Deb

Thanks, Ned for your insights and for the fascinating history of
education in CT. My family lives there now and I have been curious about
it in light of the strong homeschool community and resistance to
legislative incursions there.
>
> The law covering education in Connecticut (where Luz and I have lived for
> several years) says that parents (and/or guardians) are responsible for
> their children's education. That law was written in 1650 and is still in
> effect. The law acknowledges the natural, sacred, unalienable RIGHT and duty
> that parents have in the raising of their children -- education being part
> of that upbringing. As this group and others remind us, homeschooling (at
> least learning) goes on in every home in the world -- so what are your kids
> learning?
>
> In CT, homeschooling has been an accepted practice for over 350 years. In
> fact, it was so universal in the early days that when towns organized Common
> Schools, the schools often did not accept children unless they already knew
> how to read, write and calculate -- skills that were presumed to have been
> taught at home.

This sooo makes sense to me! Kids learned how to read, write and reckon
at home - where these things were put to practical use and incorporated
into everyday necessity! THen, if they had those skills, they could a
attend school - and I take it from you farther info that these "COmmon
Schools" were not compulsory since you say in CT there IS no compulsory
attendance law. I always had a gut feeling that the present way was a
distortion of Actually this fills a big hole in my understanding of the
evolution of education. Then it is a choice to go to a school. Many
homeschoolers do eventually go to a college to learn things they want to
learn - and many even an unschooler brags about this. IT is just
cotton-pickin' loco to trap kids in warehouses where they can't move,
can't talk and can't even think for themselves if they participate! And
as you say, teachers now are trained to "therapize" and refer to
professionals kids who don't learn under these circumstances.

> Similarly, when a child needs (wants ! ) to learn how to read, such as in
> the recent example of the smaller sister asking her older sibling in bed how
> to say certain words that she pointed to on the page, such as HOP, one
> person was helping the other to learn. It is not unusual that parents are
> surprised by the abilities of their kids -- without any teaching. The reason
> we are surprised sometimes is that we believe that learning is difficult and
> takes a lot of teaching. That is the garbage that schools want us to
> believe, so that we will maintain support for all their employees and
> outrageous budgets.
>
> As an unschooler (a staunch, radical, fanatical one) I am vehemently against
> schooling -- the kind that is done in schools, and is directed by schoolers
> for the benefit of the school establishment -- not the children. But that
> doesn't mean I am against learning or even teaching, so long as it is asked
> for by the learner.

Yeah, no restrictions ---- people learn by themselves, people learn from
each other, people teach each other. The heck with any arbitrary and
artificial confusing of the definition of the word "teach" with modern
connotations associated with it... from the degradation occurring in
schools obviously.

"School" is actually derived from the Greek word for "leisure", the time
spared from working and fighting. Those who could walked about with
PLato in his academy in the woods and talked of things, learned from him
and from their discussions. THere is another separate word "school" with
an entirely different derivation and meaning that seems to have become
mixed with the other"school". A "school" of fish came from words for
division into groups for the same type of creature. Now we've got
divisions into age groups, levels of readers and "learners", "at-risk"
students, "learning-disabled" groups, phewwey! Free them all, parents!
>
>
> My point is that UNschooling is a personal idea. Today's practice comes
> primarily from the work and books of John Holt, who told us years ago that
> the trouble with education is the schooling, the boring, life-crushing
> tedium, the sit-down-shut-up-listen-to-this madness that drives kids crazy,
> especially when there's so little that those places teach and how quickly
> most kids can learn it ALL so that they can go out and play and discover how
> the world really works.
>
> What's my point...let's not thrash each other for not UNschooling. I am not
> Anti-Unschooling, but I am also not Anti-teaching when a kid asks for that.
> Purity in unschooling (as some understand it, as *no teaching no matter
> what*) is as much the enemy of learning as school is.

Yeah, I think when the words teach and learn are too arbitrarily
defined, it makes people stop thinking and looking at what goes on in
front of them in life, and rather promotes operating based on a dogmatic
theory instead. Hmm... perhaps "feeding" is a bad word because it
implies a power of the one with the food that is enforced on the one who
does or doesn't want food at the time. If a little child wants food and
can't have it then, or doesn't want food when it is "fed" to him,
wouldn't the world be a better place if parents not only just let the
child "eat" when and what he wants to, but also never say "I fed him." -
but only said "he ate".And then have rules like never to say something
like "All the people coming on our picnic will need to be "fed" -but
have to say "The people coming will need to eat --because we'll forget
to be polite and caring and let them choose how much to eat and what
they prefer out of what we bring, if we don't say it that way.

Philosophically, what is available in the environment and what people
are doing around one always has a bearing on what people will learn. If
it is a rich environment with choices, kids can choose things. If not
much is going on or talked about or available it becomes tougher for a
kid to expand as much as they potentially could. So perhaps parents who
are unschooling and get antsy with that could dive into learning
themselves more and expanding where they go, what they read, what they
do - and how much they discuss, think and listen.
>
> Is it possible that some parents don't know HOW to teach what their child
> wants to know? Sure, it happens a lot. That's when they need to become
> learners right along with the child.
> Ned Vare
>
> Yes, that is the secret (to non-homeschoolers) delight of homeschooling. you get too learn all kinds of things too which you might not have if you were stuck in an office.... ahhh, what pleasure.

Homeschooling days with my daughter were most often like this:

Stay up past midnight reading in bed. Get up around 10 AM. Feed the
animals (oops, should I say "facilitated the animals eating"?), snack or
make pancakes, curl up and finish the book. Have a leisurely discussion
about people and occurrences in the book and real-life people they
reminded us of. Remembrances of things past. Go for a walk to the duck
pond and feed the ducks (oops, I mean "Let the ducks eat the crackers we
had.".. My daughter spent hours pouring over the mail order chicken
catalog deciding which chickens to order and which combinations of
chickens would give her the best deal on the neatest chickens - and
whether to buy separate chickens or the advertised mixed specials (hours
of math here). THen she might dictate a story to me that I would write
into a nice blank book and she then illustrated. Dress up in costumes
with friends and play. GO to the store and see if they had any unusual
fruits or vegetables we didn't know, and buy stuff to stock up. Back
home, eat, and maybe play a little chess or a card game like
multiplication war. Then start a new book and stay up late reading it.

And so it went, with plenty of trips to beach, camping, exploring - dad
actually had a systemic plan to visit every park and green spot on the
map of our area. Once we took a train trip to a nearby city for the
afternoon and came back. Science museum, art museums, bookstore. Talking
together. She saw the projects I did reading the laws for a citizens'
rights group, and I'd tell her about the alerts I was writing and she
told me to go ahead and do it, it was important.

It wasn't always rosy; dad changed businesses and moved it into our
house and it grew to a bunch of employees which made it very noisy and
no space at home, but eventually that changed again and he got an office
and we lived through it.

Now my daughter is almost 16 and attends the college near us for art and
pottery classes, does computer graphics, and has a boyfriend who takes
alot of her time. She is reading a history of philosophy with
philosophers from Greek to modern - that happened when someone on the
internet mentioned existentialism and she wanted to know more. She also
works at my husband's business where he makes herbal and nutritional
products. She watches the Daily Show with Jon Stewart at 11 PM - we all
do to find out what is going on in the world today in a bearable format
(Comedy Central CHannel). We'll see what else she gets into this year.

So that's what we have do and do now. Still read late at night and get
up as late as possible with all we have to do.

Debbie