Page Two
A SHELTER SCHOOL
No sooner had I written the above than I had a letter from Ed Nagel (P.O. Box 2823, Santa Fe, NM 87501–Tel. (505) 471-6928) on just this subject:
…Re home-study students enrolled at Santa Fe Community School, since 1974-75 we have enrolled about 100 students, from different states, of whom only 3 that I know of were ever challenged. One was Erik Sessions (still enrolled). Another was the child of a lady from Pa., on whose behalf Wm. Ball wrote a letter, obtaining a substantial delay of any action against her. Later she returned her child to prison. (Actually the child was never formally enrolled at SFCS during this period.) The third parent was fairly mobile; when her child’s attendance was challenged in Pa., SFCS wrote a letter verifying her employment with the school as a supervisor of off-campus travel-study. This satisfied the local superintendent and ended any further queries.
There are others, occasionally, who attempt to obtain a legal guarantee from the local public school officials–asking the boss in effect if they can undermine his operation–and, who, failing in this, become intimidated and soon retreat from their position. Or, they may move , literally, to another area/state where they may then proceed less conspicuously to provide an educational alternative, in some cases, at least, thru SFCS.
As I write, it occurs to me that there may have been another challenge, but NONE of the parents whose children enrolled at SFCS have ever had to go to jail or paid a fine (the unenrolled child’s parent from Pa. paid a find, as I recall, prior to Ball’s intervention), or lost a challenge throughout this five-year period.
Currently, there are between 40 and 50 students enrolled in home-study programs through SFCS, several within our own state. Of these, I would estimate about 1/3 have been enrolled for more than 2 years now. Of the many alternative schools doing this in other states which have been made known to me–roughly 30–only 3 have given me permission to put searching parents in touch with them, and then only under certain conditions; everyone is paranoid. No one wants to go to court; not the parents, not the schools; not the public officials who can manage to keep the news/noise down about the few unusual’ arrangements they allow/tolerate within their district…
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Good news about SFSC. If I were planning to take children out of school, one of the first things I would do would be to enroll them at SFSC, or make such an arrangement with another school if I knew of one that would do it. I would do other things as well, but I would certainly do this.
As for school officials, several people have told me that they have had their children out of school, and that the schools, even though they had not formally approved this, were willing to let it go on, as long as nobody complained. But as soon as some nosy neighbor reported to the schools that such-and-such children were not in school, the schools had to make a big show of disapproval, start talking about law, courts, etc. What the officials are afraid of is that someone will say publicly, How come you let those people get away with not sending their kids to school?
What we need (among other things) is an answer for the schools to give to the nosy neighbors. Maybe if the schools can say, That child is enrolled in a private school and we have nothing to say about him, it would solve their problem, and so, our problem.
ON RELIGIOUS BELIEF
A Canadian parent, writing about the Sessions case (GWS#7), discussed the part of the ruling that said that parents’ claims to constitutional protection on religious grounds of the right to teach at home must be rooted in religious belief. The court did not say what it would or would not consider religious belief. About this, the parent went on to say:
I see religion’ as a concept that can be manipulated for unschoolers’ benefit just as can the concepts of school,’ teach,’ educate,’ etc. As you pointed out, unschoolers should say, Yes, our child goes to school,’ and Yes, I am teaching my kids,’ even if the method of teaching is simply allowing them to learn. …
For religious belief,’ what just about anybody could feel comfortable with is… the feeling that one’s children are divine beings to be protected and nurtured to best of the parents’ ability. …I’d say something like this: I believe that my children are Divine Beings and that it is my Divine Responsibility to educate my children according to God’s Plan.’ ….The trick is that God and religion’ can mean whatever one wants them to. God’ doesn’t have to be Judaeo-Christian; it can be Universal Energy, or Nature, or simply Love. …
I replied that this isn’t what I meant at all. Such a statement might work in Canada (though I doubt it), but not in the U.S. What the framers of the Constitution wished to prevent, and what the Constitution itself forbade, has happened anyway. Judaeo-Christianity has to all intents and purposes become the official, state religion of the U.S. When the Constitution was amended to put the words under God into the Pledge of Allegiance, it was not just any God, anyone’s personal definition of God, that people had in mind. It was the God of Christians and Jews.
Any people who are asking on religious grounds for the right to teach their own children will have a much better chance if they use the word Christian. To defend home schooling on the grounds that children are some kind of Divine Beings would almost certainly be a disastrous mistake. In many parts of the U.S., people would consider that statement itself to be irreligious or blasphemous.
I would instead suggest that people say that what happens in schools offends their Christian beliefs about the way to teach and bring up children, as indeed I would think it would offend, and deeply, anyone who understood the word Christian to mean based on the teachings of Christ. That is to say, on the New Testament as opposed to the Old, where those with a mind to have always been able to find excuses for greed, racism, hatred, violence, and cruelty.
It is of course possible that the courts might one day uphold the right of Moslem or Buddhist or Hindu parents to teach their children at home, on the grounds that both the daily life and the subject matter and values (both taught and untaught) of the average school classroom seriously violated their religious beliefs. I hope someone will make such a test case, and will follow it closely if they do. But as for such parents winning–I’ll believe it only when I see it.
Meanwhile, if we can in good conscience apply the word Christian to our beliefs, it seems to me to make good sense to do so.
FROM QUEBEC
Helen F. St. Clet, Quebec, writes:
We are solving the school problem for our daughters (12, 8, & 3) in a combination of ways–home teaching before they are 6 so they read well and love math before they see a classroom. Then French school, which in our little village here in Quebec is friendly, relaxed, even joyful (Ed. note–certainly not true of many or most schools in France), and for some reason much emphasis is put on sports (they tan in winter from skiing and skating every day) and public speaking. All we hope for them to learn at school…that we cannot teach them better at home… is French and a total immersion in a culture and life-style different from ours. They seem unaffected by geography books from 1947 (we read maps, go places & talk, after school) and the other idiocies that are so debilitating in the suburbs, and elsewhere.
They love school, & do well. I think they love the chance to live a completely different life that the one we live here, at home … even a new personality is born in another language. I marvel at them, as I stumble along talking to their friends.
Interesting to note, though, that the older two much prefer reading in English (in which they’ve had no school training) than in French. They (esp. the older one) say it’s because there’s nothing good to read in French … no action & adventure’ but I imagine there’s less action and adventure in the act of reading that was taught methodically.
These schools, by the way, are not great for French children. A large number repeat a grade, and many get disgusted in high school & quit to work on the farm (illegally). Class, in elementary school, is often a madhouse–but it’s endured, even enjoyed, I suspect, by the teachers who, like most French Canadians I have met, really like kids & want to be with them.
In a later letter:
French school … is working so well that my 8-yr-old is reading a paperback called Preparez Votre Enfant a l’Ecole’ (Ed. note-’Get Your Child Ready for School’)
in order to get ideas for her own school that she conducts for the neighborhood 3-6 yr. olds, in French. She also cooks dinner for 5 and writes short stories in English. …
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It is now the law in Quebec that children from English-speaking families must go to French schools. (Quite a few were going even before that law was passed) These children are taught to read, in French. Except perhaps in a few families, no one teaches them to read in English. But I have seen more than one report saying that where such tests have been made, these children have been found to read much better in English than in French.
LEARNING AND LANGUAGE
Young children who come into contact with people who speak more than one language will learn to speak all of those languages, and usually without much trouble.
Older people, who have a lot of trouble, are amazed at this, and cook up a lot of fancy theories about the child having a special aptitude, or the child’s brain being somehow different form the adult’s, to explain why the child learns so much easier and faster.
The real explanation is simpler than this. The child, who speaks language A in his home, but who meets outside the home other people, especially other children, who speak language B, does not in any way set himself the task of learning language B. In fact, he does not think of himself as speaking language A, or indeed any language. He just speaks, learns to understand what other people say, and to make them understand what he wants to say.
Now, all of a sudden, he meets some people whom he can’t understand at all, and who can’t understand him. What he wants and what he tries to do, is to understand those people, right now, and to make them understand him, right now. That is what he works at, and since he is smart, tireless, and ingenious, and not easily discouraged by difficulties, and since he gets instant feedback to tell him whether or not he is understanding or being understood, he very quickly gets good at it.
His parents think how wonderful it is that he is learning language B so quickly. But he is not trying to do that, would not understand what it meant to learn a language, would not know how to do such a task even if people could explain to him what the task was. He is just trying to communicate with people.
I saw a most vivid example of this difference when, after my father had retired from business, he and my mother began to spend the winter half of each year in Mexico. My father, who had graduated from a good college (not a good student, but good enough to graduate), told himself sternly, and kept telling himself for six years and more, that he ought to learn Spanish. My mother, who had not gone to college, and had been a very poor student–she had always been terribly nearsighted, but beyond that, probably bored to death–could not have cared less about learning Spanish. What she wanted, like the little child, was to be able to talk to these people around her, who were very different from any people she had known, and who interested her very much. So, like a very young child–she always had a small child’s keenness of observation and sharpness of mind–she began to try to talk to the people around her, to ask the names of things, to ask how to ask the names of things. The people she talked to, enchanted as people always are by someone who makes a real effort to speak their language–I discovered this on my travels in Italy–talked back, showed her things and told her their names (as they did to me when I visited), gently corrected her mistakes in pronunciation or usage, not so that she would speak correctly but only so that she would be better understood, and helped her in every way they could. The result was that very soon she was able to talk easily and fluently with people on a variety of subjects.
At the same time, my father, who thought of himself as trying to learn Spanish, which meant to learn to speak it correctly, so that then he could talk to the people around him, never learned more than twenty or so words in all the years he lived there. Now and then my mother tried to get him to say a few words to the people he met. He couldn’t do it, was paralyzed by his school-learned fear of doing it wrong, making a mistake, looking foolish and stupid. He backed away from all these human contacts, all the while telling himself that he really ought to learn Spanish but just couldn’t, was too old, did not have the aptitude, and so on.
Since then I have learned something from Ivan Illich, which seemed surprising until I thought about it, when it stopped being surprising at all. He had been traveling a lot in the polyglot, i.e., multi-language, cultures of Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. What he found was that the people who grew up in these cultures before schools were widespread, and therefore, before people began to think that important things, including foreign languages, had to be learned in school, did in fact learn to speak many languages, just from the experience of daily life. This was true of even very poor, humble, ordinary people. Such people, if they came regularly into contact with people who spoke other languages, and if they had good reason–business, or whatever–to talk with them, learned to talk with them. But among the younger people, who grew up going to school, and so learned–even if they learned nothing else–that important things can only be learned in school, and then only when they are taught, very few learn more than one language.
In short, schools not only make knowledge scarce and expensive, but they make it difficult, by making it abstract, and cutting it off from the powerful motives, incentives, and rewards of daily life. They make the vast majority of people, not more informed or learned, but more ignorant, less eager and less able to learn new things than they would otherwise have been.
ON UNDERSTANDING
The friend I mentioned, in Life In School in GWS#6, once wrote to say that many children in her science class had not understood a talk she had given about asteroids, and asked what she might do about it. I wrote back, saying in part:
… I decided that when we don’t understand something, one (or more) of three things are happening. 1) We have heard a word/words or seen a sign, for which we don’t know the referent–which just means, the object, thing, experience that the word or sign refers to. Thus the referent of the word ‘dog’ is a four-legged furry animal, usually with tail, etc. If you had never seen a dog, and someone mentioned the name in conversation, you’d be a little puzzled. Or if you were an Eskimo, and someone mentioned a giraffe (I can’t imagine why), again, you’d be puzzled. If you had only lived in the far North, it would be very hard to explain’ to you what a tree was. Or a mountain, if you lived on flat tundra. People who have never seen snow, even though they have heard of it and even seen photos of it, are usually bowled over when they see the real thing.
If you had seen some animals, say a horse or a cat, I could explain a dog pretty easily, could say it was smaller than a horse but about the same size or bigger than a cat, with four legs, head, and tail in the same position. If you had never seen a four-legged animal at all, it might be a little bit hard to explain how a four-legged animal is put together. You could perhaps draw a picture. But people who have had no experience of pictures, primitive tribes, cannot connect in their minds pictures of things with the real things, cannot even recognize a picture of themselves or their own house.
Part of your problem in explaining asteroids may have been that many of your classmates didn’t have the feel for the distances and emptiness of space. They can perhaps imagine what something is like a mile away, but tens or hundreds or thousands of miles don’t mean much to them, in which case words won’t help.
The second thing that can cause us not to understand is when we hear one thing, and then another, and the two seem to contradict each other. If you had been told that ducks fly in the air, and that snapping turtles live in the water, and later heard someone say that a duck had been caught by a snapping turtle (which happens), you would be confused. How could that be possible? Someone would then have to say that ducks also live some of the time in the water, at which point you would understand.
And the third thing that causes us not to understand is when someone tells us one thing, which seems to make sense, and then some other thing, which also seems to make sense, but we can’t see how they are connected, what they have to do with each other. Or someone may tell us something, that we think we understand, but it doesn’t seem to connect with anything, we think, Why are you telling me that?’
Knowing this about understanding can be useful for people trying to learn things. If you find, reading, or hearing someone talk, that you don’t understand something, don’t panic. Take a few moments to ask yourself which of those three cases you are in. If you are reading, and are not sure what the referent of a word or phrase is, what thing is being described, you can ask someone, or look it up in a dictionary, or if the book is a textbook, look it up in the index in the back of the book, see on what page the word first appears, and then see what it says about the word on that page. In a math or science textbook, you can usually find the word earlier in the chapter you’re reading.
If your problem is that two things seem to contradict each other, it will help to say as accurately as you can what the contradiction is, thus, It says that ducks fly in the air, and that snapping turtles live in the water, so how could a snapping turtle catch a duck?’ That is an easy question for someone else to answer. When a student says to a teacher, I don’t get it,’ there isn’t much the teacher can do about it.
The more precisely we can say what it is that confuses us, the easier it will be for us, or someone, to clear up the confusion.
SEATWORK
A mother–not an unschooler, she was interviewing me for a newspaper–told me the other day about some of the reading problems her child is having at school. His problem is that he loves to read and regularly reads books several years ahead of his so-called grade-level. His teacher complained to his mother that the boy was falling behind in his reading seatwork. This work consists of copying out vocabulary and spelling lists, reading sample paragraphs and answering questions about them, filling out various workbooks, and doing similar exercises–the kind that people invent who think that the ability to read well consists of hundreds of separate and measurable skills.
When the children were supposed to be doing this seatwork, this boy held books in his lap and read them instead. The teacher said that if he did not catch up with his seatwork she was going to give him a C in reading. The mother said, How can you do that? You know he is a good reader? You know he reads books, for his own pleasure, that are way ahead of his grade level. How can you give such a boy a C in reading? The teacher admitted that she knew the boy was a good reader, probably the best in the class. But she still insisted that he had to do his seatwork. The mother than said, But the reason for the seatwork is to get the children to the point where they can read and understand the kind of books my son is already reading. Why should he have to get ready to do what he already knows how to do? The teacher would not budge. The children were supposed to be doing seatwork, he had to do seatwork.
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
From MANAS (see GWS#3) of 12/20/78, this quote:
… a month or so ago, a public school official in Los Angeles declared on TV that the child, until he graduates from high school, belongs to the state.’
THE SCHOOLS CONFESS
A recent issue of Case and Comment, for which I have no address, reprinted an article on Teacher Malpractice which originally appeared in the American Educator, journal of the American Federation of Teachers. The article said, in part:
In 1972, parents of a graduate of the public school system in San Francisco brought a $500,000 suit against the school district charging that after a total of 13 years of regular attendance, their son was not able to read.
During his years in school, according to information compiled on the case, he was in the middle of his classes, maintained average grades and was never involved in anything which resulted in major disciplinary action. His parents claimed that during their son’s years in the public school they were rebuffed in their attempts to get information on the progress of their son, but were assured by school officials and teachers he was moving along at grade level.
Shortly after the youth’s graduation, he was given a reading test by specialists who concluded the youth was only reading on a fifth grade level…
…the California State Court of Appeals rejected the parents’ claim of the school system’s failure to educate their son. The court declared it was impossible for any person, most of all the courts, to set guidelines for proper’ academic procedures which must be followed by all schools and teachers.
Unlike the activity of the highway, or the marketplace, classroom methodology affords no readily acceptable standards of care, or cause, or injury. The science of pedagogy itself is fraught with different and conflicting theories of how or what a child should be taught, and any layman might, and commonly does, have his own emphatic views of the subject,’ read the court’s opinion.
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The court was, of course, quite right in saying this. But what then becomes of the claim, which the schools make all the time, that they alone know how to teach children? It might not be a bad idea for parents, fighting in court for the right to teach their own children, to quote those words from the California decision.
SMOKING
Every now and then, in the subway or some public place, I see young people, perhaps twelve or thirteen years old, sometimes even as young as ten, smoking cigarettes. It is a comic and pitiful sight. They have obviously practiced (as I once did) all the mechanics of holding the cigarette, taking a puff, inhaling the smoke (if they can), blowing it out casually, flicking the ashes off the end, etc. They want to look as if they had been smoking for years, yet they give themselves away every second. They dart nervous glances in every direction, half wanting to be seen (and admired) by everyone, half fearing that they may be seen by someone who will get them in trouble. Above all, they can’t let the cigarette alone for a second. They take puff after puff, one right after another. The smoke they are breathing must be as hot as a burning building.
It is an ordeal. The smoke tastes awful. Children have sensitive taste buds, and that smoke must taste even worse to them than to most non-smoking adults, which is saying a lot. They have to struggle not to choke, not to cough, maybe even not to get sick. Why do they do it? Because all the other kids’ are doing it, or soon will be, and they have to stay ahead of them, or at least not fall behind. In short, wanting to smoke, or feeling one has to smoke whether one wants to or not, is one of the many fringe benefits of that great social life at school that people talk about.
Some people, when they learn I don’t smoke, say, I wish I had your will power.
I tell them they have it backwards. I tried to smoke, but I didn’t have enough will power to keep at it. The taste of the smoke itself I could just barely stand, but the taste it left in my mouth–for days–was too much for me. I gave it up.
I was able to give it up only because I was so far on the outside edge of the peer group that being a little farther out made no difference. I had nothing to lose. I longed to be an insider, but smoking, even if I could make myself learn to stand it, was not going to make me one. So why put myself through it. I had already learned, a little bit, and only because I had to, to say, The heck with them. So I said it. For a few years I smoked only when I got drunk, which meant I had a double penalty to pay the next day. Years later, thinking it might help me fight off drowsiness on a long driving trip, I inhaled a big puff of a cigarette. It almost knocked me down–I thought the tip of my head had lifted clean off. Wow, what a drug! Since then, no more.
I feel sorry for all the children who think they have to smoke, and even sorrier for any non-smoking parents who may desperately wish they could persuade them not to. If the children have lived in the peer group long enough to become enslaved to it, addicted to it–we might call them peer group junkies — then they are going to smoke, and do anything and everything else the peer group does. If Mom and Pop make a fuss, then they will lie about it and do it behind their backs. The evidence on this is clear. In some age groups, fewer people are smoking. But more children are smoking every year, especially girls, and they start earlier.
One remedy, of course, is for children to feel themselves full members of a human group or groups whose example and good opinion they value enough so that they don’t worry about what the peer group is doing. I don’t know any other.