Page Four
COMPUTER IN North Carolina
Philmore Rial (NC) writes:…We had been home schoolers in Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina. We had obtained approval from the public school officials in Texas and S.C; but we elected to be silent in N.C. since recently many widely publicized legal cases made it seem impossible to get permission… We contacted you when we received first a visit, then a letter suggesting that we enroll our eightªyear-old daughter in public school. We called the North Carolina Office of Non-public Schools and asked for a copy of all the laws which would pertain to opening a private school. After examining these laws, we decided to open a private religious school. The N.C. laws purposely limit the state’s authority over private religious schools, the only requirements being health, fire safety, teacher health certification, attendance records, and immunization records. [See GWS #13.] Some of our friends who were interested in what we were doing for our girl’s education have now enrolled in our school. The “New System School” has three classrooms conveniently located in three homes of its five students….Our two daughters, Jennifer and Jessica, are doing very well in the home schooling environment. They receive daily instruction from my wife, Linda, and Mr. Apple. Mr. Apple is an Apple brand computer….I purchased my computer to use as an educational tool for myself and then discovered its potential as a tool for educating my two daughters. My oldest daughter, Jennifer, has been using the touch-typing tutor on Mr. Apple. So far, her progress has been astounding to me. The computer can accomplish a function which no human can do and that is formulate practice exercises which are tailored to the keys she has problems with. The computer monitors each key twenty times per second. If the student is a small fracªtion of a second slower on a given key, then the next practice exercise will contain more words that contain that letter than any other….Jennifer has been working with the mathematics tutor program for the computer. Her math began as her worst subject and now has become her favortie. The math tutor finds the student’s threshold of understanding and then gives exercises at that level. As the student makes progress, the computer advances the level of difficulty. We also have a spelling tutor. I was disappointed when I first purchased this software package - I felt that it was much too advanced for Jennifer, who is 8. Much to my amazement, she has
grasped the impact of the teaching. She is going to begin a course in BASIC computer language soon. She will be instructed by the computer.
I have learned a great deal about computer language. The most important lesson is never to be afraid of the unknown. This fear prevents many intelligent people from tackling new subjects. I have learned three languages which the computer is fluent in. I have found that software experts no longer confuse me; software is not as mysterious as the software expert would have the layman believe. When we talked on the phone, I told you that I would be happy to assist any other unschoolers who would like help in getting started with a computer-assisted instruction program. Now that I have full word-processing capability, I am able to write letters with ease. My typing does not have to be perfect to produce minimal errors in my text. The computer allows me to correct my errors before printing…
HOME COMPUTERS
From Linda Collins, Prussia PA :
…I have started a new project called Educational Software Library, Inc., a nonprofit organization devoted to distributing educational computer software programs… I would be very interested in knowing how many GWS readers have home computers, and which ones might consider purchasing one if they knew such a program-lending service was available. I can foresee this becoming an alternative form of correspondence school. Also, if anyone is interested in volunteering their time to write instructional units or in programming, I have lots to keep them busy!…
A CHILD LEARNS FRENCH
From Helen Fox (Que.):
…When my daughter was two she spent a lot of time with some French children down the road. One was a little boy who took great delight in teaching her all the swear words in his vocabulary. She adored this child and was his attentive pupil. Naturally he fell over laughing whenever she repeated these forbidden words, and this was so rewarding to her efforts that she said them on every possible occasion. But she was always listening, and as soon as she caught on to a few more important words and phrases she discarded her sacrilegious vocabulary. One day she made a momentous discovery; there are two words for everything; he says it one way, I say it another. From that moment the language came more rapidly. If she didn’t know a French word, she’d try an English one pronounced with a French accent, just for effect. She began spending six hours a day with the boy’s sister, either at our place or at theirs. The girls were three now, and in between the swings and the sandpile they would argue interminably 1over the pronunciation of a word. They’d ride in the back seat of the car singing “Petit Papa Noel” on the hottest day of summer, their faaces an inch apart, their eyes glued to each other’s mouth. In this way my daughter learned to imitate her friend’s speech flawlessly. By age four, she could say anything she wanted to in both languages. She was completely at home. And this was accomplished without using a cent of the taxpayer’s money, without spending hours poring over books, without embarrassment. Magic!…
DISCOVERING FOR HERSELF
From Hanni Woolsey (CA):…Your multiplication math grid in GWS #17 was (is!) a great success with Nancy, our 7-year-old unschooled daughter. She wanted to make her own grid and filled it out right away. It took her until 10:00 PM; she couldn’t stop! I just sat there, having fun watching. She knew her 5’s and 10’s. When she did the 6’s she would do it like this: 5 times 6 is 30, plus 6 is 36. She likes numbers and seems to always figure out a way to get the correct answers….This past summer she also taught herself how to read and can now sit for hours at a time reading in books like HEIDIÐ Ð F. Her interest in reading started exactly at the point when I stopped my “clever” attempts to try to get her to read - when I realized I should leave her alone and just bear the embarrassment of having a 6-year-old daughter who couldn’t read anything besides Stop and Exit and her name. It amazes me how fast her progress happened and still does. It is so simple. The more I learn to stand back and keep my mouth shut, the more Nancy learns and the happier she is. The more I see her grow, the more confident I get. Like her spelling. She likes to write letters and at first, I could hardly figure out what she had written. Now each time she writes, her spelling gets better. Without tests and drills and spelling exercises. Neat! Looking back to my own childhood, the most fun times I had \were when I was free to do what seemed fun. Experimenting with wood, yarn, cooking, baking, fixing bicycles, etc. And watching my father do various projects, fixing everything in and around the house… I still like to learn from books better than from people. Like playing the guitar when I was 15, or baking, or making baskets, or, recently, typing. Books don’t get impatient and insist that I do it their way!…To give Nancy the freedom to learn and discover things by herself was in our case easy to do. (The technical part of it, I mean. To let go of all our imprinted programs about education and learning mentally, was not so easy at first.) Last fall we filled out the affidavit declaring our home a private school. We’ve never had any problems so far. We keep a low profile…
RICHES IN R.I.
Peter Van Daam (RI) writes:…The variety of constructive activity outside the home seems to be several magnitudes greater than what I had experienced in what I (then) thought was a full youth. Brigitta recently began training as a zoo docent (guide). Julia, 10, will be participating too. And Jessica, 8, and Percival, 4, will obviously be benefitting too, especially since Brigitta hopes to encourage an art (drawing) program for other children and adults during her tours of duty. She has also been helping organize a small Montessori school’s art curriculum in trade for some weekly one-on-one tutoring of all three children by the school’s director. They all have been using the public libraries rather intensively. Recently they asked for and got a special tour showing them how to utilize the main branch’s resources better. They are participating in a variety of free programs such as children’s reading hours, creative dramatics, poetry, and the like. Julia and Brigitta also take in a special film series and discussions dealing with the role of women in our society. I have always had a vision of our libraries becoming a multi-faceted learning center and it seems to be happening right before our eyes. Julia and Jessica have joined a state-supported sculpture class at the Pawtucket Children’s Museum. I’m enclosing a photo of Jessica and her work that was published in the Pawtucket “Times”. The sculptor really likes her work, her originality… Brigitta and Julia have also been taking public TV’s Speed Learning course. They attend plays and other events by ushering downtown at the main theaters. With Jessica, they are part of a stuffed toy sewing class. They play recorder together. An acquaintance, the chairman of R.I.’s Libertarian Party who happens to be an electrical engineering professor at Brown University, offered late last year to introduce Julia to electronics concepts. So she and Jessica and I have been learning how to put together transistors, capacitors, semi-conductor chips (impulse generators, multiplexers, and the like) to produce digital display outputs, working from commercial specification sheets. Fascinating how fast he is moving us through complex concepts close to the cutting edge of technology. They could bootleg their whole education at Brown. Julia is learning conversational French in a very small adult class at Brown’s International House, and learning modern Greek at their language lab. She still has her apprenticeship at a nearby health-food restaurant, having full responsibililty for preparing some of the dishes, serving, earning money equivalents. There is more, but no space or time to continue. There is an unbelievable richness all around us just waiting for us and anyone else who chooses to do so to absorb it…
FAMILY HISTORY
From Carol Kent (VA):…An activity never taught in school that would be of great learning value to children is genealogical research. A good researcher does some numerical figuring, uses reading and writing skills constantly, and understands geography and history. He learns what records our society keeps, why and where they are kept, and what they contain. A child working on his genealogy has a reason to correspond with many adults: family members, other researchers, libraries and historical societies, state offices and courthouses. The resulting knowledge of family traits and heritage may recapture much of the depth and richness of life which are lost in the nuclear family…
REMEDIAL MATH
The Winter 1980 issue of “Outlook” (2929 6th St, Boulder CO 80302; $12/yr), a quarterly about open education in schools, contains a very useful article by David Wheeler, Professor of Mathematics at Concordia University in Montreal, saying in part:…A while ago, for a talk I was due to give, I wrote down a few of the half-truths that get told about children and mathematics. (To be a little more accurate, I should say “school mathematics” and “school children” - that is, mathematics and children as they are supposed to be when in school.) “Mathematics” (1) is difficult to learn because it is
abstract; (2) is a linear subject, so if you miss something,
you’re lost; (3) trains the mind to think logically; (4) is a
deductive system; (5) requires a special cast of mind; (6) is the subject where you always know whether you’re right or
wrong. “Children” (1) have poor memories; (2) have short attention
spans; (3) learn by imitation and drill; (4) will not learn correctly if allowed to make mistakes; (5) need continual
success; (6) must be given praise to reinforce their learning.
It is tempting to have fun with some of these; I always like to remind people that “I” have a very poor memory for jokes, and an extremely short attention span for watching baseball. But there are much more serious things to say, like insisting on the sharp distinction between “drill” and “practice”, and pointing out that no one learns very much by imitation since the origins of most behaviors are invisible. The first three items in the “Children” list are over-generously described as half-truths: the first two are not specific to children and the third is largely false for everyone. So since the statements are, if anything, rather “less” than halfªtruths, I wonder why I hear them occasionally used as if they served some explanatory function? The fourth and fifth items on the “Children” list are, in my book, plain wrong. The sixth item is perhaps the only legitimate half-truth in the set; one can find some supporting evidence for it some of the time with some children. But I get very unhappy when I hear it put forward as a principle for teachers to use. It sounds patronizing, in the first place. In the second place, it can have damaging long-term effects. If in the short term success is always associated with praise some chldren will learn to work for praise rather than success, and I can’t see what good that will do them when they leave the school environment. The clincher, though, the argument that demolishes the “Children” list, is that each single statement fails if applied to children “before” they get to school. When they are learning to walk, to talk, and to master a great veriety of physical and social skills in their early years they show excellent memories for the things that matter, their attention spans are suited to the tasks, they practice a lot but don’t have to be drilled, they persist in learning to correct their mistakes, and they manage to learn a great deal when no one is there to praise them. I can’t believe, and I don’t know who could, that children suddenly acquire learning disabilities on entering the kindergarten door. If the statements aren’t true, why do they continue to circulate in the underground of educational folklore? I have to infer that many of children’s difficulties in school must be due either to the things they are required to learn or to the way they are required to learn them. If something in the content or methods of school mathematics is the cause - or a contributory cause - of their difficulties, we are not likely to be able to offer remediation to students without first standing aside and inspecting critically what it is we are asking them to be good at. Yet most of the advice about remediation that I’ve seen takes the content and “style” of school mathematics as unalterable “givens” and proceeds from there. Of course, if we want to provide remediation in mathematics the endpoint has got to be the mathematics that everyone recognizes, but it doesn’t follow that it has to be arrived at in the usual way. Unfortunately, many teachers don’t know other ways or don’t believe there could be other ways. I don’t blame them - at least, not much - because their schooling didn’t teach them mathematics; it only taught them rules for doing a few mathematical things. If rules are all you know, it doesn’t occur to you that you can achieve the same results with different rules, or perhaps without any rules at all. And if you believe, as apparently some teachers do, that the point of mathematics in school is that it teaches rule-obedience, then you won’t want to look for alternatives to the traditional rules even if you know they exist. My list of half-truths about mathematics looks a good deal more plausible than the “Children” list and I could probably smudge together a few arguments to make the statements look even more plausible. Nevertheless they are by no means as uncontroversial as they may seem, and two or three of them are downright misleading. Take the first, about mathematics being difficult because it is abstract. Mathematics “is” abstract, for sure, but so are many other human attainments, including language. Thinking is abstract yet no one bothers to say so. Why make a particular point of the abstractness of mathematics? Indeed, mathematics is a particular form of thought.
No one, not even the best of teachers, can “put” thoughts into students’ minds: but the good teacher knows how to set up situations that elicit, that trigger, even impel mathematical thinking. The criterion for efficacy relates to whether the situation “says something” to the student, “has meaning” for the student so that he can “enter into a dialogue” with it. The second statement in my “Mathematics” list is about the supposed linearity of mathematics, about its being built brick by brick, like a tall tower. There is no doubt that a student who misses something in an arithmetic class may get lost in a stonger sense than the student who misses something in a language or history class. The interrelationships between various mathematical ideas are generally much more crucial than they are in other subject areas, perhaps because they are more detailed and more specific in their interdependence. But there is no reason why the mathematical relationships that “can” be linearly ordered should be so displayed to sudents. This is false economy with a vengeance. It would be sounder pedagogical principle to allow for multiple connections and give students the possibility of multiple entries into each mathematical idea. I don’t know of any school textbooks which follow this procedure. But now I’d better get closer to my title (An Askance Look at Remediation in Mathematics), and the last item on my “Mathematics” list takes me there. Like all the other statements this one (”… is a subject where you always know whether you’re right or wrong”) needs to be qualified and put in context before one can say how far it is true; but by turning it around it seems to me I get a working criterion for deciding if a student needs remediation or not. If the student almost never knows whether what he or she is doing in mathematics is right or not then I would regard this as a distress signal calling for emergency measures…
[JH:] We will quote more from Prof. Wheeler’s good article in a later GWS.
SPELLING IN THE AIR
I wrote in THE UNDERACHIEVING SCHOOL:…Good spellers know what words look like and even, in their writing muscles, feel like. They have a good set of word images in their minds and are willing to trust these images. The things we do to “teach” spelling to children do little to develop these skills or talents, and much to destroy them or prevent them from developing….There are some tricks that might help children get sharper word images… One is the trick of air writing: that is, of “writing” a word in the air with a finger and “seeing” the image so formed. I did this quite a bit with fifth graders, using either the air or the top of a desk, on which the fingers left no mark. Many of them were tremendously excited by this. I can still hear them saying, “There’s nothing there, but I can see it!” It seemed like magic. I remember that when I was little I loved to write in the air. It was effortless, voluptuous, and satisfying, and it was fun to see the word appear in the air. I used to write “Money Money Money,” not so much because I didn’t have any as because I liked the way it felt, particularly that “y” at the end, with its swooping tail…
MORE ON HANDWRITING
In GWS #19 (”On Handwriting”) I wrote about children who, in my fifth grade class many years ago, could write faster in manuscript print than I could in what I had always thought of as very speedy cursive writing. The other day I decided to test myself, to see whether I could write faster in cursive or in the modified Italic-manuscript print which I some-times use to write little notes in the office. And I found to my surprise that though I have been writing cursive writing all my life, and until making this test had been doing much more writing than printing, “I” could print faster than I could write. The difference was not very great, but it was consistent. No matter how much I warmed up and practiced my cursive, I could never make it as fast as my printing. Why should this be so? The only reason I can think of is that when we move from the end of one letter to the beginning of another, we can move our pen a little bit faster through the air than across the paper, partly because the paper slows down the pen a tiny bit, and partly because when we move our pen through the air we don’t have to worry about what the joins or connections between the letters look like. So, at the tender age of 56, I am going to drop cursive (except for my signature) and do all my pen and pencil writing in my modified print. Since it is both faster and more legible, why not?
Why, in general, is print more legible than cursive? Or, to put it a little differently, why are unjoined letters easier to read than joined? Because there is no possibility of confusing the joins (”ligatures,” as one italics book calls them) with the letters themselves. This is one of the main problems of most illegible handwriting, you often can’t tell whether a particular mark on the paper is part of a letter or only a join between letters. So now we have two solid and convincing reasons for resisting, if we want to, the demand of the schools that our children learn cursive writing - print is more legible, and is demonstrably faster. Of course, if children want to learn cursive writing, because they like the way it looks, or because they see some grownup doing it, they can. But there is no sensible reason to make them. A word about my sample printing. Only a few basic shapes and pen strokes are needed to make all the letters, and all these pen strokes ƒare easily and quickly made by the hand and fingers. On the whole, I see no reason to make children waste time practicing these shapes. If they write, as they speak, in order to say things they want to say to people they want to say them to, and if they have good models of printing to look at, they will improve their writing just as they improve their speech. A possible exception - children who have learned to write cramped, awkward, illegible cursive may need “a little” practice on shapes just to loosen up their hands and give them the feeling that printing can feel as well as look good. But I wouldn’t push this if a child resisted, preferring to write “real” writing, i.e., writing meant for others to read.
STARTING EARLY
From an article in the “New York Times”, 2/8/81, about Kyra Nichols, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet:…There is little question that today, at 22, Miss Nichols belongs in that realm, a place in dance that she seems, in retrospect, to have aimed at all her life. Mrs. Nichols recalls the terrifyingly single-minded determination with which her daughter took to ballet from the age of 4, a determination that seems surprising, today, in view of Kyra Nichols’s serenity onstage and off. “I hated school because it got in the way of dance,” Miss Nichols says today. “I wanted to be in the studio working…” At four, Miss Nichols decided it was not enough to imitate from the sidelines as her mother taught ballet. “She took class holding onto a pool table across the room, then one day I noticed her at the end of the barre,” Mrs. Nichols remembers. “And, rather than have a fuss in front of the other children, I let her stay.” At nine, Miss Nichols began to take company classes with her mother at the San Francisco-based Pacific Ballet. “Everyone else in the class was an adult,” Mrs. Nichols recalled. “But no one thought of Kyra as a child. She was tall for her age and she always looked and acted mature…”
From the liner notes on an album of music by Harry James:…When he was ten years old, he was the leader of the number two band in Christy’s Circus, having mastered the trumpet after a couple of years of instruction from his father, who led the number one band.: That wasn’t his first musical experience either. At four he performed on drums (and doubled as the world’s youngest contortionist) in the Mighty Haag Circus, in which he had been born on the road, and from which he derived his middle name…
A quote from the great jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, on a record album jacket, “Jazz Women: A Feminist Retrospective”:…I have to give my mother credit here. She used to tell the story that I was a nervous child. To keep me out of mischief, she held me on her lap while she played an old-fashioned pump organ that she had at home. One day my hands beat hers to the keyboard and I picked out a melody. She was so surprised she dropped me on the floor and ran to get the neighbors to come and hear me. That was the beginning and from that time on (I was three) I never left the piano. She never let a teacher near me. She had studied and all she could do was read. She couldn’t improvise on her own at all. So instead, she did a very good thing. She had professional playing musicians come to the house and play for me. That’s how Jack Howard came on the scene. Some days I’d stay at the piano twelve hours. I didn’t stop to eat or anything - sometimes I’d drink just a glass of water. It was my step-father, Fletcher Burley, who really encouraged me. He bought me a Seth player with piano rolls. I learned the classics for him from the rolls and he used to listen to Irish songs, as well. He was very proud of me, and used to take me everywhere with him. He’d hide me under his coat and bring me to his meeting places and have me play for all his friends. By the time I was six I was professional - playing for parties at $1 an hour. I played with the Union Band in Pittsburgh, Pa. where we had moved when I was four. And later on when musicians came to the city, they’d come out to the house and ask me to play with them: Earl Hines’ guys and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers I remember especially. When I was twelve or so, a revue came through town… It seems their pianist got hung up or something, and one of the stagehands said he knew where they could find a pianist for the show. The producer came out in his big car to East Liberty where we lived and got mad when I was pointed out playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. But he changed quickly when we went inside. They hummed the score to me and I played it through, and played the show that night, and then went out on the road for the first time in my life…
MORE FROM KATHY MINGL
…The quote by Pete Seeger in GWS #18 really hit me, because I’ve been thinking about that very thing myself. I’ve realized lately that I’ve had a mistaken idea all along about singing - I had this odd notion that there was a “right” way and a “wrong” way to do it… I enjoyed music classes in school, but no one seemed very excited about my performance… By the time I was grown up I more or less assumed that “songs” were notes and words on paper or nice sounds you listen to, and “music” properly belongs to people who do it “right.” Then I married Tony, and we had J.P. When I sang lullabies to the baby, Tony astonished me by thinking my singing was beautiful (the baby seemed to think it was OK, too). Tony never thought “he” could sing, but he gets these deep, mellow tones that go right through you… I think he sings great. When J.P. sings, I can tell that what he does isn’t up to Roger Wagner Chorale standards, but he’s happy, and it makes me happy to hear him. In fact, if Robert Wagner could hear the three of us belting out some fine old classic like “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad,” or “It’s the Meat, Meat, Meat that Smells like Dirty Feet” (one of J.P.’s favorites) as we ride in the truck, he’d probably throw himself in the nearest river, but it makes “me” feel so happy, I can hardly stand it. All of this gives me a different idea of what “singing” really is. J.P. sings when he’s happy and moving - dancing, driving, marching, etc. Watching, I think I would define singing as something you do when you feel spiritually lifted and moved along with some motion or emotion. It’s an expression of a “feeling”, not this note or that one, or any technique at all. Maybe when you feel an especially nice feeling, or you feel greatly moved by things and “need” to express yourself with music, the discipline of instruction would help you enlarge and refine your technique, but I can tell you from experience that it’s a waste if you have nothing to say……We made a lot of Christmas presents this year instead of buying them, and just before Christmas we got the idea of making rocking horses to sell. We didn’t have much time and we only sold two - for $45 each - but we felt encouraged enough by that that we’re thinking of going further with them. We came up with an especially good baby rocker that I think would sell well for $10 or $12, and I also made a really cute teddy-bear puzzle for my niece out of 1×8. I used acrylic paints thinned with water to stain the wood, and it worked great. I drew up my own design - I’ve worked out a system for making patterns come out evenly from a sketch made directly on the wood - and the whole thing only took a couple of hours. That sort of thing is a lot more fun to me than fighting my way through a crowded department store, too…
SKILLS POOL
The Spring ‘81 issue of “Unschooled in Maryland” (9085 Flamepool Way, Columbia MD 21045; $1 for 3 issues) printed a “skills pool” to start a learning network. Here are the skills that 13 people listed: 1. Solar energy, building, carpentry, vegetarian cooking. 2. Early childhood elementary school teacher; alternative approaches as well; environmental games, activities, projects; ecological studies for adults and kids; centering games and exercises; organic gardening; tofu making; assisting home births. 3. Incorporating businesses; homebirthing & breastfeeding info; sewing for my own shop. 4. Registerd nurse; assist homebirth with a nurse midwife; needlecrafts. 5. Sewing, quilting, cross stitch, etc; stained glass. 6. Carpentry; shop woodworking; house and boat building. 7. Oil painting and craft; Japanese language; knitting, sewing; international cooking; Origami. 8. History; social and political philosophy; films as a learning resource. 9. Learning games and activities for young children. 10. Sewing; nutrition & natural foods; herbal medicine. 11. Builder (any structure); organic farming; foraging; beekeeping. 12. Various media related skills; sewing, knitting; vegeterian cooking & natural foods; canning; learning materials, activities, etc. 13. Various musical instruments; gardening, drawing; resource for geology, astronomy, other sciences; meditation.
ONTARIO PRIVATE SCHOOLS
Anna Myers (GWS #19) writes:…Here’s all you do to start a private school in Ontario: phone the Ministry for a form to fill out (which only asks for name, address, phone, etc). It is called a “Notice of Intention to Operate.” You must have at least five school-age children enrolled to be called a school. You never have to give names of children, just fill out a “September report” each year, which asks for teacher’s names, etc. None of the teachers or principals have to be qualified teachers (we just listed all our parents). The law just states that you must meet “at some time” during the week during regular school hours. The Ministry has the right to enter the school at any reasonable time (school hours), but a man from the Ministry told me they are too busy to come unless they receive a complaint. You must also have your “school building” (we chose our home as the “one” building) inspected for fire and public health. Here’s the trick - “they” have a magic number of “5 or under”, so to approve it they don’t want more than 5 kids in the home at once. They said they don’t care how many we have in our home if “school” is not in, so the trick here is: find out who is at the door. If it’s Fire or the Public Health dept. and there are more than 5 kids say it’s not school. If it’s the Ministry, say it is! We can “enroll” as many as we want to but just can’t have them here all at once. I tell parents to try to make it down here once a week for a short visit if they can, just to make it all legal! But we don’t push it or feel we “have” to do this……When we visited Pioneer Village, in every house a lady dressed as a pioneer would ask why the kids weren’t at school! The first time Drew said, “We have the day off.” In the next house he said “We have a Professional Development Day.” (Schoolkids get 12 of these a year - teachers use these days to mark, write reports, have staff luncheons, etc.) I asked Drew why he told those ladies those things and he replied, “It sure ends a lot of talking!”…
PEOPLE VS. LEVISENÄ
When people in Illinois ask us how they can legally teach their children at home, we usually suggest they look up an Illinois Supreme Court case called “People vs. Levisen”. The legal citation for the case is 90 NE 2d 213, 14 ALR 2d 1364; this just tells you the names of the series, the volume numbers, and the page numbers where you can find the decision. You can usually find a law library open to the public at your county courthouse or city hall, and the staff will help you find what you’re looking for. In an opinion dated Sept. 27 1979, the Michigan Attorney General surveyed what the courts in other states had ruled on home schooling, and summarized “People vs. Levisen” as follows:…The respondent was convicted of violating a comparable [to Michigan] compulsory education statute. The defense was made that the child was receiving private tutoring at home. The facts were that the child, a third grade student, was receiving five hours of instruction at home in comparable courses, the instruction was being given by her mother, who had two years of college work and some training in educational psychology. Further, the child showed the academic proficiency of the average third grade student. It should be observed that the tutor in this case did not possess a teaching certificate. The Illinois court defined a school as a place where instruction is bestowed upon the young. The number of children being taught does not determine whether the place is a school, so that the respondent was, in fact, providing an education in a private school for her child in her home, in lieu of attendance at the public school. But the court pointed out that the parents have a burden of showing that they have in good faith provided an adequate course of instruction in the prescribed branches of learning. Finally, the court held that the copulsory education statute was not enacted to punish those who provided their children with instruction which is equal or superior to that which may be obtained in the public schools. To the same effect is the decision of the Indiana Supreme Court in “State V. Peterman”, 70 NE 550, and the decision of the Oklahoma supreme court in “Wright v. State”, 209 P 179… For more info on these last two cases, see GWS #3, page 2. As it happens, we do not yet have copies of these three decisions in our files; if anyone would like to send us a copy, we’d be grateful. - DR
B.C. EXEMPTION
A reader received a letter from the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation, saying in part:…The Public Schools Act requires every child over the age of seven years and under the age of 15 years to attend some public school subject to certain exemptions. One of the exemptions is that the child is being educated by other means thought to be satisfactory to any justice or tribunal to whom the matter might be referred… Another possible exemption is “where the child has reached a standard of education equal to or higher than the standard to be attained in the public school within a distance of three miles”…
FROM WASHINGTON STATE
A reader writes:…My thoughts on getting around the officials here in Washington come down to this: I think it would be quite easy to satisfy the state in setting up a private school, since there is no follow-up after the initial approval. If I were not credentialed, my plan of action would be to find a credentialed teacher, preferably one who is not currently teaching, and put his or her name down on the application as the teacher of the school. The credential is checked up on, but I doubt if any cross-checks are made to see if they are teaching at a public school that same year. No one ever visits the school to see if a teacher is physically present, so I don’t think that there is much chance that you’d ever be found out. The key here is getting a credentialed teacher to let you use his or her name. Not everyone would be able to find one, of course, but I think it would work for many. Until they tighten up the laws, that is. Some people might be turned off by the dishonesty involved, and it might cause some uncomfortable moments, but I think I would do it if it were the only way I could keep my kids at home….All the dealings in our case were done with: Carl T. Fynboe, Administrator of Private Education, Division of Instructional and Professional Services, Old Capitol Building, Olympia WA 98504; (206) 753-1137. We were told in no uncertain terms by Mr. Fynboe that licensing the home as a private school was the only legal way to teach one’s own children in this state. He was a stickler for having forms signed and filled in properly by the proper persons (fire dept. chiefs and health dept. officials) but generally he seemed very receptive to what we wanted to do. I was told he was a pretty “free thinker” himself, but he definitely took the requirements of his job very seriously. There is one family nearby teaching their kids at home, without benefit of private school approval, and they have never been bothered. They plan to continue, since this year went by without any problem. They are not credentialed. If I couldn’t find a credentialed teacher to lend me her name, I’d do the same thing as this family has done. They just tell people that it is legal, and no one questions it.? One nice by-product of being approved as a private school is
that our address is given out to all sorts of businesses that sell to schools. We get catalogues and letters daily from all sorts of businesses, and it is fun to look through their wares. We have ordered a few things from these sources, especially films. We have access to a projector at the local elementary school and can order films for free from the public library…
HIPPOPOTAMUS QUESTIONS
While talking to a recent and very interested and friendly meeting at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I said something that I make a point of saying in all my talks about home schooling, and that I think might be useful to others who talk about it, since it saves much pointless and heated argument. What I said went about like this:…One of the things I want to try to do tonight is to stay away from what I call hippopotamus questions. [Bewildered looks.] I mean by that questions like, if hippopotamuses could fly, how would we keep them from breaking all the branches off the trees? I admit that if hippopotamuses “could” fly, that would be a serious problem. But for this evening, I don’t want to take time to discuss it, just as I don’t want to take time to talk about what would happen if tomorrow all the public schools disappeared, what would poor people do with their children, etc, etc. Public schools aren’t “going” to disappear tomorrow, or a year from now, or ten years from now. They will be around for some time to come, and for some time to come most people are going to be sending their children to them, no matter what the home schooling movement may or may not do. So we don’t need to see tonight’s discussion as some kind of battle to save public schools.
WINNING THEM OVER
From a California reader:…We were visited in the fall by a representative (his title may be Private School Consultant) from the County School Superintendent’s Office. He brought with him the assistant principal from the local high school that our daughter would attend if she attended public school. We leveled with them totally. His first question was, do we keep an attendance record. This is the one thing the California law requires of private schools. I told him we didn’t because we couldn’t see how we could have anything but perfect attendance when the school met in our home, but if he had a need, I would do that. He agreed that any attendance record we kept would be a perfect one, but he also said that he thought we should keep a record anyway. He thought it was the responsibility of the County Superintendent’s office to supply a school with a record book and he said he would see that we got one of those. The book has never come, however, so we have not done anything about it. His next question was what math series did we use and what reading program did we follow, so I explained our no-teaching approach and he loved it. He asked some very intelligent questions about it and the conversation eventually turned into a discussion on how we would make this work for the whole society….As they were leaving, the man from the County Supt.’s Office asked if he could keep in touch because he thought I would be an asset to the local Student Attendance Review Board and hoped I would feel good about serving on it. This was interesting to us because this is the board (although in a different location) that we had to appear “before” when we were first approached about being illegal. Two days later an English teacher we know told me that while she was standing in the office of the high school, the assistant principal had come up to her and told her about his visit to our home and how excited he was about what we were doing. We talked for a little about it and she is interested in learning more about this approach. Then just last week we were at a group gathering and my daughter had occasion to mention we learned at home; a member of the group we didn’t know searched us out to talk about this. She was a friend of the man from the County Supt.’s Office and he had told her about a family he had visited who was using the noªteaching approach. He was really excited about it, she said….We are constantly approached by people who want to talk about what we are doing and how we can do it and we always send them away with a GWS. We feel this is important because the one thing we get consistently from these poeple is a fear of doing something out of the ordinary all by themselves… GWS also shows them that home-schooling can be approached in a million different ways - that they can just decide for themselves what approach meets their own personal needs and go with it…
SELECTING A JURY
The same issue of the “Ocooch Mountain News” that we quoted in GWS #19 has a story about Mr. and Mrs. Sawall, who were found guilty by a jury of failing to send their children to school. It was not clear whether they would appeal the verdict. Mr. and Mrs. Sawall acted as their own defense. At the beginning of the trial, Mrs. Sawall asked, “Is there any person on the jury who does not believe the Bible is the inspired word of God?” The District Attorney objected that religious beliefs could not enter into the selection of jurors, and the objection was upheld by the court. In a very similar case in Minnesota a couple of years ago Joseph Palmer, who like the Sawalls was defending himself, handled the matter of jury challenges somewhat more wisely. Though he was taking his children out of school primarily for religious reasons, he did not ask prospective jurors about their religion. What he did was to use his challenges to strike off the jury list all persons who worked, or whose relatives worked, for the local schools. Sincein many small towns the schools are by far the largest employer, this got rid of a good many people who might have been expected to be prejudiced against him. The jury thus obtained acquitted him and his wife. There is an important lesson here for others facing possible jury trials.
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)