Articles

Current educational thinking is dominated by the curriculum. As the school term has started nearly everyone I know has asked me if my children are "back to lessons" yet; amongst them even many other home educators who "know" that we don't hold with transmissive notions of education. I recently heard one teacher espousing the view that any reasonable LEA officer can only judge whether a child is being legally educated by comparing his or her "progress" with peers being taught the National Curriculum and the horror stories of the behaviour of some LEA officers prove that this teacher is far from alone in his thinking.

The social pressure to conform to the one and only one way of doing things can creep into every aspect of life. Teachers and LEAs are aided and abetted in their crusade to enforce a particular and narrow coercive state of mind at every turn. A while ago we had a terrible experience when a visiting family with whom we had been close for years was staying. Their children subjected ours to a barrage of "testing". It was actually a very sad attempt by these coercively educated children to rationalise and justify their own experience of the school system in the face of friends who do not have to endure what they endure and who present an option that is not open for them. However for my children it was a devastating blow to their confidence and self esteem. They became quite convinced that they could never achieve anything in life and that they "should" know or be able to do a whole list of useless things in order to be "proper" nine or ten year olds. Meanwhile the discussion amongst the adults was quietly sowing its own seeds of doubt and panic in our minds as parents. It was made very clear that whatever level our "untaught" children are at it certainly wouldn't be the optimum one and they would be considered failures within the system. This was from friends who are actually supportive of our decision to home educate. We have found others much more condemning of our style!

Authorities, friends, relatives, other home educators who are more formal in their approach and a media which constantly talks about children in terms of standards and value added, as though they were just another consumable item, all press upon us and we're unlikely to be able to so far remove ourselves from the world that the whispers won't ever creep in and disturb us. In the face of all that we are only going to survive if we are well stocked with tactics which support what for most people is a crazy and extremist view of education and pedagogy.

We first of all need to be clear in our own thinking. What are curricula for? The whole process of defining, implementing and managing curricula is related to standardisation and control. It is not so much a tool of education as a tool for the management of large, artificially created groups. Our society is not one which likes or respects children. Children are seen as a problem to be solved and schools and the curricula which fill up the school days are part of the management solution. Schools, no matter how small, are centred on groups and systems, not individuals. Curricula are designed not because they are presenting the right things at the right time. It is preposterous to imagine that it must be the right time for all children in a class aged from six to seven years to learn to tell the time on a particular Friday in October. Curricula are designed to do as best as they can in managing the diverse needs of a huge range of children who are artificially brought together on the basis of one arbitrary factor (their age by any given September).

So why should we ever need to consult curricula even for ideas of what might interest our children? We do not need to. The world is full to bursting with all sorts of sources of information and learning in so many media and added to that non coercively educated children have their own life experiences to draw on. With access to all of that we only need to consult our children and go where they lead; .to pick up on our children's clues as to what direction they want to take and give them all the help they want. Curricula are for institutions, not for creative people and we need to get that message ingrained in our own psyches so that we can resist all the atrocious, but pervasive theories about how much our children are missing out on by not studying for level 2 SATs tests!

Just as we need to be clear in our thinking about what curricula are for so that we can demonstrate their uselessness to autonomous children so we need to be clear about why commonly accepted notions of monitoring and progress are so damaging and futile. The notion of ""progress" is such a tempting one. It can so readily be "shown" that children (that is children who are being coercively educated in schools) gain great satisfaction from seeing the progress they have made and to gain this satisfaction they have to have a stock of former inferior work to compare to their now superior work. It is true. School children do gain satisfaction in this way (if they are amongst those who are making the "progress") but only because they have learnt from painful experience of having their work judged as good or bad, progressing or failing that the only way to get the attention and approval that all children should have by right is to play the progress game. The satisfaction is a vicarious one and not a joy in the learning itself. Learning is not a self fulfilling pleasure, but an object with which to court affection and notice. Autonomous creative children do not need any artificial means of knowing that they are constantly developing and learning. We do not commonly tape-record baby noises so that our ten year olds can compare how far their speech has come and be congratulated for it. We trust that our babies will talk, that our children will learn an amazing range of skills and knowledge and that they don't need to be patronised by having their so called "progress" pointed out to them.

The related notion of monitoring is similarly based on inadequate theories. We know from both physics and philosophy that the process of discovery always affects what is being discovered. (Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle) There is no such thing as neutral observation. If we think that we can keep a secret diary or portfolio we are fooling ourselves. Aside from the implications that has for the respect between parents and children it would be virtually impossible not to allow the monitoring to have some coercive and/or objectifying effect on the process of autonomous learning.

Our first tactic then is to know our arguments. It is so commonly assumed that curriculum, progress and monitoring are beneficial that we can easily be sucked into the pervasive and oppressive mentality unless we are standing on firm theoretical ground. These things are not good for children, they are attempts to control how, what and when children should learn and they are to be resisted.

That said, even our best theories can crumble under the pressure that can be exerted either by educational authorities or those we encounter in daily life, so our second tactic must be to gain as much support as possible for our apparently alternative theories. Support can come from journals or Internet lists, from others who are pursuing consent based autonomous education whether by regular meetings or more distant forms of contact, but we need that support continually. Such support not only enables us to remain clear in our thinking and not allow our confidence to be undermined, it also provides our children with the encouragement of seeing that their own family is not just an isolated example of extreme strangeness. Our children will be as aware as we are that we are swimming against the stream, but like us they also can benefit from knowing that we are not swimming alone. I know from my own experience that I am most liable to self doubt when I am isolated and I saw that in my own children whilst we had our summer visitors. The support of others enriches all our lives, keeps our thinking sharp and our confidence high.

The tactics needed are obvious ones, but ones which can be eroded under pressure none the less. Sustaining non coercive education demands our best theories and a supportive environment in which to thrive.

TACTICS FOR NON COERCIVE EDUCATION

TACTICS FOR CONSENT BASED EDUCATION


TACTICS FOR NON COERCIVE EDUCATION	>Menu>Articles>TACTICS FOR NON COERCIVE EDUCATION
TACTICS FOR CONSENT BASED EDUCATION Current educational thinking is dominated by the curriculum. As the school term has started nearly everyone I know has asked me if my children are "back to lessons" yet; amongst them even many other home educators who "know" that we don't hold with transmissive notions of education. I recently heard one teacher espousing the view that any reasonable LEA officer can only judge whether a child is being legally educated by comparing his or her "progress" with peers being taught the National Curriculum and the horror stories of the behaviour of some LEA officers prove that this teacher is far from alone in his thinking. The social pressure to conform to the one and only one way of doing things can creep into every aspect of life. Teachers and LEAs are aided and abetted in their crusade to enforce a particular and narrow coercive state of mind at every turn. A while ago we had a terrible experience when a visiting family with whom we had been close for years was staying. Their children subjected ours to a barrage of "testing". It was actually a very sad attempt by these coercively educated children to rationalise and justify their own experience of the school system in the face of friends who do not have to endure what they endure and who present an option that is not open for them. However for my children it was a devastating blow to their confidence and self esteem. They became quite convinced that they could never achieve anything in life and that they "should" know or be able to do a whole list of useless things in order to be "proper" nine or ten year olds. Meanwhile the discussion amongst the adults was quietly sowing its own seeds of doubt and panic in our minds as parents. It was made very clear that whatever level our "untaught" children are at it certainly wouldn't be the optimum one and they would be considered failures within the system. This was from friends who are actually supportive of our decision to home educate. We have found others much more condemning of our style! Authorities, friends, relatives, other home educators who are more formal in their approach and a media which constantly talks about children in terms of standards and value added, as though they were just another consumable item, all press upon us and we're unlikely to be able to so far remove ourselves from the world that the whispers won't ever creep in and disturb us. In the face of all that we are only going to survive if we are well stocked with tactics which support what for most people is a crazy and extremist view of education and pedagogy. We first of all need to be clear in our own thinking. What are curricula for? The whole process of defining, implementing and managing curricula is related to standardisation and control. It is not so much a tool of education as a tool for the management of large, artificially created groups. Our society is not one which likes or respects children. Children are seen as a problem to be solved and schools and the curricula which fill up the school days are part of the management solution. Schools, no matter how small, are centred on groups and systems, not individuals. Curricula are designed not because they are presenting the right things at the right time. It is preposterous to imagine that it must be the right time for all children in a class aged from six to seven years to learn to tell the time on a particular Friday in October. Curricula are designed to do as best as they can in managing the diverse needs of a huge range of children who are artificially brought together on the basis of one arbitrary factor (their age by any given September). So why should we ever need to consult curricula even for ideas of what might interest our children? We do not need to. The world is full to bursting with all sorts of sources of information and learning in so many media and added to that non coercively educated children have their own life experiences to draw on. With access to all of that we only need to consult our children and go where they lead; .to pick up on our children's clues as to what direction they want to take and give them all the help they want. Curricula are for institutions, not for creative people and we need to get that message ingrained in our own psyches so that we can resist all the atrocious, but pervasive theories about how much our children are missing out on by not studying for level 2 SATs tests! Just as we need to be clear in our thinking about what curricula are for so that we can demonstrate their uselessness to autonomous children so we need to be clear about why commonly accepted notions of monitoring and progress are so damaging and futile. The notion of ""progress" is such a tempting one. It can so readily be "shown" that children (that is children who are being coercively educated in schools) gain great satisfaction from seeing the progress they have made and to gain this satisfaction they have to have a stock of former inferior work to compare to their now superior work. It is true. School children do gain satisfaction in this way (if they are amongst those who are making the "progress") but only because they have learnt from painful experience of having their work judged as good or bad, progressing or failing that the only way to get the attention and approval that all children should have by right is to play the progress game. The satisfaction is a vicarious one and not a joy in the learning itself. Learning is not a self fulfilling pleasure, but an object with which to court affection and notice. Autonomous creative children do not need any artificial means of knowing that they are constantly developing and learning. We do not commonly tape-record baby noises so that our ten year olds can compare how far their speech has come and be congratulated for it. We trust that our babies will talk, that our children will learn an amazing range of skills and knowledge and that they don't need to be patronised by having their so called "progress" pointed out to them. The related notion of monitoring is similarly based on inadequate theories. We know from both physics and philosophy that the process of discovery always affects what is being discovered. (Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle) There is no such thing as neutral observation. If we think that we can keep a secret diary or portfolio we are fooling ourselves. Aside from the implications that has for the respect between parents and children it would be virtually impossible not to allow the monitoring to have some coercive and/or objectifying effect on the process of autonomous learning. Our first tactic then is to know our arguments. It is so commonly assumed that curriculum, progress and monitoring are beneficial that we can easily be sucked into the pervasive and oppressive mentality unless we are standing on firm theoretical ground. These things are not good for children, they are attempts to control how, what and when children should learn and they are to be resisted. That said, even our best theories can crumble under the pressure that can be exerted either by educational authorities or those we encounter in daily life, so our second tactic must be to gain as much support as possible for our apparently alternative theories. Support can come from journals or Internet lists, from others who are pursuing consent based autonomous education whether by regular meetings or more distant forms of contact, but we need that support continually. Such support not only enables us to remain clear in our thinking and not allow our confidence to be undermined, it also provides our children with the encouragement of seeing that their own family is not just an isolated example of extreme strangeness. Our children will be as aware as we are that we are swimming against the stream, but like us they also can benefit from knowing that we are not swimming alone. I know from my own experience that I am most liable to self doubt when I am isolated and I saw that in my own children whilst we had our summer visitors. The support of others enriches all our lives, keeps our thinking sharp and our confidence high. The tactics needed are obvious ones, but ones which can be eroded under pressure none the less. Sustaining non coercive education demands our best theories and a supportive environment in which to thrive.