Today we visited the final exhibition of work done by young offenders in an art project that I evaluated. The art was stunning - marvellous graphics and animation made during long months of art workshops. But there were some really sad statements in the words that accompanied the images. One young person wished only to see his baby daughter grow up with a better life than he'd had. This is a 17-year-old! It seems so tragic that he's already written off his own contribution to society. Hopefully he will have a wonderful relationship with his girlfriend and child and he'll see things differently in a few years' time. One heartening thing is that this art programme is part of allowing creativity back into the young people's lives, but it'll probably be a long uphill struggle towards any meaningful sense of self-worth.
So we left the gallery and as we were walking back to the car, dd took a call to tell her that she got a distinction in her latest music exam - grade 6 recorder. She was absolutely thrilled, of course, and I'm so pleased she got the result she wanted and worked for. Of course, exams are only markers (heaven help us when they become the actual purpose!), but this was a big step up in technique for her and she knows how much her playing has developed recently.
A day of contrasts, then. Firstly, seeing a bunch of kids who've been in the school system all their lives and who're only just beginning to value their own creativity now that they're doing something where "learning outcomes" matter less than self-expression. Sadly, it takes the kind of emergency situation where they're in danger of becoming long-term criminals before they've had access to this kind of programme. Then the very different situation of seeing my lovely daughter, outside of the school system (which a certain G Badman sees as the best - almost only - route to achievement), sure of her own ability but still thrilled to have played well. You certainly couldn't draw any general theory from these two isolated moments: it was just a weird and slightly ironic juxtaposition.
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Friday, 24 July 2009
Learning nothing
Well, today was officially Learn Nothing Day (see link on side panel of this blog). The aim is to go through a day of ordinary life sincerely endeavouring to learn nothing. It shows how much we DO find out just by living.
We thought we'd found the perfect solution: an afternoon at an outlet shopping centre. Hardly the stuff of intellectual enlightenment. Except, except, except... We drove through the Tyne Tunnel and saw a sign relating to travaux publics, so I learned that a French company are part of the construction while dd learned some new vocabulary. We all learned how the construction was progressing and we wondered whether we'd have a northbound and a southbound tunnel or matching 2-directional routes.
When we got there, we had a sandwich and dd learned that a key ingredient in pesto is basil, and she remembered we have this growing at home. I remembered I need to look up how to prune our container of mint which is looking tall and spindly.
While we were caught in traffic on our way home, dd was puzzled why UK vehicle licence plates are white at the front and yellow at the rear. Do you know, I'd never ever thought about that? A quick internet search suggests that the yellow at the rear is to prevent the driver in the following car being dazzled by the reflection of their lights on a white plate. The white at the front is possibly to afford clearer recognition of the registration number (and therefore the speed camera's friend?).
When we got home I learned about a lot of interesting home ed day-trips that are on the horizon. And I learned that my credit card had definitely been hacked. Thankfully, the bank caught it in time. I now know the purpose of those verification panels that seem such an irritation when you're trying to make an online purchase.
That's a lot of learning on a day when we tried to avoid it altogether and it's not that late yet.
We thought we'd found the perfect solution: an afternoon at an outlet shopping centre. Hardly the stuff of intellectual enlightenment. Except, except, except... We drove through the Tyne Tunnel and saw a sign relating to travaux publics, so I learned that a French company are part of the construction while dd learned some new vocabulary. We all learned how the construction was progressing and we wondered whether we'd have a northbound and a southbound tunnel or matching 2-directional routes.
When we got there, we had a sandwich and dd learned that a key ingredient in pesto is basil, and she remembered we have this growing at home. I remembered I need to look up how to prune our container of mint which is looking tall and spindly.
While we were caught in traffic on our way home, dd was puzzled why UK vehicle licence plates are white at the front and yellow at the rear. Do you know, I'd never ever thought about that? A quick internet search suggests that the yellow at the rear is to prevent the driver in the following car being dazzled by the reflection of their lights on a white plate. The white at the front is possibly to afford clearer recognition of the registration number (and therefore the speed camera's friend?).
When we got home I learned about a lot of interesting home ed day-trips that are on the horizon. And I learned that my credit card had definitely been hacked. Thankfully, the bank caught it in time. I now know the purpose of those verification panels that seem such an irritation when you're trying to make an online purchase.
That's a lot of learning on a day when we tried to avoid it altogether and it's not that late yet.
Wednesday, 22 July 2009
All Growed Up
My little girl is definitely growing up. Her friend invited her to a birthday party and, where it would once have been soft-play, it's now a pampering session at the local beauty salon. She's so excited. I hope the nail artist is ready with suitably doomy colours!
It's funny how, of all the indicators of adolescence, this is the one that's made me realize how close she is to adulthood.
It's funny how, of all the indicators of adolescence, this is the one that's made me realize how close she is to adulthood.
Monday, 20 July 2009
More "News from Nowhere"
Aha, I've found the relevant section of William Morris' utopia now. It's on pp23 -25 and it involves the narrator of the tale (who has awoken to mysteriously find himself in a very different England) being shown around by one of this new world's long-time residents:
"School?" he said, "yes, what do you mean by that word? I don't see that it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting ... but otherwise," said he, laughing, "I must own myself beaten." ...
... I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; and so I said after a little fumbling, "I was using the word in the sense of a system of education."
"Education?" said he, meditatively, "I know enough Latin to know that the word must come from 'educere', to lead out; ... but I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it means." ...
... "Well, education means a system of teaching young people." ...
... "I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a 'system of teaching' or not."
And so it goes on, with the narrator discovering that all children learn according to their aptitudes to swim, to ride, to thatch and carpenter and cook. That learning to read is a matter of waiting until the books that are lying around are interesting enough to encourage the child to decode the symbols. That writing necessarily comes later, when the child is dextrous enough to make the calligraphy 'handsome' [here we have Morris the handicrafts-obsessive at work!] Languages are picked up as necessary, and
"many people study facts about the make of things and the matters of cause and effect ... and some ... will spend time over mathematics. 'Tis no use forcing people's tastes."
This discussion happens just a couple of pages ahead of the tale's narrator discovering that the new use of the Houses of Parliament is as a store for manure. So, not much change there, then!
"School?" he said, "yes, what do you mean by that word? I don't see that it can have anything to do with children. We talk, indeed, of a school of herring, and a school of painting ... but otherwise," said he, laughing, "I must own myself beaten." ...
... I thought I had best say nothing about the boy-farms which I had been used to call schools, as I saw pretty clearly that they had disappeared; and so I said after a little fumbling, "I was using the word in the sense of a system of education."
"Education?" said he, meditatively, "I know enough Latin to know that the word must come from 'educere', to lead out; ... but I have never met anybody who could give me a clear explanation of what it means." ...
... "Well, education means a system of teaching young people." ...
... "I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a 'system of teaching' or not."
And so it goes on, with the narrator discovering that all children learn according to their aptitudes to swim, to ride, to thatch and carpenter and cook. That learning to read is a matter of waiting until the books that are lying around are interesting enough to encourage the child to decode the symbols. That writing necessarily comes later, when the child is dextrous enough to make the calligraphy 'handsome' [here we have Morris the handicrafts-obsessive at work!] Languages are picked up as necessary, and
"many people study facts about the make of things and the matters of cause and effect ... and some ... will spend time over mathematics. 'Tis no use forcing people's tastes."
This discussion happens just a couple of pages ahead of the tale's narrator discovering that the new use of the Houses of Parliament is as a store for manure. So, not much change there, then!
Sunday, 19 July 2009
The REAL Home Education Review
This is AHED's (Action for Home Education) briefing paper in response to the present climate of suspicion about home educators:-
AHED Briefing Paper
Says it all, really.
AHED Briefing Paper
Says it all, really.
News from Nowhere
I suppose it's because the BBC are promoting a bodice-ripper costume drama about the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood that I've been thinking about William Morris. He of the obsession with handicrafts and the poetry as flowery as his wallpaper. But this was the man who in 1890 created "News from Nowhere", a socialist utopia that's unusual because, more than a century on, it doesn't read like a vision of mechanistic hell. I've always had a soft spot for this book: of course it's naive and idealizes pre-industrial life but, hey, when you compare it to almost every other utopian vision, it's incredibly human.
In Morris's visionary society, children don't go to school - learning's far more organic. I was browsing the web for the relevant section of the book and fell instead on an article from a couple of years earlier. Dated 1888. It made me smile. Sometimes those of us who reject school are written off as casualties of 1960s idealism (I'm sure a certain Mr Badman believes this), yet there were people who could identify the underlying paradoxes of schooling almost as soon as it became universal.
Morris, Thoughts on Education Under Capitalism
Here's a telling excerpt that neatly anticipates the ideas of John Holt and especially John Taylor Gatto:-
"Though even our mechanical school system cannot crush out a natural bent towards literature (with all the pleasures of thought and imagination which that word means) yet certainly its dull round will hardly implant such a taste in anyone's mind; and as for the caput mortuum, the dead mass of mere information which the worker comes away with when his 'education' is over, he will and must soon forget this when he finds out that it is of little use to him and gives him no pleasure.
I must say in passing that on the few occasions that I have been inside a Boardschool, I have been much depressed by the mechanical drill that was too obviously being applied there to all the varying capacities and moods. My heart sank before Mr M'Choakumchild and his method, and I thought how much luckier I was to have been born well enough off to be sent to a school where I was taught - nothing; but learned archaeology and romance on the Wiltshire downs."
Of course, the reference to M'Choakumchild derives from the schoolmaster in Dickens' "Hard Times". Dickens described his hellish fact factory in 1854. These concerns that schooling can squeeze the life out of the imagination go back a long way. Of course, approaches to schooling have come a long way since children were drilled with facts, haven't they? But replace 'facts' with 'targets' and 'drill' with 'literacy/numeracy hour', and I'm not so sure how much has really changed.
In Morris's visionary society, children don't go to school - learning's far more organic. I was browsing the web for the relevant section of the book and fell instead on an article from a couple of years earlier. Dated 1888. It made me smile. Sometimes those of us who reject school are written off as casualties of 1960s idealism (I'm sure a certain Mr Badman believes this), yet there were people who could identify the underlying paradoxes of schooling almost as soon as it became universal.
Morris, Thoughts on Education Under Capitalism
Here's a telling excerpt that neatly anticipates the ideas of John Holt and especially John Taylor Gatto:-
"Though even our mechanical school system cannot crush out a natural bent towards literature (with all the pleasures of thought and imagination which that word means) yet certainly its dull round will hardly implant such a taste in anyone's mind; and as for the caput mortuum, the dead mass of mere information which the worker comes away with when his 'education' is over, he will and must soon forget this when he finds out that it is of little use to him and gives him no pleasure.
I must say in passing that on the few occasions that I have been inside a Boardschool, I have been much depressed by the mechanical drill that was too obviously being applied there to all the varying capacities and moods. My heart sank before Mr M'Choakumchild and his method, and I thought how much luckier I was to have been born well enough off to be sent to a school where I was taught - nothing; but learned archaeology and romance on the Wiltshire downs."
Of course, the reference to M'Choakumchild derives from the schoolmaster in Dickens' "Hard Times". Dickens described his hellish fact factory in 1854. These concerns that schooling can squeeze the life out of the imagination go back a long way. Of course, approaches to schooling have come a long way since children were drilled with facts, haven't they? But replace 'facts' with 'targets' and 'drill' with 'literacy/numeracy hour', and I'm not so sure how much has really changed.
Wednesday, 15 July 2009
Solar powered
Just a little video of the solar powered car that we built from a kit. Great fun - but, boy, does it remind me of the old Reliant Robins. It goes backwards because we put the worm gear on the wrong way round! The wheels are CDs which came with the kit. But it could also be a way of recycling any albums you love to hate! DD would quite like to do this to every High School Musical and Cascada recording ever released.
Oh, and check out this talk about creativity. A very serious message delivered with the comic timing of a great stand-up comic.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
I keep hearing that there's a big policy drive towards 'creativity' in education at the moment. There's the 'cultural offer' and 'Find Your Talent', trying to 'deliver' 5 hours of creative activity for every schoolchild each week. I've never yet worked out how 'delivery' of creativity would work. I HOPE it succeeds, but, to be honest, there seem to be a lot of ready-made national-curriculum-style instant solutions being handed out to teachers during Inset days (learn these songs and that'll tick off music, etc). How genuinely creative it'll be I don't know, but, hey, it's got to be better than yet another 'literacy hour'. How nice it'd be if they genuinely gave the kids freedom to explore and freedom to fail. Meanwhile, it's nice to have the space to let our girl find her own way as creatively as she can.
Oh, and check out this talk about creativity. A very serious message delivered with the comic timing of a great stand-up comic.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
I keep hearing that there's a big policy drive towards 'creativity' in education at the moment. There's the 'cultural offer' and 'Find Your Talent', trying to 'deliver' 5 hours of creative activity for every schoolchild each week. I've never yet worked out how 'delivery' of creativity would work. I HOPE it succeeds, but, to be honest, there seem to be a lot of ready-made national-curriculum-style instant solutions being handed out to teachers during Inset days (learn these songs and that'll tick off music, etc). How genuinely creative it'll be I don't know, but, hey, it's got to be better than yet another 'literacy hour'. How nice it'd be if they genuinely gave the kids freedom to explore and freedom to fail. Meanwhile, it's nice to have the space to let our girl find her own way as creatively as she can.
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