Page Three
GROWING WITH TREES
A mother writes:
… I read HOW CHILDREN LEARN when A was 2 and felt helped by it to see ways of playing and communicating that I’d been missing. I heard part of a lecture you gave on public radio about kids having the right to work and be part of the real’ world. But I didn’t know until GWS#1 came out that you’d gone all the way to no school. At that time A was 8 and had never gone to school. It was so exciting to hear that there even were any others. GWS has filled a real need, helping us feel less alone and more faith in what we are doing.
T, A, and I … earn almost all of our money by seasonal orchard work–picking apples. 2 months in the fall and pruning apple trees 2 months in the late winter. We leave home and work in various parts of [apple country].
I’ve been doing this since I was four months pregnant with A. She is almost 10. The other 8 months we are home, in a neighborhood with 6 or so other couples who also live in the woods, are building their own houses. Most garden, most are self-employed doing crafts or odd jobs. A’s best friend–M (8)–is also her cousin and also has never been to school. She’s enrolled in the Santa Fe Community School. We are keeping a low profile.’ Neither of our families have been bothered by the law. A and M play with other kids in the area who do go to school. We don’t hide what we’re doing but we don’t advertise it either. I don’t really know how much the local school board knows and whether or not they’re purposely looking the other way. (Ed.–this is often the case) Since we three leave home Sept. 1st and March 1st each time for 2 months, it is possible they just assume she goes to school somewhere else.
…A started picking of her own accord one day when she was 5. She put her raincoat on backwards, using the hood as a bucket to hold the fruit until she emptied into the boxes. She was very proud of herself. She worked all day and picked 3 bushels. The next rainy day we made a quarter size bucket out of a plastic waste basket and a pant leg. The cloth bottom opened up for emptying like our buckets. T made her a 10 foot ladder (he makes and sells apple picking ladders). She picked from the bottoms of our trees and we paid her what we earned per bushel before deducting for food and rent.
Now, 5 years later, she has a custom-made 1/2 size bucket and a 14 foot ladder. She works 2 hours or more most days, picking to the same quality standards we use. She keeps her own tally. She pays about 1/2 of her own living expenses from her earnings when we’re on the crew. She handles the ladder well, picks as much of the tops as she can.
How much to pay her and how much to expect her to work have been areas of confusion. It didn’t seem right to continue to pay her, in effect, more per bushel than anyone else by not deducting any expenses. But if we deducted her full expenses, she wouldn’t earn anything (yet). So we compromised. Earning money is not her main motivation but she likes to get paid and it seems good for her to have money to spend.
If she continues to increase her production she’ll soon be able to pay her full expenses on the crew and have a good amount left over.
In many poor cultures the kids’ earnings help support the whole family. We have to earn enough to live on the rest of the year. So it seems possible that as she gets older she might pay her expenses the rest of the year too, or contribute toward things we’ll all use. We are not part of a tradition where the kids work a lot or contribute much to the family’s survival. And we are not so close to the line that our survival depends upon her contributions. So when we’re in doubt we take the more regular (like our own upbringing) course. I believe she’s working a good amount of her own accord when we’re on crews. She says she wants to get so she’s paying all of her expenses on the crews.
I don’t believe in compelling kids to study some subject they don’t want to, but I do believe in insisting they do some work, in relation to their abilities and the needs of the family. Since they start with a compelling desire to do what the older family members do, this is no problem. Now sometimes she objects to some chores (It’s boring, so-and-so doesn’t have to). We insist. If you want to be warm, too, you have to carry firewood, too. She seems to see the justice of it and gives in pretty easily.
She helps with pruning, too. Has her own saw and with direction will sometimes prune a whole tree. But it is a harder skill to learn.
I think living on a work crew has been really good for our family. It helped me set limits and encouraged us to accept time away from each other, but still allowed us to be together when we needed it. Very young, A accepted that I had to work and learned to amuse herself very well. I think that kind of solitude is very important for everyone. She became less clinging and demanding and I learned I could choose which demands I would meet. Before crew life I felt I should give her everything she was asking for. As a result of working with her near I learned that she could accept it and benefited when I sometimes let her work it out herself. This led to both of us feeling our own individuality and made our close times closer. And brought my way of being with her into accord with T’s way.
Spending a good part of every day outside is another important benefit. There are so many more things to do outside, such good things to choose from. She did not amuse herself outside in the cold part of the pruning season when she was 3 and younger. When it was too cold for her to keep herself warm in deep hard-to-move-in snow, we took turns not working to stay with her. But I remember days when it was snowy but fairly warm and she dug, went sliding, climbed trees, bounced on springy limbs and found a deer antler.
Her attitude toward work (and mine) have benefited from the work situation. Most of the crew, most of the time, are working with a willing attitude and there’s a lot of enthusiasm that is catching. She works harder and longer with T, who enjoys pushing himself, than with me. She and I talk a lot and concentrate less. Everyone is paid by how much they do and there are a lot of other kinds of companionship fit in around the work. Some people return year after year and some don’t, but one season is enough to get very close in a situation like that. Working with someone makes it easy. …
Even though there’s a gap of 7 1/2 years, A and E enjoy each other a lot and play together really well. A is an accomplished baby-sitter, patient, full of good ideas when something goes wrong, a playmate. We make sure they visit during the 8 months we’re not on crews because they miss each other. A started babysitting on the pruning crew when E was 7 months old. One hour a day in exchange for lessons and a trip to the library one morning a week with E’s mother. That concept of the time with an adult being a privilege put lessons in a wholly different light. They made booklets about aspects of apple trees, like insects that live on them, and pruning. This last picking season it was recorder playing for 1/2 hour or so when she wanted it in exchange for one evening a week baby-sitting.
Another thing that’s become a regular tradition is that M and A each spend a week with each family during each work season. She spends a week at home with them and M spends a week on the crew with the 3 of us. M is 2 years younger and the swap was a little hard for her at first but it gets better each time she does it.
How much time we’ve had for lessons has varied. It’s less on crews than the rest of the year but they tend to be more regular since our life is more the same every day.We’ve done math and word games with me picking and her sitting on the grass under the tree. A favorite pre-reading game went with a book of all the mammals. I would name one. She’d guess what letter it started with and look it up alphabetically, verifying the word with picture, and then write it down. She also wrote lists of things around her. Another favorite was writing a word like clover or dandelion and then finding the other words inside the big one. i strongly believe in answering a question If I know the answer rather than saying, You can figure that out, Sound it out, etc. We were amazed to see that with no drill to speak of she got better from lesson to lesson. The lessons were showing us that she was learning, rather than doing the teaching. I have noticed more and learned a lot about the English language by being involved with her learning to read and write. It’s been exciting and interesting, the hardest part learning to shut up, not to push. All along we’ve read aloud, gone for nature walks and discussed numbers. …
Since I have been the bookkeeper on the last few crews her interest in math has grown sharply. She helps with the payroll and counts out everyone’s final net pay. She seems to have a good solid concept of reading and math. She doesn’t gobble them up in quantity but when she’s interested in something she follows it through.
Here some of my insecurity about her comes cropping up. How does she compare with other kids her age? I can remember doing more at her age with school stuff (naturally) and being more interested in reading and music and kids’ games. But I lived in a city neighborhood, went to school and had 2 sisters, and my parents were more intellectual.
ll in all the hardest thing about not sending A to school is the unknown. Since school was such a big part of my life, I can’t imagine what it would have been like without it (especially ages 13-18). It’s hard to imagine what her life will be without it. Looking back–so far, so good, but looking ahead is one big question mark. Will she be equipped with what she needs to be independent of us? Will she have friends enough during adolescence? She doesn’t ask to go to school, will she try it later?
I think we need to do more to help her have access to other parts of the world and help her follow through with more of her interest. Pottery, sewing, cooking, and French are some.These aren’t my strong interests or skills and so it will be with friends that she pursues them. We’ll continue sending her over to our potter friend’s house. We’ve just found a French woman living not too far away. Maybe she’ll tutor A in French.
I’d like for her to try out more extra-curricular but school-type things. She was in a swimming class last summer. 4-H?
I sometimes feel unsure in how much to encourage or make things happen for her and how much to wait and let her initiate.
I wonder if we’ll get hassled by the law sometime in the future….
A, M, and I went on bike trips last summer. I want to do that more and perhaps include more of the kids in the neighborhood.
We have recently found 2 families, 15 miles away in two different directions, who recently got school board approval for home instruction for their kids. We are meeting one day a week, bringing the kids together and getting to know each other.
REPLY
…You wonder how A compares with other kids her age? My guess would be that she compares very well, probably smarter, more self-reliant, more serious, more considerate, more self-motivated, more independent, more honest, etc.
I think of the exclusive and expensive school where I first taught fifth grade. My students were the children of many of the leading business, professional, and academic families in this area. I would guess that the average family income must have been at least $40,000 a year, and the average IQ of the children over 120. I worked with three fifth grade classes there, sixty children, grew fond of them, came to know them well. But I felt very strongly that of that group of children not one in four, if even that many, had the kind of health of mind and spirit that I would have wanted for a child of my own. And I suspect they were better than their counterparts at that same school today, for these are harder and more anxious times for children to grow up in.
You say that as a kid her age you were more interested in reading. I was too. But in the school I just mentioned, I can’t remember more than a handful of those super-bright children who ever read for fun. At 10 and 11, I read a great deal, on my own. By the time I was 13, away at boarding school, this had stopped . I had plenty of time at school, since I found the work easy, but I can’t remember ever, not even once, reading a book that had not been assigned. Many of those that were assigned, I loved–Joseph Conrad, for instance. But I never read any of his other books, just for my own pleasure. Neither did anyone else. We would have been astonished if anyone had suggested it. (No one did.) Reading had become one of those (many) things that you did when, and because, and only because, They told you to.
With any luck at all, A should escape that way of looking at reading–and at life.
I suspect A is in any important sense a great deal smarter than most kids, and far more likely to adapt, and adapt well, to any new and difficult environment she might meet. See Jud Jerome’s piece in GWS#1 about his daughter who quit school for years, and when she went back found herself way ahead of the kids who had stayed in.
Ever since he wrote, I’ve been meaning to do a follow-up piece for GWS about How People Get Smart. They get smart by giving constant attention and thought to the concrete details of daily life , by having to solve problems which are real and important, where getting a good answer makes a real difference, and where Life or Nature tells them quickly whether their answer is any good or not. The woods are such a place; so is the sea; so is any place where real, skilled work is being done–like the small farm where Jud’s daughter worked, like your own orchards.
Like GWS for that matter. In putting out this magazine we do a great deal of what most people would call routine clerical work. But in doing this work we have hundreds of little, immediate problems to solve. Every time we put out a new issue we find ways to do the work a little better and more efficiently. There is nothing like it for sharpening wits.
Two summers ago I spent some time working with a small farmer in Nova Scotia, the neighbor and friend of the friends I was visiting. He had a large garden where he grew almost all his own vegetables, had about 20 acres in hay, raised Christmas trees. He also owned woodlots, from which he cut wood, for his own use and to sell. He was 72 years old, and did all this work himself, with the help of two horses. The skill, precision, judgment, and economy of effort he displayed in his daily work were a marvel to see. The friend I was visiting, a highly intelligent and educated man, no city slicker but a countryman himself, who had long raised much of his own food and killed, butchered, and cured or frozen much of his own meat, said with no false modesty at all that if he farmed for fifteen or twenty years he might–with plenty of luck and good advice–eventually learn to farm as well as this old neighbor.
No use trying to answer all those questions about the future. The future is a mystery and a gamble whether you send her to school or take her out. One thing we are sure of–school is a very destructive experience for most of the children who go through it. Keep her out of it if you can. As for access to the world, as she gets older she will want to see more of it, and will find ways to do it. If she needs your help she will ask for it.
Meanwhile, if your own life and the lives of other adults around you that she knows are rich and satisfying, that will be the best possible example and encouragement for her. And unlike most children, she will not only have seen but shared most of the best parts of your lives.
THE WORK ETHIC
Poster (advertising a savings bank) in the Boston subways:
WON’T IT BE GREAT WHEN YOU FINALLY QUIT WORKING?
CHILDREN AND PLAY
Candy M. (Van Etten, NY 14889) wrote us two interesting letters earlier this year, saying in part:
One of the strongest revelations I have experienced in my life was during the first September out of S-chool since age 5. i was 22, and had plodded along all the proper channels for seventeen years, without questions. I was a winner.’ But for some reason I dared to not take my designated course (to be a social worker, or some such thing) and decided to travel. Life was real! Never had I experienced such exhilaration. And all those compartments-chemistry, math, psychology, philosophy–were real questions and answers about the world. They were living. For the first time for me, the world was whole. And there were so many things to do!
I eventually took a job as a Head Start T-eacher in a rural area where I wanted to live. I wanted to work with young children because it seemed like it would be an enjoyable job. And in many ways it was. …I left teaching to try my hand at farming, building, and many other interesting activities. I returned four years later to two programs that I was more excited about: one, a cooperative nursery school organized and run by mothers, the other a home-based Head Start program where mother, child and I sit at the kitchen table once a week to engage in an hour’s worth of activities. Both, I felt strongly, could work us away from the expert-worshipping that exists in education, because the premise was that parents are teachers and play is learning.
Three major stumbling blocks I have come to in this work are: 1) Most parents’ goals are to prepare their children as best they can for S-chool, so that they can be winners (Ed. note–or at least, not among the worst losers). 2) Although there was progress, most parents see learning as something you get in school…given by experts who know best. 3) Most parents are not willing to get on the floor. I mean this literally and figuratively. That’s where these children are most of the time–and that’s where you have to be willing to go if you want to really hear what they have to say. Also, perhaps it is a matter of letting go,’ or being interested or excited about the world, and getting your hands dirty exploring it. In your words, DOING. To too many people, teaching is lecturing–telling facts to deaf ears. In the realm of Doing, there is something very strange and unnatural about having a place and time solely for the purpose of teaching children.
When parents were active, and creative–DOING–in their own right, that’s when things began to flow with the children. During one home-based session we made paper bag puppets. L, her mother, and her grandmother were there. It began with L’s mother R instructing her how to make her puppet until I finally convinced R to join us and make one also. This she did, and it met with sarcasm and ridicule from grandma. Finally grandma was convinced to join us too, and when everyone relaxed and let their creativity flow a bit, we created some wonderful characters, and had a nice play.
I’m not going to continue this work after June. There are other things I would like to do, and I’m finding that early childhood education is getting too S-chooled…falling more and more into testing, labeling, ranking, and preparing children for S-chool, and in the process has lost much.
One other thing I’d like to share with you. A four year-old friend explained to me how she was learning to read. She told me that she has a Little Red Riding Hood record and a Little Red Riding Hood book. She listens to the record and looks through the book at the same time, and sometimes, when the record goes slow, she can match the words. She was not only learning to read on her own, but she was perfectly aware of how she was doing it. (Ed. italics)
C and I are living examples of the effects of Education. I went obediently through 16 years of schooling, doing what I should (never more), and won gold medals for it. C, for the most part, went to school only when he wanted to. (He remembers first skipping school in kindergarten.) His father wasn’t at home, and his mother wasn’t around very much (going to college and working) and, too, there was an intellectual environment in the family–lots of reading–and plenty of trips and day excursions to botanical gardens, museums, etc.
In ninth grade, C avoided school 90 days out of 180–finding effective ways to beat the system without them realizing. He always did fine on tests and was always in the top’ classes. Often, in Science, he was way ahead of the class curriculum.
At home, C would pick up his older sisters’ Chemistry book and read it cover to cover. Most of his learning was done this way–on his own.
Also he began taking responsibility for maintenance of the house–using tools, puttering around. He put in a new bathroom when he was 13.
C’s understanding of things, and how everything relates to everything else, is so much greater than mine.
Another amazing part of his learning (one I’d eventually like to write more about) is the game Atlas. The family didn’t have much money, and did have plenty of German thriftiness–hence the children were not swamped with plastic toys and gadgets…They had to create their own play, so C and his brother and two sisters (all older) played this on-going game (invented mostly by his brother) for 8 years or more. It was a game of the World. Each child had tribes of people made from: toothpaste caps glued to marbles (the Lilliputians); Hi-Q game pieces (the Microscopians); used magic markers with toothpick swords and aluminum foil shields (the Sudanis); cooking oil bottles decorated with paper (the Criscoeans), etc. The tribes fought battles in the garden, conquered territories, kept maps and records, held art shows, had a newspaper, and had their own languages and money systems.
It was an ingenious invention of play, which the children created entirely by themselves, and which lasted through time, always encompassing new interests and ideas as the children grew.
————–
Tx for fine letters. When I visit (now rarely) classrooms of little children (whom I would rather watch playing in the Public Garden), I always find an out of the way spot and sit down on the floor. Soon children come up and start talking to me, showing me things, asking who I am, etc. Can I be sure that the same children might not have come up to me even if I had remained standing? No. But I think they would probably have waited a lot longer before doing it.