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I’ve been thinking about education and school a lot recently. Evelyn is four and Oscar is two. Time to start thinking about school for Evelyn – where will she go to elementary? We’re a few blocks away from an older school with an excellent reputation and it seems like a logical choice to send her there. But I think we will not. Why? Why would we turn up such a good opportunity?
The answer is not simple and I warn you now – it will probably offend a few people and step on some toes. But please read on, this is something I’ve come to feel quite strongly about.
The first reason we are hesitant about school is that if all goes well I will graduate from my professional program in 3 years at which point Evelyn will be 7 years old. If she’s started school at 6 then we’d be moving away after only one year of school which I think would be quite disruptive for her. I have no idea where we will end up – BC? Alberta? Montreal? France? (please yes!) and have no idea what kind of educational options will be available. So if we did decide to homeschool her after a year of public school the transition would probably be hard for both her and us. So we feel like our nomadic situation makes homeschooling a more stable choice.
The other reasons deal more with the school system itself. I’ve watched Evelyn as she has grown up from a baby who cried all the time to an amazing child. I’ve watched her stack towers of blocks, all arranged in the same orientation at 1 year old, learn her alphabet by the same age, talk like a grown up at age 2, teach herself how to write letters and now she’s starting to learn spelling and phonics (mostly by her own motivation with a help from us) at age 4. Did I ever sit down and drill her? Occasionally, with disastrous results! When we let her take the lead and when we take advantage of her questions to teach her things, she does it on her own. Amazing! Do I have the smartest kid in the world? No! Am I an excellent teacher? No! ALL kids learn like this. Unfortunately, it’s getting hard to allow children the opportunities to learn on their own. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this and I have no wish to list them all here, but two examples would be these: 1) our societal push for early literacy … preschoolers are now expected to know the alphabet and write, which was not the case when I was a child, and 2) our preoccupation with getting kids into organized activities (which themselves can be great) … but the problem comes with too many activities. Think of the “Tiger Mom” book – Mrs. Chua had her daughters so scheduled they were never able to spend half a day with their grandmother. Their grandmother constantly expressed a wish to spend a few hours with them and never had that wish fulfilled because the girls were going from one lesson to another every day of the year. To me, that’s a great tragedy. Anyway, I digress. We DO NOT ALLOW for free time, for creative exploration or self learning. Children who are not able to sit and learn are labelled as “problems” or maybe even diagnosed with a learning disorder or ADHD.
I struggled enormously with Evelyn as a baby and as a child. She seeks out patterns, loves to organize things, hates to stop an activity unless she was ready and likes to do things her own way. We had a LOT of conflicts over daily tasks (just ask me about brushing her teeth sometime). I have to tell you that at one point I honestly thought she might have autism. I got a referral and had Evelyn assessed. No, she does not have autism. This is who she is and how she learns. Now that she’s mature enough to understand that she’s not the centre of the universe and understand her situation in our family, things have improved quite a bit. But my experiences with Evelyn made me realise she’s not the kind of person who will easily conform to the will of others, follow what others are doing or do things without asking herself “why should I?” first. She’d definitely be the “difficult” child in daycare. I can only imagine the conversations I would have had if she were in daycare as a young child.
Our interest in education has had deep roots. My education and Dan’s education were shockingly different and deeply influential on both of us. I attended elementary school in a wealthy suburb and had, for the most part, good teachers who loved their job, truly wanted us to learn and in some cases truly loved the subject they taught. My PE teacher loved sports and my art teacher was an artist herself. I was lucky enough to get into an advanced program in high school which probably saved me from making choices based on my financial situation rather than my dreams. Dan’s schooling on the other hand was far from positive (one teacher told him he’d never make it past grade 9). It’s not my place to discuss details of it here, but you can take my word that school was not a positive environment for him. Dan has frequently expressed his anger and the feeling that he was “cheated out of a better future”.
Another source of interest for us was a book one of our housemates read (we shared a living space with two other people for a few years which was both challenging and rewarding and it was an experience from which I learned a lot). The book was called “Why Gender matters” which addresses some great concerns over how boys are treated and taught in today’s society. We saw another book by the same author (Boys Adrift) in a local bookshop and picked it up. It opened our eyes to some of the shortcomings of our education system. If you want the gist of the book, visit http://www.boysadrift.com/. At this point I was thinking more of Oscar than Evelyn but it planted a seed of doubt in my mind about turning my kids over to the education system.
An article which also fueled our thoughts in this area was an essay called “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto. Someone gave a copy to Dan while we were living in Montreal. We both read it and found it challenging, interesting and flagged it for future investigation. You can read it here http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm.
Our decision to put Evelyn in preschool has also become part of our journey on education. We decided Evelyn really needed to be around other children, as we had only rare contact with family or friends that have children Evelyn’s age after our move to Edmonton. We felt that if she did have something like autism, being around other children might help her to be more social, learn interactions and social norms and maybe even help her to eat new foods (peer pressure!). We investigated the local Waldorf school on the recommendation of a friend and fell in love after our 30 minute visit to the preschool class. We enrolled Evelyn the same week and she’s going to start her second year in a few days. Do you see the irony that I’m writing “against” school here and yet Evelyn is in preschool? 
Being in a Waldorf community provides a breath of fresh air. I feel like the environment and philosophy of the school matches with our values well. This is not about becoming a close follower of the founder of Waldorf or anything of the sort, but more about the value the program places on teaching children to respect one another, respect nature, valuing their personal creativity, and providing them a mixture of structure and free time. It’s also about encouraging children to take responsibility for their actions, creating an environment with only natural materials (which urban children have little contact with these days), a commercial free environment (no clothing with logos or cartoon characters is allowed and children are encouraged to not watch television before coming to class). If I were to dream up a preschool I would not come up with one better than this.
Part of the Waldorf philosophy is a great emphasis on play. Dan recently took several books out of the library including 1) “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” by Stuart L Brown 2) “The case for make believe: Saving Play in A Commercialized World” by Susan Linn 3) “Einstein never used flash cards: How Our Children Really Learn–and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less” by Kathy Hirsch-Pasek 4) “The Unprocessed Child: living without school” by Valerie Fitzenreiter and 5) Gatto’s “Weapons of Mass instruction” (see http://johntaylorgatto.com/). I felt like I gained quite a bit of insight (and hopefully more patience with my kids) from reading these and I’d encourage everyone to read them at some point as well. Even if you’re just out of school yourself and kids may or may not be part of your future. This is information that is critical to our understanding of how children think and also what they need to be moulded into caring, thoughtful, intelligent and creative adults.
For a 20 minute summary of some of the points from this book, this TED talk does an excellent job http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html. The film “Waiting for Superman” also addresses some of the shocking conditions in the US school system. I also highly recommend anyone to watch this film.
So what finally spurred me into writing this blog was an article posted by one of my high school friends who is an elementary teacher. Please read it as well: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/06/living/teachers-want-to-tell-parents/index.html
I read this article just as I finished reading “Weapons of Mass Instruction” and could not help but feel greatly disappointed and saddened that we have come to the situation where parents and teachers are actually fighting against each other (just read a few of the comments on this article, you will see what I mean). For whatever reason, whether it is by design or accident or maybe a bit of both, we seem to have created a situation where parents mistrust teachers and teachers despise parents – and I expect the kids are paying the price for this. I don’t think either party is at fault, although I do believe there are areas where both have made mistakes. Parents: I agree with the author of this article that you have to stop making excuses for your kids. Hold them to high standards and let them face the consequences of their actions and mistakes. Don’t be so quick to blame the teacher. Teaching is a very demanding job and they’re doing what was traditionally OUR jobs FOR us. Be respectful. Teachers: don’t be so quick to label children as “having a behaviour problem”. Children are individuals as much as adults and need a safe environment in which to express themselves, understand the world and find meaning. Additionally, using language like that naturally invokes a defensive response, as it is an aggressive statement. Maybe it’s time that teacher education include some basics on how to handle conflict and deal with situations assertively. Even in Pharmacy school we had a few lectures on that and I’d fail a clinical lab if I used that kind of phrasing. Making enemies out of parents is not the way to solve this problem. I digress. I think it’s the problem lies in the way the system is set up. We’re factory farming our kids and children do not all conform to this system. Some kids DO. I did. But that does not mean it works for the rest of them. I truly believe for many kids their “problems” arise more from their distaste of always being told what to do, trained to memorize and regurgitate, the social context of their schoolmates, and natural desire to get up and use their bodies more.
The end result of all this is that we’re very heavily leaning toward homeschooling and/or unschooling Oscar and Evelyn. This is not to say that structured education has no value. Not at all. People don’t become scientists or athletes or dancers without training. Intensive training is needed to accomplish these things. We need a system of instruction and mentorship. But as one Gatto put it, do we need to enact the farce of re-teaching our children colours, days of the week and the alphabet in elementary when they’ve already learned it? Do we need to put our children under tremendous pressure to “get into the right schools” and pass standardized tests? Do we need to teach them to conform to authority by putting them through 12 years of schooling? Please struggle with these questions as you look at your own education or think about how you might educate your real or hypothetical children.
We’re fortunate to be in the situation where we’ve been given opportunity to do so. Our situation arose out of circumstances beyond our control (and not without a price to pay; my mother’s preventable death from lower esophageal cancer lead us to where we are now). Most families don’t have a choice, either due to time or financial constraints or family situations and it’s for this reason I really desire to see a change in how we address children’s education as a society, as parents and as teachers. In the meantime I hope this blog post has planted some seeds for though for you and that we can all make informed decisions about the value of education and what we want our kids to learn.