John Holt

Unschooling

Automatic Learning

Charlotte Mason

Waldorf

Montessori

Summary

How do you Home Educate?

Everyone has the right to educate their own child: it is something that has been happening since the beginning of time and it makes sense that this is what people should turn to at a time when the education system fails.

In principle, how you educate your child is a matter that concerns only you and your immediate family: you are the ones who know what is best for your children:  interference from outside rarely makes things better and often makes things worse.

It can, however, be helpful to know how other parents in a similar situation to yourself have answered questions such as 'Should we do regular lessons?', 'Should we follow the national curriculum?', 'Should I panic if my child will not look at a book?', 'Should I tell the Local Education Authority that I am home-educating?' etc.

The answers vary from child to child. 
The page of home-education links  has links to home-education sites that provide information about support groups, discussion groups and web rings that should make it possible for parents to make contact with other people in a similar situation to themselves.

In addition, I have compiled a brief guide to some of the terms and people that one comes across when searching the internet for homeschooling information: John Holt, Unschooling, Charlotte Mason, Waldorf teaching, Montessori methods .

John Holt 
John Holt  played a pivotal role in making homeschooling a viable option for parents and children in the United States.

He started his career as a school teacher and despite the fact that he was successful was not blind to the deficiencies of the system within which he was working.

He wrote two best-selling books - 'How Children Fail' (1964) and 'How Children Learn'(1967) - which became standard text books for students studying education and eventually sold over one and a half million copies.

Rather than resting on his laurels (teaching at Harvard etc) he chose to carry on trying to understand the real reasons why children were learning so little at school.

By the late 1970s he had come to the conclusion that schools could not be reformed - they are inherently flawed institutions - and that parents would be best advised to teach their children at home. His work became less and less accepted in academic circles but found a warm reception amongst parents who could not understand why things were not working out for their children at school.

He started a magazine, Growing Without Schooling, in which he set out a radical philosophy: not only suggesting that children should not be sent to school but also that any sort or organised schooling was detrimental to a child's development.

John Holt spent much of the remainder of his life campaigning for and supporting Homeschooling. His books are still amongst the most lucid on the subject. It is at least partly due to his efforts that Homeschooling is now legal in all the states of America.

John Holt will be remembered as one of the people who did most to restore a measure of humanity  to the education of children in western countries in the twentieth century. 

There is of course another side to the story , many people who homeschool feel intimidated by the legacy of John Holt - they do not feel comfortable with the way he recommended a lack of structure to the teaching day and the fact that he would not promote a particular curriculum or particular books.

My perspective, as a European, is, however, that John Holt is the only person in  a prominent public position, on either side of the Atlantic, who has been prepared to stand up and support parents in their attempts to defy the authorities and give their children a proper education. 

Whatever differences people may have had with him on points of detail, his courage helped to win everyone in America the right to follow whatever course of education that they believe to be best for their children. It must be at least partly thanks to him that things have moved forward so rapidly in America while so little progress towards real educational reform has been made in the UK and the rest of Europe.

John Holt - An excellent article describing his life and work of John Holt by Patrick Faranga - his friend and colleague.

Unschooling  
This term was first used by  John Holt in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, and was taken up by many homeschoolers in North America. Unschooling is the opposite of schooling. 

Where schooling implies that one is making a group of children all behave in the same way and learn the same things, unschooling is about letting children follow their own direction and allowing them to learn through a process of discovery and exploration.

By definition, unschooling can never be a prescribed system of education and the way that it is practised is bound to vary from home to home depending on the personalities of the parents and children involved and the nature of the resources available to a child from which they can learn.

Nevertheless, parents whose only experience of education is the time that they spent at school themselves should definitely make an effort to put some of the ideas behind 'unschooling' into practice. They will be amazed by the self-assurance and good judgement that their children display in managing their own time and in deciding what they want to do.

In practice unschooling covers quite a large spectrum, some people do not do any lessons with their children at all, some do bookwork when their children want to and others establish a rhythm to their day, which includes lessons, in co-operation with their children. 

Families that live in unspoilt areas where children are free to roam at liberty in the surrounding countryside can afford to take a relaxed approach to their children's education but those living in built-up areas have to make more effort to provide their children with a stimulating environment - four walls, a television and a computer are not the raw materials from which a child can fashion a balanced education for themselves: they are bound to need positive input from their parents.

Unschooling.com - active American site sponsored by Home Education Magazine promoting  unschooling.
Unschooling.org - site run by Family Unschooling Network: started in Maine USA, still predominantly oriented to the USA but still of interest to UK families.

Automatic Learning
The experiences of  John Holt and unschooling families have given rise to the idea of 'automatic' learning which suggests that children learn best when left to their own devices and that interference from adults hinders rather than helps the process.

If this idea is correct - and common sense suggests that it is - then the implications for the education system are enormous.

In my view, automatic learning does not reduce the importance of a teacher or parent in a child's life but it does alter the way in which they should work. Instead of  deciding what the child should learn and when, the adult has to be sensitive to what the child wants; should let the child determine the pace of learning  and should always be ready to answer questions. 

Charlotte Mason 
Charlotte Mason is sometimes referred to as being the pioneer of Home Education. She was born in 1842 in England, was home-taught herself but orphaned at the age of sixteen. She decided to earn her living as a teacher and over the course of the following years worked in both schools and private homes.

In these posts she discovered  the best and worst of the educational practices of her time. She was committed to the idea that there should be a strong bond of love between teacher and pupil and that education should take place within the confines of a loving and caring environment.

Her reputation increased and she wrote geography books, trained governesses in the art of teaching; founded an organisation - the Parents National Education Union (PNEU) which ran correspondence courses and she also wrote 'Home Education' - a book which gave a detailed description of how children could be taught at home. In 1890 she founded the magazine Parents Review, which survived until the 1960s.

She drew upon her religion for inspiration and to provide a structure to her lessons. This has made her work popular with many modern Christian homeschoolers - especially in America - but may, perversely, have prevented other home educators from benefiting from her work, much of which is simply the application of common sense and experience.

She structured the time that she spent with children - reading, writing, drawing, playing music, telling stories and encouraging children to retell what they had learnt. Like other successful educators she did not believe in using 'twaddle' or dumbed-down material as educational aids. She introduced children to the best of everything - the best literature, the best music and the best art.

It is interesting to read about the life of Charlotte Mason. She started work at a time when education was still the preserve of the privileged few but she pioneered a method that could have brought it within the range of a much wider circle. Instead of supporting her humane and successful methods, the government of the time chose to back the development of a harsh and brutalising school system. 

Since then, standards in education have declined remorselessly and few people receive an education that people of Charlotte Mason's day would recognise as being satisfactory.

It is now difficult to obtain copies of Charlotte Mason's original work and perhaps too much time has elapsed for it to be put directly into practice: the conditions under which modern parents work are quite different from those faced by Charlotte Mason. However, she does remain identifiable as the founder of the Home Education movement and her work provides incontrovertible proof that the home can provide the ideal environment for the education of children of all ages.

Links:
Charlotte Mason This site gives a more complete picture of the life and work of Charlotte Mason and links to related sites.

www.amblesideonline.com In addition to new teaching materials this site has the original text of 'Home Education' online.

Waldorf Methods  
Waldorf education derives from the work done by Rudolf Steiner in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart in the 1920s. It is most commonly associated with Steiner Schools but is in many ways easier to apply in the home than at school - there is every reason to believe that Steiner himself developed his ideas on education when working as a private tutor and that he had reservations about whether proper education could ever be conducted within the confines of any institution that was recognisable as being a school.

These are the sorts of ideas that homeschoolers have taken from Waldorf education and found to be useful:

Young Children (up to the age of seven):
Concentrate on providing a stimulating environment with an emphasis on natural materials - toys made of wood; dolls made of cloth; wooden furniture;  no television, computers, plastic toys etc; good food; lots of contact with nature; drawing and painting; fairy stories; no pressure to learn to read or write.

Older Children:
Establish a rhythm to study time. Do the same sorts of things at the same time each day. Do academic work in the mornings. Study one subject at a time: history every day for two or three weeks, then geography every day for two or three weeks, then science, etc. Do a lot of drawing and story telling. Put everything in a clear historical context. Maintain contact with nature - gardening, nature study. Do crafts, art and music. First work with myths and legends and then with ancient history and scriptures from around the world - and only then tackle more 'modern' subjects such as history, science, etc. Modern languages can be learnt by reading good literature in the original version. Classical approach to mathematics -geometry, algebra, trigonometry. 

Waldorf Home Schooling Resources - predominantly American site with contact information, discussion groups etc for homeschoolers who want to use Waldorf methods
Waldorf Homeschoolers - Another American site practical information, compassionate and one step removed from the rather off-putting 'Steiner Movement'. 

Montessori  
Montessori methods naturally translate to the home. Maria Montessori developed her methods by providing a home-like environment for children who had never enjoyed even basic comforts in their own houses.

Nearly all modern parents have it within their power to provide the right sort of environment for their children and this is the area explored by homeschoolers who use the Montessori method. It involves common sense things such as not having televisions and computer games in the home, not feeding children junk food, having toys that involve the imagination etc. 

There are a lot of Montessori teacher training courses available but it is doubtful if these are helpful for home-educating parents. The biggest obstacle to success in educating your own children is having pre-conceived ideas about what you should be doing. It is better to apply the spirit of Montessori's work than to copy what she actually did. My favourite quote from Maria Montessori is: "I studied the children and they taught me how to teach them". If a parent puts this into practice, they cannot go far wrong.

Montessori Home Schooling a good introduction to Montessori with links to other sites - mainly in the US.

Summary
When you study all the different methods used by home-educating families, a common picture starts to emerge. The keystones are always showing respect for your children, providing them with a good home, stimulating books and resources and  freedom to explore their own interests.

Families that try to follow a particular method or particular curriculum too rigidly can run into trouble: there has to give and take. Things often don't work out as one expects them to, but this is a strength, not a weakness, of home education. 

Most home-educating families gradually develop their own approach ('unschoolers' would say that it was unschooling in one form or another). It usually involves some compromise - its not easy to be at home with your children and to earn money at the same time.

It may not have any fixed goals or any fixed structure, but everyone in the family becomes involved in one way or another. 

The older the children, the more control they take: they can decide whether or not they want  to work for exams, to do correspondence courses, what subjects to study etc.

Home-Education in the UK - an article giving an overview of home-education in the UK.