2) has been homeschooled all her life and has been an only child until recently.  We live in a rural setting, but there’s been a group of close neighbors who shared a lot together.  In fact, most of her "official" lessons were not with her parents but with various other people nearby.  And most of her lessons were paid for by her, by babysitting or trading other work.  She got once a week lessons in French, plant identification, flower arranging, piano, sewing, weaving, microscope work, and identifying constellations - I can’t remember them all.  She kept a chart of when she’d gotten a lesson and when she’d paid for it.  So - an aside about homeschooling in general - sometimes a child prefers lessons with someone who’s not her parent.  Homeschooling doesn’t just mean "parent schooling."
Vanessa made some lasting friendships with people 10 to 20 years older than her through these lessons.  I often think kids in school miss out on close relationships with people not their own age.
As to our extended family: my own is far flung but quickly intimate when we are together.  And Vanessa’s father and I are divorced, but he’s in steady contact with us and has visited or had Vanessa to visit him twice a year steadily over the years.  My husband’s family is physically close - his three siblings have been neighbors some of the time.  and we see each other frequently.  Vanessa’s two cousins, who are close in age to her, are the next thing to siblings.  Learning to write made the most sense in terms of letters with whoever wasn’t living nearby.

Then there’s our work: apple picking and pruning crews are like small temporary communities, and a child fits right in.  So, Vanessa didn’t have sibling or schoolmates, but she belonged to a group with a common purpose and many shared activities, not just apple picking.  We put on plays, shared our leisure time, our skills and interests.  and being on a crew with someone is the perfect setting for getting to know the whole person, relatively quickly, without social pressures.  There have always been a wide range of ages and backgrounds on the crews, and Vanessa was able to take an active role in the work starting at about age 8.  By the time she was 14 she was very close to being a regular member of the crew, picking more than some adults.
I think apple-crews were crucial to Vanessa’s satisfaction with homeschooling.  a child not in school needs to feel she’s involved in something as good or better.  These days Vanessa feels that more on crews than  she does when we’re all home.

Now that we have two small boys, the amount of time for special activities with
Vanessa is more limited.  So a bid advantage of homeschooling an only child is the amount of time and energy you can devote to that one child.

Lest I seem too glowing and as if everything is perfect - now, at 17, Vanessa is feeling lonely and wanting more contact with people her age.  This isn’t just because she’s been an only child; it’s more because of homeschooling- or, as we put it, because of school - everyone else is in school; even their leisure activities revolve around school.  We don’t have many homeschoolers near us.  In some ways the close neighborhood, extended family, and cooperative work setting kept us from developing other ties that would be good to have now - like 4-H or Girl Scouts or a church youth group.

So we’re working on this and thinking about it.  Vanessa’s much freer of feeling peer pressure or the need to conform than I was at her age, but it’s still hard to get beyond shyness and to find good settings for getting to know new people.  We’re looking for teenage homeschoolers to work on our apple crews, interested in GWS travel network, and seeking out other homeschoolers near us.  We’re also looking into interesting things in our area - a soup kitchen, a group working against nuclear power, etc.  We’d like to hear to her people’s experiences about teens finding niches for themselves.

To a large extent I need to step back and let Vanessa make the moves.  We’ll let you know what she finds…
_____

From Laura Pritchard (OR):

…My son, Daniel, is an only child, who is going to be 9 years old this fall.  Homeschooling one seems to bring with it its own advantages and problems.
We do have the advantage of no one distracting us.  I can concentrate solely on Daniel’s interests and abilities.  I am not torn between different children’s needs.   We move along at Daniel’s pace.  In addition, Daniel has "alone-time" to let his mind wander.

The disadvantages are I am Daniel’s sole companion for much of the time.  Too much of any one person can become overwhelming.  Daniel does not have an older sibling to nudge him beyond what he would do on his own or expose him to areas which he and I would not come upon on our own.  Daniel does not have younger siblings that he can nurture and watch develop.

How do we cope with these advantages and disadvantages?  Honestly, sometimes quite well and other times I’m left wondering.

From Daniel’s birth to 7 1/2 years, we lived in Connecticut.  By extending our family, we created a large network around us.  I babysat for other children (various ages) to assure Daniel of sibling-like relationships.  I coordinated activities for the statewide support group in order to expose Daniel to other homeschoolers.
He was lucky enough to have other caring adults and their families in his life.  He seemed to function quite well with other children or adults.  In addition, Daniel was able to occupy himself for reasonable lengths of time, which I felt was an important trait in this world of mass-media entertainment.
Fifteen months ago, we moved form Connecticut to Oregon.  We moved from the safe and friendly town neighborhood where Daniel grew up to a rural area.  In many ways, this has been a double-whammy.  We lost, so to speak, family, friends, homeschooling allies, and the neighborhood atmosphere.  We came to a new area with few friends and they did not have children.

After a year, I can finally say, "We are getting it together."  Daniel enjoys the chance to observe wildlife on a continuing basis.  he enjoys spending time with the animals we are responsible for.  Our most recent addition, a baby goose with a broken leg that we are nursing back to health.
We have only one neighborhood boy for a companion to Daniel.  Because he attends public school and other activities, their time together is limited.  I’ve tried to compensate for this lack, but it is a major problem.
I’ve begun a local support group in order to make contacts for us both.  We have been able to go on joint field trips with other homeschoolers in this area.  I have become friends with and babysit for another homeschooling family.  Although the children are younger, Daniel has formed strong attachments to both.
In addition, I work at a small business in a neighboring small town.  Daniel accompanies me and rides his bike around the neighborhood making friends as he goes.  This has been a great experience in that many of the children are immigrants, which exposes Daniel to different cultural lifestyles.
…How do I handle my need to be occupied elsewhere?  Daniel has gradually learned that I need to have time for my projects, be it my homeschooling group activities or craft projects.  I try to include him whenever possible or start him on his own projects.  I make a point of planning "alone time with me" when I know I will need time for myself.

How do I handle "I’m bored.  There’s nothing to do!"?  I try to buy and encourage others to buy multipurpose toys, in which Daniel can enjoy a project he does alone (e.g. Legos, Construx, craft kits).
I keep on hand a good selection of taped books.  Some I’ve purchased, others we borrow from the library.  Even small rural libraries can obtain tapes through the inter-library loan system.  Daniel enjoys the adult taped books, which would be above his reading ability though not above his comprehension level.
This is not to say life goes along smoothly all of the time.  For weeks at a stretch, I question if my desire to homeschool is taking Daniel away from contact with other children, which he needs.  Daniel and I talk honestly about our relocation and homeschooling - the pros and cons.  So far, we’ve come to the decision that public school would not be an answer, so I continue to look for other ways for us both to reach out to other people.  It’s an ongoing process!
_____

From Beth De Roos of Calif.:

…You recently asked about homeschooling an only child.  I really can’t think of anything negative.  We not only had more time to do things but we were able to get up and go, had more money available for materials, etc., and because there was only one child we were able to do our own projects while he was doing his.  I do need to note that I have heard from friends whose children are spaced further apart, six years, that it is much the same.  But don’t you think it makes a great deal of difference what the parents’ or child’s emotional make-up is?  Had Christopher been anything but his gregarious, curious, easygoing self I might not have survived.  Our learning environment wasn’t as structured and our outside community/social/religious activities were such that the intellectual stimuli were fresh, providing for continuous curiosity…

In GWS #51, J.H. asked how other older moms cope.  From Elaine Kaplan of San Diego:

ADVICE FROM OLDER MOM

…I am 44 years old and have a 4 !/2-year-old son and a 3 1/2-year-old daughter.  I have had to take in typing work ever since the children were born, juggle sitters endlessly before they were old enough to be able to play together without an older person to resort to very frequently, do the housework, run all the errands, etc.  In early 1985, I filed for divorce, putting new financial and career pressures on myself and a very nasty and ridiculous court battle that my ex insisted upon.  As you can see, I am busy.  But here are a few pointers that might help you…

Examine your idea of "housework."  Do beds really have to be completely made every day?  I just pull up a sheet and blankets.  If you’re vacuuming frequently, cut it down by half.  No one will care.  Wash the floors when they’re noticeably dirty; not according to the calendar.  We older women simply don’t have the energy that younger ones have, and we’re a lot busier with other responsibilities than our mothers were.  We can’t live up to "house beautiful" a la 1950.  I’ve felt embarrassed about this many times, but I’ve learned one thing:  No one cares except me.  Everyone thinks my house is perfectly acceptable just the way it is…

Examine the kinds of "educational experiences" you go to with your child, especially away from the home.  If you are taking him because he "should" see this or that at his current age, you’re using up energy you might not have to.  Both my children are very bright; the house is full of toys and gadgets to keep them busy, and we have friends we visit whom I genuinely want to see.  So I refuse to go to events, certain movies, and many "educational" experiences which might please the children but which I truly do no want to go to myself.  We live in an age which reveres the notion that our children will only develop their minds if we expose them to dozens of things all the time.  We often think that means "children’s events."  But carrying their own little baskets in the supermarket is a fine experience for children, as are trips to the library, coffee shop, the local construction site to see the house being built, walks around the block, etc.  I believe these to be every bit as educational and a lot less wearing on me.  I either have to, or want to do those things for myself, so they don’t wear me out doing them.

Examine your appointments involving your child.  Does he go to a pre-school or any classes which require your having him somewhere at a certain time on a regular basis?  Unless he’s going to be there enough hours for you to go hoe and relax, keep scheduled events to a minimum.  They are far harder on your energy level than you may realize.  If the event is something your child says he really likes, point out to him any fuss or resistance he gives you concerning getting ready to go to it at the proper times.  tell him if he won’t cooperate to get ready to go, there’s no use in your taking him.  You’re taking him for his enjoyment.  If he makes the preparations unpleasant for you, tell him you won’t take him the next time.  And don’t.  And point out to him that you are not taking him when the next occasion comes.  Give him a chance to be more cooperative the time after that, and take him if he is.  My two kids have both learned that Mommy likes things to be pleasant for herself.  They often need reminding, but it works…

LEARNING TO MANAGE STRESS

From Gretchen Spicer (WI):

…All the kids are still thrilled with homeschooling.  No one wants to go to school.  Jacob (15) and Tom, my husband, are working at an outdoor Shakespeare Theater.  Jacob started as an intern at $100 a week, but within two weeks was filling the position of two interns and is now getting $200 a week.  (Needless to say he is the richest person in the house.)  We get to see lots of plays and now the kids are quoting Shakespeare constantly.  Our house has become a very dramatic place lately…

…I am glad to see lots of people talking about the difficult aspects of homeschooling (Dealing With Stress" (GWS #50).  It is stressful.  I think I personally built a lot of pitfalls into the whole show by trying to be the perfect parent/homeschooler.  I expected too much of myself and of course became frustrated and nobody reaps any benefits from frustration.  I came slowly to the realization that it was fine for me to at times not be interested in my kids and to allow myself to be truly interested in something I wanted to do.

I think that we teach out children powerful lessons about how people learn, by the way we ourselves learn.  If we present to them a picture of a harried mother, constantly distracted, trying to snatch little moments here and there for learning, I wonder if that’s not how they will approach learning.  But if instead we insist on quiet, uncluttered time when we have a task we wish to accomplish, I wonder if the kids won’t find ways of providing that time for themselves.  Not that I always am able to accomplish this, but I am getting better.
I think it’s a mistake to let kids drain parents emotionally (and I certainly speak from experience).  When I am emotionally drained I don’t meet anyone’s needs well.  I do a sort of superficial, band-aid job.  I get so I answer questions vaguely and start making poor eye contact.  I interact in a distracted way with my kids.  But if I slow down and make sure I feel good, then I listen well to my kids, look them in the eye, and am really with them, not just around them.

One way that I think many homeschooling families become emotionally drained is by overindulging their kids and allowing them to become bratty, whiney, overly demanding, and very controlling.   I think that it is a very simple mistake that I and many of my homeschooling friends have made simply from an over-concern for the well-being of our children.  Many of us not only gave our kids 100% of our time, attention, and concern, we gave them more like 140%.  How many of us have been at a get-together with other families, where at least one child (often the youngest) from each family demanded constant attention from one or both parents…  I know it go to be so bad when my kids were little that I didn’t feel like going anywhere with them.  Things weren’t bad at home, most of the time, where I went about routinely giving them 140% of my attention (of course, overwhelming myself in the process).  But when we went outside our home and I would have like to have maybe 10% for myself, boy did they let me have it.

I think the mistake comes from wanting to be totally accepting of and approving of our children.  What we don’t realize is that by being accepting of atrocious behavior, we are really giving kids the message, "You don’t have to treat people with respect, " while we as parents and indeed many of our circle of friends may go right along accepting obnoxious, demanding behavior as normal.  Sooner or later our kids will have to deal with someone who doesn’t, and it won’t be any fun for them.  I don’t think we do kids any favors by letting them get accustomed to acting bossy and demanding.

Fortunately, I have found these mistakes easy to correct.  I wish I could say that I arrived at all this wisdom on my own, but I can’t.  Much of it I gleaned from a wonderful book by Foster Cline called THE YELLOW BOOK PARENT EDUCATION TEXT, available for $15 from Evergreen Consultants, PO Box 2380, Evergreen CO  80439.  It has the most practical, useful advice for parenting that I have ever found.  A lot of the text deals with allowing children to reap the consequences of their own actions.  But it also deals with the issue of not allowing children to be bossy and controlling.  It is written in a straight forward and humorous manner.  When I read it, lights went on in my head.  I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t realized it before.
To use the example of incessant talking, as a parent you need to sort our what are real questions for which a child desires real answers and what is just attention getting behavior.  When we determine that a child is simply demanding excessive attention or "jamming the air waves," we say, "Honey, you’re not much fun to be with right now.  When you have something you really want to talk about, why don’t you come back, and I’d love to be with you, but neither you nor I really enjoy when you just talk to get my attention or interrupt me, so why don’t you go somewhere by yourself until you are pleasant to be with."   It may sound a little harsh, but it really works.  The same message can be used for the whining toddler to the teasing adolescent.  My kids usually isolate themselves for one to two minutes and come back pleasant and sunny.  Occasionally they find something interesting to do when I ask them to leave my presence and actually get involved for an hour or two.  It has really worked for me.  I enjoy my children much more now that I feel very clearly that they have no right to inflict lousy behavior on me.

…It was a hard lesson for me to learn (and I’m not doing it perfectly yet) to let go and allow my children o solve their own problems.  I’m afraid I have a bit of trouble with being bossy and controlling myself.  I’ve always got an answer for everyone.  But I am learning, and once I stopped worrying about everyone else’s problems, I started having more time to think about things I’m interested in.  Also, as Wanda Rezac mentioned (GWS #50), once my kids quit getting their emotional "fixes" from me every time they fought with their siblings, were rude to their friends, lost their shoes, etc., they started having a lot less of these problems that they and I had believed needed my intervention…

THE CART AND THE HORSE

A reader writes:  "One mother I know sounded gratefully relieved as she told me how glad she felt that she had recently started her 4 1/2-year-old using scissors, since they used them in the Kindergarten Readiness class she would be attending.  Never mind that such skills might be useful in their own right!"
I see this story as an example of a very important distinction that we need to keep clear.  On the one hand there is Life, and Experience, and Reality.  On the other hand is Looking Good - Looking Good in order to be allowed to continue, or to be allowed to move on to the next step.

I see this same confusion in the excerpt we ran in GWS #50 from Joe Nathan’s book FREE TO TEACH, about teenagers running a Consumer Action service.  Here were kids solving REAL problems of REAL people, and it was exciting to read.  Then , near the end other section, the teacher-author can’t help but point out that in the process, the students were improving their reading and writing skills.  True, they were, but how that paled in comparison to everything else they were accomplishing.

Do you teach kids arithmetic so they will know how to handle money (as most teachers and parents see it, if they ever stop to wonder at all) or do you let them handle money so they will learn arithmetic (as probably many alternative school teacher and homeschoolers see it)?  Why not just let them handle money so they know how to handle money?  And if they happen to learn arithmetic from it, fine.
Just as school is not really an effective preparation for life, neither should life be considered a preparation for school.

Now, I know we talk a lot in GWS about how to speak and write to educators, how to describe everyday life in educational terms, because many of us have to deal with the schools, not to mention  an entire society that believes that Education is a Good Thing.  and we’re not being phony - all those wonderful things your kids do are educational.  But let’s keep as clear as we can about which is the cart and which is the horse.
This confusion between the real and the artificial reminds me of something that happened twice after I came to Boston to work with John Holt.  A friend or relative asked me about my job, and after listening said, "That will look good on your resume."  Both times I was floored.  As if I would come to a place like this and do work that I thought was vital, in order to put it on a resume?  Why?  What could I possibly be planning to move on to, and would they think THAT was temporary, too?

Well, I can’t really blame them.  "That will look good on your resume is much like "That will look good on your college applications."  I did most of my extra-curricular activities in junior high and high school so I could have something to list when I applied for college - that’s what we were advised to do.
Employers, college admission, schools, even (for heaven’s sake) Kindergarten Readiness class - the pressure is everywhere to look good for the next level of judgment, at the expense of truly living. - DR

RESEARCH: PLAY, NOT PUSHING

From "Kids: Are We Teaching Too Much Too Soon?" an article by Glenn Collins of the NY Times News Service, published 11/10/85:

PHILADELPHIA - As the debate over the "suberbaby" phenomenon intensifies, researchers have coined a verb form to describe it: "hothousing."  The word was the focus of a conference here on the trend toward the early educational stimulation of infants and toddlers…  An array of experts gave serious attention to the issue of early learning at the symposium, "The Hothousing of Young Children:  So Much, So Soon."
Researchers described the negative effects of inappropriate formal instruction on infants and their parents, underscored the value of unstructured play for growing children, and placed hothousing in perspective as a middle-class phenomenon.

"Hothousing is a useful metaphor for what’s going on," said Jeanette McCarthy Gallagher, a research psychologist at Temple University.  "There is a natural pace to the development of children," she said.  "When we hothouse children, we superimpose a leaning environment in order to make them learn faster."

…"We are told that the hothousing of these children makes sense because of their natural urge to learn," said Irving Sigel (research scientist at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ].  "But where is it written that children have the natural urge to learn Japanese or Suzuki violin?" he asked, referring to some early instruction programs.  Sigel said that many skills hawked by the purveyors of such programs are taught by rote.  "You can get a horse to do half those things, " he said.

…A devastating effect of hothousing is what a child "comes to believe about himself," Sigel said.  "Children come to believe they are valued for what they memorize or produce or achieve."

"Young children learn the most from play and interaction with their environment and from interactions with people, "  said Patricia Minuchin, a research professor of psychiatry at the New York University Medical Center…

A SENSIBLE QUESTION

From Suzanne Alejandre (Spain):

…Lee (7) had an amazing question the other day.  We were walking to the park and he asked, "Was it like this when you were born?"  Richard took up the question first and said, "No, the cars looked different, things were made in different fashion…"And before Lee said more I answered, "Yes, things looked similar" - I was looking at the trees, sky, etc., and figured things hadn’t changed too much - but I added, "The trees were smaller." after I made my comment Lee said, "No, I mean, were things in color or in black and white?"  I glanced at Richard as he glanced at me - both of us with wide eyes, but thinking to stay serious since Lee was so serious.  and I answered, "It was the same, in color, like now."  I asked why he had thought it could have been in black and white.  He said, "Like the pictures when you were little."  And then it clicked - he had been looking at an old photo album the other day and had assumed that because the pictures were black and white, possibly the world had been black and white.  So, Richard explained about cameras and film and then Lee understood.  But a few days after that he asked me about the Charlie Chaplin movies, just to make sure, again…

JURIES: FINDING THE TRUTH

Recently I fulfilled one of my civic duties as a citizen of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts - I served on a jury.  Once inside our jury-room I couldn’t help but note what a diverse group we were: a cabbie, a bartender (he was our foreman), a secretary, a law student, a construction worker, a bank teller, various others.  The jury was roughly divided into what seemed to me Black, Irish and Italian backgrounds, a mix not surprising for Boston.  With such a potpourri how would we as a group arrive at any decisions about what to do with the defendant?  How were we to arrive at the truth?

a week before my scheduled jury duty I was sent a small pamphlet that served as a  reminder of my coming engagement and was packed with juror information.  There were twenty-eight pages of questions and answers about being a juror, some of which I found provocative, especially this one:

Q. Being a juror is very difficult.  What if I am not smart enough to be a good juror?
A.  Remember that the function of a jury is to find the truth.  Jurors have to decide which evidence to believe and which evidence not to believe.  It is wrong to think that an individual who is highly educated is better equipped to determine which witnesses are telling the truth and which are n to telling the truth.  Moreover, the jury’s verdict is a group decision.  It is not the decision of any single person.  You should have confidence in our Constitution which requires citizens, like you, to participate on a jury.  If you forget a point, another juror may remember it; and you may remember a point that another juror has overlooked.  For many centuries, our jury system has worked well with citizens serving as jurors.

Learned judges, high-priced attorneys, bailiffs and clerks do not decide whither or not a crime has been committed; the jury does.  The truth lies not with the experts, who can no doubt be summoned forth by both sides, but with the people.

Before and since Lauren’s birth we have been inundated with information about childbirth and raising children.  Deciding what to do about getting our daughter immunized was a recent example, one that was solved by the same process a jury goes through.

Like our parents, Day and I are vaccinated with everything the Family Doctor wanted to give us.  In medical slang, all our shots are up to date.  But when the issue became our decision for our newborn Lauren we questioned the Family Doctor.  Most of the books we read tell parents to get their newborn children immunized as soon as possible, usually for Diphtheria, Pertussis (Whooping Cough), Tetanus, and Polio.  However, articles and books we read contradicted much of the information we received from our family and doctors.  We started to doubt pro-vaccine claims, noting that some diseases, like polio, have diminished or vanished throughout other modern-day countries without mass vaccines for them, that proper sanitation might be more responsible for the lack of illness there.  Our questions and objections were usually ignored.  Vaccines are safe, a miracle of modern science, and should not be denied your little one, we were told, sometimes angrily, by more than one person.

But those dissenting voices nagged us.  When we found out about the pre-vaccine consent forms you sign we were more uncomfortable; doing so absolves everyone but yourself for the "accidental" problems that might develop as a result of the vaccine.  We proceeded with caution.  Our doctor wanted to give Lauren all of the shots above in one day and was taken aback by our request to wait.  She told us it is our social duty to vaccinate our children since everyone has to do their part to eliminate disease.  She had never heard of any of our sources of anti-immunization information; she asked us to bring in a book on the topic, then said she hoped for Lauren’s sake that we would decide to immunize.
We talked to many friends about the choices facing us: full vaccines, no vaccines, just certain ones.  Over the next few weeks we read, re-read, thought and talked about all the reasons and situations in which to vaccinate Lauren or not.  We finally decided to give Lauren two of the four shots: tetanus and the Sabin (dead virus) polio vaccine.

I can complain about information overload, but I won’t give in to it.  It is we who must sift through the melange of information and decide what is the truth to act upon.  Once we cave in and stop examining our feelings and thoughts about a particular issue and allow someone else to sift through the facts and choose the truth for us, we abdicate our freedom and a part of our mind to someone else.
The jury I was on had its moment when members yelled and were curt with each other.  We examined the evidence, speculated on what sort of person the defendant was, argued about who correctly remembered certain testimony, complained about the attoneys and what we wanted to hear them ask.  We reached our guilty verdict in about ninety minutes and sent the person to prison.  When we went back to the jury room for our personal items some people said they hoped they wouldn’t have to serve on another jury again, but not me.  It certainly was not fun to announce our guilty verdict and send a stranger up the proverbial river, but it was a lively, enlightening process to arrive at a verdict we all believed in.

Our legal system assures our right to debate and palaver based on the principle that a person can learn and understand something complex without going to school; we can bear this in mind while we learn alongside our children and patiently encourage them to become good jurors of their own lives. - PATRICK FARENGA

TALK WITH STEPHEN ARONS

[SS:]  Stephen Arons is a professor of legal studies and author of COMPELLING BELIEF: THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN SCHOOLING, a book about the conflicts between institutional schools and individual dissenters.  John Holt took a great interest in this book when it was first published.  One long section of the book looks specifically at homeschooling, and in preparation for writing it Stephen Arons conducted extensive interviews with homeschooling families and superintendents.  In September I spoke with him in his office at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst:

SUSANNAH SHEFFER: Why does a school feel threatened when a family asks permission to homeschool?

STEPHEN ARONS: There’s probably three or four different answers to that.  In my judgment, probably at the top of the list is that the schools really pride themselves on being professional.  The idea that somebody not trained in education, someone who didn’t have to jump through all the hoops that are typically involved, nevertheless wants to do what the educators do, is probably going to make them feel pretty resentful, regardless of how well qualified that somebody might be.  Second, most of the folks form whom the hostility comes have lived their professional lives in a highly bureaucratized setting, and when confronted with somebody who doesn’t have that burden, the result is that people get pretty upset.  Maybe this cuts to the core of somebody’s professional identity even more than the training thing does.  Another answer is strictly an financial one.  I think that without particularly good justification some superintendents believe that by letting a few people educate their kids at home they’re going to be opening the floodgates, as if everybody could or wanted to.  That fear may be a paranoid fear, but it leads them to see the funds leaving with the students.

SS: We always encourage families to suggest a cooperative relationship with the school, to offer to let the school carry them on their records and still receive state aid in exchange for the family’s use of resources, so it seems that if that were really their sole fear, more superintendents would agree to that.

SA: In a sense, if you agree to something like that, you admit that it was the finances in the first place that led you to be reluctant to do it, so I don’t think a smart superintendent, and most of them are pretty smart when it comes to things like this, is going to buy anything like that.

SS: If schools don’t like families acting as though they can do what the school people have been professionally trained to do, should that affect the way the family writes a proposal?  Should they take their life experience and turn that into qualifications, or should they play up whatever degrees they do have?

SA: I wouldn’t say that a family that’s trying to establish a cooperative relationship ought to pretend to be like the professionals - that distracts you from what you’re really all about and you run the risk of getting sucked into doing it in a way that isn’t really you.  I think that, as with the whole business of defining the kind of education that you and your kids are seeking, you have to take possession of the definition too.  You have to say, I’m qualified because I love these children, because I’m a smart person, I know what they need, I’m a reflective person, I’m not going to be imposing myself on them, etc.  They might be looking for your degrees and certificates, but you have to say that’s not the right definition of qualifications.

SS: What about public reaction to homeschooling?

SA: The minor key in the public reaction to homeschooling is, these people are underdogs, it’s a David and Goliath type of situation.  Some people have a "favor the underdog? attitude, so these people will be pretty supportive of homeschooling families.  But I think most of the reaction on the part of the public is a hostile one, because it’s similar to what the superintendents feel, that if the home educating family thinks that school isn’t good enough for their kids, well, either they’re right - in which case what the hell am I doing with my kids in school, because my kids are certainly as good as your kids - or homeschoolers are wrong, and they are just attacking something that the rest of us have found to be acceptable.

SS: I notice that sometimes our critics don’t like to hear examples of single working mothers homeschooling, and so on - we take the position  that anyone who really wants to, can, and not everyone seems to want to hear that.

SA:  You’re throwing down the gauntlet when you do that.  What are they going to say?  I don’t really love my kids?  No, they have to say that the school is OK.

SS: In your book you also talk about the deeper American conflict between individualism and institutions.

SA: I think that’s a great ambivalence in the American character.  We’re all trying very hard to be individuals, but at the same time we live in a totally institutionalized society.  Most of us spend most of our time in institutions.  The main skill that we have to learn, often the main skill people learn in school, is how to survive in and manipulate a bureaucracy.  So homeschoolers come along and make a declaration of their independence from that entire fabric, and this provokes that ambivalent feeling in the minds of the rest of us.  It grabs us, that mythic individualism, but it also reminds us that individualism is out of place and dysfunctional in this society.  It makes you go through the same struggle that the home education family has gone through, only they’re resolved it, and you’re just starting out with it, or at least it reminds you that you’ve buried this ambivalence, who wants to go through that?

SS: It’s interesting that people can make the argument for both individualism and institutionalism, that either one is fundamentally American.  Do you think either of the two is winning out, these days?

SA: That’s an interesting question.  I think that the real American characteristic is to have contradictory feelings, to be hung up about a clash between individualism and collectivism.

SS: Was that true from the beginning?

SA: I think that’s certainly been true since the Civil War.  In fact, you can easily trace it back to the Puritans, right here in Massachusetts, who were religiously very individualistic but at the same time had created a total theocracy that controlled large portions of people’s political and social lives.  So, it’s probably a part of the American Character that’s been around for a long time.  I don’t know if you could say that either of those two forces is winning out, that’s a question of individual psyches in a culture, but if you look at the material nature of American society, it is in fact much more institutionalized now than it has ever been.

SS: Does that make homeschoolers reactionary, or revolutionary?

SA: I think it probably makes them lucid, it means that they are probably less hung up on that dichotomy.

SS: You wrote in the book about what being this kind of dessenter can do for a person, how it can make them choose public action where before they might not have.  You find, among homeschoolers, people who never dreamed they’d be involved in, for example, legislative efforts, but who are doing it now.

SA: There’s nothing like one’s concern for one’s children to put one into action in a hurry.  But I think this, like lots of other things that require just a little bit of political involvement, tends to have an incredibly radicalizing effect on people.  I don’t mean in terms of their politics, left wing or right, I just mean in terms of the degree to which they lose their alienation from public life and really become fighters, really become people who have a reason to struggle with the public sphere.  And in a way, they become much better democratic citizens than what used to be called the silent majority who sort of sit back and let it happen.

SS: In your interviews, did you encounter anyone who’d had this sort of thing happen to them?

SA: I remember the story of one family in which the father was a police officer, and he started out with a real traditional set of attitudes about schools, but when he and his wife got into the struggle with the schools, they couldn’t believe it.  I think originally they were led to homeschooling by certain religious impulses, and they thought that there might be some little complications, but they certainly didn’t anticipate anything other than a pat on the back and a little help.  The worse the conflict got, the more lucid this guy became.  By the time the thing was over, he was talking about how his colleagues on the police force were having trouble dealing with him, and people were beginning to question whether he’d be a good police officer because he seemed to have no respect for authority anymore.  It seemed to me that he had become quite radicalized in the best sense of the term, you know, really pursuing the truth and not being hoodwinked by more conventional wisdoms.

SS: Did he ever reflect on that change in himself?

SA: He did, because his job was threatened.  He was saying, "What’s happening to me?   What is this country about?  I thought I understood and now I’m not so clear that I do."  So he was strong but he was frightened.

SS: All this makes it sound as though homeschooling could actually be a force for democracy, which is funny because one of the major arguments against it is that  it’s just the opposite.

SA: Oh, very clearly.  Think about the so-called founding fathers, and how they were educated.  Most of them were educated by tutors, they didn’t go to school.  That kind of revolutionary energy and receptiveness that they had is really connected to that form of education, because when you’re educated in a setting like that, I believe, you’re much more likely to become a critical thinker, to think for yourself, to know and act on your own values.  That’s what’s required before you can really step into the political process and become an active participant.  When you’re educated in a gigantic school or a big classroom or whatever, I think that’s more conducive to learning how to play the bureaucratic game, and not thinking for yourself because it doesn’t pay.  So I would say this is much better training for preserving democracy.

SS: Several laws have changed in the last couple of years, become more specific and favorable to homeschooling.  Often, these laws require the family to submit some sort of affidavit saying that they’re teaching the required courses for the required amount of time, and so on.  This tends to appeal to the schools, because the family is saying it’s willing to be accountable, and to the family it’s actually liberating, because they know they can meet those requirements by doing what they would do anyway.  Do you sense this favorable change in the climate?

SA: I think that if the atmosphere is basically a tolerant one, then that sort of law makes it possible for the school to think that it gets what it needs and won’t look bad, and makes it possible for the family to do whatever the hell it wants because it all fits in these required categories.  But if the atmosphere becomes hostile, then it becomes possible to use these categories to give people a lot of trouble.  So, we may be in a phase that reflects a greater tolerance for homeschooling.  Perhaps the school people have started to see something which I was really surprised they didn’t see a long time ago, that there are so few people who do homeschooling that it’s just a whole lot easier for a school official to say, "Sure, you seem like a decent person, do what you want," than to put enormous resources into a hassle that the school official may very well lose.  But all this doesn’t mean that the tides can’t shift again at some point.

SS: I’m afraid some people might be scared off by your book, might think a conflict was inevitable.

SA: Well, one thing about this book is it’s very definitely about homeschooling but it’s also about a lot of other forms of educational and cultural dissent.  What I was getting at, and what I think probably has not ameliorated much at all, is that there is a general hostility in the educational establishment and in the public to alternative to the public schools.  I would say that if you look at the whole picture - for example the curriculum content of the public schools - where the intolerance is at a fever pitch, and is worse than when I wrote the book, or if you look at the way that non-traditional private schools are generally treated, you see that the hostility to educational dissent is as virulent as ever.  It may be that a certain kind of truce has been created with regard to homeschooling and that if you just looked at that you’d say things are getting better.  But if you look at the whole attitude toward dissent I think the picture is as grim as ever and maybe more so.

SS: Do you think home education is a right?

SA: I think it’s very clear that the Constitution provides the right for people to have alternatives to public education, but then the question is, what alternatives?

SS: It’s clear even though it isn’t explicitly stated?

SA: I think it’s quite clear, not just from the language of the Constitution but from the ways in which the Constitution has been interpreted.  The cases make it clear that it’s unconstitutional for kids to be forced to go to only public school.  So then the question is, what else can they do, and there it varies enormously from one jurisdiction to another.  I do think that a very strong argument can be made that there’s a constitutional right to home education and that it’s to be found in the First Amendment.  Now, the flip side of that is, are the public schools as presently constituted unconstitutional?  I do happen to believe that the present arrangement of public schools raises very, very serious problems and undermines the principles of the First Amendment.  But that’s not the same as saying that you could convince a court that the First Amendment means that the present system is unconstitutional.  The court is not about to make a change in the structure of a two hundred billion dollar a year industry, on the basis of mere logic and principle, unless there’s a feeling that the public at large wants that change.

SS: That’s very much in keeping with what John Holt used to say, that the schools won’t change because people don’t want them to.  You were talking about whether public school is unconstitutional - what about the idea of compulsory schooling itself?

SA: I think the state can legitimately require that every child be educated, but it can’t legitimately require that every child be educated in a public school.

SS: What about in a school?

SA: Can they require that?  I think not.  So if that’s what you mean by compulsory schooling -

SS: It is.

SA: then that’s questionable, yes.  I think that’s a very good position to take.  I think a lot of what this is about is the difference between being educated in a school, of any kind, and being educated.

SS: So it’s actually a good legal strategy, to put it this way?

SA: To come on and say, the state has the right to require education but not school, yes, I think that’s a very good strategy.

[SS note: At the Clonlara Jamboree this past August, I attended attorney David Schwartz’s presentation on "State Control and Cultural Freedom," which explored, among other things, the internal conflict that people can experience when they comply with laws that acknowledge the state’s power to determine what constitutes education, even though they don’t believe the state ought to have this power.  Such laws may make it possible for families to homeschool, but do they require an ideological compromise at the same time?  The remainder of this conversation with Stephen Arons is a further examination of this issue.]

SS: I was talking to a lawyer recently who quotes Emerson saying " I will not pay for a privilege where I have intrinsic right."  If home education is an intrinsic right, as you said earlier, is working for home education legislation only paying for a privilege?  This is what the lawyer seems to think, and he worries that for some people it may be too big a compromise.

SA: I think that’s an ideologically correct position to take, to say that one shouldn’t compromise one’s beliefs.  It’s good if you’re interest is in trying to move the body politic, it’s good if you look at home education as a form of civil disobedience, which in a way it is.  But as a practical attorney making a judgment about how to advise a client, I’m not sure that’s right at all.

SS: Yes, because what people want, immediately, is to be able to homeschool legally.  But I know that some of us who lobby for home education legislation think of such laws as a sort of second best, or the most realistic thing we can get, since we might really like to see compulsory education laws done away with entirely but we know we can’t get that.

SA: Well, when you enter into the legislative arena to do something like this you’re a very small part of a very large operation.  You’re going to have to make substantial compromises to get anything at all.  One likes to think of the judiciary as a place where principles win out over power, and sometimes that’s true, but in the legislature it’s rarely if ever that way.
You do want to worry about losing sight of what your beliefs are.  Maybe you aren’t after a win, maybe you want to struggle and lose for a while.

SS: But of course the flip side of that is people whose kids are about to turn compulsory school age don’t want to wait.  John always used to say we don’t want martyrs in this movement, and in fact the ideological justification for home education legislation is that once you get it, you can show, for example, that people can learn outside of schools, and so on.

SA: Well, ideologues aren’t always the most reliable allies, if they don’t have a personal stake in it as well.  But sometimes the ideology becomes the language of the struggle after a while.  The whole thing between the family and the school is being fought out on this incredibly principled plane, while the reality of it is very gritty and simple.

SS: That’s interesting, because in the book you say it looks gritty and specific but is actually bigger, deeper/

SA: I think that’s what makes it so incredibly fascinating and rich, because people are really playing out everything.

A BRUSH WITH THE POLICE

Gretchen Spicer (WI) wrote in response to "Preventing Truancy Harrassment" (GWS #50):

…My 12-year-old son, Seth, had a particularly unpleasant brush with the law enforcement agencies in our small town, about six months after we moved from the country into town.  The older boys, 12 and 14, had been going to the library almost every day during school hours, so I hadn’t given the truancy problem any thought.
On the particular day that the incident occurred I asked Seth to run an errand that seemed crucial to me.  He didn’t want to do it, but I begged until he agreed.  On his way home a city police officer stopped him and asked why he wasn’t in school.  Seth said he tried to explain and asked the officer to call his mother, but he wouldn’t.  The officer then asked Seth to go into the court house with him and Seth refused because he thought he was going to be put in jail.  At that point the officer "talked on his walkie-talkie."  Moments later another person, in an unmarked car, in plain clothes, pulled up.  When he tried to talk to Seth, Seth yelled, "Shut up" and ran off.  When I asked Seth why he did that he said that he thought the man in plain clothes was going to kidnap him.  By the time Seth arrived home he was terrified, shaking, and sobbing.
Of course, the plain clothes officer, who turned out to be the local juvenile officer, arrived shortly on my doorstep.  At this point, I hadn’t even had a chance to talk to my child, I only know that he was hysterical and "something had happened with the police."

The officer knew me, but was upset and wanted to know why Seth was so hostile.  When I asked him what he meant and he described the interaction I said, "Why, it sounds like he was terrified."  When I was able to draw the story out of Seth bit by bit, I certainly realized that terror was the underlying theme.
I know that officers see lots of street-wise, hostile kids each day, but it concerns me that they weren’t able to pick up on how scared this kid was.

Certainly we were most negligent in not preparing our kids for this kind of situation.  I think kids who are on the streets during school hours should carry some sort of letter or pass that makes it clear to authorities that they are not truant.  Additionally, parents and kids should go over what to do in the eventuality that they should be stopped and questioned.  I did some role playing with Seth to help him discover better alternatives to telling the officer to "shut up" and running off.

Seth said the most frustrating thing for him was that before he lost his cool, he kept asking the first officer over and over just to call us and he wouldn’t do it.  So maybe we need to go a step further if we want to allow our children the freedom to be on the street during school hours, and contact the local police department and inform them of our program, and introduce our children to them in advance.  I think this would be most applicable to people living in small rural communities…

THOSE HOMESCHOOL "CONTRACTS"

In GWS #52, Connie Pfeil (CA) mentioned "contracts" between the homeschooling families and school district, which reminded me of a point I have made to several people who have asked about this.  Sometimes a school district insists that a family sign a document that the district has written and that it calls a contract, and the homeschoolers are justifiably cautious about signing until they know what the consequences may be.
I tell these people that they should ask a lawyer to make sure, but that, from what little I know about law, those so-called "contracts" are not at all what are legally considered to be contracts.  A tremendous number of court cases throughout the centuries have dealt with the question of what is a valid contract, and some of these educational documents that are being passed around do not meet the definition in the slightest.
For example, the HANDBOOK OF EVERYDAY LAW says:

…A contract, to be enforceable in a court of law, must have the following essential elements:
The contractual obligation must be made by one party and an "acceptance" of that offer by the part to whom it was made.  This is called consent, "mutual assent," or, popularly, "a meeting of the minds."
Each party must have contributed some consideration toward the creation of the contract.  There must be a quid pro quo, a something in exchange for something else to make the deal a binding one.  A mere gratuitous promise, not made in reliance upon  a reciprocal promise, is not binding and not enforceable…

The word "consideration" in the above paragraph does not mean "thought," but an actual, tangible benefit, such as money paid or a service performed.  If I have a valid contract with a carpenter to build a porch, the "consideration" that she gets is money, and the "consideration" I get is a porch.  But if for some reason, the carpenter signed a paper saying she would build a porch for nothing, no court would consider that a binding contract.
Now in a case like Connie describes, where homeschoolers agree to do certain things in exchange for the availability of certain services, there’s at least a chance of this fitting the description of a contract (though you could easily argue that the school receives no benefit directly from the family - indirectly, yes, if their attendance provides state aid money).  But some of the other cases I have heard of, where a school district insists that a family promise to do this, that, and the other in exchange for nothing at all, no benefits, no services - well, that is exactly what a legal contact is not.

Could the district say, "What we are giving in exchange is approval?"  Maybe, but it sounds fishy to me. What does it mean to give approval to an action, anyway, except to promise that you won’t try to prevent it?  Going back to the porch example, what if the contract said that the carpenter makes me a porch and in return, I merely agree not to stop her?  Hardly rewarding to the carpenter, is it?  No, I think "approval" calls into question the entire "voluntary nature of the contract.

I believe this new meaning of the word (a contract that is not a legal contract) came about through psychological circles, behavior modification, etc.  Counselors, therapists, and others recommend "contracts" between husbands and wives, parents and children, teachers and students, as a way to change or manipulate behavior.  So its not surprising that educators might slip the word, full circle, back into the legal domain, without even realizing that it has changed significance.

Whether or not you want to make a fuss about this linguistic point depends on the total picture.  If you have no problems with what’s in the agreement, then it probably doesn’t make any difference what it’s called.  But in some cases, you might at least cross out the word "contract" and substitute a term like "agreement," and if asked, say politely that you have been advised that such a document is not a binding legal contract.  and if they’re trying to force all sorts of unacceptable conditions on you, you can use this point, more forcefully, to negotiate a better deal.

I happened to talk on the phone with Connie Pfeil since beginning to write this piece, and when I outlined these thoughts, she said that something like this actually took place in their situation.  When she and other homeschoolers saw what the school district was proposing for a contract, the families knew enough to say, "Wait a minute, we have a right to have some input into this, and to get some benefits from it."  So homeschoolers and the district have worked for some months revising the contract, and have come up with a "Written Agreement" that is acceptable to both sides. - DR

EFFECT OF SCHOOL MATH

A story from Stephanie Judy (BC):

…An 8-year-old friend offered to pour a glass of juice for my daughter, then 2.  "Just pour half a glass," I told her.
The child stiffened and a look of panic crossed her face.  "I CAN’T pour half a glass," she said.  "I haven’t had FRACTIONS!"

IMPOSING VS. SHARING

I’ve heard from some parents who worry about how to share their interests with their children without "imposing" those interests upon them.  I can’t help thinking of the way my parents shared their love of Shakespeare’s plays with me when I was a child.  Sometimes, a mood would strike them and they’d want to read the witches’ scene in Macbeth aloud.  There are three witches in this scene, so it was natural to ask me to join in.  I never, during all the years that we did this, knew what the rest of the play was about.  But I loved to match my "cackling" voice to theirs, and I loved to recite the list of horrible ingredients which went into the witches’ cauldron.

My parents didn’t arrange this acting session so that I’d learn something I ought to know.  They didn’t think I ought to love Macbeth, but because they did, they hoped I would too.  The difference is not in content but in spirit.  "Hey," my parents said, in effect, "This is something we love, and it would be even more fun if you would be part of it."  This is the spirit in which most of us share books, movies, plays with others in our lives.  Done this way, I wouldn’t call such sharing "imposition." - SS

STORYTELLING

Here in New England, along with a growing interest in folk music and dance, there is an increasing interest in story-telling.  Professional story-tellers perform at concerts and festivals, and often run workshops encouraging people to discover their own natural story-telling ability.

Story-telling definitely seems to be a lost art, in this day of television, VCR, movies, records, radio, and cassettes.  Even the popularity and cheapness of children’s books means that parents are more apt to reach for pre-printed entertainment than to do anything that requires thinking.  But I find that story-telling is useful for a spur-of-the-moment diversion of a tired child, when we’re away from home, or when my hands are occupied.  and it’s engaging for both the teller and the listener.  I can get very bored reading children’s books - I can disengage my mind and not think at all about the words I am pronouncing.  Not so if I’m telling a story.

The few times I have done this, I used stories I have heard - like "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" - or that I’ve read somewhere.  I’ve not yet graduated to making up stories, though I know people do.  I remember once when I told stories to my niece, then 4, she kept saying, "Read me another!" I think she knew I wasn’t "reading," but that was the term she was used to.
I would like very much to hear how any of you fit story-telling into your lives. - DR

LEARNING MUSIC AS ADULTS

From a speech John Holt gave to a VIOLIN SOCIETY OF AMERICA conference, 11/5/80:

…As a teacher I am enormously interested in doing what I can to increase adult participation in music.  I want to see more adults starting to make music, or starting once again after having neglected it for a long time.  One of the nice things that has happened to me as a result of NEVER TOO LATE is that people have written me a great many letters to say that they always wanted to study a string instrument, or some other instrument, but that they always thought that they were too old.  After having read my book, they decided that they weren’t too old, have started to take lessons, and are having a lovely time.  I got one letter from a man in his 70’s, who, if I remember correctly, took up the cello.

Because I love music and have been listening to it for a long time, I hang out quite a lot with musicians.  Over the years I’ve heard a great deal of talk about how to get more children to make music and how to get music into the schools.  I tend to think that this is attacking the problem from the wrong end.   There must be hundreds of thousands, millions of children who learn to play different instruments while growing up, or in school, and often at a rather high level of proficiency, who then stop when they reach the age of 18, 19, or 20 and never play again.  My feeling is that anything like an equivalent amount of effort expended in helping adults to play might very well have a better payoff.  If we could double or triple the number of adults making music, the children would follow along because they get their ideas of what is worth doing from what they see us do.  In a community in which there was a good deal of adult musical activity, I do not believe there would be much of a problem in motivating children.

…There are a number of reasons why it is difficult for adults to learn to play musical instruments well.  Some are physical or environmental.  People say they don’t have time, that their lives are full.  However, it seems to me that the number of hours that people spend watching television might just as well be invested in music.  Still, there are serious constraints of time and space.  It’s hard to find a place to practice.  Many people live in places in which they couldn’t play without causing an uproar.  Also, people who might smile indulgently at the sounds produced by a young player might become furious at having to listen to an adult playing at a comparable level of skill.

However, the more important obstacles to adult playing are psychological or internal.  These are not characteristic of adults only.  They operate in people of all ages.  I have discovered that what keeps children from learning in school situations is anxiety, fear, and shame, and these also operate with us.  A considerable part of NEVER TOO LATE  is a description of how these negative factors work on me as I play by myself, or try to play with other people, and the ways I use to try to overcome these feelings.  I suspect that feelings of fear, shame, guilt, inadequacy, etc., are perhaps stronger in adults than they are in young children.  Not the least of the explanations for this lies in the fact that when we come to the making of music in the middle of our lives, we have in our ears, in our minds, the sound of what it really ought to be like.  I think that  many children do not have this frame of reference.  The discrepancy between the sounds we produce and those we know can be produced is simply more than many people can stand.  That, I believe, is an obstacle we can learn to overcome.

Another obstacle can be summarized by the old saw that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.  The prophecy that you can’t do it unless you start young becomes self-fulfilling.  If you believe it’s true, it becomes true.  We can turn that saying around if we can convince people that it isn’t too late, that old dogs can learn new tricks, and that they will discover that they are able to learn new tricks.

Another, and perhaps related, problem is an idea that has a very powerful hold on music instruction in general.  My knowledge in this area isn’t complete, but I live in Boston which is a very musical community and I have many musical friends with whom I discuss ways of teaching.  Therefore, I don’t think I’m completely off-base in saying that an idea that seems to run through musical instruction is that the people who learn fastest will go furthest.  We tend to make judgments about people’s talent, if not their ultimate musical capacity, on the basis of how fast they learn, how fast they get from point A to point B.   A teacher may have a group of students to whom he gives a number of exercises or pieces to learn.  Some will learn this material in a week, others in two weeks, while others may need as long as a month.  I think the prevailing assumption is that the students who learn the material the fastest have the most musical talent and will some day be the best players.  But this is simply an assumption.  I don’t think it has ever been proved or tested.  What happens over the years in music is what tends to happen in sports, and I have coached a lot of sports.  It’s like an elimination contest.  Each year a number of participants are cut from the varsity squad.  And, as in high school athletics, you finally end up with a fairly small handful of very expert players, while a much larger number of participants have been convinced that their future role is that of spectators.

Now I understand some of the conditions that bring this situation about.  If you are a teacher, an orchestra conductor in a school, you have limited amounts of time and it makes a certain kind of sense to invest that time where you think it is going to produce the most results.  Yet, I think we may lose a great deal of very real talent in that weeding-out process.  This has particular reference to adult training because I think it is almost certainly true - for reasons that I’ve given and others - that adults beginning music will, at least in the first years, learn more slowly than most children.

…It seems to me that many of the ideas, techniques, and methods of music teaching have been largely designed with children in mind.  Therefore, they may be very inappropriate for adults who have much more music in their heads, so to speak.  They have a more highly developed mental model of what music looks and actually sounds like.  They may, as I said, be very good at solving problems.  In teaching very young students it may make good sense to say: "Now do this, and then I’ll tell you how to do something else."  The child is taken, a step at a time, on a journey towards a destination he can hardly imagine.  Kids like to do tricks, they don’t particularly care what they are.  Perhaps over a period of time these steps and tricks will add up to the development of a considerable degree of skill.  I don’t think that’s the best way to teach young children, but I have to admit that it will often work.  At least it works with children who happen to like it.  But I suspect that this approach will be much less successful for adults.  An adult student must be - to a far greater degree - a partner in this musical venture.  At any rate, I know that is true of myself.  I need to be able to apply my own intelligence and resourcefulness to the large problem of musical skill.  What makes it interesting to me is not just the music, but the actual challenge of learning it…
_____

[And from a similar speech to a music educator’s conference in Minneapolis, 4/24/81, transcribed by volunteer Janet Roelle:]

…I feel at least as strongly about this as anything I will say to you today.  This is another word that I want to get out of the vocabulary of music, discussing music, etc.  And the word is "fun."  (Laughter.)  What you hear people say, usually with some asperity is, "Learning can’t all be fun…"  The notion of the range of possibilities conjures up the image of a scale, let’s say of -100 to a +100, with "fun" on the +100 end of the scale, and I guess, "no fun" at the other end of the scale.  As in, "Gee, Ma, this is no fun." or "Gee, Ma, why do I have to do this?"  Presumably the feelings that we have vary from the "no fun" end of the scale to the "fun" end of the scale, the presumption being that if we spend 99% of our time at the "no fun" end of the scale, eventually we will get to a point where we have a little fun.  I think this is a disastrously mistaken way of looking at music.  Nowhere on that scale of ‘no fun" to "fun" can I find any of the emotions that I feel when I am working with my instrument, which range from arduous effort to intense concentration, great frustration and exasperation to - I hardly know.  I maybe conveyed a little in my opening remarks.  I used words about exaltation, about feelings so deep that you can barely play the music for the emotion that you feel when you play it.

You can’t use the word "fun" to describe the range of feelings which I observe in a 5-year-old friend of mine who, sometime in the last year decided that she was going to play the violin.  She was already a quite remarkable little pianist.  She is a little child an to see these little baby starfish shaped hands thumping out - you can’t imagine the volume of tone and sound that this little mite produces on the piano, when she plays with spirit.  She and her very talented older brother, about 4 years older, again experienced these feelings of exaltation and excitement and passion, on the one hand, and baffled fury.  They just burst out crying sometimes, they get so furious that they can’t get the phrase to come out the way they want it to.  But this little 5-year-old is not operating on an emotional range with "no fun" on one end of the scale and "fun" at the other.  We just trivialize our work when we think in those terms.  The effort, the concentration, the frustration, the doggedness, the resolution, the moments - very considerable moments - of surprise and joy, the feeling, "My goodness, I didn’t think it was going to come out as good as that."  The exaltation, the emotion… it’s another kind of world…  Let’s try to stop talking about "fun" or "no fun."  I don’t know whether that’s going to be possible…

CHEERS FOR PIANICA

[SS:] When we asked Susan Shilcock (PA) about how the children at the Open Connections Family Resource Center use the pianica, she responded:

We were initially attracted to the pianica because we believe that children most enjoy, and deserve, real, working items, rather than imitation toys.  In this case, "the real thing" translates to real music - not the tinny music created by some made-for-children instruments.

For the very youngest children, we think the fascination of the pianica lies in the sense of accomplishment that playing it can provide.  A child of 1-2 years may not get sound out of it at the beginning, but with a little practice and some easy-to-give help from an older child or adult, the young musician can experience some sense of power over this mysterious machine.  The pianica is not as instant as a piano in its feedback, and consequently we think it actually strengthens the connection between player and music produced.  A child must consciously coordinate two actions to make something happen - the sounds just don’t happen by accident.
The 3-5 year old age group seem to enjoy the choice involved; whether to blow through the long tube while sitting down (with the keyboard in a piano position) or whether to use the mouthpiece an play it more like a clarinet.  Attaching either set of pieces is easy and young fingers can make the switch back and forth on their own.

The 3-8 year olds also take interest in the pianica as a puzzle.  The five pieces and storage case make for a manageable invitation to keep the instrument protected and the parts together.  When we were up visiting John two years ago, he was the first of many we have watched who fumble around as they experiment with putting the pieces back in the carrying case.  Since the, we have observed several children who must have decided to work with the pianica just for the fun of taking it out and putting it back in its case!
The case makes it not only durable, but allows for easy portability.  Our two pianicas have found happy, temporary homes inside, outside, and on car trips.  because it runs on wind power (not an electric keyboard) it can be enjoyed almost anywhere.

The biggest plus of the pianica, however, has been the amount of experimenting it has invited, by both children and adults.  Because it is not quite like any conventional instrument, our response to it may be less bounded.  One who thinks, "I can’t play the piano" may just find himself/herself willing to sit down to the pianica and mess around.  If we have no one right answer in our mind about how the instrument must be played, then perhaps we are freer - or more comfortable - in taking a risk to compose our own moments of music.
There it is - the pianica: a real "tool" with flexibility, decision-making, personal power, durability and uniqueness all built in…
_____

A couple of years ago, John had us take the office pianica home to see how we all liked it.  We have enjoyed it so much that I keep putting off returning it - I think we’re going to have to make it a permanent part of our musical life.

The children especially love the pianica.  There seems to be something special about making the thing work by providing the air yourself.  That’s the way other wind instruments work too, but the keyboard allows very little children to make more of a variety of sounds since it takes less coordination than many other instruments.  The only disadvantage we have found is that you can’t sing and play at the same time, though Helen (3) can hum and occasionally dances while playing.  A year ago last summer, Anna (4) insisted that she was playing Bach.  When I said, well, it did sound a little like Bach, she said, "No, it is Bach."  And when Greta was only a few weeks old, Mark would entertain her by playing the pianica for her so I could occasionally sit down at the table and eat with both hands.

The really astounding thing about the pianica is that it is virtually indestructible.  It has taken almost every kind of abuse imaginable (mostly unintended) and has stood up to it.  Even the tube from the mouthpiece to the keyboard is still functional though it has been stretched, twisted, and chewed on.  There are a few tiny holes in it but it doesn’t seem to matter.  For children, sturdiness is a great advantage.  Portable electronic keyboards are available at good prices now, but they’re rather delicate.  Our children are generally as careful as they can be with things, but accidents happen - and we’ve found we don’t have to worry about the pianica.
Even with a piano in the house, the pianica gets a great deal of use.  We recommend it highly.
-MARY VAN DOREN

GWS was founded in 1977 by John Holt.
Editor - Donna Richoux
Managing Editor - Patrick Farenga
Subscriptions & Books - Steve Rupprecht, Wendy Baruch, Elsa Haas, Sandy Kendall
Associate Editor - Susannah Sheffer
Office Assistant - Mary Van Doren
Editorial Assistant - Mary Maher
Copyright Holt Associates, Inc.

This archive is presented as a service to the homeschooling community by the editors of  Home Education Magazine © 2006 and is reprinted with permission of Holt Associates, Inc., © 2006. (All rights reserved)