Learning All The Time:
Re-thinking the Compulsory Education Paradigm
Ginny Silva
SAINT KOSMAS CONFERENCE
November 2019 (CALIFORNIA)
This session will introduce the ideas of educators John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, and Raymond and Dorothy Moore, who spent their lifetimes teaching children in public, private, and home education settings. An important common thread to their work is that the compulsory education model of the West has significant drawbacks that hinder creativity and learning. Bringing that model home without examination can cause frustration and burnout. From the observations of Gatto, Holt, and the Moores, home educators will gain insight, understanding, and peace of mind about the learning process and our role in it.
I wanted to talk to you today about this topic because it’s so common, once the decision is made to educate our children at home, to continue to be influenced by societal, and also internal, expectations of academic progress. It’s crucial for parents to look at what those expectations are, and evaluate them for their own family. So, in order to re-think the compulsory education paradigm, we would need to first spend some time examining what that paradigm consists of. What are the premises of compulsory schooling – what ideas is it based on? What are its goals? Why doesn’t it seem to work very well for so many children?
As a starting point to answer these questions, most of us know from our own experience that compulsory schooling believes—and requires—that in order to learn what they need to know, children starting around age 4 or 5 should be separated from their family and sent to a large, impersonal, uninviting building where they will spend most of their day sitting in a chair, in a confined space with 20-30 other children of exactly the same age, with one adult in the room. All day they are watched, evaluated, assigned tasks at specific intervals, for specific amounts of time, which these days even the teacher is not allowed to alter. Their day is arbitrarily regulated by the sound of a bell, no matter how interested they are in what they are doing at the time, and for everything they want or need to do they must receive permission, even to go to the bathroom. They are expected to acquire “age-appropriate” knowledge, determined by experts. This is the method by which modern children learn to read, cipher, and write, advance intellectually and socially, and become ready for college and meaningful adult occupations that render them useful members of society.
Even though countless generations of human beings reached adulthood and high levels of personal and intellectual achievement without this type of forced confinement and instruction, the universality of how things are done in modern schooling can cause us to have assumptions about what children should be learning, and when, and how; these assumptions can influence our goals for our children, and affect (or infect) our whole approach to education. If our children are at home, that’s a wonderful thing, but we probably would not choose to operate under the same set of beliefs or assumptions about children that compulsory educators do, once we understand what those beliefs are and what they were intended to achieve. Because most of us passed through the modern schooling system, we may have accepted, without thinking much about them, many of those assumptions. Learning why contemporary schooling operates as it does can help us, really beyond measure, to evaluate what we want to be doing with our own children — what course of instruction, and what manner of instruction we should adopt. So the history, and the understanding, are important to our task.
I think it’s fair to infer from children’s experience of school that I described above, the following premises or assumptions:
Compulsory schooling has children’s best interests at heart.
Success in life is only possible through academic success in school; all the important learning takes place in school.
To excel, better start young.
These three premises are directly contradicted by the titles and content of the authors I’d like to introduce to you today. The Underground History of Education, by John Taylor Gatto, reveals the actual intentions of mandatory government schooling, which are radically different from, in fact the opposite of, the impressions most of us have. Learning All the Time, by John Holt, another lifelong educator, asserts that most learning is acquired naturally by a child, just as children learn an entire language with no instruction from anyone by the time they are two or three years old. And, Better Late Than Early, by Raymond and Dorothy Moore, asserts with impressive evidence from both a physiological standpoint and a developmental one, that it is better to begin formal education at age 8 - 10 rather than 5, 6, or 7 years old.
One thing that’s noteworthy about these authors is that they were not homeschooling parents themselves. Instead, after many years working as teachers in the school system, they became fervent advocates of education at home, within the family. What’s great about this is that parents educating their children at home have to try to figure things out with only a little sample size of their own children, and maybe the children of some friends, but these authors, as educators, were teaching hundreds and hundreds of children over decades – they really had a very large pool of knowledge and experience with children, of what helped them learn and what prevented them from learning, or even harmed them as a person. So their observations about children and education really carry a lot of weight, and are worthy of attention.
John Taylor Gatto
The first person I want to introduce to you is John Taylor Gatto, who just passed away about a year ago—may his memory be eternal. We owe a lot to him for his research on the history of education. He spent 30 years as a teacher in the NYC public school system, and was NYC Teacher of the Year for three consecutive years, while also recognized as NY State Teacher of the Year in 1991. In that same year, he wrote an op-ed which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, titled “I Quit, I Think”, (which can still be found online here), and he went on to research, write books about, and speak about, the history of compulsory schooling and the plight of children caught up in it. In addition to his wonderful small collection of essays, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, which is well worth reading, he wrote an amazing book, The Underground History of Education, which I encourage everyone to get a copy of, because I can only cover a small part of it here. If you can, read it, take notes, talk it over with each other, and reflect.
In this book, Gatto explains the origins of the very strange idea that children should be separated from their families at an early age for their own good, not by the freewill of the parents, but under the compulsion of the State. Where did this strange idea come from, and what is the history of it becoming so prevalent in the West, and in America in particular? The individuals who envisioned institutionalized schooling—and others who continued to promote it at the highest levels, until it became so ingrained as to be almost the air we breathe—had very specific goals. But first, what were the goals of education prior to the adoption of this idea that the State was in charge of the upbringing of children?
Gatto provides a long-term perspective on education with this statement: “Between the fall of Rome in the late 5th century and the decline of monarchy in the 18th century, secular schooling in any form was hardly a ripple on the societies of Europe. What simple schooling we find was modestly undertaken by religious orders….and should not be looked upon as the spark for our contemporary schools.”
Again, he writes: “Pope Pius II, in his tract on ‘The Education of Children’ (1451), prescribes the reading and study of classical authors, geometry and arithmetic, history and geography.”
Revealing the goals of pre-modern education, Gatto writes: “Like most educated men and women, Erasmus was his own teacher. He assigned politeness an important place in education, saying, ‘The tender mind of a child should love and learn the liberal arts, be taught tact in the conduct of social life, and from the earliest years be accustomed to good behavior based on moral principles’.”
Providing another glimpse into the purpose of education during all the years before compulsory education was imagined and implemented, Gatto also quotes Montaigne, famous philosopher of the late 1500s, “If the judgment be not better settled, I would rather have the child spend his time on tennis.”
I want to take a brief moment here to highlight, as Gatto does, just a few of the outstanding individuals in American history who did not receive much formal education, who in fact barely attended school at all. David Farragut, the US Navy’s very first admiral, was commissioned midshipman at the age of 10 on the warship Essex. By age 12 he got his first command. Gatto writes: “This unschooled young man went hunting pirates in the Mediterranean at 15; anchored off Naples, he witnessed an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and studied the mechanics of volcanic action. On layover in Tunis, the American consul tutored him in French, Italian, mathematics, and literature….I’d be surprised if you thought his education was deficient in anything a man needs to be reckoned with.”
We've probably all heard that Thomas Edison left school early because he was thought to be mentally deficient. He went to work on trains before he turned 12, which as Gatto notes, would put his mother in jail today. Shortly afterward he began printing a newspaper about the lives of passengers on the train and things that could be seen from its window, a newspaper which within months was earning him a monthly profit 25 times that of the average schoolteacher at the time.
Ben Franklin rose from circumstances of poverty and obscurity as one of 17 children, leaving school at age 10, and even by that time, he wrote in his Autobiography, much of what he had learned was from the conversation and instruction of his father. You may be aware, as Gatto points out, that from colonial times, without compulsory schooling, actually with very little formal education at all, and with a population consisting mostly of farmers, the literacy rate of New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies was nearly universal. Data from states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut in the 1840s shows a literacy rate of 93-100%. Incidentally, by 1993, according to the Educational Testing Service of New Jersey, after over a century of compulsory schooling for all, 42 million Americans over the age of 16 couldn’t read, with another 8 million only able to read at a 4th-grade level. I’m sure statistics are worse now, almost thirty years later.
So, according to Gatto’s extensive research, which he terms “seven years of reading and reflection” (you see how great a debt we owe to him – I don’t know of anywhere else that this evidence has all been collected in one volume), how did we get from there to here? In brief, the professional soldiers of Prussia suffered a demoralizing defeat at the hands of Napoleon’s soldiers in 1806, the immediate reaction to which was a speech “Address to the German Nation” by the philosopher Fichte. He informed the Prussians that “children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning (note – not educating, but conditioning) – they could no longer be trusted to the parents. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that…laying down one’s life to the commands of the State was the greatest freedom of all.” According to Gatto, the Prussian idea was that “centralized schooling would provide obedient soldiers to the army, obedient workers for mines and factories, well-subordinated civil servants, and citizens who thought alike on most issues.” And there you have it. Far from being a benevolent undertaking, mandatory schooling was envisioned from the beginning as primarily a tool of societal control.
Universal schooling was implemented in 1819 in Prussia, and quickly caught the attention of, and was admired by, many influential people both in the rest of Europe and in America, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Horace Mann, and others. In the 1800’s, the only place you could get a PhD was in Germany, so many advanced scholars went there and were influenced by this new conception of forced schooling. They came back home and became professors at colleges and universities that trained teachers and administrators, places like Columbia and the University of Chicago. I have to give the short version, but this is fascinating stuff. From there, the plan took off, and by the 1860’s America had its first mandatory education law. And so it went. According to Gatto, after being pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century, mandatory mass schooling really took off in the United States between 1905 and 1915.
I want to give you some idea, quoting from Gatto, of what the intention of compulsory schooling was.
“The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book Social Control: ‘Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media…the State shakes loose from the Church, reaches out to school….people are only little plastic lumps of dough.”
Gatto writes, “By 1917, the major administrative jobs in American schooling were under control of a group referred to in the press of that day as “the Education Trust”. The first meeting of this trust included representatives of the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the National Education Association. The chief end, wrote Benjamin Kidd, the British evolutionist in 1918, was to “impose on the young the ideal of subordination'.”
Gatto continues: “The famous creator of educational psychology, Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teacher’s College, announced in 1929 ‘Academic subjects are of little value.’ His colleague William Kirkpatrick boasted in his book Education and the Social Crisis that the whole tradition of rearing the young was being made over by experts.”
1989: “What we’re into is total restructuring of society.” – senior director of the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Laboratory speaking to 50 governors of American states assembled to discuss government schooling.
Gatto also writes: “It was from James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard for 20 years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000-4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine in Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up a copy of Conant’s 1959 book-length essay, “The Child, The Parent, and The State,” and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modern schools we attend were the result of a “revolution” engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he directs the curious and uninformed to Alexander Inglis’ 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which ‘one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary.’”
Reading these statements, you might begin to wonder if it isn’t best to question almost everything we know about how schooling works. The foundation of it is so utterly in opposition to what we would want for our children that perhaps we need to re-evaluate our notions about education from top to bottom.
Gatto writes: “Independent study, community service, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships—the one-day variety or longer—these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents—and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850—we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.” He continues, “The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to. School was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and an increasingly layered social order….The decisive dynamics that make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem actually encountered in real life.”
Gatto tells of teaching Moby Dick to 8th grade students: “The school edition provided chapter abstracts and a package of prefabricated questions. I had to throw it away. Real books don’t do that. Real books demand people actively participate asking their own questions. Books that show you the best questions to ask aren’t just stupid, they hurt the mind under the guise of helping it—exactly the way standardized tests do. Real books conform to the private curriculum of each author, not to the invisible curriculum of a corporate bureaucracy. Real books transport us to an inner realm of solitude and unmonitored mental reflection in a way that schoolbooks and computer programs can’t, because that would jeopardize school routines devised to control behavior.”
So there is much, much more information in this fascinating history, but in a nutshell, that’s not only how we got here, but why we got here. Those are the actual premises of modern education, which are hidden behind the stated or assumed premise that schooling is benevolently provided for all children for their benefit. It’s shocking, but that’s the reality.
Gatto writes: “Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. Schools train children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology—all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.”
John Holt
I want to move on to another educator, who like Gatto worked and wrote in the last part of the 20th century — John Holt. He taught for many years in public schools, and wrote a book called How Children Fail. Moving to private education, he then wrote a book called How Children Learn. Eventually becoming a proponent of home education, he wrote Teach Your Own. The book I want to tell you about today, from which I drew the title for this talk, is Learning All The Time. Holt’s basic premise is that children “want to learn about the world, are good at it, and can be trusted to do it with very little adult coercion or interference”. As you might suspect, he was a proponent of unstructured education, especially in the early grades.
He quotes one parent who educated two sons at home: “We did not draw up a curriculum, a study plan, or an outline of courses. Such moves are the first step in formalizing the learning process, and we feel that the best learning takes place informally. The narrow structuring of the school courses has always appalled us. Who are these schools to decide that architecture, archeology, or astronomy (to take only the A’s) don’t belong in the elementary grades? We believe that all subjects interlock…for the joy of learning is in discovering – even in discovering subjects—and satisfying one’s curiosity. We bought a few books, but mostly he used the library, teaching himself to use the Dewey Decimal system; he learned it because he needed it to find books. Shortly after he turned 17, our oldest son took his high school equivalency test and scored well in all areas. He applied to college, and Bard College in NY accepted him with a full scholarship.” This little story, and thousands of others like it, show that a self-educated child can navigate the academic world quite well, if that’s what he wants to do.
Holt writes that children, “without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will, and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we would call the Basics.” What are the basics? Reading, writing, and arithmetic – the foundation of all further learning. He goes on to say, “ordinary people, without special training and often without large amounts of schooling themselves, can give their children whatever slight assistance may be needed to help them in their exploration of the world, and this task requires no more than a little tact, patience, attention, and readily available information.” Notice that he says nothing about curriculum, subjects, the age at which certain skills and knowledge should be acquired, tests….and so on.
Holt takes down one of the premises of compulsory schooling, which is “that children are not interested in learning and not much good at it, that they will not learn unless made to, that they cannot learn unless shown how, and that the way to make them learn is to divide up the prescribed material into a sequence of tiny tasks to be mastered one at a time, each with its appropriate morsel and shock….. Actually, the easily observable fact is that children are passionately eager to make as much sense as they can of the world around them, are extremely good at it, and do it as scientists do, by creating knowledge out of experience. When they are not actually prevented from doing these things, they continue to do them and to get better and better at them.”
Here is a long quotation from Holt’s book Teach Your Own, which I highly recommend getting a copy of. It will encourage you so much. What follows is from a letter written to him by a homeschooling parent:
So far as our teaching is concerned, we do very little in the way of formal instruction, first, because he seems to learn quite effectively without it, and second, because his academic progress seems like such a minor aspect of his overall development.
(I want to interrupt here to say that this parent expresses an important Orthodox truth – our children’s education is primarily to educate their souls, to love them and nurture them in the true Faith. It can be easy to forget that, and separate that into a different category, one that perhaps gets less attention than it might otherwise, while all the weight and pressure is on whether they seem to be doing well in their subjects. So this small comment is very, very important to keep in mind. What we are doing is helping them with their overall development, of which academic progress is such a minor aspect…)
Back to the quotation:
What we do instead is simple and relatively effortless. First, we provide him with the materials he needs to learn with. These include such things as paper, pencils, pens, art materials, books, good toys – the sorts of things parents get their children anyway. Second, when he has a question or needs help with something, we try to assist him, but no more than necessary. Third, we’re patient. We don’t expect him to learn anything he’s not ready for. That’s all there is to it. We don’t spend more than twenty minutes a day helping him with the traditional school subjects, and the help we give is the same kind of help most parents give their children if they are going to school. If he asks us, for example, we might read him a story, or tell him the meaning of a new word, or answer a question about numbers, or listen while he talks about a new project he’s involved in or reads us a story. The way we handle our son’s education now is the same way we’ve handled it right from the beginning. We haven’t changed anything because he’s become “school age.” From our own experience we’ve become convinced that most parents who have done well with their children up to the time they would be entering school could continue teaching them afterward with little difficulty.
…Our biggest problem as far as his instruction is concerned is that we’ve sometimes lacked the courage of our convictions. When he was old enough to be a first-grader, for instance, he had no interest at all in learning to read. We were well aware that every child has his or her own timetable for learning such skills, but we were also aware that many children his age in school were well into their first year of reading, and we were concerned that school authorities might check up on his progress and discover he was “behind” his grade level. Fortunately our common sense prevailed, and we didn’t pressure him in any way to learn to read. The following summer he suddenly became interested in reading, and now with seemingly little effort he has learned to read as well as most children two or three years older than himself.
John Taylor Gatto noted that he himself learned to read at home with his mother, whose “scientific method” as he put it, was to hold him in her lap and read to him while running her finger under the words. That was it, except to give him some practice with letter sounds and sing the ABC song every day. He writes: “We learned to love each letter. The books had some pictures but only a few; words were the center of attention. My mother chose to teach me to read well. She had no degrees, no government salary, no outside encouragement, yet her private choice to make me a reader was my passport to a good and adventurous life. She said “nuts!” to the Prussian system and for that I will always be in her debt. She gave me a love of language and it didn’t cost much. Anybody could have the same, if schooling hadn’t abandoned its duty so flagrantly.”
John Holt gives an example of how schooling, or teaching, may not always work the way it is intended: “When I first taught fifth grade, before I had taught the children anything about fractions, or even mentioned the word, I used to ask them questions like this: ‘If you had 3 candy bars and wanted to divide them evenly among 5 people, how would you do it?’ Most of them could think of one or more ways to do this. But after they had “had” fractions, and learned to think of this as a problem you had to use fractions to solve, most of them couldn’t do it. Instead of reality, and their own common sense and ingenuity, they now had “rules” which they could rarely keep straight or remember how to apply.”
Raymond and Dorothy Moore
I want to take a little time before we end to tell you about the work of Raymond Moore, who was also an educator for many years, and then began his Research Foundation to study the young child’s mental development, maternal attachment, vision, hearing, social-emotional progress, and the activities of the central nervous system, in order to determine optimal entrance age for school. The result was the book I mentioned before, Better Late Than Early, which he wrote with his wife Dorothy. They were writing in the early seventies, and became known as the “grandparents of homeschooling.” What they found is that research “clearly supported the brain specialists and psychologists in their contention that children are not ready for sustained learning programs until age 8-10.” This evidence really goes against the popular modern pressure to make “early readers” out of children. In their opening chapter, they write: “What the child needs most to grow well is a warm one-to-one relationship with a parent who is always there to comfort and guide him. During the first crucial eight years, home should be the child’s only nest and parents the teachers for their children. These are the years when the child requires affection and emotional security more than learning skills, years when he should be able to get ready for life unfettered by school rules.”
And what does affection and emotional security result in? It seems that no talk about homeschooling is complete without a nod to the specter of socialization, because one of the biggest assumptions of all by modern society about the importance of mass compulsory schooling, which I didn’t mention in the beginning, is that no one would ever learn how to relate to others without a full day of interacting with their peers at school, and that children educated at home are deprived of this vital interaction which prepares them better for life with others than being with their family could. The Moores offer one of the best answers to that concern that I have ever seen: “The assumption is that social development gives a child an ability to hold his own without fear in the midst of a group of people. But children who appear sociable and seem able to get around well with their peers are not necessarily well socialized. To be truly sociable means to have concern for others, to know how to practice the golden rule and be willing to serve others. The idea of treating others as they would like to be treated is far from the minds and behavior of many young children who are supposed to have been socialized by school.” And that is probably because the best and most natural place for true socialization — compassion and consideration for others — is within the family, where they have affection, understanding, and emotional security. Spending all day, every day all week, competing with dozens of people of the exact same age and level of immaturity for the attention of one adult is not the best recipe for learning to truly care for other people. More likely it undermines the good things happening at home after school.
The Moores emphasize that learning happens when children are ready to learn things, and that attempting to force learning on them before they are developmentally ready, both biologically and emotionally, is detrimental to their overall development, as well as to their academic progress. In their chapter on reading readiness, the Moores note that “Often children of 6 or younger are not able to see well enough to read properly…children’s eyes are made primarily for distant vision or large objects. Evidence shows that a child’s eyes are not physiologically ready for continual and consistent reading until age 8.” In Scandinavian countries where children historically entered no sooner than 7, reading problems were rare.
The Moores quote Helen Hefferman, formerly of the California State Department of Education, who concluded that “children who wait until they are older to begin school become better readers and more motivated learners. There is a cultural pressure in our society to make every child learn to read in kindergarten or first grade….we may be denying children their childhood by forcing formal language and reading on them at too early an age.” For home educators who might worry about whether learning is happening at the appropriate time, the Moores have this to say: “A child’s ultimate success in reading will depend largely on his background of experiences and his language development. He needs to see, feel, smell, touch, and taste things in the world around him, and he needs to acquire the language skill to communicate well orally before he will be ready to attempt the complex task of reading for himself.”
The Moores offer a lot of wisdom about raising and teaching children in this book, backed up with research in many different scientific disciplines. They cover the developmental stages of the early years in detail, but not so much detail that it’s boring or overwhelming. It’s really just a wonderful book. At one point they note, “Most responsible parents of teenagers wish they could do the job over again. Almost to a parent, they will express the wish that they had known more about children and had spent more time with their youngsters during their early years.” This is a good reminder — God has given us this beautiful opportunity to have our children with us, to learn who they are and to understand them, to be with them during this very small window of time before they leave home as young adults. It’s not all about keeping up with what the schools do, or patterning what we do at home after what is done in school, and if it becomes about that, the experience ultimately will be less fulfilling for children and for parents as well.
In Conclusion
One last quotation from John Holt sums up his message, consistent with the message of all of the educators we’ve been looking at here:
Children are not only extremely good at learning, they are much better at it than we are. As a teacher, it took me a long time to find this out. I was an ingenious and resourceful teacher, clever about thinking up lesson plans and demonstrations and all that. And I only very slowly and painfully learned that when I started teaching less, the children started learning more. I can sum up in 5-7 words what I eventually learned as a teacher. The seven word version is: Learning is not the product of teaching. The five word version is: Teaching does not make learning. Organized education depends on the assumption that children learn only when and only what and only because we teach them. This is not true. It is very close to one hundred percent false. Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn; in other words, children are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them.
(How many times have you seen a young child with a toy kitchen, a little stove and pots and pans, drop everything to beg her mother to help make the soup or the omelet? Or a little boy abandon his blocks or cars to follow his mom or dad around and help feed the animals, or hand him tools to fix the car?)
We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach it to them, but by making the world accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions, if they have any, and helping them explore the things they are most interested in. The ways we can do this are simple and easily understood by parents and other people who like children, and will take the trouble to pay some attention to what they do and think about what it may mean. In short, what we need to know to help children learn is not obscure, technical, or complicated, and the materials we can use to help them lie ready at hand all around us.
Keeping our children with us at home can be stressful and burdensome if we try to adhere to the template laid out for us by compulsory schooling. In fact, anxiety about our children’s education can, and frequently does, take a lot of joy out of family life. If we try to follow that template, it’s easy to let our children know we’re frustrated with them if they are not learning at the pace we imagined or hoped for, or if they just don’t seem able to focus, or especially if we realize that we actually don't have the bandwidth to be "ingenious and resourceful" teachers. If we discard some of the accepted notions about how learning happens, if we begin to think of home education as primarily a place where a loving, present parent offers the resources necessary for self-teaching, rather than a process of an overwhelmed and stressed parent teaching 5 or 6 subjects a day from workbooks and textbooks to however many children she has, making sure they are always at (or preferably above) “grade level,” what a burden can be lifted from our minds and from our hearts!
Seeing education as John Taylor Gatto and John Holt do can take away the anxiety we feel about whether we are doing a good job as “teachers,” (i.e. whether our children seem to be “good students”), it can relieve the pressure we feel about providing the best education for our children; it can resolve our doubts about whether they will progress academically under our guidance. Ultimately the words and observations of these educators can help us reject the assumptions and ideals of compulsory schooling, so that we can enjoy our children learning within our families, and help them develop as persons, whatever person God designed them to be, with His help. So I really encourage you to find these books, to read them and go back to them again and again, for encouragement and practical advice, because I’ve only scratched the surface of each one.
I’m going to end with one last quotation from John Taylor Gatto.
Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your road map through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.
The author/speaker is the mother of seven children, who were all educated at home from kindergarten through high school. Her children went on to earn college degrees from San Jose State University, Hillsdale College, and UC Berkeley.