So much of how we educate - in the sense of helping young people grow into their particular culture and into the world at large - depends on how we think people by nature behave.  When we talk, as John Holt does in this issue’s Focus, about education for peace, we are talking not only about what we want but about what we think we’re starting out with.  Do we think that working for peace means working against human nature, or in conjunction with it?

The trouble with this question, important as it is, is that it’s not enough to ask what human nature is, even though that alone would keep us all arguing for a good while.  We also have to ask, and argue about, how we find out what human nature is.  People say, “Of course children (and by implication, human beings in general) are naturally aggressive - look at how they behave on the playground.”  Or they say, “Of course children need to be made to learn - look at how my children just sit around if I don’t suggest things for them to do.”  But others say, “Of course people are naturally peaceful - look at how they behave if we don’t make them feel so badly about themselves that they feel they have to harm other people,” and “Of course children are good at learning - look at how much my baby has learned without anyone forcing him to do it.”

Which are true?  How can we tell?  In Instead of Education John writes about Japanese Bonsai trees, whose twisted, shrunken shapes gardeners create by limiting their supply of water and sun, by clipping their branches, and so on.  John asks, “If a tree can be deformed and shrunk, is this, then, its nature?  The nature of these trees, given enough of the sun, air, water, soil, and food they need, is to grow like trees, tall and straight.  People can be more easily deformed, and worse deformed, even than trees . . .  Only to the degree that people have what they need, that they are healthy and unafraid, that their lives are varied, interesting, meaningful, productive, joyous, can we begin to judge, or even guess, their nature.”

“Only to the degree that people have what they need . . .”  One way to find out about human nature, then, would be to look at people who seem to have what they need (although how we know when we’ve found such people is, again, open to question).  One of the reasons we interviewed Jean Liedloff, author of The Continuum Concept, in this issue, is that she has so much to say on precisely this subject.  Jean also talks about the power of assumption - about how much our expectations about what will happen affect what actually happens.

John, in the essay in this issue, talks about how harmful it is for children to be subjected so much of the time to capricious, arbitrary authority, authority that does not derive from anything children can respect or consider sensible.  But this is only one kind of authority.  Aaron Falbel, responding to John’s essay, reminds us of George Dennison’s distinction between natural authority (authority that someone invests in someone else) and authority of rank (authority that someone holds over someone else).  ”Great damage is done,” Aaron writes, “when we use authority of rank in place of natural authority.”  Great damage is also done when we forget that natural authority is possible and decide that all authority is coercive and that there can be no good reason to do what someone says or follow someone’s example.  Children expect and demand natural authority - they want us, as Jean Liedloff makes clear, to be strong, capable, examples worth following.  Helping children become peaceful people is in large part about helping them become people who can figure out which kind of authority is which. –Susannah Sheffer

NEWS & REPORTS

OK TO COUNT ON FINGERS

Reader Connie Knudtson sent us this article from the 2/19/89 Rochester, NY Democrat and Chronicle, saying, “I thought you might find this interesting.  Shortly before I saw this I heard of a teacher commenting, very negatively, that a lot of homeschooled kids counted on their fingers.”

Schoolteachers have scolded children for counting on their fingers for decades, but some researchers say finger-counting can keep good students good and help not-so-good students become better.  Robert Siegler and Dennis Kerkman, Carnegie Mellon University Psychology professors, say their studies show there’s nothing wrong with finger-counting, and teachers probably should show their students how to do it correctly.

“They’re going to do it anyway.  Every teacher we’ve talked to about this has told us that telling children not to use their fingers doesn’t work . . .  We think children are right to do this because if you don’t know the answer very well, then it’s better to be right than to be wrong.”

Good students rely on their memories more than not-so-good students or perfectionists to solve math and reading problems, according to a study of 80 children at an elementary school in suburban Monroeville.  When they couldn’t remember an answer, good students turn to backup methods, including sounding out words, using a dictionary, counting up from a number to add or down from a number to subtract - or using their fingers.  Perfectionists used backup methods even when they could remember the answer, frequently taking longer to solve problems as a result, Siegler and Kerkman discovered.

Not-so-good students gave the most incorrect answers, as expected, but also displayed poor finger-counting skills.  Poor students may do poor work because they are bad at backup strategies, including finger-counting, Siegler said.  Siegler hopes to develop ways to teach not-so-good students how to use backup strategies and to determine whether this kind of teaching can help them learn more quickly.

NEWS & REPORTS

[SS:] I suspect that being able to use these sorts of backup strategies is an indication of how well you really understand, and trust that there is sense in, what you’re doing.  As John Holt observed repeatedly in How Children Fail, you can’t simply teach these strategies, and expect that to be enough, if the foundation of genuine understanding is as shaky as it is for so many children in school.

PLANS TO REDUCE COMPETITION IN ALBERTA

Wendy Priesnitz wrote in the Spring 1989 issue of Child’s Play, the newsletter of the CANADIAN ALLIANCE OF HOMESCHOOLERS:

An Alberta reader recently sent a copy of an article that appeared in Alberta Report in mid-April.  Entitled, “A Revolution in Our Schools,” it described a new policy that will take effect by August 31, 1993 in all Alberta’s public, separate, and independent schools . . .  Under [the policy], competition between students, or by any student against a class or provincial standard, would no longer be used to determine how a child was progressing.  The article goes so far as to say there will be no more failures, no more examinations by grade, and in some schools, no grades at all.  It talks about individual progress and learning styles, nonthreatening learning environments, goal-directed learning that reflects a child’s goals rather than a teacher’s, evaluation of progress in relation to a child’s own goals and capabilities, and the inappropriateness of much of what is now accepted classroom behavior.

A system is described in which a child would be entered in Year 1 and tested for his or her initial capability in various subject areas.  He or she would then be guided by a teacher to work at his or her own pace, throughout the first six years, being advanced in relation to various goals along the way.  This, of course, would create obvious nightmares for a teacher having to deal with thirty students all at different levels in different subjects.  But it’s the way many home-based education situations function now.

OPPOSITION TO TESTING

Two interesting items from the Spring 1989 issue of the FairTest Examiner:

GEORGIA DROPS TEST:  IS TEXAS NEXT?  The state of Georgia will drop a controversial test that has been used to determine entry into first grade.  The kindergarten test, used last spring for the first time, was criticized by teachers, administrators, local school boards and parents as traumatic to children and educationally unnecessary.  Because the test was not mandated by state law, the State Board of Education was able to both implement and drop it arbitrarily . . .  Georgia joins other states that have recently stopped testing in one or more grades.  North Carolina banned testing in grades one and two.  Arizona stopped mandating testing in grades one and 12, and Mississippi will drop its kindergarten test.

The state of Texas may soon become part of this trend.  With wide backing from education reform groups and the State Board of Education, the Texas Senate has passed legislation to drop its mandated grade one test.  The bill is expected to become law . . .

OPPOSITION TO SCHOOL TESTING GROWS.  The National Association of Early Childhood Teacher Educators (NAECTE) has voted to go on the offensive against the misuse of standardized tests.  In a November resolution, NAECTE reported that “a number of highly questionable practices have resulted from the widespread use of screening, readiness, and achievement tests” on young children.  Among the negative results of such test misuses are denial of entrance into regular programs, group segregation, increased retention, and excessive use of drill on isolated skills by teachers pressured to raise scores.

According to NAECTE, these practices are not “consonant with the body of knowledge that explains how children learn,” and stifle young children’s motivation to continue learning.

WHY QUESTION ELIGIBILITY?

Eileen Perkins of Utah writes:

I must write in response to the homeschooler who questioned why homeschoolers couldn’t be part of the National Geography Bee (GWS #69).  I think perhaps some homeschoolers automatically think people are against them, and are continually on the defensive.  Last year I read of the Geography Bee.  I wrote saying that we had a home school, and would they please send us the information so we could be involved.  They sent a book, an inflatable world globe, a beautiful world map, and all the tests.  My daughter, then 8, took the school winner’s test.  We sent it in to the Washington, D.C. headquarters.  We later received a letter saying she was one of the top 100 qualifiers for the state bee.

At the luncheon before the bee one speaker announced, quite proudly, that among all the contestants, there was even a homeschooler.  My daughter’s name was listed on the program as Sadie Perkins, Perkins Home School.

Often I read or hear of opportunities for schools.  I just write in and say I have a home school, and will they please send the information.  I’ve never been turned down.  Why question eligibility for programs?  Instead calmly assume you are eligible.

STATE NEWS

California:  In GWS #69, we said that the state’s Legislative Analyst had recommended that public school Independent Study programs for elementary school students be eliminated (ISPs are one way for families to homeschool under the law).  Elizabeth Hamill now writes in the June/July issue of the NORTHERN CALIFORNIA HOMESCHOOL ASSOCIATION News that the members of the Assembly Ways and Means Subcommittee voted to reject the analyst’s recommendation at a hearing on April 12.  The members of the Senate Budget Committee’s subcommittee on education did not vote to reject the recommendation at their hearing the following week, so homeschoolers are still monitoring the situation.  Elizabeth notes, however, that the legislators did not seem to be concerned with homeschooling per se; ISPs involve many other students as well.

Homeschoolers are also watching Senate Bill 1563, which would require local school districts to set tighter controls for public school ISPs.  NCHA comments:  ”The bill’s strongest point is that it allows changes to be made at the local level, with parental input.  For instance, parents could work with the administrators of their ISPs to determine how often students should meet with teachers and what guidelines should be set for screening admissions.  Parents who object to the tighter controls still have the private school options for homeschooling.”

Iowa:  The one-year moratorium of prosecutions of homeschoolers expired July 1, so the requirement that homeschooling parents be certified teachers is now back in effect, according to Greg Nichols of the IOWA HOME EDUCATORS ASSOCIATION.  Greg says that the HOME SCHOOL LEGAL DEFENSE ASSOCIATION has filed a suit on behalf of five families who have been threatened with prosecution.  The suit charges that when the section of the Iowa law regarding qualifications of homeschooling parents was changed in 1953 from requiring parents to be “competent to instruct” to requiring that they have teaching certificates, that change was passed in violation of the Iowa constitution.  The Iowa constitution requires that bills deal with one topic only, which was not true in this case.

Kentucky:  In GWS #69 we wrote that truant officers had claimed some families were neither sending their children to school nor complying with the home school law.  Homeschooler Ruth McCutcheon now writes:  ”Things have been happening here in Kentucky, beginning about the first of the year.  Newspaper articles, obviously slanted against homeschooling, appeared in at least two areas of dense (for Kentucky) population.  In early February, adults from seven families, and numerous children, met with State Department of Education officials.  We were told that we have nothing to fear if we are responsibly educating our children but that the officials are concerned about people who are using the current liberal regulations for homeschooling to circumvent truancy charges.

“The man we met with seemed favorably impressed with our group but one said he had put a proposal on the desk of the current state superintendent of public schools and that he hopes some regulations will be forthcoming.  This man was on television a couple of years ago advocating testing for homeschooled children and specific qualifications for parents.”

Ruth says that a statewide group called the KENTUCKY HOME EDUCATION ASSOCIATION has formed to monitor any legislation that will be proposed during the 1990 session.  

Nevada:  The State Board of Education passed regulations which restrict the way in which tests can be administered to homeschool students in the state.  From the regulations:  ”The board of trustees of the [school] district shall select the administrator of the examination and the location where the examination is to be given, giving consideration to the recommendations of its staff and a representative of parents whose children are excused from [school] attendance . . .”

Miriam Mangione of HOME SCHOOLS UNITED tells us that homeschoolers in Clark County have been working to convince their Board of Trustees to allow tests to be administered at home by the parent, as they have been in the past.  She says, “The State Board’s intent was to mandate that a certified teacher administer the test in the home (if the parent paid for it) or at a school site.  However, they wrote ‘test administer’ instead, and according to the state of Nevada’s definitions the test administer cannot be a certified teacher or a parent.  So the regulation as written doesn’t coincide with the State Board’s intent.

Wisconsin:  A law passed in 1988 requires that local school districts adopt a plan for dealing with truants by September 1, 1989.  Homeschoolers are concerned that some procedures may include special provisions for homeschoolers, or recommend that the Department of Public Instruction regulate home schools.  The WISCONSIN PARENTS ASSOCIATION has prepared a fact sheet on truancy and homeschooling, and its May newsletter lists suggested ways to prevent the truancy procedures from affecting homeschoolers.

GED REQUIREMENTS

From Judy Garvey and Jim Bergin:

We are beginning to collect information about the GED (high school equivalency exam) with the thought of one day challenging the minimum age requirement in Maine.  We believe that a person’s right to take the exam should be based only on his or her ability to learn the necessary academic subjects required to pass the test.

We would appreciate hearing from anyone in any part of the country who knows of a young person who has been allowed to take the test early.  These exceptions can help us show that the age requirements are arbitrary and that precedents have already been set.  It would also be very helpful to find out if others are working toward this same goal, and whether there have been any past efforts to change the age requirements in other states.

[SS:] If you write to Judy and Jim, please send a copy of your letter to us at GWS, too; we’d like to keep track of and publicize any efforts on this front. 

Is GWS in your library?  Please consider giving your library a subscription, or encouraging the librarian to order one.

THE MAKING OF A HOMESCHOOLER

Anne Bevilacqua of North Carolina writes:

To my great surprise, we are now a homeschooling family.  Last year Maggie (now 8) was interested in the homeschooling idea, but content in school; my husband Paul was opposed, sometimes vehemently; I was convinced of its superiority, and wavered between teeth-grinding frustration, deep sadness, and hopeful resignation.

I’ve read GWS for years, ever since Maggie’s reluctance to attend pre-school pushed me toward alternatives.  But my radicalization did not come easily.  First I tried all kinds of ways to pave her way toward fitting in to school:  faithful attendance at library story hour for group activity exposure, a home pre-school with another mother, choosing a half-day kindergarten instead of full day.  At story hour she sat by my side or on my lap; home pre-school evolved into totally free playtime for the children while my friend and I talked; and she went to kindergarten without balking primarily because her best friend went with her.  She enjoyed it, I believe, because it happened to be small and one of the last around here to hold onto socialization over academics (i.e. they got to play a lot).  I learned about homeschooling and GWS from my preschool mother friend, subscribed, and began a most interesting intellectual journey.

Maggie went bravely to first grade, and after the initial shock of not having any time to “just play,” seemed to do well.  The bravery lasted two weeks.  The bus ride was the first to go, and I began driving her to school.  By now I was convinced that school was illogical and unnatural, but felt, in a confused sort of way, that Maggie should make the decision to homeschool herself.  She knew about homeschooling because of my subscription to GWS and our friends whose children were not in school, but I tried to avoid didacticism.  I assumed she considered it an alternative.  Part of my caution was due to Paul’s distrust of the idea.  My attempts to laud homeschooling and his reluctant reading of my growing collection of material were met with solid defenses.  It was a deep and complex and unhappy situation with roots going through our own schooling and childhood experiences, and our relationship and our individual relationships with Maggie.

I did not press the issue.  For one thing, I was still a timid radical, too timid to buck both Paul and the school authorities.  For another, I believed that things really would work out, now that the truth was about, and even though I was the only one to fully grasp the idea, it seemed inevitable that it would become clear to anyone who had the strength to care.  And one of the reasons I am so enthralled with homeschooling is that teaching the unwilling is what schools are about, and can rob the student of her freedom and her power.  So this is where we stayed for a year, seemingly mired, though, in retrospect, we were working hard.

Maggie did decide to homeschool twice during this period.  I, considering something I read long ago in GWS about fear alone never being a good reason for not doing something, worried that Maggie was reacting out of fear of school, and proceeded cautiously.  I would explain that yes, we could homeschool, and that I would have to send in the proper forms to the governor’s office, and that it would take several weeks to get approval.  I decided to wait for her to insist, and she never did.  Paul would discuss with her what he considered homeschooling’s drawbacks, primarily that she would miss her friends.  The topic would pass.

Maggie “did well” in school, was popular and excelled academically.  Indeed, I was sometimes envious of the families with “misfit” children, the children who seemed to be well aware of the absurdities of compulsory schooling, or at least so uncomfortable that they would readily leave (only now do I see the irony - years ago my worry was about her not fitting in).

Meanwhile, I read a lot.  I was so intrigued I finally ordered and devoured the back issues of GWS.  I ordered George Dennison’s The Lives of Children.  Quite frankly, I ordered it out of homage to John Holt, who was becoming a mentor to me.  John called it “essential”  OK, I’d read it.  For some reason I expected it to be dull, and was shocked to discover possibly the most exciting book I’ve ever read.  It could have been called The Lives of Teachers, and I couldn’t help imagining myself at the school in their place.  What would I have done as Maxine flounced around the classroom, when Jose panicked at the sight of words?  Would I have recognized the deep, deep fears behind these behaviors?

Maggie was at home sick for a week near the beginning of second grade, and refused to go back to school once she was well.  Paul knew that the only alternative, forcing her to go, was out of the question.  It was that simple.

I had fantasized for so long about our lives as homeschoolers, drawing from my reading sources, and I know we had a smoother transition because of this.  I was influenced by the relaxed atmosphere in the First Street School in The Lives of Children.  Relaxed teachers, but always observant, interested, willing to act.  Better Than School convinced me that I did not have to rely on a purchased curriculum, and influenced me to include our two girls in adult activities.  Vita and Ishmael Wallace were read David Copperfield and taken to intelligent movies; I began to question assumptions of American parenting (lots of toys, never miss a kiddie movie).  I loved the freedom portrayed in And The Children Played.  ”Happiness first, and all else follows,” was author Pat Foudry’s belief, and slowly our lives seemed to be becoming ordered in that way.

The most helpful and exciting were the back issues of GWS.  Again and again as I read them I would see our culture in a new light, becoming ever more confident in what I felt, what I believed, what I said and did.  Children don’t have to be silly.  They don’t need dozens of friends.  ”Leaders are people who go their own way without caring or even looking to see whether anyone is following them.”  Schools are strangely divorced from life.  My children don’t have to be “winners.”  I don’t have to be a winner.  ”Finding our work is one of the most important and difficult tasks in life.”  ”Most healthy and curious children don’t like to be taught.”  And all this (from the first ten issues alone) is in the form of stories.  A lovely way to learn.

Maggie, as I later learned, had questions of her own as the whole family mulled over the issue of homeschooling, among them the common “How will I learn without being taught?” and “Will I be comfortable being so different?”  And Paul, once the decision was made, once he (and I) realized that it wasn’t his decision or my decision, became a sudden enthusiast.  I think the fact that we let Maggie know there was an alternative to school would have helped her even had she chosen to remain in school, but she made up her own mind to homeschool.

CHALLENGES & CONCERNS

UNWELCOMING TO YOUNG CHILDREN

Michael Duggan (MO) writes:

There were some very interesting ideas put forth in the focus on making communities more welcoming to children (GWS #69).  I especially liked the one by Sue Radosti, about making public places more welcoming to very young children.  I can’t begin to count the number of times that we have had to change my daughter’s diaper on a restroom floor or in the trunk of the car (believe it or not) because there were no counters or tables to use.  Being a father who is the prime nurturing parent in our family, I often find no place to change diapers in the men’s room, and wouldn’t even think of putting her on the floor in most of them.  So I have to resort to benches or other make-do techniques.

My complaint with this situation isn’t that I don’t like to change my daughter in public, but that when we, as a society, don’t make a minimum effort to support parents and children in these most basic ways, we send them a message that they aren’t important.  When we don’t give children a place where they can take care of their bodily functions in a sane and rational manner we say to them, in effect, “This is an adult bathroom.  There are no facilities here for you children.  You aren’t people yet, and therefore don’t deserve our consideration.  Just make do.”

PHYSICAL HANDICAPS

Alison Lattimore-Horridge writes from Australia:

An added dimension of homeschooling for us is that our son Tor, nearly 2, is moderately visually impaired.  Born with cataracts, his mid- and distance-vision is expected always to be poor.  We are hoping he will be able to read ordinary or large print after the cataracts are removed, but reading will probably never be for him the joy and endless pastime that it is for the rest of us.  We are challenged to develop our family so that he can fit comfortably with us; gone are my hopes of taking up bird-watching but we read aloud, act, and are becoming more musical.  I suspect Tor will need extra encouragement if he is to achieve a balance of skills (though I wonder what price society and individuals pay for balance, and to what extent it is necessary).  We were encouraged yesterday, visiting an exhibition of aids for the visually impaired, to see sophisticated computer equipment aimed at making print more accessible.

I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has a similar homeschooling challenge.

And from Dawn McNamara of Massachusetts:

GWS has always been packed full of information and positive energy, so I thought I’d write to get some thoughts on our particular situation.  We have three children, 6 1/2, 2 1/2, and 6 months.  We chose to homeschool the 6 year old, Tyler, when he was 2, and now, with two more children in the picture, we are still very much planning to keep them all home.

The catch is our 2 1/2 year old, Ross, has a seizure disorder that’s been uncontrolled.  He’s been on every seizure drug available since he was 2 months old (he’s currently on an experimental drug).  We’ve tried homeopathy, as well as many neurologists, and still we continue with an average of four or five seizures each day.

Ross has had REACH (an early-intervention program) workers helping since he was 6 months old, and developmentally he has been “on target” in every way except motor control and a slight right-sided paralysis.  The REACH program has its pros and cons, but basically we’re pleased with it.   The program ends for Ross on his third birthday, and then the town takes on its responsibility (there’s a side-by-side program here for Special Needs preschoolers.)  I have many reservations about sending Ross off for three hours a day, three days a week at 3 years old, yet he does need extra therapy.  I could possibly do the therapy myself if I had some instruction.

I feel quite drained at the prospect of having to fight for what is right for Ross and for our philosophy of education as well.  I need some advice and support.

RECOVERING FROM SCHOOL
Some Excerpts from the booklet How To Begin Homeschooling that GWS reader Judy Garvey has written (the complete booklet is available from Judy at RR 1 Box 105, Blue Hill ME 04614):

. . . Homeschooling is so much easier than having to deal with children who have been in school all day.  My kids used to come home to me tired, often angry, generally feeling incompetent, always comparing themselves to other children, worried and resentful about the evening’s homework, and frustrated about not being able to do the things they really wanted to be doing during their evening “free” time.  I used to feel that I was holding them together with some kind of “Mother’s glue,” constantly patching them up where they had broken a bit during the day at school.  Every evening I would sit with Matthew and do homework.  Many times he would do it by himself, but he needed the emotional support of someone nearby him to help him tolerate the task.  Just as often he had to have me explain it because he didn’t understand it, or actually help him finish it because he was too tired or frustrated.  So, besides encroaching on Matthew’s free time, school was also dictating how Jim and I would spend our evenings with the children.

. . . Recently Matthew talked to one of his former classmates who said she would like to quit school too, but that she is afraid she would miss her friends too much.  Matthew said to me later, “That’s the way I used to think too, but I was wrong.  I really like my friends in school, but it’s better being home.  I really didn’t know how it would feel before.”  If anyone was ever afraid of leaving his friends it was Matthew.  Like many children, seeing friends was the only real reason he wanted to go to school.  He really wrestled with the idea of homeschooling for quite some time before he was finally secure in choosing it.  We let him make the decision though we did try to show him the high price he was paying for the very limited social interaction he got at school.  His boredom in the classroom and dissatisfaction and hurt from the disciplinary measures finally got painful enough that he decided to leave school.  Even then, he still couldn’t see how much he would like his freedom until he was out of school . . .  Now Matthew can’t believe how long he stayed in school.

. . . If your children have attended schools before beginning homeschooling, be prepared for a “flushing out” period as they go through times of anger, exhaustion, bitterness, or generally uncooperative behavior.  With both of our boys there was an initial period of just plain happiness and relief and an involvement with projects that had been on the back shelf for a long time.  Then for Daniel there came a time of anger and lack of interest in anything.  This too passed, but it was unpleasant to see the effects of what had happened to him in school.  We came to see this behavior as the flushing out of everything negative he had experienced in school . . .

Matthew didn’t show his bottled-up feelings in the same way.  He actually became physically ill - sick to his stomach.  It seemed that each time he threw up he was getting rid of some bad moments.  He is more volatile, and less simmering by nature than his brother . . .  When I was talking about this to a friend one day, she told me about similar conclusions drawn by A. S. Neill in his best-selling Summerhill.  The staff at the now-famous Summerhill School in England found that kids who came to them after being in a traditional school had a period of flushing out like what we observed in both our boys . . .  I found it helpful just to back off from too many demands during this time, and especially not to push any academic practice.  They would practically snarl at me sometimes if I suggested activities that sounded like school subjects.  Matthew nearly became ill at the sight of anything resembling school work for a long time after he left school.  We simply went on about our everyday business when the gloomy moods hit, and didn’t give up . . .

Our children seem to be past the worst of this now, though we still see traces of it from time to time.  They are branching out in many directions and are rarely down in the dumps . . .

TESTING IN FRANCE

Julie Stiller writes from France:

I absolutely must comment on standardized testing.  Please, please, please continue to fight against it.  While there are many wonderful things about living in France, the French addiction to standardized and psychological testing is inhuman.  Their system of having to pass a master test (the baccalaureate) at age 18 wreaks havoc on their young people.  The incidence of suicide is high, the despair of the young who cannot pass a “bac” of high enough difficulty (there are bacs A, B, C, D, etc.) or even pass at all is profound.  That the system is completely inflexible is cruel and causes a great loss of human potential to French society.  If you cannot pass the “bac,” you cannot get a decent job, and even if you pass, but don’t pass the right one, you will never have another chance to enter higher educational institutions, never have another chance to change professions or to get another diploma in another area of study.  I have talked to students whose lives are “over” at 18, and, more poignantly, I’ve talked to parents who are bitter and despairing for their children.

We adults would never stand for constant testing of our work, so we shouldn’t inflict it on our children.  It only shows them that the system is cruel, and doesn’t teach them anything meaningful.  Intellect should not be bound by the narrow limits of standardized tests and human lives should not be ruined because of a piece of paper.

SHOULD WE INTERVENE IN CHILDREN’S FIGHTS?

Nancy Wallace (NY) writes:

Jan Hunt asked in GWS #69, “Why should it be easier to intervene in the mistreatment of a pet dog than in that of a child?”  She was referring, I think, to adult mistreatment of children, but what about children’s mistreatment of each other?  I wonder why it is so hard for us to justify intervening when children fight.

The other day several neighbors with small children were having a picnic in the park across the street from our house.  While the grown-ups sat eating and talking at the far end of the park, a little boy - little but tough - knocked one of my little friends, Seth, to the ground, and began pummeling him with a stick.  I suppose it was all child’s play, as they say, but in fact there was something very determined about it.  Seth didn’t cry out, however, and so I wasn’t sure I should interfere.  Just as my resolve was weakening and I was about to run over to his aid, Seth’s 2 1/2-year-old sister Sarah arrived, carrying a big ball.  Heroically she took aim at the little brute, with every intention of saving her brother, but the brute was too quick.  He leapt up, knocked the ball out of Sarah’s arms, and knocked her down as well.  She bounced back up and ran for the ball, still fully intent on liberating Seth.  The drama went on this way, with me continually tempted to run over, only to hesitate as once again Sarah performed another act of bravery.  Finally, the boy lost interest in Seth and Sarah and wandered off.  I was left wondering if any of the adults had noticed what had gone on and if so, what they thought.  I know that I felt disgusted with myself for simply standing there while Seth and Sarah were beaten up, but I was genuinely confused about what I thought, or ought to be thinking.

The amazing thing about this scene, you see, was not only that baby Sarah was brave and loyal, but that this was the first time I had ever seen her out of her mother’s arms of her own accord.  She had been born three months prematurely and had weighed just about a pound at birth.  Her mother had stayed with her for the three months that she had been in the hospital, had breastfed her when she was big and strong enough to suckle, and had then carried her around everywhere.  Sarah didn’t learn to walk until she was 2, and even when she could venture out on her own, she didn’t.  If I had interfered in this scene, I thought to myself, Sarah would never have had the opportunity to show such independence.  I would have deprived her of the job that she, out of love and loyalty, had at least tried to do by herself.

The next day, on my way to the store, I met Sarah and her mother, Sarah again sitting comfortably in her mother’s arms.  Assuming, I guess, that Sarah’s mother had made the decision to let her children “work things out” as the other boy went about trying to massacre them, I said pleasantly (and honestly), “Wasn’t Sarah a little heroine yesterday, taking on that tough kid with only a ball?”  Instead of agreeing with me and beaming proudly at Sarah, her mother said, “I never know when to interfere.”  ”Yes,” I surprised myself by saying, “Isn’t it strange the way we put people down for intervening when children fight on the playground, and yet we think it’s terrible when no one runs to the aid of a person being mugged on the street?  Why do we treat children so differently from the way we, ourselves, would expect to be treated in violent situations?”

I surprised myself because I hadn’t thought of it that way until I said it.  But it’s true.  Sarah will have plenty of opportunities in her life to show independence, loyalty, and bravery.  She didn’t need me to stand back and create the opportunity for her then.

SUPPORT GROUPS AND COMMUNITIES

VERMONT NEIGHBORHOOD

Debbie Kniffin of Vermont writes:

In reference to the discussion of finding community in recent issues of GWS:  In our search for homeschooling support and interaction for the children, we checked out the GWS Directory years ago and noticed many homeschooling families listed in one small town in Vermont (a rarity, at least several years ago).  We visited the area, met the families, and decided to move there.  Now we get together with the other homeschoolers, sometimes regularly, sometimes periodically - often we swap children or all take field trips together.  For me the most important thing is the readily available support, advice, ideas, pooling of resources, and the fact that other homeschooling parents care about our children and spend time with them.

We all have a great relationship with the local school and often join them during special days or for presentations.  In return, our homeschooling puppet club performs for the school.  The school looks at us as great resources and accepts us readily.  In our town of 500, with about 75 elementary school children, we number 7 homeschoolers (aged 5-13) - not a bad proportion.  A friend of our daughter’s noticed new neighbor boys on our road, and when I asked if they went to school with her, she replied, “No, they must be homeschoolers,” as if it was the normal thing to do.  We’re so fortunate!  (Actually, the boys just moved here and continued going to school a couple of towns away.)

HOMESCHOOL CO-OP

Caren Furer (CA) writes:

We are members of a homeschool co-op of seven families.  Each family is at this point responsible for all of its own academics.  We meet two days a week:  one day is a “school” day when there is a planned activity.  Some of these have been:  working with a poet, learning knitting from a Waldorf teacher, and exploring clay with a local ceramist.  These activities are so wonderful, and the kids really enjoy them.

The other day we meet is usually a field trip and/or picnic day.  We visit local places of interest or just go to the beach and play.

HOMESCHOOLING AN ONLY CHILD

ARE WE DEPRIVING HER?

Cecily Stern of Alaska writes:

We would appreciate some input from members of only child homeschooling families.  My husband and I are very happy with our choice to have a single child, but it raises questions about homeschooling that we must answer soon.  Caitlin will be 5 just in time to enter kindergarten next September, and we must decide what to do before then.

Interactions with other people have always been very important to Caitlin.  Even as a baby she was far more interested in playing with someone her own age than many babies are.  Friendships and social situations supersede anything else for her; the activities she most enjoys are enhanced for her when shared with a friend, even being read to (one of her very favorite occupations).

We live thirty minutes’ drive outside of a small town in Alaska, and can be quite isolated in the winter.  There is no such thing as a neighbor or neighborhood here; it is a wilderness lifestyle with no telephone or easy contact with others.  There are no children within walking distance, and few within close visiting distance.

We earn our living as commercial salmon fishers, gilnetting in the beautiful coastal waters near our home.  Actually, this sounds much more united an effort than it has been.  I used to skipper the boat while my husband, Mark, worked another job.  I delighted in the adventure and challenge of the work and continued until I was forced to quit in my eighth month of pregnancy.  Mark has fished the boat ever since.  The all-engaging, round-the-clock hard work, rough weather, and tough conditions of working a fishing boat are no place for a very young child.  It has always been our dream to fish together, however, and now that Caitlin is 4 1/2, we are going to give it a real try.

Caitlin has enjoyed all but one of the school experiences we have carefully selected for her to date, and we removed her from that one immediately when it became apparent that it was not a good environment for her.  She has attended various schools on a very part-time basis and has always done a lot of her learning at home with us.  But she loves to be with other children, school has always been a positive experience for her, and my prediction is that she would probably love the local kindergarten where one of the teachers is already a friend to her, her close friends will attend, and there are wonderful toys and equipment and group activities that are unavailable at home.

An additional consideration is that I am a writer, and am very serious about this occupation.  I became an author when Harper and Row published my first novel, and have written another novel since then which needs revision before it can find a publisher.  I’ve been too busy being an active mother, gardener, fishing support crew, and just living everyday life fully to work at my writing for quite some time.  I don’t at all feel that my creative energies are being wasted, but I do need to fulfill that part of myself that is only satisfied by this intense and solitary activity.  I simply cannot work seriously on a novel unless I am alone for a couple of consecutive hours at least two or three times a week.

Unfortunately, there are no other homeschoolers very near to us here, and no support group available.  The nearest homeschooling family is that of an only child who, after one year of homeschooling, is reentering school next year because he is lonely and misses his friends.  The other homeschooling families I know of in this area are both families with several children.  The siblings are clearly each other’s best friends, need no other playmates, and have very few.

Mark and I feel very comfortable about making the decision to homeschool Caitlin, and though she’s intrigued by the local kindergarten she’s amenable to staying home since we’ve always had so much fun together.  We’ve done wonderful projects together, gone on exploring expeditions, and had great family times.  We’ve also done some extensive traveling during which we were each other’s only constant and best company.  I’ve read all the homeschooling books I’ve been able to discover, as well as many other related books about children, learning, and schools.  I am quite convinced that growing without schooling would be the best thing for Caitlin in many important ways, and find that I am quite challenged by the idea of taking on this creative and engaging process with her.

I agree with many GWS writers about the negative interactions often present in school playground situations, but think that Caitlin may be one of those lucky children for whom school is a happy place socially.  She has grown from babyhood, playgroups, preschool, etc. with more or less the same children, and has a few solid friendships, including one best-friend relationship, already.  These children will all be going to school and I fear that Caitlin, in being homeschooled, will somehow be left behind by them socially.  I think my need for writing time, the need that both Mark and I feel (that Caitlin seems not to, yet) for time alone, and many other problems raised by homeschooling can be worked out.  I just don’t want to deprive my happy daughter of the companionship she needs and enjoys so much.

There are only two answers I’ve been able to find so far.  The first is getting Caitlin together with her friends after school and on weekends as much as possible.  This is problematic in the winter since our hours of daylight are so very short that children go to and return from school in darkness.  Driving conditions are difficult.  Also, several of these children are from working families whose weekends are their only family time, and I’m not sure how available these children are for socializing with peers then.

The other opportunity I see for Caitlin is socializing with adults.  She already has several different adult friends and teachers, and we will continue to involve in her life as many of the wonderful, talented people of this place as we can.  Through formally paying for sessions with people who have a passion for a particular thing, and by simply involving Caitlin in our adult activities and relationships, we can continue to make this world available to her.  But when, and with whom, will she play the group children’s games she loves:  Farmer in the Dell, Duck Duck Goose, etc.?  And how will she meet new children to befriend, living the relatively isolated life we do?

We’d particularly like to hear from only children who are being homeschooled.  Are you lonely?  Do you feel left out of the fun children have together in groups?  How do you find friends?

We are relatively certain that we will decide to homeschool Caitlin next fall, but it would help to have some of our concerns addressed, some of our questions answered.

RESPONSES AND SUGGESTIONS

We asked a couple of other homeschoolers with only children to respond to Cecily’s letter.  For more letters on the subject, see GWS #53.

First, from Jan Hunt:

I wrote a similar letter to GWS when our son Jason, now 8, was 4.  I was feeling overwhelmed by his delightful but incessant comments and questions and wondered how (without resorting to schools) I would ever have any time to myself.  A homeschooling friend whose only child was then 7 assured me that I was actually nearing the end of the “no free time for Mom” period.  Now I can assure you that 4 is the last stretch of that era.  Now that Jason is 8, I have lots of time for myself.  (I almost said “enough” time - but there was never enough time before he was born!) These days I sometimes stop what I’m doing to seek him out.

I know it’s difficult for mothers who haven’t experienced any age past 4 to believe that things will ever change.  How unfortunate that schools enter the picture at this particular time when mothers are most tempted to use such readily available substitute help.  So, in terms of your need for personal time, I’d say:  be patient, things will change soon.  In the meantime, you might try my solution:  I hired a wonderful teenager to play with Jason while I was also at home, working on my own projects.  I was lucky - she was homeschooling and available during the day.  But you could try this solution at other times, if necessary.

Whenever I hear a parent considering school for the reason of socialization - even a parent in your situation - my first thought is, “What socialization?”  The only good socialization I remember from my school days took place outside of school, after school hours, on weekends, and in the summer.  Going to school for the tiny amount of socialization it provides is like going to a bad movie for all that socialization at the popcorn counter.  School is a very inefficient way to find real friendship.

I think, too, that something should be said (because so little is ever said) about the importance of learning to spend time comfortably with oneself.  There are many adults who have never learned to do that, who are lonely and uneasy when alone.  The capacity to get along with oneself, to enjoy those times as well as the social times, to make wise choices about the use of solitary times - these too are important aspects of maturity which I believe our society undervalues.

When I asked Jason if he felt lonely, he replied “No!” most emphatically.  When I asked if he “felt left out of the fun children have together in groups,” he said, “No, because I like being with two or three friends.”  The question, “How do you find friends?” baffled him, probably because he has found his closest friends through my friends in La Leche League, homeschooling, and children’s rights groups.  He has always found these children more compatible than the neighborhood children, and I too have found them more fun to have around.

As a way to meet like-minded people, could you advertise homeschooling get-togethers?  My experience with this has been that even a very small group of homeschooling families will attract others - and even create others.

It’s important to recognize that a decision to homeschool does not need to be seen as a permanent commitment.  If you try homeschooling and later decide not to continue, Caitlin would probably - like most homeschooled children - still be at the same (if not higher) level of achievement as her friends, so she could enter into their grade.

It might be helpful to analyze more deeply your fear that Caitlin’s friends will exclude her in the future if she doesn’t accompany them to school.  Although this is a valid fear, the truth it represents is (I think) not so much the reduction of time they will spend with her, but the kind of socialization that takes place in school, which encourages cliques and rejection of outsiders.  It might be helpful to reread John Holt’s statements on socialization in Teach Your Own; his conclusions have certainly met the test of time for us.

The Alaska weather does seem to present special problems, but I would think that the short days should be spent outdoors to get what little natural light you can; when would Caitlin get this essential light if she were inside a classroom all day?

You seem to be doing a terrific job so far despite the isolation.  I think it is especially commendable and significant that Caitlin has been able to make friends of all ages, which is almost impossible when a child spends most of her waking hours with age-peers.  I think you should continue the good work!

From Laura Pritchard (NM):

I just looked back at what I wrote about homeschooling an only child in GWS #53.  It’s several years later, and yet many of the points still hold true.  The advantages remain.

Socialization improved while we were living in Oregon the past couple of years.  The support group I ran flourished and gave Daniel several good friends.  I took an office job (2 days a week) and during that time Daniel stayed with a friend of mine who owned a business.  He kept himself occupied during school hours, and then played with the neighborhood kids once they were home. With one boy, we established a regular routine of the kids sleeping over at each other’s houses. Daniel seemed to enjoy the amount of time he had alone without ever complaining of being lonely.

The older he’s gotten, the easier it’s become for me to be involved in my own projects.  In addition, he’s more likely to get involved in a task along with me when four hands are better than two.

This past year we left Oregon, returned to Connecticut (where we’re originally from) briefly, then relocated to New Mexico.  Here, we live in a town of about two hundred people.  We’re sixty miles from grocery stores, etc.  We’ve started a small local homeschooling group,  but no one in it is Daniel’s age.  I’m looking for other families within traveling distance, so we can branch out and create an extended family once again.

Looking back over the years, I’d say the variety of living arrangements has been a plus.  Daniel’s been exposed to different lifestyles and has grown because of it.  He knows how to occupy himself and enjoys his own company.  He makes friends easily and enjoys adults.  When I asked him the questions Cecily asked in her letter, he said no, he doesn’t feel lonely, and no, he would not rather have been in school.  About missing out on siblings to play with, he said, “I don’t see where it would have made much difference except you (Mom) would have had less time to spend with me.”

The thing that has helped a lot over the years is that I’ve reached out to others to find friends for Daniel.  Also, I’ve shown by example that I enjoy being with Daniel and therefore other people will too, if he just gives them a chance to know him.

To speak to Cecily directly:  Try homeschooling and keep an open mind.  Watch your daughter.  You’ll see when the isolation is a positive factor and when it isn’t.  If a problem arises, be creative and look for solutions.  As you settle into a homeschooling routine, you may find that Caitlin doesn’t want or need other children as much as you thought.

As for your writing career, it can be done while homeschooling.  It might not be a regular schedule of the same time every day, but if it’s a priority in your life you can arrange it.  I found that straightening the house at night gave me “alone time” with Daniel in the morning.  With that time block set aside as his, Daniel could keep himself busy for a couple of hours in the afternoon.  Once he was in bed at night, I could set aside a little more time for myself.

And from Peggy Roberts (MA):

My first response to Cecily Stern’s letter was envy.  How fantastic it sounds to be living in such a wild and beautiful place.  What a perfect setting for raising a child - fishing, writing, living without a phone.  But of course I can appreciate her concerns.  Even in our semi-rural area here, where we have neighbors and a large town ten miles away, I worried at first that we were depriving Emma of her community by taking her out of school.  She too has always been very sociable, very attached to her friends.  Although she knew that she did not want to be in school, there were days in those first winters after we took her out of school (she was 8 then) when she was lonely and bored, and longed for a group of friends at 10 o’clock in the morning.  But always those days passed and she came to see that particular kind of loneliness more as frustration that her friends had limited time to play.  As she said, “It’s not that I want to be in school, it’s just that I want everyone else out here with me.”

That’s been a good way for us to look at her needs.  We are committed to being “out here,” free to choose what we’re going to learn, where we’re going today, what exactly we’re going to do.  Emma is 13 now, and knows what that freedom means on a daily basis for her:  lying in bed to read, working at the food co-op, practicing dance whenever she feels like it, being alone with no pressure to be like anyone else.  To her that’s more important than anything, and if the short days of February are a little bleak and lonely sometimes, well, that’s how they are for a lot of people anyway and school won’t make a difference.

Because friends have always been important to Emma, we have made a special effort to get her to them and them to her.  It’s hard to remember, but at first that probably meant driving back and forth to their houses after school and on weekends, as Cecily suggests.  Eventually, she found a group of homeschool friends to get together with during the days.  Her best friend now does go to school, but they see each other every week and share similar activities - dance and theater.

For the past three or four years Emma has been very active in community theater, auditioning, taking classes, performing.  As long as she’s planning for or participating in a theater or dance production, she’s happy with her whole life.  This is an enormously rewarding social experience, not to mention educational, creative, fun, etc.  And so I have almost stopped thinking about what more we should do for her.  Once again we have learned that by letting her follow her own interests she can meet her own needs.

Of course, I had no way of foreseeing this when Emma was 8, and I did worry, like Cecily, that Emma’s life as a single child at home would be too empty.  She is old enough to laugh at me for that now.  She has grown to relish her solitude, the privacy of her room, and the time she has to play around on her own, just as much as she loves being with her friends.

[SS:] I hope these letters will reassure Cecily (and other parents of only children) that homeschooling is indeed viable with only one child, and can have its own set of advantages.  I was an only child, too, and can second Jan Hunt’s comment about the value of knowing how to enjoy being alone - and it isn’t as if being resourceful in solitude means being at a loss with other people.  We can - indeed, ought to - be good at both.

WATCHING CHILDREN LEARN

UNDERSTANDING CONCEPTS

A reader writes:

The Focus in GWS #67 on making connections and discoveries reminded me of a couple of instances with my daughter Marci (9).  I have never questioned her ability to understand concepts that have been carefully explained to her.  But it was a startling and refreshing discovery for me when she indicated to me with something she said that she thought a half moon meant there was only half of the moon up in the sky.  Many times over the years she has had explained to her the concept of the earth passing in front of the sun, causing a shadow on the moon.  She has even used fruit to show the phenomenon.  But when she made that statement I realized that just because she repeats something that she has been taught, it doesn’t mean she understands it.

Another example was when I was reading a simple science book to her and her 5-year-old sister.  One item explained that years ago people believed the earth was flat, so that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge.  Now, my daughter knows the earth is round, but she insisted that if you sailed far enough you would still sail straight off the edge.  At first I couldn’t understand what she meant.  I kept explaining that because of gravity you would stay on and sail around but still feel like you were sailing straight.  She still insisted that it must be possible to sail straight off.

Finally I understood that in her mind she could see a round ball and someone sailing straight off it.  I explained to her that if it were possible to sail straight off you would have to do it with enough force and speed to break through the force of gravity like a spaceship.  She seemed to understand, but who knows?

[SS:] Only when we understand the pictures that other people have in their minds - the mental model they have made of a particular part of the world - can we even begin to think about explaining things to them.  And understanding other people’s mental models is not always easy, particularly if, like many young children, they lack the words to describe them.

JOINING THE BLUEGRASS COMMUNITY

From Elizabeth Hamill (CA):

We had always told Harrison that when he turned 7, he could choose any musical instrument he wanted, and he and I would learn to play it together.  In spite of a background leaning heavily toward classical music, Harrison turned to me one day shortly after his seventh birthday and announced that he wanted a banjo.  He had this look in his eyes which I can’t really describe, but if you ever see such a look on your child’s face you’ll understand why I went out and immediately bought a banjo.  It turned out to be one of the best things I ever did.

Two years later, I am really, really glad we chose the bluegrass banjo.  It’s a loud, fast, rowdy, show-offy instrument, which gives a kid a chance to be loud, fast, rowdy, and show-offy without damaging any persons or property.  It’s a friendly, humorous, outgoing, exuberant, and slightly defiant instrument - perfectly suited to Harrison’s personality.

It’s usually played in settings that are accessible and friendly to children.  Bluegrass festivals and “picking parties” are usually held outdoors, in beautiful natural settings, where younger siblings can run around and play without bothering anyone.  Winter and nighttime events are more likely to be held in pizza parlors than in bars, and families with children are almost always made to feel welcome.

Bluegrass encourages people to be participants rather than just spectators.  Every festival has many jam sessions going on in addition to the stage performances, and talented long-time pickers are real nice about encouraging beginners (especially kids) to join in the jams.  This is an ideal way to learn about music, and a great way to live, in general.  Even though the kids are made to feel welcome, bluegrass events are not usually designed especially for children.  So it becomes a matter of the kids joining the grown-ups in a grown-up activity, when they are ready.  They aren’t cloistered off by themselves to play “children’s music” with a group of other children.

We’ve found, in bluegrass people, a wonderful new community to feel part of.  We’ve made lots of great new friends, especially the Thiles, whom we met through GWS and corresponded with for several months before getting together at a festival this summer.  Wow, did Harrison and their son Chris ever hit it off.  Chris is a remarkably talented mandolin player, and those two kids were unstoppable.  They were making music all over the place, and were the talk of the festival.

Another advantage of bluegrass is that the heroes are so accessible.  While the neighborhood kids can only dream about someday meeting their sports or movie or rock star heroes, Harrison has not only met many of his banjo heroes, he has made good friends with them.  He’s played together with a lot of them (sometimes on stage!) and he writes letters to several who live far away.  They’ve been wonderfully encouraging and inspiring.

I think Harrison likes it that there aren’t very many other kids his age who play the banjo, so he doesn’t have to be compared or feel competitive.  But at the same time, when he does meet another kid banjo player, there is an instant affinity and bond between them.  Also, playing the banjo has given Harrison the self-confidence to try other things that look difficult, like typing or juggling or catching pop flies.  Sometimes it’s not enough to understand intellectually that practice makes perfect.  You have to know it first-hand.

I told Harrison from the start that I would learn the banjo along with him, but I imagined that it would only be for the first few months, until he got the knack of it on his own.  But two years later, here I am, still plugging away at it.  I’m not as good as Harrison, but I love it all the same.  And now Finnegan, who just turned 7, is taking lessons from the same wonderful teacher that Harrison chose.  We’re all having a great time whooping it up together.

CHOOSING THE VIOLIN

A reader writes:

About two years ago, my son Allen announced that he wanted to learn to play the violin.  I was dead set against it.  I explained to him that I didn’t know a thing about the violin, and that we couldn’t afford lessons.  I happened to have a very cheap half-size violin lying around, so I gave him that.  Well, he found a woman who was willing to teach him for free, and all I had to do was provide transportation.  I didn’t even feel I could do that, because with seven kids, you don’t feel it is fair to take one to lessons and not the others, and if you don’t have them all doing the same thing, it becomes impossible.  But I went ahead.

He got only about four lessons from that woman, over several months, but he went off by himself and worked on it, and when she moved away she got the best violin teacher in town interested in him.  She told this teacher that Allen had taught himself to read music (which is true) and that if you told Allen anything once, he knew it.  This man worked out a barter with Allen:  Allen is cataloging his records in exchange for the lessons the man is giving him.  Allen has been studying with him for nine months now and is already working on violin concertos - in perfect tune, with expression, memorizing the music, and with a vibrato he figured out himself.

Allen has chosen to be a professional violinist.  I have been so intrigued with this whole thing that now I am starting to learn the violin in my spare time.  It is fascinating!  So if it happens that you have a child who figures out what he wants to do in life, and develops a passion, be sure to let him do it!  I don’t need to tell the GWS readership that, but it is such a shame that so many parents and schools never give children the space they need to figure out what they want to do in life.  This is partly due to the fact that school keeps kids so busy they don’t have time to think about it, and partly due to the belief that children should have a “well-rounded” education, which, of course, means nothing, because children will not retain what they have learned against their will.

SCHOOL VS. HOMESCHOOL

Adria Spagnolo of Washington writes:

I used to go to school and am now a homeschooler.  I went to school for six years, preschool through third grade.  I have been homeschooling for seven months.

In school, I liked math, spelling, PE, and recess.  I liked lunch the best because I got to talk with my friends for an hour.  In school I sat and listened to the teacher for half an hour before I could do the work.  Now at home my mom explains what to do in a much shorter time, or I learn to do it myself.

In reading in school I would have to read the reader, work in the workbook, and take the tests.  But now at home I always read what I want to read.  I am a volunteer worker at the local library so I find many new books to read.  I read so many books that I am good at my English and spelling.  In school, teachers don’t allow children to read what they want.

I think homeschooling is better because you can learn what you’re interested in, while at school you learn what everybody else learns.  You have no choice about the subjects you learn.

And from Adria’s sister, Nicora Spagnolo:

At school it seems like they were trying to teach me things I already knew.  Kids at school don’t really like to read because they are not allowed to read what they want.  When I was in third grade, every morning at 8:30 we had reading for an hour.  We usually did about five or six worksheets and then read a story.  At home, reading is reading.  We just read our books.

In math, we learn one thing and then go on to the next.  When I was in school I had to do it over and over again.

It took my mom a long time to decide to homeschool.  I hope that this letter will make a difference in the time that it takes other parents to come to a decision.

HELPING EACH OTHER WITH WRITING

[SS:] At the MARYLAND HOME EDUCATION ASSOCIATION conference in April I led a writing workshop for a few children, most of whom were between 8 and 10.  Usually at such workshops I focus on the writing that the children do right there, during the session, but this time I asked the children if they had any questions that they would like to ask each other about long-term writing projects that they were involved in at home.  I said that perhaps they were facing specific challenges in the course of working on something and would like to ask others for suggestions while they had the chance.

One girl volunteered immediately, saying that she was working on a play and was having trouble beginning it.  She knew what she wanted it to be about, she said, but she didn’t know how to write the opening scene.

“I think you should start with the scene that you’re thinking of,” another child suggested.  ”Write the one that made you think of the play, and then you can go back and do the beginning later.  That’s what I do when I’m stuck like that.”

A couple of the others followed this example and asked for the advice and opinion of the group. After a while we went back to the writing exercises that we had been doing.  I thought about how helpful the children had just been to each other.  They hadn’t met before the day of the conference, and most of them had had no previous experience discussing or reading their writing in a group.  These children suggested to me that we don’t necessarily need a lot of experience with cooperation and group process to be good at it.

I don’t doubt that if these children and I were to meet regularly over a longer period of time we would develop a stronger sense of ourselves as a group and become better at helping each other.  I’ve seen that happen in other workshops, and time and familiarity do make a difference.  And yet these children were already, during a single meeting of relative strangers, giving each other the kind of useful suggestions that we read about teachers of writing (or anything else) working so hard to encourage their students to give.

I think these children were such helpful workshop members because their sense of and trust in their own work was so strong.  They were able to talk about how they had handled a particular situation (not knowing how to begin something) because no one had ever suggested that there was anything wrong with their way of working or that they didn’t know enough to advise someone else.  No one, for that matter, had ever suggested that being stuck, not knowing how to begin, was anything to be ashamed of.  It was hard, sure, and frustrating, but it didn’t mean you couldn’t ask someone about it or tell someone what you had done in such a situation.

If these children liked the experience of getting others’ ideas and suggestions in a workshop, they may look for it again.  Strong in their individual work, they will know how to use a group, how to get from it what they want and how to offer others the help they may ask for.

LEARNING FROM SOUP KITCHEN

More from Elizabeth Hamill:

A few weeks ago we were at a campout organized by local bluegrass musicians and fans. Someone had brought an ice cream maker, and a dozen or so kids had lined up to take turns cranking it.  I was busy playing my banjo with another adult beginner so I didn’t really pay attention to the dynamics of this endeavor, other than to be aware of general high spirits, jostling, and laughter.

After the ice cream was served, one of the mothers who had been helping supervise came over and asked me if the boy with the red hair was my son.  I admitted that he was, and she asked if it was true that he was only 7.  She went on to say that she works as a teacher’s aide, and that she has two sons of her own near that age, and that she had never before seen a kid so effective at “line control.”  Apparently some of the bigger kids had started shoving and cutting in front of the younger kids, and Finnegan had somehow managed to keep things going smoothly without a grown-up’s intervention.  The mother told me it was amazing that such a young kid could manage this “so gently and with a sense of humor,” especially since he didn’t know most of the bigger kids.

I was pleased and proud, of course, but also a little surprised.  Most of our “line standing” experiences tend to be very civilized, if boring - at the grocery store, the library, the movies.  I had no idea where Finnegan could have picked up these “line control” skills.  But then the next Tuesday we went to work at the neighborhood soup kitchen where we have been fixing and serving breakfast for homeless people for two years now.  I realized that Finn must see all kinds of this stuff going on when forty or fifty tired, hungry, and often very angry homeless people line up for breakfast.  They have to regulate themselves gently and buffer it with a sense of humor, because the stakes are pretty high if somebody “flips out.”  And they have to police themselves, because the volunteers working there - three women, two kids, and three retired people - aren’t able to do it for them.  In fact, we haven’t had a violent incident yet in spite of a few close calls, which were effectively taken care of by the guests themselves before they blew up.  Anyway, there was Finnegan, serving toast, smiling, saying good morning to each guest, and watching every move that went on in the line snaking towards him.  Chalk up one more for the real world.

SIBLINGS WORKING TOGETHER

A reader writes:

We have seven children, so socialization is not a problem.  For several years, the kids didn’t really have outside friends.  Then gradually, over time, we developed friendships with a few select families.  The families all live way across town, so occasionally we all get together, but mostly the kids talk over the phone.  One family we see fairly often tried homeschooling for a while and decided they didn’t like it.  But they think it’s fine for us to do it, and we have a very good time together.

The kids hit on the idea of making tapes of the ghost stories they were telling each other.  They looked all over for appropriate sound effects to incorporate into the tapes.  One of the results of this is that they are writing wonderful stories.  The younger kids were dictating to the older ones, but the older ones got tired of it, so now one of the younger ones decided to type on his own, and an older sister corrects his spelling.  A neighbor who is a writer recently agreed to critique these stories, and we are anxious to hear what she has to say about them.

Recently the kids all decided to make crafts and sell them, to earn money for college.  One thing they want to do is make pottery.  Since we have a wheel but no kiln, we had to figure out how to work it, but they already had a solution.  A lady they met has a kiln but no wheel, and she had already asked if we could work a trade.  So they called her, and she was thrilled.  The only catch was that our wheel is in our barn, and our barn was a shambles.  So without me even realizing what was happening, they decided to clean up the barn.  They did a total job.  The only thing I had to do was take the stuff they boxed up to the house in my car.

My kids don’t fight much.  If they do, I tell them that they have to learn to work out their own squabbles.  I don’t intervene unless it seems really serious.  One time recently they came to me with a dispute, and since I have been studying law on my own I sat like a judge in a courtroom.  The decision I handed down pleased neither side.  But I enforced it, and explained that when you have to take your dispute to an outsider, most of the time you won’t like the solution, so it works better if you can work it out on your own.

ARITHMETIC GAME

Ellen Shipley (CA) writes:

Billy (6) and I play our own game with numbers which he has named “Three friends over to visit.”  I originally used it to illustrate negative numbers, or the concept of being “in the hole.”  Now we use it more broadly, taking turns giving each other problems to solve.  It goes something like this:

“You have three friends over to visit and you all decide to have a snack.  Mommy bakes you cookies and gives you a plate with ten cookies on it.  You all want the same number of cookies, so how many cookies does Mommy owe you?”  The answer Billy comes up with, after mentally handing out cookies and coming up short, is 2.

Sometimes he adds, sometimes he subtracts, sometimes he remembers his fours-tables and multiplies.  A happy array of pathways to the answer, all exciting.  Billy loves number-crunching.  And the problems he gives me are just as complicated.  He doesn’t know it, but he’s helping me overcome my own math anxiety.

SELF-DIRECTED 4 YEAR OLD

Karen Raskin-Young (CA) writes:

In response to Barbara Nelson’s letter about pursuing her own interests (”Children Become Interested,” GWS #68):  I had a similar experience with my 4 1/2-year-old son who in the last two or three months has become independent enough to play and create on his own in the way I had always hoped he would.  Suddenly he’s inventing a constant stream of new games, reading books on his own (fourteen one memorable day) and, as he says, “doing math frantically.”  Probably he just got ready.  But also it’s only been recently that I’ve been claiming parts of the day for myself.  For six months I have been avidly playing classical piano, and loving it for the first time ever.  I’ve also been pursuing my writing more actively.  Now quite often Jeremy is too busy with some pursuit of his own to be interested in anything I can do for him.  So don’t be afraid to be less available; it didn’t work for us right away, but now Jeremy’s gone to town!

LIVING WITH 2 YEAR OLD

Michael Duggan (MO) writes:

The interview with Marc McGarry in GWS #69 was very interesting, especially as it echoed thoughts that I have had recently concerning how, and why, we live with our daughter.

It seems that most of our friends and family are “raising” their children.  They don’t seem to give any thought to what they are doing and why.  They just steam-roll ahead, and the person who most often gets flattened is the child.  If you say you are raising your child, that implies that he is currently less than you but someday, with lots of help, he might reach your level.

In our house we try to remember that we aren’t raising Jessie, we are living with her.  She is an equal member of our family, is a complete person unto herself, has her own standards which she must live by, and her own destiny that she must fulfill for her life to be complete.  Of course, since she is only 2, much of this can’t be acted on in any more meaningful way than that we allow her the room and opportunity to discover all these wonderful things about herself.

Our job as her parents is to teach her the rules that we all have to live by in order to live together.  One of the very first rules we made was that we weren’t going to be screamed at.  When Jessie feels the need to scream she is welcome to do so, only it will be in a room where we put her, away from us.  What’s important to keep in mind is that we don’t do this because we feel that she should respect us and not yell at us.  We don’t do it to punish her, we do it because screaming at people is not an acceptable way to say something, and we don’t feel we have to listen to it.  She has gotten the idea, and we don’t have to do this as much now.

When we go to parks or to special places we aren’t doing it to “expose her to all those good experiences,” as our friends might say.  We do it because we like to go places together and have fun and watch her grow and learn.  I’m convinced that the intention with which you do something is at least as important as the thing you do.  If you have fun with your children only because you feel you are supposed to, you convey to them the idea that they aren’t worth having fun with just to be having fun, that everything has to have an ulterior motive, and that most of these hidden motives are directed at changing them.

THINKING ABOUT MONEY AND INDEPENDENCE

Nancy Wallace (NY) writes:

It is easier for me to understand why we get bamboozled into thinking that we have to teach children about chemistry or long division than it is for me to understand why so many of us believe that we have to teach children about money.  I realize that people like Marc McGarry - who said in GWS #69 about his work for the Cambridge Psychotherapy Institute, “We try to help kids become financially responsible for themselves early on” - have only good intentions, but money, after all, is a completely ordinary, everyday thing.  Children can’t help but learn about it, particularly since in so many ways it symbolizes the adult world that, for better or for worse, they are so desperate to be part of.  Giving children exercises in financial responsibility as a way to help them learn is completely unnecessary.  Children not only watch us earn money, spend money, save money, and worry about money every day, but if we let them, children create their own situations for learning financial responsibility, at first in their play and later in their daily life.

I think immediately of Anita Giesy’s lovely story, also in GWS #69, about her older sister Danile who, at 18, decided that she could earn enough money to pay her rent and living expenses, even though her parents were perfectly happy to help her out.  Nobody pushed her to be independent; nobody gave her any lessons in financial responsibility.  Lessons weren’t necessary.

On a lesser scale there is my daughter Vita, now 14, who earns money giving violin lessons and has decided to pay for all of her art materials (a rather hefty output, actually).  She knows full well that I would go to the ends of the earth to buy her paints and canvasses, but as she says, as long as she can, she would like to buy them herself.

One reason that Vita feels so free to use her money to buy art materials is that she knows that if there ever comes a time when she doesn’t have the money, it will be fine.  No one would ever consider her a failure.  Because there is no pressure on her to earn the money or to spend it in this way, she feels secure enough to try.

Anita Giesy, in talking about her sister’s steps toward independence, put it beautifully when she said, “If you know you can’t go back, it’s harder to go forward.”  When we decide to teach children financial responsibility, and require, for example, that they assume the entire financial burden for some part of their lives, we often give them the impression that they can’t go back - that we won’t let them.  Our children then become more afraid than ever to attempt independence.

I wasn’t always so clear about this.  When Vita and her brother Ishmael were younger, I would have read the interview with Marc McGarry and wondered, for the hundredth time, if I was wrong not to suggest, or even insist, that the children earn money by doing household chores, and begin to buy their own necessities.  I used to worry because I never assigned Vita and Ishmael chores.  I asked them to help out when I needed help (and they gladly did), but that was all.  I worried because they didn’t have pocket money and the experience of spending it, but giving them an allowance seemed totally arbitrary and paying them to help me when I really needed help seemed ludicrous.

I was so busy worrying about what I might be doing wrong that I was blind to all kinds of things that we were doing right.  Vita and Ishmael were constantly working on money-making schemes - picking and selling blueberries, writing and producing plays and charging admission, running a neighborhood newspaper.  For years they saved to buy a guitar, something I would have bought for them if they’d asked, but they never did ask.  All that, in a way, was their fantasy play, fed and nourished, I now realize, by our real life family financial dealings.  Never for their own good, but simply because we had no secrets, I was always open with Vita and Ishmael about our family money situation.  As members of the family, they knew about our financial constraints and how we thought about setting financial priorities.  They knew, not because we made a point of telling them, but simply because money is a big part of what makes a family function.  I used to smile when they talked about “our job,” “our salary,” or “our savings.”  Now I realize how important that was.

Vita and Ishmael are practically grown up now, and without a single lesson in financial responsibility Vita, as I said, buys her own paints, and Ishmael, at 17, is studying music in Philadelphia and does his own grocery shopping, writes the checks to cover his rent and utility bills, and buys his own clothes when necessary.  The transition has been easy.  Although Ishmael relies mostly on his parents to keep his bank account from running dry, he works as an accompanist or does occasional stage managing and contributes what he can to his living expenses.  It has been this easy, I think, because Ishmael still thinks about “our money.”  Even when he didn’t personally earn it or spend it, he never felt separated from the ways in which we earn money in the real world.  And he knows how to ask for help in dealing with the problems he confronts.  But then I ask for help too, and surely always will.

Looking back, I wonder if Vita and Ishmael never whined for ten-speeds or fancy toys because they felt the responsibility of being part of a family with real budgetary concerns.  What gets us into trouble, then, is when we (even inadvertently) exclude our children from the honest to goodness concerns of the family.

HOW ADULTS LEARN

TAUGHT HERSELF LANGUAGES

We received an unprecedented number of responses to Cindy Howdyshell’s request for information about Native American languages in GWS #68.  We’ve forwarded these responses to Cindy (who must, as a result, be an expert on the subject by now, and can probably answer others’ questions!) and we print here the response that seems to be of the most general interest, as it is as much about how adults can learn something new as it is about learning Native American languages.

A reader writes:

I have played around with several Native American languages, including Tohono O’othham (Papago), Hopi, Inupiaq (an Eskimo language), and Hawaiian.  The first thing I did was get a copy of the Bible in the language I wanted to learn.  The advantage of this is that the Bible contains a lot of stories, and a copy is usually fairly cheap.  In the case of Hopi, tribesmen were involved in making sure the text was idiomatic, so that translation is not a literal translation of the English.  The Inupiaq New Testaments contained English alongside, and this helped.  I was able to get these Bibles from the American Bible Society in New York City.

When I got a copy of the Bible, I began to make myself a dictionary.  The way I did this was to find some verses where there was a lot of repetition, and tried to decide which English word corresponded with the word in the other language.  I made a list of these words, in alphabetical order, on my computer, listing the other language first.  In this way I was able to get a few words in my dictionary.  As I moved to verses that had less repetition, sometimes I would want to check a particular word to make sure I was right.  To do this, I would look up the word in an English concordance, and look up a few of the verses.  This showed me whether I was right or wrong.

After I did this for a while, I contacted the Wycliffe Bible Translators, or the Summer Institute of Linguistics (same group) in Denver.  They put me in touch with missionaries who had worked on the language in which I was interested.  They also told me where to get dictionaries and collections of native stories.  In some cases I could get tapes of portions of the New Testament and by reading along while listening to the tapes, I could learn how to pronounce the language.

Sometimes the missionaries gave me hints on pronunciation and grammar.  I could figure out some of the grammar by noticing patterns in the words I was putting in my dictionary.  I always put in the different parts of the verbs, and once I had enough of them I could figure out the endings and the root words.  Sometimes the missionaries pointed out some specific grammar rule that would be particularly hard to discover on one’s own.  For example, the Hopi word “noqw” means “and,” but only when the subject of the second clause is different from the subject of the first.  The missionary told me that it had taken them several years to figure this out.  I hadn’t guessed it yet, but I had figured out that the word meant “and” and that there was more than one word for “and.”

It was great fun to see how accurate my dictionaries were.  They really exceeded my expectations.  I was able to show them to people who spoke the languages, and they were quite impressed also.  I can’t begin to describe the thrill I experienced when I learned enough words to read my first complete sentence!  Homeschooling for many years got me thinking about how to teach myself, and I developed all these methods myself.

JOHN HOLT’S BOOK AND MUSIC STORE

IMMUNIZATIONS:  The Reality Behind the Myth

by Walene James  

When I first picked up this book, it was for more information to back up my growing feeling that immunization was not a good idea.  It is the best book on the subject that I have seen.  It is researched and documented thoroughly, and it is very well-written.

Section I includes a chapter on the dangers of immunizations, which provides convincing evidence that immunizations are far from harmless.  The chapter includes both statistics and personal stories of deaths and injuries that have resulted from all forms of immunizations.  Another chapter offers alternative explanations for the decline in infectious diseases during this century (which traditional medicine usually attributes to widespread immunization).  The section ends with helpful information on building natural immunity to disease, with personal stories attesting to the effectiveness of the methods.

The second section of the book looks at the basic relationship between the body and micro-organisms.  The author shows us that the germ theory of disease, which leads to the current medical practice of viewing health care as a fight against germs, is not well-proven.  The book presents an alternative theory of disease, which leads to the practice of building health, creating a strong environment in the body so that it is not receptive to the growth of pathogenic bacteria.

As I read on in the book I found, to my surprise and delight, a chapter about the difference between indoctrination and education.  This wonderful chapter points out common tools of propaganda.  It encourages and helps us to question “what everybody knows.”  This chapter is in the last section, which deals with the implications of a coercive health care system in a democratic society.  The author tells of her family’s legal battles over the decision not to immunize her grandson, and of their ensuing political efforts.  She finishes the section with a view of a more hopeful health care system.

This book should be a great help to anyone whose child faces possible immunizations.  I recommend it strongly. –Theo Giesy

NONTOXIC AND NATURAL:  How to Avoid Dangerous Everyday Products and Buy or Make Safe Ones by Debra Dadd  

This is a book that we use frequently.  It has good information on a wide variety of products - toxicity, alternatives, sources of alternatives, and instructions for homemade alternatives.  Among the products listed are foods, cosmetics, office supplies, building materials, air and water filters, cleaning products, pesticides, clothing and linens, and appliances.  Not everything is covered, of course, but it’s amazing how complete the listings are.

We feel that it is very important to avoid as many toxic substances as possible, especially since pollution in general seems to be increasing.  We cannot avoid all harmful substances; that’s why we try to avoid as many as we can.  Our bodies seem to be able to tolerate quite a lot, but it doesn’t seem to be a good idea to push our tolerance to its limits.  And some of us are more sensitive than others.

We have used Nontoxic and Natural as a guide to clear the poisons out of our home.  We now use only a very few cleaning products for a variety of purposes.  We are much more careful about body care products, too.  Many chemicals can be absorbed by the skin and cause obvious reactions, or stress to internal organs.  We’ve gone from reading labels on food products to reading labels on everything.

There is a good list of mail order sources in the book that we have found to be very helpful.  Often safer products are unavailable locally.

I recommend this book highly to everyone interested in keeping their homes and workplaces as safe as possible.  We still have to make choices, but this book can give us the information we need to choose wisely.  It is very complete and is quite easy to use. –Mary Van Doren

TROUBLED CHILDREN:  A Fresh Look at School Phobia by Patricia Knox

Each time we reprint an article from the popular press about school phobia - that relatively new disorder that seems to be spreading as rapidly as attention-deficit disorder and hyperactivity - I am amazed, all over again, at the way we choose to interpret the fear of a child who refuses to go to school.  We would rather think that a child is suffering from a strange and difficult disorder than ask whether there is in fact something to be afraid of.  Suppose a child is afraid to go to school because every day he gets hit on the playground?  Or because his teacher yells at him?  Or because he is going to be held accountable for assignments that he doesn’t fully understand?  What do we do to such children when we not only require them to go to school despite their fears but also imply that those fears are irrational, that the problem is in the child rather than in the external situation?  I’m afraid of the answer.

British homeschooler Patricia Knox apparently asked herself similar questions, and the result is the book Troubled Children:  A Fresh Look at School Phobia.  She writes in the introduction:

Until I had personal experience of the problem [of school phobia], when my own child became school phobic, I was fully in the belief that all such children were treated in a humane fashion.  But not so.  I was told to send my suicidal child to school, to ignore the suicide threat, and to allow the EWO (”truancy officer”) to drag her to school each day.

I joined Education Otherwise (an association of parents who teach their children out of school) and discovered that I was not alone.  There appeared to be many other families who had had similar experiences, where the educational and psychiatric personnel had either disregarded the problem as non-existent, or had meted out harsh treatment to the family, with threats of court cases, care orders, and psychiatric hospitals.

Patricia Knox corresponded with families who had dealt with school phobia, and researched the theories behind the label and the ways in which societies (with emphasis on British) respond to the problem.  She brings all this information together in her self-published book, and offers some alternative ways to think about children’s refusal to go to school, exploring legitimate reasons to fear school, for example, and discussing the option of home education.

Some GWS readers have had direct experience with the school phobia label, and they will surely find much of use in this book.  But we would not have added this book to our catalog if we thought it was relevant only to that specific group.  The book is important because it reminds us of what can happen if we deny the validity of what children (or adults, for that matter) say they feel.  It encourages us to question our tendency to think, as we so often do, in terms of disease and disorder.  If a child says, “I’m frightened,” or clearly shows us that she is frightened, do we assume that she has a “fear disease” - a phobia?  Again, do we ever question the world (in this case, school), or do we always locate the problem within the child?  These are important things to think about, and Patricia Knox, backed by her research and her own experience, has a lot to say on the subject.  Her book deserves our attention. –Susannah Sheffer

LOVE, MEDICINE AND MIRACLES by Bernie Siegel

When John Holt was looking for a surgeon to remove the cancerous tumor in his leg, he wanted to find someone who would be open to alternative cancer treatments as well, and who would be interested in hearing the patient’s ideas about his treatment.  Friends recommended Dr. Bernie Siegel of Exceptional Cancer Patients (ECaP) in New Haven, Connecticut, and John did indeed end up choosing Siegel as his surgeon.  Since then, Siegel’s book Love, Medicine and Miracles has been on the bestseller list for weeks, and Siegel (actually, he likes to be called Bernie) has traveled around the country talking about why his cancer patients don’t seem to die when they’re supposed to.

The patients in ECaP are exceptional because they defy the expectations of the medical establishment.  They survive illnesses that the textbooks say are terminal.  Bernie Siegel is an exceptional surgeon because he doesn’t think he knows what’s best for his patients.  He listens to them, helps them explore the possible conditions in their lives before they got sick that might have made them more vulnerable to it, and then together doctor and patient plan a course of treatment.

From the book’s introduction:

Sir William Osler, the brilliant Canadian physician and medical historian, said that the outcome of tuberculosis had more to do with what went on in the patient’s mind than what went on in his lungs.  He was echoing Hippocrates, who said he would rather know what sort of person has a disease than what sort of disease a person has.  Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard, two of the giants of nineteenth-century biology, argued all their lives whether the most important factor in disease was the “soil” - the human body - or the germ.  On his deathbed, Pasteur admitted that Bernard had been right, declaring, “It is the soil.”

Despite the insights of these eminent doctors, medicine still focuses on disease, giving it a failure orientation.  Its practitioners still act as though disease catches people, rather than understanding that people catch disease by becoming susceptible to the seeds of illness to which we are all constantly exposed.  Although the best physicians have always known better, medicine as a whole has rarely studied the people who don’t get sick.  Most doctors seldom consider how a patient’s attitude towards life shapes that life’s quantity and quality.

Bernie Siegel has decided to study people who don’t get sick, and people who get better after they do get sick.  Most compelling are the stories that the patients themselves tell in those pages, stories that are not glib, not simple, not about easy miracles, but about thinking about health and illness in new ways.  Like Troubled Children, and like Immunizations, Love, Medicine and Miracles invites us to question the traditional medical model and to think of health - just as GWS readers think of education - as something we can make for ourselves, rather than as something we can only sit back and hope to be given. –SS

EARN COLLEGE CREDIT FOR WHAT YOU KNOW by Susan Simosko

For many years, John Holt suggested ways for homeschoolers to translate into the language of school educators what has been learned through life experience.  As a result, most homeschoolers are adept at documenting their children’s normal household activities as language arts, science, math, etc. whenever school officials - or worried in-laws! - demand accountability.

Earn College Credit for What You Know extends that process to the college level, offering well-organized, methodical instructions for obtaining college credit for skills acquired outside of school.  Although the author tends to glorify the college degree pursued for its own sake, her advice is useful to anyone who desires a head start on degree requirements or needs a degree as a job ticket.  She includes examples of people in a variety of situations, evaluates their individual skills and expertise acquired through job experience, hobbies, volunteer work, personal reading, etc., and explains how to apply for subsequent credit from a college with a nontraditional degree program (a lengthy college directory is included).

As a graduate of such a program (with a mish-mash of credits from five different colleges), I can vouch for Simosko’s explanations of how colleges think about learning and what they are willing to grant credit for.  She is very skilled at manipulating that insider’s knowledge to the applicant’s advantage in her instructions for compiling a professional-looking portfolio.  Although Simosko obviously didn’t have homeschoolers in mind, her book is a valuable tool for those of us already accustomed to modifying traditional educational methods to meet out needs . –Sue Radosti

(We have a limited number of copies of Earn College Credit for What You Know, so please indicate whether you would like a credit or a refund if we are unable to fill your order for this book.)

STORIES THEY’LL REMEMBER by Frank Lord

This gentle modest book is only 106 pages long, but it holds a wealth of information about how you can share your values with your children by telling them stories about your own life and growing up.  Unlike so many books about parenting, this book doesn’t tell you what your values should be, but instead focuses on how to use a time-honored technique for getting one’s point across without being preachy or hysterical.  Of course, we are all probably going to be preachy and/or hysterical with our children at some point in our lives, and this book is not about how we can avoid these moments.  What it makes clear is how, when the storm has passed or when the moment seems ripe, we can share stories about our experiences with our children and shed some light on their own dark moments by letting them know we’ve been there too and, most important, by telling them honestly how things turned out for us.  In doing this we provide our children with more real choices for their future behavior.

By stories Frank Lord does not mean fiction.  He means real, true-life stories, sometimes only a few sentences long, but that have relevance to a given situation.  These stories can be about comfort, empathy, achievement, failure, industriousness, illness, good health; any topic, really, that allows us to reveal our past to our children in a nurturing manner.

What I like most about this book is how form and content are so neatly tied together.  From the introduction on, Frank Lord makes most of his points not with expository paragraphs but with stories.  This approach reminds me so much of GWS, and the innumerable stories that are told in each issue.  Our variety of experiences tell us, and our children tell us, that despite the generalities each of us is unique, and we need to reach and be reached by others in our own ways, so we need a multitude of stories to reach a multitude of people.  Frank Lord does well to remind us that storytelling is our ancient and effective method of reaching one another, not only on the conscious level but especially on the unconscious level, and that it is a highly effective method to use with one’s family.  Here is a story from the book:

When Tom was worried about Michael’s use of the family car to drive to a party clear across Chicago, or rather worried about him making it back home, he picked a time when he and his sixteen-year-old were changing the oil in the car to tell him about his own experience thirty years earlier.

“Your grandfather told me when I was about your age that if I ever had the car and got to drinking, he’d pay for a cab to bring me home.  He said that we’d figure out how to get the car back the next day.

“Well, one of my friends had to get married when we were in high school and they served champagne at the wedding.  His older brothers kept filling up my glass after I had taken a sip or two so I couldn’t really tell how much I’d had to drink.  I figured I was okay until I walked out to the car to drive home.  I was so dizzy I had a hard time even finding the car.

“After I finally located our old beat-up Chevy, I poured myself into the front seat and sat there for a long time trying to think.  I finally decided I didn’t belong on the highway so I stumbled back into the church basement.  Nobody from our neighborhood was still there and it was maybe two in the morning, so I found a phone and called a cab.

“Of course, when I got home I didn’t have nearly enough to pay for the taxi, so I had to go in and wake up your grandpa.  It was so late I was afraid he’d be mad, but he wasn’t at all.  And the next day your grandma didn’t say a word about it either.

“Dad and I borrowed a neighbor’s car and picked up the Chevy from the church parking lot, and then we went out to a pancake place for breakfast.  I felt kind of dumb that next day, but I figured it was better than killing somebody - maybe me.  I guess it worked out all right.

“Hey, the same offer goes for you.  I’ll foot the cab bill for you to get home if you know you shouldn’t be putting that key in the ignition.”

Tom had rather painlessly fulfilled his parental responsibility of adding another choice to Michael’s unconscious store of behavioral possibilities.  This adolescent is going to have a hard time getting behind the wheel after drinking, without considering the possibility of a cab.

. . . At another level the story promises that Tom won’t be angry if son Michael drinks too much as long as he behaves responsibly.  The story neatly separates the virtually inevitable over-drinking while learning about alcohol from the quite separate issue of drunk driving.

Frank Lord gives us many good examples of stories to tell children from age four on, and suggestions for when to (and when not to) tell a story, how to choose a relevant story, how to tell it, and how to end it.  On this last point, he shows his deep trust in and respect for children:

For me, the hardest part of telling children a story is knowing when to quit.  The temptation to add a moral at the end of a well-told tale is sometimes overwhelming.  We don’t feel the need to insult our contemporaries by explaining our stories, but that often happens when we’re dealing with children, especially our own.  We’re so anxious that they “get it” we forget to end the story with a chuckle or a pensive stare into space, giving the youngsters some time to decide for themselves what the story means.–Pat Farenga

FOCUS:  EDUCATION FOR PEACE

HELPING CHILDREN GROW INTO PEACEFUL ADULTS

John Holt wrote in the mid-1960s:

. . . Traditional education, sometimes inadvertently but quite often deliberately, denies children the kind of experiences that would help them grow up to be the kind of people who, being at peace with themselves, are ready and eager to live at peace with other human beings.

Our efforts for peace are doomed to fail unless we understand that the root causes of war are not economic conflicts or language barriers or cultural differences but people - the kind of people who must have and will find scapegoats, legitimate targets for the disappointment, envy, fear, rage, and hatred that accumulates in their daily lives.  The man who hates or despises his work, his boss, his neighbors, and above all himself, will find a way to make some other man suffer and die for the sense of freedom, competence, dignity, and worth that he himself lacks.  There will always be others to help him, political leaders ready to appeal to and make use of his unconscious but inexhaustible and insatiable desire to do harm.

The fundamental educational problem of our time is to find ways to help children grow into adults who have no wish to do harm.  We must recognize that traditional education, far from having ever solved this problem, has never tried to solve it.  Indeed, its efforts have, if anything, been in exactly the opposite direction.  An important aim of traditional education has always been to make children into the kind of adults who were ready to hate and kill whoever their leaders might declare to be their enemies . . .

Human society has never until now had to come to grips with the source of human evildoing, which is the wish to do evil.  It has been sufficient, until now, to control human behavior, to prevent most people from robbing, injuring, or killing their neighbors by threatening to punish them if they do, because if anyone wanted badly enough to hurt other people, legitimate victims could always be found.  The moral codes worked, at least fairly well, within their limited frames of reference, precisely because there was always an escape, there always were people whom it was all right to hate and injure as much as you wished.  And humanity was able to afford the escape clause, was able to survive the killing and destruction of enemies that our moral codes allowed us, because, after all, our means of destruction were so limited, and because it took most of our time and energy just to keep ourselves alive . . .

But no more . . .  The means to kill tens and hundreds of millions of people, even to destroy all life on earth, lie ready at hand . . .  The man who does not value his own life, and hence feels that no life has value, may not be able to make Doomsday machines in his own basement, but with the vote, or even without it, he can get his governments to make them, and eventually to use them . . .

Seen against this background and in this light, the argument of A. S. Neill of Summerhill, that the business of education is above all else to make happy people, must be acknowledged to be, not frivolous and sentimental, as its opponents claim, but in the highest degree serious, weighty, and to the point.  For the sake of our survival we must indeed learn to make happy people, people who will want and will be able to live lives that are full, meaningful, and joyous.  We may be able to do more than this (though Neill feels this is enough), and perhaps we should; but we must do at least this much.  If we can get wisdom, skill, and intelligence along with the happiness, and we probably can, as they tend to go together, so much the better; but the happiness we can no longer do without.

The word “happiness” is so generally abused and so little understood that it may be well to try to put this objective into clearer and sharper terms.  Happiness is not game to be trapped, or a bird to be caught in a net.  It does not come when we beckon, or even when we pray.  There is no formula for it, no sure recipe; we cannot bake it like a cake.  The most we can say is that there are elements or ingredients of life, in the presence of which happiness may be found very often, and in the absence of which it is rarely found at all.

There can be a great variety of happy persons, living in a great variety of circumstances, but about them a few things will almost always be true.  The happy person has a strong sense of his own aliveness; his senses are keen, or at least he rejoices in them and makes full use of them.  He is not dead to the world about him.  He does not seek happiness in escape and forgetfulness; he is alive and aware, and moves toward life.  Also, he has a strong sense of his own unique identity; he is himself, and not someone else, and not like anyone else; he has his own very particular ideas, and opinions, and tastes, and skills, and pleasures, that no change in his circumstances can take from him.  He is not a mass man, who has to be told who he is; he knows.  Most important of all, he has a strong sense of his own dignity, competence, and worth.  He may value the good opinion of others, but he does not need it or depend on it.  For he knows, despite his many faults and weaknesses, that he is a creature worthy of affection and respect, and that, in however tiny a degree, the world is a different and probably better place for his being in it.

Only a rare child could possibly survive conventional schooling feeling this way about himself.  That it happens at all, as it occasionally does, proves how tough and resilient children can be . . .

[In their schooling] children are above all else demeaned and degraded by being subject for so long to the feeble, wavering, capricious, arbitrary, and aimless tyranny of their elders.  Submission to authority is not always or necessarily degrading.  We are not lessened in our own eyes by having to do the bidding of someone we know to be our superior; thus musicians, for example, felt it an honor to submit to the tyranny of Toscanini.  We can even obey the orders of lesser men, and suffer indignities at their hands, when we know it is done in a good cause . . .  Children could very probably submit, without feeling resentment or suffering harm, to a strict and even harsh adult tyranny, if they could believe that the adults knew what they were doing, and that the grown-up world they were being prepared to enter made sense and had some stability and purpose.  But what child of today can believe this, when twelve, ten, even six year olds talk, and think, and dream of the end of the world, when little children say, as I have heard them say, not “when I grow up,” but “if I grow up”?

To have most of your life controlled by people who are so clearly not your superiors in anything except age, size, and power, and who are so far from being able to manage their own lives, is a continuing indignity that cannot but destroy, as it does, most of the self-respect of the children who undergo it.  As it destroys their self-respect, it destroys their respect for other people, and forces them to try to find a sense of being and worth in one of the collective identities (be it teenage gang or nation state) that have throughout history been the great agents of human evildoing, and that today stand solidly in the way of peace and brotherhood . .

The following are responses to John Holt’s essay on the preceding page.

NATURAL AUTHORITY VS. AUTHORITY OF RANK

From Aaron Falbel (”Reading as Part of a Relationship,” GWS #68):

I could tell from reading John’s remarks that I was dealing with a relatively early piece of his writing.  It struck me that there were a number of points on which he would later change his mind.  Yet all the same it is remarkable to observe the way in which John, in this piece, was able to write so cogently about some of the deepest and most important aspects of the human condition:  the origins of aggression, the causes of war and human evildoing, submission to authority, the tyranny of schooling, and the nature of happiness.

I believe that John later came to reject the notion that education could or should provide children with certain types of experiences.  Certainly by the mid-seventies he was using the word education to refer to some sort of designed process that certain people (educators) perform on other people (students) for the alleged benefit of the latter.  The question of schools providing or denying certain kinds of experiences had become a moot point.  Education by schooling was the wrong type of business to be in.  John would often quote Paul Goodman (author of Growing Up Absurd) and argue that where we have failed the young is not that we give them lousy schools which provide them with the wrong types of experiences, but that we fail to provide them with a sane, worthwhile society, a society that makes sense.

Similarly, I think John changed his mind about whether one could “make happy people.”  I think he came to view happiness not as the end result of some number of processes but rather as a state of being.  Indeed, happiness is a very deep concept, and in philosophical literature it has often been confused with the notion of pleasure, which I think is something quite different.  Like A.S. Neill, John asserted in his later writing that there is no recipe for happiness, that it wasn’t anything one could get - it was something one could be.  Pleasure is a temporary thing, a sort of peak experience that comes and goes.  Happiness, on the other hand, is a continual sense of contentment and aliveness, of vivacity, verve, and joy.  Neill wrote in Summerhill, “If the word happiness means anything, it means an inner feeling of well-being, a sense of balance, a feeling of being contented with life.  These can exist only when one feels free.”  It was freedom, then, and not happiness, to which Neill devoted his attention.  I believe one can observe the same emphasis in John’s later thinking:  in the context of freedom, happiness (as well as intelligence and a moral sense) would look after itself.

I’m not sure I agree with John that wars are caused by unhappy, hateful, resentful people - that is, people with pent-up aggression.  I would say that this sort of aggression makes war possible, but it does not cause it.  We would have many more wars if John’s assertion were true.  The fact that there are many unhappy people with little control or power over their own lives means that when we do have war, there is no short supply of people to fight.

I find myself wondering, after reading John’s remarks, why women don’t start wars or feel a strong need to fight in them.  One might think that the millennia of oppression women have endured would produce precisely the sort of aggressive character type John describes:  people with little sense of dignity or self-worth, people who get pushed around and thus have a strong need to push others around.  I suppose John might answer that many oppressed women take their aggressions out on their children, or on children in school (87% of elementary school teachers are women).  It would be interesting to try to find out whether women who feel they are liberated tend to be more humane in their child-rearing practices or come to call into question the validity or necessity of schooling.  To “educate” a child (in the sense of the word mentioned earlier) is at root an act of aggression.  Among so-called primitive societies such as the !Kung Bushmen or the Yequana Indians, who are essentially non-aggressive people, the concept of “education” is unknown.

When asked if the children at Summerhill respected him as headmaster, Neill always responded, “Oh, I hope not!”  Neill would have no truck with the sort of authority associated with rank or title.  It is an error to demand respect; one must earn it, as John’s example of Toscanini aptly illustrates.  This hearkens back to George Dennison’s notion of “natural authority,” which John referred to over and over again in his books and public lectures.  Natural authority, as opposed to authority of rank, is based on skill, experience, and competence.  Great damage is done when we use authority of rank in place of natural authority.

I think that most young children naively think that adults really do know better, are usually right, and are therefore entitled to use the justification, “It’s for your own good.”  Certainly I felt this way for a long time.  It probably wasn’t until I was halfway into my teens that I began to doubt all this, to think that maybe adults weren’t right all the time and didn’t really always know what they were doing and thus couldn’t really judge what our own good was.  The dawning awareness of this constituted both a sort of liberation and a crisis - liberation because I no longer suffered the pangs of guilt and diminution of self-worth when I felt that adults were wrong but felt I ought to think they were right; crisis because I, at a relatively late age, had to take my life into my own hands since I was no longer going to rely on my teachers’ “feeble, wavering, capricious, arbitrary, and aimless tyrannies” to make life decisions for me.  I became my own person; I became a freer and ultimately happier and more peaceful person.

THE NEED FOR NEW PARADIGMS

From Peter Bergson (PA):

John’s article brings to mind the talk these days in business circles about paradigms and how they affect decision-making up and down the corporate ladder.  American business people are tripping all over themselves in a rush to emulate the world leaders in a new management style that is blowing away the competition.  In the process, the Americans are learning that in order to duplicate the success of their mentors, the Japanese, they must adopt a radically different view of the consumers of their goods and services, starting with the workers in their own companies.  They must, in the new parlance, shift their paradigm about people and about how corporate decisions are best made.  Then they must restructure their companies to reflect this shift in both philosophy and daily practice.

How I wish that American educators would, in similar fashion, effect an equally radical paradigm shift.  I wish they would adopt the view of children and of education that is represented, not by the Japanese model, but by our friend John Holt.

I first heard the use of the term paradigm in a lecture by Joseph Chilton Pearce in which he made the point that certain paradigms which we take for granted do not exist in other cultures.  He cited as an example the pre-technological Yequana Indians described by Jean Liedloff in The Continuum Concept.  Pearce said that the Yequana parents could not conceive of a disobedient child because disobedience did not exist in their culture - there was no paradigm of a disobedient person.  Neither was there a paradigm for child abuse, or even the concept of work as opposed to play.

More recently, I have learned of the role of paradigms in the business world from futurist Joel Barker.  I have since come to understand why people like John Holt have such a difficult time getting people to see the world’s problems, and their possible solutions, as clearly as they themselves do.  Barker defines paradigms as the patterns, or models, that we develop in our minds as a result of our experience.  We each have - need to have in order to function - a zillion paradigms.

But paradigms can keep us stuck, too.  Barker calls this the Paradigm Effect and Paradigm Paralysis, meaning that we see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear, and filter out or misconstrue all the rest so as not to rock the boat.  This is how we get stuck and lose the ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

This reminds me of the part of How Children Fail in which John describes sitting in the back of a math class and watching not the teacher but the children.  What John saw was remarkably different from what the teacher thought was going on.  How easily we delude ourselves!  And how difficult it is to hear when an outsider, like John, tells us that our view of our teaching, our schools, our end products, is so totally off-base.

John refers to A.S. Neill’s argument that “the business of education is above all else to make happy people.”  I confess that on this point - the role of schooling in the development, or lack thereof, of happy people - I am more confused than clear.  Certainly I agree with John that schools are often harmful to the way children feel about themselves.  But how often?  Here’s where we need data to separate fact from opinion.  How many unhappy people can legitimately claim school as the cause of their woes?  I have no trouble accepting the idea that school contributes, but is it the cause?  How do we explain those children - whether one in a thousand or one in ten - who leave school as happy, well-developed people?  And how do we explain those children who are unhappy but have never been to school, either because they’re too young or because they’re homeschoolers?  Surely there are more variables to consider - in-born temperament, for example.  Or diet, or television, or family process - a child’s first paradigm of how people relate to each other.

As one who is both the parent of four children and the director of a family resource center, I have had the opportunity to live and work with children both as family member and as educator/facilitator.  When I’m working with children outside my family I find that I’m more likely to be successful in helping them to become peaceful people when I am building on a solid foundation laid by the parents.  By solid foundation, I mean parents who are a generally peaceful couple, and a home that is a generally peaceful one, so that the child has the kind of basic acceptance of self that John referred to in his description of a happy child.  I think these children have an inclination to use the strategies for cooperation that we practice at our resource center because they expect the constructive resolution of differences.

Some children, on the other hand, have already learned to expect failure.  Their paradigm of adults is that of lecturer, judge, maybe even dictator.  They won’t look you in the eye, and they certainly don’t expect that you’ll do right by them.  Their world view is already a hostile one.

In my own family, I find the model set by the parents is overwhelmingly important.  We create the paradigm that children adopt, not by our words but by our behavior.  If Daddy yells when the going gets rough, we shouldn’t be surprised when the kids do, too.  I am all too certain that there is a direct correlation between my behavior over time and my children’s behavior.

So what are we to do to build a more peaceful world, with more peaceful children?  I think we need to start by creating a shift in our own paradigms, our own adult view of the world as it

could be.  We must come to expect - not just hope for, or dream about, but expect - the new paradigm to be fulfilled.  We must surround ourselves with people and books and work and whatever else will feed this new paradigm.  We can’t be oblivious to the negative paradigms of our culture, but we don’t have to live by them, either.

“YOU SHALL NOT BELIEVE YOU ARE SOMETHING”

From Rasmus Hansen, one of the founders of the Danish Ny Lilleskole (now Friskolen 70) described in John’s Instead of Education and in the film We Have to Call it School:

Many authors describe in their books how they have experienced their childhood as a more or less unhappy time, and try in their adult lives to understand why it has been that way.  A Danish author by the name of Sandemose sets it up very clearly as a law under which children must live.  It goes something like this:

        You shall not believe you are something
You shall not believe you are capable of something.
You shall not believe you are wiser than us.
You shall not believe that someone likes you.

And so on.  His childhood was in the 1920s, but how much has this in reality changed today?  Isn’t it still a very common attitude toward children - among parents, in the school, in sports, in society?  It is practiced in many ways:  gently and lovingly, through threat and reproof, with demands, tests, and competitions, bad marks and disparagement - discipline and punishment.

It can cause many children to lose trust in themselves and their abilities.

And we shouldn’t wonder that when some young people do finally believe that they “are something” and “can do something,” they demonstrate this by illegally using a knife or pistol against another person - or, legally, machine guns or artillery.

CONFIRMING CHILDREN’S EXPERIENCES

Leila Berg, British author of Reading and Loving and Look at Kids, wrote her response as a letter addressed directly to John:

You remember Risinghill School - in that decaying London district where parents and then teachers (a very few of them) began to learn not to beat kids, where working-class parents stood on decrepit street corners discussing excitedly into the night what education really meant, where parents and kids and probation officers and social workers collected hundreds of signatures and marched to Whitehall, saying “Hands off our school!”

Salisbury Playhouse commissioned me to write a play, based on my book Risinghill.  I called the play Raising Hell (that’s what the wilder kids once - affectionately - called the school).  Some of the material in the play was about Tim, a student at the school.  A teacher who was fond of him had told me that she took him to her country cottage for a weekend.  She showed him his bed, but he wouldn’t sleep in it - he wandered round the place all night, checking that every door and window was locked, and appeared at breakfast gripping a toasting fork and maintaining seriously, “I always keep a weapon with me.”  At one time Tim was seen by the education psychologist, who put a table-tennis ball in front of him and said, “That’s an orange.  Peel it.” Tim retorted, “I’ll peel it, if you’ll eat it.”

Anyway, we took the play round several counties, me sitting in the theatre van with the company, and we had discussions with the audience after the play, often very stormy.  One day we took it to an open Borstal (youth prison).  This Borstal - an experimental one; it was the end of the sixties - had a theatre, but it hadn’t yet been used, as no one knew what to do in it.  It also had a new Education Officer, who had dared to book Raising Hell and whose job was now going to hang on a thread.

No one knew what would happen.  I sat in the audience of convicted teenagers.  Clearly none of them had ever been in a theatre before.  The play began with music and spontaneous dancing - “Everybody loves Saturday night,” sung as the kids at the school used to sing it, in English, Greek, Italian, and any other of the nineteen languages the kids spoke at home.  The audience began to go wild.  I held on to the arms of my seat; I wondered if the actors were going to be able to cope, let alone the poor education officer.

Dialogue began, and gradually the audience calmed down.  To my amazement they became absolutely silent and absorbed.  No audience in my memory, of any play whatsoever, has ever been so held.  They were watching themselves.  The play told them that their lives were valid.  Someone was fighting for them, and they were fighting for themselves.

At the very end of the play, a girl is on the stage by herself, reading one of the last pages of the book:

On that last day at Risinghill no one did break up the school.  [The school was forced to close, and some of the kids had said, about its founder, “If Mr. Duane can’t have the school, no one will.  We’ll smash it up.”  But Mike had spoken to the whole school, asking them not to “lash out and hurt other people just because they’ve hurt us.”]  The people who came to move the piano said another school had been smashed to smithereens . . .  But Risinghill closed quietly, with crowds of children talking in Mr. Duane’s study, and the toughest kids of all crying in the lavatories.

She closes the book and walks off the stage.  For a long time - I don’t really know how long, but it seemed interminable because I dared not breathe - the theatre stayed dead silent.  Then at last the lights went up.  The boys still sat there.  Then very slowly and clumsily they began to get to their feet, still silent.  They were crying.

A little while after that, I began to work out Nippers, my series of first storybooks for 5 to 8 year olds learning to read.  They were the first books to come into schools in which at last a majority of children recognized themselves.  Early on, while the stories were still in typescript, I took some of them to an East London school and read them aloud.  They were a group of stories based on a mixture of the East End itself and the Risinghill district and Brixton, part of London, about a large family, like the families that used this school.

I hadn’t read half a sentence before the children began to laugh.  They laughed without stopping right the way through all the stories; I had to read straight through it.  It wasn’t ordinary laughter.  They were crying with laughter, and they were up out of their seats, hugging themselves, and hugging each other, and moaning things like, “It’s my Dad, it’s my Dad.”

The publishers were getting a little nervous about the unusual content of the books, and decided to send out some typescripts to schools.  The teachers were outraged.  They said children did not play on bomb-sites or dumps (which I had talked about in the books).  No children played in old cars.  All homes had hot water and proper bathrooms.  Nobody used tin baths.  They said the children themselves were shocked to hear such things - which did not exist - mentioned.

These were not teachers who taught in glamorous districts.  These were people who taught in areas where children always played in the local dump, and in the abandoned cars, and had homes without hot water, and used tin baths filled up with a kettle.  Fortunately a fortnight later other teachers wrote in saying, “At last!  Vigorously imaginative . . . vivid . . . poetic!  The children love them!”  These teachers, by sheer chance I felt, were more than the first lot, so publication went ahead.

These days I go to schools once or twice a month under the “Writers in Schools” scheme.  They are small schools, sometimes village schools of forty or fifty kids.  I make my own programs

.  Sometimes I tell my own stories.  At one storytelling, one 6-year-old said with shy solicitude, “Do you live in a ‘ome?”  I was puzzled.  ”Do you mean a house?  I live in a little house, by myself . . .”  No, he meant a ‘ome.  It took quite some time before I discovered the whole class had been taken to see Annie and he thought all orphans (he knew I was one) had to live in a ‘ome and were badly treated.  He was really sad and concerned for me, and his kindness grew out of the context of mutual enjoyment and appreciation of each other.

I do storymaking workshops too, originally for the older ones but now for 6-year-olds up.  I start by telling my own stories.  Then I tell them the real incident that sparked it off - another story on its own.  Then I tell them that all stories, whether they’re about ghosts, spacemen, witches, monsters, or whatever, always have something in them that is real, that the author remembered or saw or heard.

They tell me about their lives, and I write it down, and it makes a story.  The kids are eager to get their own bit in, that bit of their own life.  The teachers always ask if they can sit in.  Very occasionally a teacher, perhaps wanting her class to shine, or maybe thinking I need support, will say, “Oh, come on, so-and-so, I’m sure you have something to say.”  But I ignore her, and she falls silent, and the children realize I really do mean they belong, their real lives belong, in this story.  And they start, and do not want to stop.

The teachers always say afterwards, “But they have so many ideas!  I never thought they could have so many ideas!”  But it’s they’re own life they are talking about.  They’re delighted and excited that their own life is important enough to go in stories.  They had thought that only things outside them had any validity.

Sometimes I explain this a bit to the teacher who runs me to the railway station when the session is over.  I say it isn’t their “creative imagination” that will fuel them first of all, but their self-awareness, their confidence that their life is valid.  I’m not as interested in the product as in the strength, the sweetness, the vitality, the softness, the electric absorption that comes to them instantly when they realize their own importance, not only for their writing, but for their own health.  I might add, for the human race.  I think if this happens only once in a child’s schooltime, that child gets a sense of vitality that might be obstinate and not easily dislodged.

LOVING ONE ANOTHER

From Jud Jerome (”Learning from Grief,” GWS #60):

As I was driving to the post office in our little village to pick up the mail in which I was to find Susannah’s request for comments on this passage of John’s writing, I followed the rudest bumper sticker I have ever seen, the text of which I will not repeat in a publication meant for family reading.  It was a late model car with a young man driving and a passenger I could not see.  But I ponder what one could do about such a phenomenon.  I fantasized about leaving a note on the car, if I found it parked.  I would say, “It is not the language that bothers me.  It is the hostility, especially on a bumper sticker.  The last thing we need when involved in the complex, sensitive exercise in cooperation that driving requires is a message that expresses and invites hostility.”  I wondered what deprivation in a person’s life could lead to such a display.  I thought about schools, of course, but as John says, it is a much broader question than schooling.

I think of the headlines these days about violent repression in China.  During the uprising my wife and I waxed sentimental about the sweet faces of the young Chinese people, about soldiers and officials who met them with tears in their eyes, as we remembered our impressions of pervasive sweetness when we visited China in 1987.  While we were there, though, violent repression of Tibetans was going on in Lhasa, and as we watched the miracle of the burgeoning peaceful protest in Beijing we knew in our guts that it could turn bloody at any moment, as it did, as it will, no doubt, again and again, in China and elsewhere, because, as John says, clever as human beings are, they seem not to have been able to discover the roots of their most primal need:  happiness.

One theme John stresses seems to me worth examining, however:  individualism.  He says that a happy person “has a strong sense of his [or her] own unique identity.”  Maybe, and maybe not.  It may be that a sense of individual worth, of individuality itself, is a purely Western notion.  Those Chinese, either in their sweet or savage phases, seem to behave much more like molecules in a larger body than like individuals with a sense of self.  I would say that the bumper sticker I mentioned is individualism run rampant, individualism as disease.

“He found a home in the army” was a phrase one often heard back in World War II days.  Some men and women did, indeed, seem to find the submission of their personal choice to the organization, the system, a great relief, and I often think that the apparently desperate need many feel to belong, to believe, to join, to identify with a faith or creed or group, is a yearning to escape individuality.  On the other hand, individualism may be the world’s ultimate salvation from the diseases of indoctrination, mass centralization, and war that sweep civilization again and again.  For me that is an open question.

But there is no question that we somehow have to figure out how to make what John calls “authority” a benign force.  The worldwide shudder of abhorrence that came as a response to the brutality of the Chinese suppression of the democratic rebellion is a shudder not at the authority (and obedience) of those who conducted it, but at the defiance of those very officials of the higher authority of humanity itself.  There is an unwritten global law against bloody violence against unarmed citizens.

And the law is not some piece of legislation passed by a democratically elected parliament.  It is a law of our inner nature as human beings, a law that binds us together as fellow creatures, that puts the species above the individual, just as partners in a loving marriage are able to put the entity of their union and of family above personal preferences.  To live peacefully, people have to learn to honor that bondage of one to another, to the group, to the neighborhood, to the nation, and, above all these, to humankind.

PEACE AS HEALING

[SS:] Reading all these thoughts about peace made me remember the time I heard the poet Olga Broumas read from her work.  During the question and answer session that followed, someone asked Broumas for her definition of peace.  She said, “I always think of peace as healing.”

This past May I visited Friskolen 70, the Danish school that John Holt wrote about in Instead of Education.  I met a girl there named Marianne (I’ve changed her name here to protect her privacy), now 12, who had been born in India and adopted by a Danish woman when she was a year old.  Shortly after bringing her to Denmark Marianne’s mother came to suspect that she had been severely neglected as an infant.  At a year old she was almost no more fully developed than she had been at birth.  During the first several years of her life in Denmark it became clear that Marianne was suffering from the emotional and physical neglect of her early life, and would need to be helped to heal.

The government in Denmark provides special schooling to children, such as Marianne, who are in need of it.  For a while Marianne did attend one of these special schools.  When she was 7, her mother discovered Friskolen 70, and Marianne has gone there ever since.  Friskolen 70 is indeed special, but it is not obviously geared toward children with Marianne’s difficulties.  Most of the children there seem to radiate health and happiness - the feeling is one of a strong, vibrant group of people.  Yet in this community (and of course with the help of her very caring mother) Marianne has begun to heal.  During my short stay in Denmark I was able to get some sense of what it is about this community that has helped Marianne.

At 12, Marianne acts in many ways like a much younger child.  Because the seventy or so children at Friskolen 70 are not segregated by age, Marianne is able to play freely with the younger children without calling unnecessary attention to how much older she is.  And because the older children, in turn, are so accustomed to treating the younger children respectfully and allowing them to join in wherever appropriate or possible, it comes naturally to them to extend this treatment to Marianne as well.  They don’t automatically exclude her from their activities just because she doesn’t act like a typical 12 year old.

Marianne is able, in this community where people decide for themselves how to spend their days, to spend hours and hours bouncing a ball in the school courtyard, sometimes varying the rules of the game and other times repeating the same game for a long stretch.  The assumption (so it seemed to me ) on the part of others at the school is that if Marianne spends so much time playing ball it must be meeting some important need.  It must be the work she needs to do right now.  (No one can say for sure what, precisely, is the need that the ball game meets - maybe it gives Marianne exercise in physical coordination that she missed earlier in life, maybe it gives her increasing confidence because she has become so good at it - but the tacit assumption is that Marianne will play the ball game for as long as it is meaningful and useful to her, and will move on to something else when it isn’t.)

Marianne only began reading within the last year or two.  The people at the school, like many homeschooling parents, had to keep themselves from worrying about whether Marianne would ever read or gently urging her to try it.  I think it’s likely that Marianne didn’t begin reading - indeed, probably could not have begun reading - until other, at that time more primary, needs were met.  Only when she had in some (probably large) measure compensated for the losses of her early life was she able to turn her attention to reading.  Now, her mother says, reading is one of Marianne’s favorite things to do.  While I was visiting the school Marianne asked me to read with her several times - by which she meant listen while she read aloud.  Her reading is actually so fluent now that she would often get impatient with the slowness of reading aloud and lapse into silent reading.  But she still wanted company while she read to herself, something I think many children want as they are learning to read.

It’s tempting to put children who are troubled into some kind of setting with other children who are troubled, and to provide them with adults who specialize in helping troubled children.  Yet I

think that in Marianne’s case she was most helped by being in a community that specialized in health, so to speak, a community whose members know about energy, vitality, strength, and make that knowledge manifest in the lives they lead.  Marianne, we can say, needed to learn about health (and strength, and security, and community), and it makes sense that she would learn it best in a place where it was in such abundance.

RETHINKING HUMAN NATURE:  INTERVIEW WITH JEAN LIEDLOFF

[SS:] Hardly an issue of GWS goes by in which we do not mention Jean Liedloff’s book, The Continuum Concept.  The book is about how the Yequana Indians raise their children in keeping with the continuum of human biological experience - with, for example, almost constant physical contact during the first year, and with the assumption that children are innately social and good-natured.  Quite a few GWS readers seem interested in putting continuum principles to work, and we have discussed this, and the book’s ideas about community and about work and play, in many previous issues.

Jean Liedloff recently moved from England to California, making it practical for us to interview her by telephone.

Susannah Sheffer:  What have you been doing since The Continuum Concept came out in 1975?

Jean Liedloff:  I’ve been calling what I do tutoring, or teaching.  People are concerned about Adult Children of Alcoholics - well, I think of what I do as helping adult children of “normal” parents, because normal is so sick in our society, and, by definition, tragically prevalent.

SS:  What does the tutoring involve?  I know that so often people’s response to your book is, “It’s too late for me, there’s nothing I can do now,” but it sounds as though you believe that something can be done to help people who have been brought up normally. 

JL:  What I had suggested in the original edition of the book, as an idea for research, was to try to give adults the experiences that were missed in infancy and childhood.  But it was difficult to do.  For a while I investigated what they call primal, or abreaction, therapy:  having people relive incidents from their early lives.  I thought that might be the way that the psyche heals itself.  But I was disappointed when I saw that it doesn’t work most of the time.  It’s certainly cathartic, but it doesn’t actually change you, it just makes you feel better for the moment.

SS:  How did you come to realize that?

JL:  It’s very dramatic to see people screaming and weeping.  You can witness the terrible tragedy in the way babies and children are normally treated as you watch adults relive those early experiences.  But at the end they’re pretty much unchanged; they’re still shrinking away from the same things, they don’t feel free and powerful.  So I had to look elsewhere.  There’s an awful lot of phoniness, a lot of talk, and not much of anything genuinely happening in the world of psychotherapy.  For a time I feared that maybe nothing would truly transform the victim of normalcy, but I persisted because that was too terrible to contemplate.  Now, I’m happy to say, I’ve arrived at something that does work.  What is wrong with us, to state it simply, is what we believe - not our conscious beliefs but our unconscious beliefs.  It’s that that needs to be changed.  Birth, and events in infancy, and even prenatal experience, form beliefs in us about ourselves and the world - for example, “No matter what I do, no one responds.”  We never think, “What’s the matter with my mother, that she doesn’t respond?”  We feel that the inadequacy, the fault, is in ourselves, instead, and that is what takes the toll on us in our later lives.

You begin to see very clearly how these beliefs have come about.  Our character is designed to develop in a certain way, which, if the continuum of human experience were followed as it was for tens of thousands of years, works extremely well.  If our parents are behaving correctly and treating us with appropriate respect - which is what the Yequana do, what the Balinese do, what people do all over the world when they have not had the benefit of being educated out of everything that makes sense - when people behave this way, things work out fine.  But we’re brought up in a completely different way.  Children in our culture are made to feel that they’re incompetent, that they’re dangerous, destructive, self-destructive, selfish, dirty - all kinds of things that are just not true.  We’re naturally social, profoundly social, and we keep treating ourselves as though we were innately antisocial and nasty and depraved.  Dr. Spock says that at the age of three months a child will become a tyrant, if you don’t oppose him.

SS:  I think many parents read your book when their children are older and think, “My goodness, I did everything wrong in the child’s infancy, we didn’t have much physical contact at all,” and so on.  You have some examples in the revised edition of people compensating for that by taking older children into bed with them at night, for example.  Do you still believe that this works?

JL:  I have seen it work again and again, but you have to use your judgment about the age at which it can still be appropriate.  Certainly it’s tremendously repairing to people to be physically together.  For example, if you have two children who fight a lot, you can put them in the same bed and let them fight for a few nights, whatever it takes, and you’ll see that they settle down and become much better friends.  It’s quite magical, and it’s a very deep kind of bond that forms.

But physical contact is not the main thing, when a child is older.  It’s a matter of how the child is treated.  I have come to believe, much more even than when I wrote the book, in the tremendous power of expectation.  I use the clumsy phrase, “the assumption of innate sociality.”  If you assume that human beings are innately social, deeply cooperative, if you assume that that’s our nature and you don’t have to make children cooperative but just have to allow them to be, than that is indeed how they behave.  But we show children that we expect them to be destructive and wild and dangerous.  Our toddlers keep toddling away from us and we run after them.  Yequana or Balinese or other continuum children run after the adults.  Now why should that be?  We don’t understand our children, we don’t believe that they’re going to follow us.  We have lost our ancient faith in, and familiarity with, human nature.  I’m writing a book now on Non-Adversarial Child Care, and if a Yequana could read and saw that working title, he’d say, “What do you mean?  Do you mean your people are adversarial toward their own children?  Sounds crazy.”  But of course that’s the normal way we’re taught to do it in Western civilization.

SS:  What’s an example of how we might change our behavior?

JL:  If children spill ink on the carpet, we think we have two choices:  The customary one is to look at them with anger and rejection, to blame and punish.  The other way is to say, “Oh, that’s perfectly all right, darling,” which is ridiculous because it’s not all right to have ink on the rug.  It’s so false, and it’s confusing, because it makes children want to dump more ink on the carpet to get some kind of authentic reaction out of you.  People think there’s no other alternative if you don’t react in either of these ways, but in fact neither is effective.  Children want to learn what’s going on in life, what their people do so that they can do it, and imitate, and help.  So when the ink is on the carpet you can say, “Oh, what a mess,” you can say that it’s horrible - it is, but the child isn’t - and then you can say, “Come on, let’s clean it up.”  You’re giving an honest reaction without making the child feel badly about himself, and you’re showing the child how we feel and what we do in such situations.

We’re constantly repeating things to children, in a naggy, draggy way:  ”Bring me the ball, come on, bring me the ball,” and on and on.  It’s demeaning for both the parent and the child.  We need never say anything more than once, and we should say it in a matter-of-fact, non-pleading tone of voice - “Oh, bring me that, dear,” as you continue talking or doing the work that you were doing.  If they haven’t brought what you asked for, you go and get it yourself.  Children hate to be left out.  As long as they have some kind of interaction - if you’re cajoling them or scolding, they’re still in the action.  But if you just go and get the thing yourself, with no impatient or disapproving looks or disapproval - you must not, above all, make the child feel badly about himself.  Just leave him out.  He is so very social an animal by nature, he won’t be able to bear it.  But he won’t feel badly about himself, because it will have been his choice, and the next time, seeing it is the only way to be involved, he will want to cooperate.

SS:  You talk in the book about how children don’t want to be the center of their parents’ attention, that they expect to be on the periphery of adult activity.  I know that our readers sometimes say that they have trouble taking time for their own interests while they have young children.

JL:  Nature could not conceivably have designed a species in which doing the correct thing for the child is so laborious and unpleasant as we make it for the parents.  No species like that would ever have survived.  Little babies would have been chucked in the river and there would have been only one generation.  This desire to be martyrs, which is even stronger in England than it is here, the self-sacrificing mother, has got to be wrong.  What babies want you to do, but they can’t tell you, is to be active, and to be strong, calm, and centered on your own work, with them in the midst of it.  Most of the day you’re with your peers, you’re playing, laughing, working, and the baby is always welcome, never pushed away, but not the center of attention.  Instead of putting toddlers to bed while you’re still in the living room, let them sleep in the living room where you are.  If you put them in another room it makes them long to be with you, and it makes them have to fight against your will to stay with you.

SS:  An example of how this choice comes up with older children might be the choice between reading the child a book that you love and hope the child might love, and reading a book you aren’t particularly interested in but think might be good for the child.

JL:  Think of a scene:  mother, father, and child, and the mother and father are reading to each other from a book that interests them.  The child is on someone’s lap, probably the lap of the one who’s reading.  Say you’re reading Gone With the Wind.  At the age of 2, probably about 98% of the meaning goes past the child.  A year later, at 3, much more is coming through.  If one of the characters says, “I’m hungry,” the child understands that.  If you’re reading the part about Atlanta being on fire, the child may not understand all of that but may understand that something is on fire, which is interesting.  You don’t edit down your conversation or your reading.  It should be authentic, and interesting to the adults - and then the child is in the correct position to pick up whatever part of that adult conversation and literature corresponds to his stage of development.  That way, there is no pressure to do more than he is able, and no insult to his intelligence.

SS:  One of the discussions of The Continuum Concept in GWS was about involving children in housework, and our tendency in this culture to make a big distinction between work and play.

JL:  We learn from our culture that some things are work, and are supposed to be hard and unpleasant.  But housework doesn’t have to be that way.  If you choose (and you do have a choice) to enjoy what you’re doing, and allow your children to help, you’ll soon see their innate sociality express itself in ways that will surprise you.  Each such revelation will reinforce our lost respect for our exquisitely evolved human nature.  It’s infinitely better than we now believe, when used accurately.

Readers interested in learning more about the application of Jean Liedloff’s ideas may visit: http://www.continuum-concept.org/

OLDER HOMESCHOOLERS

IN THE REAL WORLD

Kristine Breck of Alaska writes:

I’m 14 and have been a homeschooler for six years.  My main interest is animals.  I recently had the opportunity to go from my home in Alaska to an exotic animal breeding compound in Florida, where lions, tigers, leopards, and other rare animals are raised.  It was a dream come true for me because I had always admired the big cats and now I was going to live with them.

No doubt, I had worked for it, and it has been work I have loved doing.  I trained several winning obedience dogs and a performing sheep, raised a musk ox, tamed a fox, trained and raced the World Champion racing reindeer, and taught my best friend, a horse, to do thirty-five circus tricks (so far).

Last summer when the Florida big cat people brought their educational exhibit to our small town in Alaska, I gave them a copy of my resume/portfolio.  They said I had talent, and they came to our farm to give me an audition.

In February, I boarded the airplane for Florida.  I had traveled alone before, but I felt this was a special adventure.  It was a big part of my career and I was eager to get started.  The people I stayed with were really wonderful.  They took me right into their family so I wasn’t homesick much at all, though I was eager to be on the phone to my mom, to hear her familiar voice and tell her about all the exciting things I had learned with the big cats.  Homesickness disappeared entirely when I reminded myself that the trip was only for a month and I wanted to make the most of it.  When you’re so busy having fun, you never want it to be over!  In fact, I had such a good time I stayed an extra three weeks.

I am grateful that my mother allows and helps me to take advantage of career opportunities, even when they take me away from home.  She has taught me well and now I can go and get started in life.

I think that when I was away from home without my mother, people treated me more as an adult.  It’s nice when people come directly to you, instead of through your parents, to talk or ask you something.  It was great to find experienced people with similar interests who believed in my abilities enough to help me come up in the world.

Since I was working with very special animals, some endangered species, the owners trusted me a whole lot to take good care of the young baboon, the llama, the lion cubs, and the baby leopard.  I tried very hard and used all my knowledge to be worthy of their trust.  And I must have been a good “nanny,” because I never had any problems, and they invited me and my mom to come back and live and work on the compound permanently.

People I met were very surprised at my adventure.  They usually guessed, “And you’re only 16 or 17, right?”  Actually I’m 14, but under my circumstances, age was not important.  Qualities such as knowledge, interest, and desire to learn were what mattered.  It was a wonderful experience, and I think homeschooling is excellent preparation for the real world, because we live and learn right in it.

FRANK SMITH’S TEACHER

Frank Smith has come out with another wonderful book, a collection of essays called Joining the Literacy Club.  We will be selling it in our fall catalog, and in the meantime, here’s an excerpt:

Earlier this year, at an informal reception at a private house in Chicago for participants in a literacy conference, I met a most remarkable teacher of Greek.  Everyone was speaking English, but there was a pleasant Greek atmosphere in the room, in the books that were around, in the pictures on the walls, in the music that was playing, (and in the refreshments).  The setting led me to reveal that I had once studied modern Greek but had given up because I felt I hadn’t made much progress.

The Greek teacher took me in hand.  She found some books that she knew I would understand, simple stories with interesting illustrations.  We easily ignored all the other conversations in the room.  We browsed through the books until we found one that I was comfortable with.  Then she invited me to read the story with her - in Greek.  If I mispronounced a word, she didn’t worry.  If I struggled to say a word, she quietly said it for me, in Greek.  If I didn’t understand, she gently suggested a meaning, in English.  I don’t suppose I read much of the book myself, but she made me feel that I had read it all, without any stress of being evaluated, in a pleasant collaboration.  She devoted twenty minutes to me, and when we had done, I was a member of the club of people who read Greek.  I might not have been very proficient, but I was well established.  I was able to enjoy the next book by myself.  And I started to look for other Greek books that I could read . . . when my teacher was not around.

The name of my teacher was Sofia - and she was seven years old.

RESOURCES & RECOMMENDATIONS

PUPPETRY MATERIALS

Stephanie Judy (BC) writes:

I don’t remember reading much about puppetry in GWS, so I thought I’d pass on some information I have.  I worked with a small puppet company when I was in my teens, and still do some solo puppetry in modest ways.  Two years ago I worked regularly with a small group of homeschoolers - we called ourselves The Puppet People.  The best thing about our group was our freedom to fool around and make mistakes.  Often, in a classroom arts/crafts/drama activity, kids only get one chance at any particular project, and they usually have to finish it, even if they don’t like the way their work is turning out.  Over the course of the year, our little group tried lots of different puppet-making and acting techniques, abandoning some in mid-stream, using others many times over.

Some books I recommend:

Making Puppets Come Alive:  A Method of Learning and Teaching Hand Puppetry, by Larry Engler and Carl Fijan (Taplinger, NY, 1980).  If you want only one book about hand puppets, this is the one to get.  It has very precise - but never dreary - instructions on developing hand puppet technique, so your puppets can actually do stuff and not just jiggle and swoop.  It’s a complete manual of gesture - how to make a puppet wave, wait, sneeze, sleep, think, cry, read, walk, run, faint - you get the idea.  Also included are skit outlines for improvisation and a few puppet patterns.  Believe me, it really feels good to learn some of this and see what you can make a puppet do.  The kids in our puppet group worked hard on this material and got some breathtaking results.

Puppet Plays and Puppet Making by Burton and Rita Marks, published by Plays, Inc., Boston, 1982.  This is for the group that wants to put on a puppet show TODAY, but isn’t sure how to go about it.  There are five short plays here - very funny and appealing to kids from about 2 to 12 - and complete instructions for making all the puppets (out of socks, buttons, felt, yard - nothing exotic).  It’s simple and satisfying and a really good book to start with.  The plays can be done by one person or several, and they lend themselves to endless elaboration and improvisation.

Both these books are available from The Puppetry Store (2518 Mountain Avenue, Flint MI 48503).  Write for their catalog.

I also recommend Paper Projects for Creative Kids of All Ages by Jim Bottomley (Little Brown, 1983).  This is NOT your normal book about paper crafts.  Bottomley has the wittiest and most thorough approach to using paper I’ve ever seen.  His projects work (we’ve had no disappointments or disasters from this one) and they are very satisfying to do.  There’s a tree-stump-gnome house that is positively astonishing to make.  All you need is cardboard, grocery bags, and white glue.  You’ll start with a rickety, unstable, most unpromising cardboard skeleton, and by the end of one very messy afternoon you have a beautiful model of a hollow tree stump to be the stage set for a puppet show, or a doll house for someone’s creature collection, or whatever you need a hollow tree stump for.  Bottomley really knows paper and what it can do.  There are about a zillion science/math/engineering/sculpture lessons hidden in this book.  You’ll feel like a genius.  Projects here can be done by almost any age, and different tasks on big projects can be split up.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

[SS:] Some magazines that have come through our office and that might interest GWS readers:

The Doula:  A Magazine for Mothers.  Another good magazine about breastfeeding, birth, motherhood, midwifery, etc.  Personal stories and articles.

New Options.  About education, economics, peace, conservation, and much more.  The April 29, 1989 issue focused on “Building Human-Scale Community.”

Education Now.  British publication about alternative education, with some discussion of homeschooling.  Articles in a recent issue include:  ”Community as School,” “Teaching for Learning,” “Equipping Children to Avoid Drug Abuse.”

CHILDREN’S BOOK CATALOG

For those of you who don’t live near a bookstore, NURSERY BOOKS is a mail-order service that sells books for children (mostly young children, from the looks of it, although it has recently expanded to include books for older children, too).  NURSERY BOOKS

HOW TO FIND RESEARCH

Many GWS readers may find it useful to know that University Microfilms International publishes catalogs of current dissertations and theses in all sorts of areas.  You can order the catalogs for no charge, and then call to purchase the actual dissertations from the same group.  UMI Dissertation Information Service, 300 N Zeeb Rd., Ann Arbor, MI 48106.

From an advice column in the January-February 1989 issue of Child magazine:

The question:  ”In the park the other day, two mothers were talking about the schools they had enrolled their 18-month-olds in, and foolishly I said, ‘But you don’t need to worry about that yet, do you?’  Well, did I get corrected! . . .  How should I have responded?”

The response:  ”Try this:  Tell them that you’re seriously looking into the homeschool movement because you’re not at all sure about the value of modern education.”

GWS was founded in 1977 by John Holt.
Editor - Susannah Sheffer
Managing Editor - Patrick Farenga
Contributing Editor - Donna Richoux
Editorial Assistant - Mary Maher
Editorial Consultant - Nancy Wallace
Book & Office Manager - Ann Barr
Subscription Manager - Day Farenga
Book Shipper/Receiver - Kathy Munro
Office Assistant - Mary Maher
Holt Associates Board of Directors:
Ann Barr, Patrick Farenga (Corporate President), Tom Maher, Donna Richoux, Susannah ShefferAdvisors to the Board:
Mary Maher, Steve Rupprecht, Mary Van Doren, Nancy Wallace
Copyright 1989 © Holt Associates, Inc.All Rights reserved.

AT HOME IN MICHIGAN

From Judith Clark (MI):

…We have three daughters - Kelly, 12, Jennifer, 10, and Stacy, 9 - who have been home-schoolers for about seven months now. I can’t begin to tell you how rewarding this has been for everyone. We follow no particular curriculum and the children are free to explore any subject that interests them.

Stacy, our youngest, disliked having home schooling at first because of her lack of concentration. She had no study habits and she thought the words school and recess were synonymous. Now she is ahead of her class in school and even gets up early to finish something like math or spelling. She is really becoming a concerned person because we are able to teach ecology, gardening, animal husbandry, and many other subjects that public schools have no time for.

As for my other girls, their adjustment was much easier. Kelly and Jennifer are very easy to teach and they also work well together… Kelly will help Jenny with math or Jenny will spell with Stacy. Because of home schooling together, they seem to have become very close friends and their arguments almost non-existent.

…They have corresponded with many other home-schoolers and in doing this they have found many new and interesting friends, not to mention learning about letter writing, sentence structure, and spelling.

…Neither my husband nor I have teaching credentials. We have enrolled our daughters in the Home Based Education Program at Clonlara School (MI). We have found Dr. Pat Montgomery to be one of the few fine teachers left in teaching. For a nominal tuition, around $200 per school year for all my children, Pat becomes our certified teacher. She is terrific - and always ready to give us advice on materials and teaching situations.

…We have found the current poor economical climate here in Michigan to be a blessing for us home-schooling parents. Even though “they” know what we are doing, they are unable to fight us in court because of the cost…

J.P.’S GROWING

From Kathy Mingl (IL):

…I do try to remember that other people feel a certain delicacy about discussing some subjects, but I’m afraid I forget once in a while, and do violence to their social sensibilities. I noticed that just the other day, when I stopped in next door, to talk to J.P’s 2-year-old friend Matty’s mommy. Matty was showing me a doll, and we were chatting amiably away about the fact that the baby had no diaper on, and you have to watch out for babies, because of the things they tend to get all over you if you’re not careful. Matty thought it was all very hilarious, because of course that sort of thing hits right in the area of a 2-year-old’s main interests in life, but I looked up to catch a very odd expression on his mother’s face.

…I really wasn’t aware of how much I’ve taken for granted since I’ve been an adult until my son started asking me all these tricky questions. Being a parent makes you think of things like, “What kind of a world is this that my child is growing up in, and how can I teach him to cope with it?” Scientology data has been valuable to me with that, because of the practical applications it has to daily life. One thing I can think of that I’ve been able to help J.P. with lately is handling a confusion, like picking up all his Tinker Toys - by picking out one piece as the one that needs to be dealt with first, and putting that away, and proceeding from there. I got that bit from THE PROBLEMS OF WORK by L. Ron Hubbard.

Another thing that’s been useful to J.P. is a colored chart I bought and taped to the refrigerator, with the emotional tone scale all laid out in order on it, represented by a funny little guy for each one. When J.P. runs into trouble with somebody, I have him show me where he was and where he thinks the other person was, and what would have been a better thing to have done to handle the situation, all by the pictures on the chart. A good book about the Tone Scale and how to use it is HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR PEOPLE by Ruth Munshull - she’s funny.

…I have to tell you - J.P. has taught himself how to ride a two-wheeled bike! His daddy brought a small one home for him from an auction a couple of months back, and the first thing J.P. did was to get a crescent wrench and take off the training wheels. I showed him how to keep from falling down, by putting his foot down whenever he tipped, and he’s been practicing nearly every day. The other day he called me out to see how he was doing, and he just zipped off down the sidewalk - I couldn’t believe it! He’s only 3 1/2 years old, too…

CHRISTIANITY & CHILDREN

In the Fall ‘81 issue of The Last ? Resort (977 Keeler Av, Berkely CA 94807; $10/yr), a quarterly about corporal punishment in schools, Helen Fox, some of whose letters we have printed in GWS, reviews a book called WHAT THE BIBLE SAYS ABOUT CHILD TRAINING, by J. R. Fugate. According to Helen, Mr. Fugate thinks the Bible tells us that “the child is naturally sinful and totally self-centered. His inherent nature is to lie and steal, to be lazy and gluttonous, to willfully set himself up as master of himself, his parents and society. Because of his wicked nature, he must be controlled by his parents, absolutely and unconditionally. At six months [!]… His mother applies a small switch to his legs as he tries to wriggle away while being diapered. At two, the small switch is exchanged for a ‘willow or peach branch’…”

Helen Fox strongly disagrees with these harsh and cruel ideas, as we do here at GWS. Mr. Fugate and the many who agree with him are of course free to believe what they like. But they are on shaky ground when they call their beliefs “Christian.” What Christ said about children is clear and plain. “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” By “suffer” he did not mean make them suffer; he meant endure them, put up with them, be patient with them. By “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” Christ meant not that little children were perfect angels but that they saw the world as if it were newly made, a beautiful and miraculous place, and lived in it with the kind of intensity and joy that we might all hope to feel in Heaven. At any rate, it certainly is clear that Christ did not say that children were naturally evil and should have the evil beaten out of them.

Some will no doubt point to this or that quote from the Old Testament as support for their beliefs. But the Old Testament is not Christianity. It is the history of what led up to Christianity, the history of the society in which Christ grew up, and which in the most profound and radical ways he was trying to change. It is easy to forget the awkward fact that what he was crucified for was challenging the authorities, being a troublemaker - and the society he was troubling was precisely the society that had produced the Old Testament.

In any case, when it comes to raising children, what we expect turns out to be, sooner or later, what we get. If we assume that children are naturally bad, stupid, cruel, rebellious, and treat them that way, we are soon very likely to have on our hands just that kind of children. But if, as Helen Fox pointed out in her article, we treat children as if, inexperienced and passionate though they are, they basically want and mean to do right, we will soon find that we have that kind of children, helpful to us, kind and generous to younger brothers and sisters. The Chinese do not treat their little children as if they were basically bad, and the happy result is that the kinds of bad behavior which are common among American children of five or six are virtually unknown there. From a purely “practical” point of view, leaving out the ethical (which is in fact rarely a practical thing to do), the trouble with the child-haters and child-beaters is that they produce more and more of exactly what they are trying to prevent. Countless studies have shown that our most violent criminals were almost without exception the victims of violence in their own childhood, and it is an unhappy fact that those parts of our society that are the most violent are also the most violent with their children. I don’t know how to break these vicious cycles; perhaps for the time being there is no way. But at least let’s not call this way of treating children “Christian.” - JH

TRIP TO PACIFIC

This is my first chance to tell about my Pacific trip, since I had no time to write about it for GWS #23. I left Boston on August 13 and took part in the home-schooling conferences in Salt Lake City and Fullerton, California [GWS 23]. From there I flew to Hawaii, landing on the very beautiful big island, which I had not seen before. In a little over a day I was driven over most of the island, went swimming at the loveliest beach (public, too) I have ever seen, and spoke to three different home schooling meetings attended by more than two hundred families, most of whom had young children and seemed very interested in the idea of teaching them at home.

From Hawaii I flew to Honolulu on Oahu, where I talked about school reform (and incidentally home schooling) to a number of forums and university meetings. At one of these I met State Senator Neil Abercrombie, who seemed very interested in and sympathetic to home schooling. There is a good chance that Hawaiian home schoolers may find in him a helpful ally.

From Honolulu I flew to Auckland, New Zealand, where I spent a busy two days, talking at a conference at an alternative school, being interviewed by newspaper, radio, and TV people, and winding up with a big meeting at the university there.

Then on to Melbourne, Australia, for more of the same - a talk at a local teacher’s college, a meeting of several hundred people at the University, and radio, TV, and newspaper interviews. The local home schooling group had arranged that when I came back to Melbourne in a week, after my travels around the country, I would talk to a meeting of area home schoolers in a meeting room at the Zoo. Geoff Maslen, who interviewed me for the Melbourne paper, The Age, put in his interview the phone number of the local home schooling group. About two days after the article appeared, one of the members called me in Darwin saying that they had been so swamped with phone calls about the Zoo meeting that they could not possibly take care of all the people who wanted to go, and asking if I would speak to another home schooling meeting the evening I returned. I said I would; more on this later.

From Melbourne I flew with Helen Modra, who had been our first Australian contact and had got me all the meetings in the Southeast, to Wagga Wagga (pronounced “wogga”), just west of the mountains. Spent a very pleasant day there, talking to several meetings at Riverina College. From Wagga Wagga I flew to Brisbane and another meeting of families interested in home schooling. Though the meeting had been called on quite short notice, there were thirty to forty people there, many of whom expressed strong interest.

Next day to Darwin in the far north, for the big Australian reading conference that had first invited me to their country. Darwin is closer to the equator than any part of the U.S., so that even in the Australian winter it was very warm. I spent a delightful three days with the conference. These Australian teachers seemed somewhat more open to unconventional ways of teaching than is usually the case here. At any rate, everywhere I went I was treated with the greatest kindness, friendliness, and hospitality.

From Darwin I flew to Perth at the Southwestern corner of the country, for another reading conference at Claremont College. Again, I had a most delightful visit there.

Then back to Melbourne for the special home schooling meeting. We met in a room at the YWCA, and despite a $4.50 admission fee, more than four hundred people attended. A very exciting occasion. Many home schoolers the local group had never heard of turned up. Next day, a successful conference at the Zoo (very handy location, for while the adults talk, the children can look at the animals). During lunchtime, while being guided through the Zoo by one of the curators, I picked up and held a number of animals, including a big boa constrictor and a wombat.

Early next morning flew to Sydney for a rather small but very productive all day and evening home-schooling discussion group. There seemed potential for much activity there. Next morning I flew back to Los Angeles - a nineteen hour flight - and thence to Boston.

All in all, a most pleasant, interesting, and productive trip. Everywhere I went people urged me to come back, which I hope to do. Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia all seem fertile soil for home schooling. In Australia the laws of at least a number of states are more favorable to alternative schools than ours; subject to what some feel are rather crippling restrictions, they can even get government funding. So there’s every reason to hope that within a few years there will be many home schoolers there. - JH

MINDSTORMS

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, by Seymour Papert ($11.65 + 75¢ post.) This is a most important book, for two reasons. One is the reason the author intended: it is a book about the way in which we could and perhaps soon may use computers, in schools or at home, to make the culture and language of computers, mathematics, technology, and science - all a closed book to many people - more accessible, understandable, meaningful, and above all enjoyable for children.

The other reason the book is important is one that Papert did not intend (but might not object to): it is a very powerful argument for home schoolers against the ways in which almost all schools teach mathematics (and indeed everything else). What he says about the errors of current education is not very different from what I have been saying for years, in books and in GWS. But since he is a Professor of both Education and Mathematics at M.I.T., probably the leading scientific university in the U.S. if not the world, his words will give our arguments much greater weight.

A number of home schooling families have prepared very good statements of educational plans and purposes for their school authorities. Some of these, which have won the approval of the schools or the courts, we have printed in GWS and/or TEACH YOUR OWN. But in all such statements, above all where families are dealing with hostile school authorities, it might be helpful to make an even stronger objection to the educational philosophies and methods of the schools than most families have made. These should of course be made as statements of educational philosophy, as a considered difference of opinion, rather than a furious attack. MINDSTORMS gives us a great deal of material for such statements.

In GWS #21 we quoted some of what Papert wrote about his childhood love affair with gears. It is a very powerful argument against the idea that how we think about things can be separated from how we feel about them, or that we can decide in advance along what paths children will explore the world.

Here is more useful ammunition from MINDSTORMS:

(p. 7) …Children seem to be innately gifted learners, acquiring long before they go to school a vast quantity of knowledge by a process I call “Piagetian learning,” or “learning without being taught.”

(p. 30) …We consider an activity which may not occur to most people when they think of computers and children: the use of the computer as a writing instrument… For most children rewriting a text is so laborious that the first draft is the final copy, and the skill of rereading with a critical eye is never acquired… The image of children using the computer as a writing instrument is a particularly good example of my general thesis that what is good for professionals is good for children. … But [in schools] the computer is seen as a teaching instrument. It gives children practice in distinguishing between verbs and nouns, in spelling, and in answering multiple choice questions…

(p. 31) …I believe that the computer as writing instrument offers children an opportunity to become more like adults, indeed like advanced professionals, in their relationship to their intellectual products and to themselves. In doing so, it comes into headlong collision with the many aspects of schools whose effect, if not whose intention, is to “infantilize” the child…

(p. 40) Children begin their lives as eager and competent learners. They have to learn to have trouble with learning in general and mathematics in particular…

I was amused by a remark on p. 41:

…People have lived with children for a long time. The fact that we had to wait for Piaget to tell us how children think … is so remarkable…

Who waited? Most of what I wrote in HOW CHILDREN LEARN about young children’s thinking, I wrote before I had read a word of Piaget. And much of what Piaget, Papert, and I have had to say about children as eager and skillful learners was said very eloquently in 1900 by Millicent Shinn in her wonderful book THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BABY, which I hope someday to be able to reprint here.

More from Seymour Papert:

(p. 41) …Already in the preschool years every child first constructs one or more preadult theorizations of the world and then moves toward more adultlike views. [JH - we can observe this process most clearly in children learning to talk.] And all this is done through… a learning process the schools should envy: It is effective (all the children get there), it is inexpensive (it seems to require neither teacher nor curriculum development), and it is humane (the children seem to do it in a carefree spirit without explicit external rewards and punishments).

…And unknown but certainly significant proportion of the population has almost completely given up on learning. These people seldom, if ever, engage in deliberate learning and see themselves as neither competent at it nor likely to enjoy it. The social and personal costs are enormous…

(p. 47) …Our educational culture gives mathematics learners scarce resources for making sense of what they are learning. As a result our children are forced to follow the very worst model for learning mathematics. This is the model of rote learning, where material is treated as meaningless; it is a dissociated model.

That was very true in 1958 when I first taught fifth grade and started writing HOW CHILDREN FAIL, and is much more true now.

(p. 48) One day Jenny [a thirteen year old average student who had been sent by her school to work with Papert and computers] came in very excited. She had made a discovery. “Now I know why we have nouns and verbs,” she said. For many years in school Jenny had been drilled in grammatical categories. She had never understood the difference between nouns and verbs and adverbs. But now it was apparent that her difficulty with grammar was not due to an inability to work with logical categories. It was something else. She had simply seen no purpose in the enterprise. She had not been able to make any sense of what it might be for. And when she had asked what it was for, the explanations that her teachers gave seemed manifestly dishonest. Therefore she learned to approach grammar with resentment. And, as is the case for most of us, resentment guaranteed failure…

…[When Jenny went back to school after her work with computers] her previously low and average grades became “straight A’s” for her remaining years of school. She learned that she could be “a brain” after all.

(p. 50) …It is easy to understand why math and grammar fail to make sense to children when they fail to make sense to everyone around them and why helping children to make sense of them requires more than a teacher making the right speech or putting the right diagram on the board. I have asked many teachers and parents what they thought mathematics to be and why it was important to learn it. Few held a view of mathematics that was sufficiently coherent to justify devoting several thousand hours of a child’s life to learning it, and children sense this. When a teacher tells a student that the reason for those many hours of arithmetic is to be able to check the change at the supermarket, the teacher is simply not believed. Children see such “reasons” as one more example of adult double talk. [They] can see perfectly well that the teacher does not like math any more than they do and that the reason for doing it is simply that it has been inscribed into the curriculum. All of this erodes children’s confidence in the adult world and the process of education. And I think it introduces a deep element of dishonesty into the educational relationship… The child’s perception is fundamentally correct. The kind of mathematics foisted on children in school is not meaningful, fun, or even very useful…

(p. 52) …A living language is learned by speaking and does not need a teacher to verify and grade each sentence. A dead language requires constant “feedback” from a teacher. The activity known as “sums” performs this feedback function in school math. These absurd little repetitive exercises have only one merit: They are easy to grade.And as

I have said for years, teachers or parents would be wiser to give children answer sheets and let them correct their own papers

(p. 63) Turtle geometry… was designed to help children develop the learning strategy: In order to learn something, first make sense of it.

(p. 65) …Turtle geometry… gives the child a model of learning very different from the dissociated one a fifth-grade boy, Bill, described as the way to learn multiplication tables in school: “You learn stuff like that by making your mind a blank and saying it over and over until you know it.”

For most children, that doesn’t work. For a more non-dissociated, i.e., meaningful way to look at multiplication tables, see GWS #17, 18.

(p. 115) …The instructor and a child were on the floor watching… As they puzzled together the child had a revelation: “Do you mean,” he said, “that you really don’t know how to fix it?”… The incident is poignant. It speaks of all the times this child entered into teachers’ games of “let’s do this together” all the while knowing that the collaboration was a fiction. Discovery cannot be a setup; invention cannot be scheduled.

(p. 132) …As children, we learned how to build and use theories only because we were allowed to hold “deviant” views about [the world] for many years. Children do not follow a learning path that goes from on “true position” to another, more advanced “true position.” Their natural learning paths include “false theories” that teach as much about theory building as true ones. But in school false theories are no longer tolerated. Our educational system rejects the “false theories” of children, thereby rejecting the was children really learn…

With these quotes I have only scratched the surface. There are many more powerful insights into children’s learning, and learning of mathematics in particular, than I have room to quote here. And I have said nothing about Turtle or Logo geometry, the particular way of using computers that this book is all about. Please don’t assume that because of all of these quotes you don’t need to read the rest of the book; without Papert’s specific examples, you can only catch a part of the force and truth of what he is saying.

I should add that since Papert wrote this book, and as of the time I write this, two of the major companies making home computers, Texas Instruments and Apple, have designed and produced programs that will enable you to do Turtle geometry on their machines. Whether any other companies have done so, I don’t know. Whether these programs will enable you to do all the things Papert writes about in his book, or how satisfied he is with them, I don’t know either.

Meanwhile, let me urge you once again very strongly to get this book and make use of it not just in home teaching but in any dealings you may have with uncooperative schools. It is very powerful ammunition, not just for home schoolers, but also for all people working for change within schools. - JH

GNYS AT WRK

GNYS AT WRK by Glenda Bissex ($17.50 + post.) This delightful and revealing book is the detailed and loving account of how the author’s so Paul did what Seymour Papert talked about in MINDSTORMS, that is, learned without being taught. He built for himself his own at first crude models of written English, and constantly refined them until they finally matched the written English of the world around him. It is also a splendid account and example of the ways in which a sympathetic and trusting teacher can be of use to a learner, not by deciding what he is to learn but by encouraging and helping him to learn what he is already busy learning. The book is expensive, but it’s well worth the money. Like MINDSTORMS, it gives powerful ammunition both to parents who are trying to deal with the school systems and/or to teachers and others who are trying to change them. And I have to add that since the book is published by Harvard University Press, there is little chance that it will come out in an inexpensive paperback.

Paul Bissex began his writing at age 5 with an indignant note to his mother, who, busy talking with friends, had not noticed that the child was trying to ask her something. After trying a few times to get her attention he went away, and returned soon with this message printed on a piece of paper: RUDF. Luckily for him, his mother (with whom I had a pleasant visit not long ago here in the office) was perceptive enough to decode the note (”Are you deaf?”), understand its importance, and quickly give the boy the attention he had been asking for.

As the boy began to explore written English, his mother paid steady attention to the ways in which he was doing it. In her preface, Mrs. Bissex writes:

…When I began taking notes about my infant son’s development, I did not know I was gathering “data” for research; I was a mother with a propensity for writing things down… When Paul started spelling, I was amazed and fascinated. Only somewhat later did I learn of Charles Read’s research on children’s invented spelling. Excited by his work, I started seeing my notes as “data.”…

What I hope this study offers, rather than generalizations to be “applied” to other children, is encouragement to look at individuals in the act of learning. And I do mean act, with all that implies of drama and action…

…A case study this detailed and extended over time would have been unmanageable were I not a parent..

This was one of the points I made in the last chapter of TEACH YOUR OWN, in which I list a number of reasons why schools would be wise, in terms of their own interests, to cooperate with home schooling families. For such families, keeping notes of their own work, sending them to GWS, or in some cases putting them into articles or books of their own, of which we have already had some and will surely have many more, are doing a kind of long-term educational research which neither the schools nor the schools of education could possibly do themselves. This extremely valuable information about children’s ways and styles of learning, which the schools could never afford to pay for, they can have for nothing from the home schoolers and their many communication networks, including GWS.

In the preface, Mrs. Bissex describes how Paul felt about her research:

At the beginning, Paul was an unconscious subject, unaware of the significance of my tape recorder and notebook. When he first became aware, at about age six, he was pleased by my interest and attention. By seven, he had become an observer of his own progress. When I … had Paul’s early writings spread out on my desk, he loved to look at them with me and try to read them… Paul observed me writing down a question he had asked about spelling, and I inquired how he felt about writing it down. “Then I know that when I’m older I can see the stuff I asked when I was little,” he commented.

At eight he was self-conscious enough to object to obvious observation and note-taking, which I then stopped… He still brought his writings to me, sharing my sense of their importance. At nine he became a participant in the research, interested in thinking about why he had written or read things as he once had…

The study has become a special bond between us, an interest we share in each other’s work, a mutual enjoyment of Paul’s early childhood and of his growing up. I have come to appreciate certain qualities in my son that I might not have seen except through the eyes of this study…

When I was teaching fifth grade with Bill Hull, and beginning to watch and listen carefully to what children said and did in the class, I used to write down notes, in handwriting so tiny they couldn’t easily read it. They knew I was writing about them, and at first said, a little suspiciously, “What are you writing?” But as time went on and they began to understand that I did not see them as strange laboratory animals, but liked and respected them and was trying to see how the world of school looked through their eyes, they felt better about my note taking - though it would probably have been better if I had told them more specifically what I was trying to learn from their work. In other words, I could have made them more conscious partners in my research.

Many GWS readers will remember Ann Kauble’s letter in GWS #12 about her little daughter’s angry dinnertime note, saying that she would no eat her “FICH” but would instead eat all the “CUCEZ.” Many children - I have no idea how many - seem to go more from writing to reading than the other way around. GNYS AT WRK is by no means the first work I have read about children’s invented spellings. Many years ago I read, I forget where, a most interesting article on the same subject by Carole Chomsky, who has done much good work in this area. One thing about her article I remember very vividly. She reported that many children spelled words beginning in TR - tree, train, etc. - either with a CH or an H at the beginning. For a second this baffled me. But by this time I had learned to look for reason in children’s “mistakes.” I began to say “tree, train, etc.” listening carefully to what sounds I was making, and found to my astonishment that what I was actually saying sounded very much like “chree” and “chrain.”

Worth noting that neither Glenda Bissex nor Ann Kauble nor the parents of many other children who learned to write English in their own invented spelling, had taught them “phonics,” or taught them to write, or even much encouraged them to write (except perhaps by their own example). They had been told and helped to learn the names of letters. From these they had figured out for themselves which consonants made which sounds. Like Paul Bissex, they began by leaving vowels out of their words altogether, producing a writing much like the Speed-writing that many adults later struggle and pay to learn.

As Mrs. Bissex makes clear in example after example, Paul did not “learn to write,” learn what schools would call the skills of writing, so that later he could use them to write something. From the beginning he wrote because he had something he wanted to say, often to himself, sometimes to others.

I plan to say much more about his wonderful book in the next GWS. Meanwhile, let me give Mrs. Bissex the final word:

…Paul, like his parents, wrote (and read and talked) because what he was writing (or reading and saying) had meaning to him as an individual and as a cultural being. We humans are meaning-making creatures, and language - spoken and written - is an important means for making and sharing meanings.

OTHER NEW BOOKS HERE

THE SILVER CHAIR and THE HORSE AND HIS BOY by C. S. Lewis ($1.75 each + post.) Two more books in the wonderful Narnia series. In THE SILVER CHAIR, two children (whom we have not met before in the Narnia books) find themselves suddenly in Narnia, and there, at Aslan’s bidding, and in the company of a strange but brave and stubborn creature, go on a long and dangerous journey to a sinister underground world to rescue a Narnia prince kept captive by witchcraft. In THE HORSE AND HIS BOY, a poor boy, to escape being sold into slavery to a cruel nobleman who visits his master, flees with the nobleman’s horse. It turns out to be a Narnia horse, and therefore, able to talk, but obliged until now, in this strange and hostile land, to keep its power of speech a secret. After many adventures they make their way to Narnia and there help to save a good king and his kingdom from a treacherous attack. - JH

HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO DESPITE YEARS OF LESSONS, by Ward Cannel & Fred Marx ($11.65 + post.) We are delighted to be able to offer this book now. You may remember I wrote about it in GWS #21, but at that time it was only available to people who signed up for a special course. Out of the blue, last month the publishers sent us a dozen copies - no word on why they changed their minds.

I won’t repeat everything I said in #21. I will only say that this book has been the biggest encouragement to my playing songs, creating music, and getting satisfaction our of music-making of anything I can think of. Finding this book plus NEVER TOO LATE several years ago inspired me to get my own piano, and I’ve been having a great time ever since, letting go of the old fears and patterns instilled by childhood lessons, learning to trust my own ability and judgment. $11.65 is a small price to pay for a lifetime of enjoyment (and I hope you’ll get the book fast, before the publishers change their minds again!) - DR

OH, BOY! BABIES by Alison Herzig and Jane Mali ($5.35 + post.) This very amusing and touching book is the record of an important educational experiment. A private school for boys decided to offer a six week elective course in infant care. Only in this course the boys would not just read about babies; they would have real babies, to look at, play with, comfort, dress and undress, feed, diaper, and clean. In a text which is almost entirely the words of the boys themselves, and with delightful black and white pictures on almost every page, this book show what happened. It is a very good companion to BEFORE YOU WERE THREE, and a wonderful book for children (perhaps especially boys) of any age.

Two things about the book struck me very strongly. The first was how strange the babies were to the boys. They might have come from Mars. The ten-year-olds had completely forgotten about that part of their lives. The other was how quickly the boys came to understand the babies and to enjoy them and love them. They were very sad when the course ended. Many boys wanted to take the course - next to Computers it was the most popular elective in the school - and as there was a limited supply of babies, no one could take it twice.

It wouldn’t be stretching the truth at all to say that these boys needed these babies, as indeed I think we all do. Seeing babies and little children puts us in touch with a very important part of ourselves, which we may otherwise very easily lose. As I have said many times, from being with babies and infants I have learned an immense amount about human learning, including my own. And it occurs to me that many people, especially upper middle-class ones like these boys, must grow to adulthood and even to the point of having babies of their own without the slightest idea of what babies are like.

It reminds me once again what a bad arrangement for growing up the single-age peer group is. In such groups children are cut off from their own past, in the person of younger children, and from their own future, in the person of older children and adults.

This experiment, of putting ten-year-olds into close contact with babies, is one that many other schools could and should repeat. It might solve a number of important problems at once; children could get the contact with babies that they need, and some mothers, at least, would be able to get much needed help in caring for their children. Of course, people would have to have great confidence in a school, and know it for a gentle and kindly place, to entrust their babies to it. Children who have had this kind of training and experience with babies would be welcome in many families as baby-sitters, and would themselves probably be glad of a chance to do such work. And when we think of all the babies and very young children who suffer terribly from the want of human contact and loving care, we can’t but feel that in most places we should be able to find ways to bring children and babies together. Certainly the home schooling movement, as it grows, should find it easier to do this.

After the last class session in the book, one boy says, “I’m going to beg and beg them to let me take the class again. I’m going to sign up again even if I have to get down on my knees. I just love babies. I mean, I’m going to get down on my knees and beg them.” A lovely book. - JH

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR CHILDREN, by Howard Cohen ($4.50 + post.) This is a very carefully thought out, tightly organized, and clearly written argument in favor or (as I proposed in ESCAPE FROM CHILDHOOD) making available to children the legal rights and responsibilities of adults. Cohen deals in a masterful way with all the conventional arguments against this. His book will not convince haters and fearers of children, but it will greatly strengthen those who believe as a matter of justice that children should be treated as human beings, not as pets and slaves, and it may convince some whose hearts yearn in that direction but whose uncertain and troubled minds hold them back.

Since the idea of giving children legal and political rights is not a live issue and, given the present public temper, is not likely to become one for a long time, one might ask what’s the point of this book, why is it worth reading, what difference could it possibly make. Well, in the overall society it may not make any difference, but it could make a great difference in the homes of unschoolers, and in the small but growing communities that home schoolers are making. In this miniature society, this country within a country, this ancestor (I hope) of a very different larger society some of us may someday see, the question of how children should be treated and what rights they should have is a very live one. There are those in the home schooling movement who say that, except for the right to food, clothing, shelter, and health care, children have only duties and obligations, and no rights at all. This book is a powerful argument in favor of going as far as we can in the direction of treating children, despite their youth and inexperience, like sensible, well-meaning, and responsible people, and why doing so will make stronger and better families as it will someday make a stronger and better society. - JH

Editors - John Holt & Donna Richoux

Managing Editor - Peg Durkee

Subscriptions & Books Manager - Tim Chapman

Copyright 1977 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)