About the Site

Subscribe to the Free E-Newsletter    Over 1000 subscribers July 2004

Site Contents:

• Home
• Pre-School
• Home Education
  • Overview
  • Personal Experience
  • Methods
  • Books
  • Links
• Education Reformers:
  • Rudolf Steiner
  • Maria Montessori
• Part-Time School
• Mathematics: Euclid
• School
  • Bullying
  • Drugs

Apologies for the delay in the sending out of this newsletter. They have been quite irregular over the past few months but this, I hope, is set to change. The editing of the newsletter and maintenance of the freedom-in-education site are now no longer the tasks of Gareth Lewis, but of me, Wendy (his daughter). I have offered to take over the work, and make the newsletters regular again. The contents, you will be glad to hear, will remain the same!
It is a great pleasure for me to do this, not only because I am helping my father, who is very busy at the moment, but because I believe that the articles in this newsletter say what ought to be said more often, and that they bring a little common sense to an area in which sense is very uncommon.
I also like to hope that they encourage parents to do what they feel to be right for their child. I know that many parents are made to believe that they are blighting their child's future hopes of success in life if they keep them at home, but as someone who has been at home for practically all their life, I can very honestly say that I am extremely glad my parents did what they felt to be right, and didn't send me to school when I was too young to know what was best. It meant that I could grow up with all the pleasures of childhood, until I was old enough to make the decision myself.
I did return to school for a term and after having given it a fair trial I decided that, yes, home was better. Maybe all children wouldn't make this decision, or maybe they would, but it is just so important that they can make it for themselves, and that, till they can, their parents let them remain in a situation where they are happy and safe.

This month's article is about what we can learn from the USA. It is certainly an idea which one hears voiced very seldom at the moment, but I think it is true that, as regards education, America leads the way. This can be quite clearly seen in the incredible amount of free educational material which Americans have put on the internet, and is also noticeable in the extensive sections on ancient classics which can be found in their bookshops - I think this goes to show for something. I am sure you will find the following article very interesting.
With best wishes for a happy October,
-Wendy-

Learning from the USA

Parents are placed under considerable pressure to send their children to school, but experience in the United States shows that this might actually be the very worst thing that they could do.

Education is presented to parents as being something that is inextricably linked to schools and qualifications. It is assumed that, in the modern world, a child will not be able to support themselves in later life unless they get a good qualification, and that they will not be able to get a good qualification unless they are put through the existing education system. Options such as home education, flexi-schooling, or any form of self-education, although they are appealing in themselves, are seen as merely putting off the day when a child has to knuckle down to doing ‘real schoolwork’.

Parents may feel that they would like to spare their children the hardships of school but fear that this would not be in the child’s long-term interest as they would still have to integrate back into the education system when they are older. Recent experience of education in the United States shows this not to be the case.

Recent History of the United States of America
People living in Europe often have difficulty acknowledging that the United States owes its pre-eminent position in world affairs to the fact that a significant proportion of its population has a more profound commitment to real education than is currently seen elsewhere in the world.

A respect for education was brought to America by the first settlers, many of whom left their native countries at least partly because they wanted to be free to educate their children as they saw fit.

Life cannot have been easy for Europeans trying to survive in a new continent, but somehow the early settlers managed to preserve their enthusiasm for learning, and in spite of a shortage of books, the absence of universities, and the lack of specialist teachers, the American colonies produced scholars who were able to challenge the policies of the government in the UK on the basis of rational argument.

The American war of Independence, in the late 1700s, resulted in the creation of an independent United States of America, and even though it was guided in its early years by such eminent statesmen as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, the prevailing expectation throughout Europe was that the new country was doomed to disaster, due to its lack of established institutions and the lowly origins of its inhabitants.

These predictions proved to be only partially realised: independence did provide a licence to plantation owners in the Southern States to perpetuate slavery, and it also enabled farmers and settlers to appropriate land from Native Americans without any regard for the rule of law or common justice, but it also proved to be the case that, in some sections of society at least, the enthusiasm for knowledge that characterised the first colonies was maintained and nurtured.

Many of the migrants to the northern states were not simply motivated by a desire for work – they also saw the United States as a place that offered them a chance to better themselves. The perception was that the United States provided opportunities that did not exist elsewhere in the world, particularly to people who were prepared to study and learn new skills.

Throughout the eighteen and the early nineteen hundreds America’s particular commitment to education was disguised by various factors: for much of the nineteenth century the United States was a divided country, split on the issue of slavery. This division eventually resulted in a civil war which crippled the country for decades to come. Meanwhile, European countries were ruling over empires built upon technological advances made in previous centuries – guns, railways, steam ships, etc. – which gave the impression that it was Europe, rather than America that still had the edge in innovation and educational excellence.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, America had become a relatively united, stable country, and the underlying interest in learning and education which had always existed in large sections of its population, began to have the inevitable effect: America started to assume a position of supremacy in world affairs.

Still, Europeans did not notice that their American cousins were surpassing them in most areas connected to education, and it was still common up until a few years ago for people to regard American universities as being inferior to the old European institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, or for American schooling in general to be considered second-rate when compared to that provided by European schools.

This complacency, particularly over the last twenty to thirty years, has had serious repercussions. In many ways schools in the UK and Europe have been going backwards for the past quarter of a century. Most experienced teachers agree that standards have declined in areas such as English and mathematics. The reason why these observations do not cause the concern that they should is because people assume that if a school or university awards a child with a qualification, it does not really matter whether or not those qualifications represent an improvement or a deterioration in standards that prevailed twenty or thirty years ago. They have not realised that the nature of the world economy means that children leaving school now are in direct competition for employment with other people of their age around the world. A government-backed education system may be able to guarantee a certain number of jobs to its graduates, but if the standard of education that it offers is significantly lower than that which exists elsewhere in the world, then the status and the value of those jobs will steadily decline, the country will become poorer and individuals will experience greater difficulty in supporting themselves and their families.

This appears to be what is happening today. While education systems in countries such as the UK have become more bureaucratic – with the introduction of a national curriculum, standardised testing, more examinations, etc. – many areas of the American education system have been going in the opposite direction.

Education in the United States
There is much about the school system in the United States that is at least as bad as school systems in

New to the Jamboree website: Clear and easy instruction for how to make these delicious Italian pizzete.

 other parts of the world. Attempts to force education upon people have failed as miserably in the United States as they have elsewhere, with the result that there are areas of the inner cities where the public school system has presided over a decline in educational standards in much the same way as is seen in similar areas in Europe.

The difference is that in America, this represents only one part of the picture. There are significant numbers of people in the United States who do not expect to be educated by government departments but who see education as being something for which they are themselves responsible.

For example, there is a long-standing tradition in America for people to pay for their own University education, often financing it by part-time work at week-ends and in the holidays. As a result, it is usual on American campuses for students to demand value for money from their professors. Poor teachers are confronted with their inadequacies, and irrelevant courses are boycotted.

Another example is the way in which parents in the United States have approached the issue of homeschooling. Thirty years ago it was technically easier to educate children at home in the United Kingdom than in the United States – there were many states in which home education was not even legal – and yet once American parents realised that home education offered advantages over school attendance they found ways of making it possible, and ‘homeschooling’ is now accepted as part of the mainstream education system throughout the US.

Also, there are examples of schools themselves changing. Whereas in the UK schools in both the public and private sector have become more tightly regulated over recent years, the past decade has seen the growth of the charter school movement in the United States. Charter schools are funded by public money, but run by parents and teachers; they do not have to follow a prescribed curriculum and are exempt from many of the state inspection procedures. More than 2000 such schools have opened over the past ten years.

Another recent trend is for school courses to be offered on-line – from kindergarten right up to the final year of high school. In some states these courses are now in direct competition with schools, and the state education authority pays substantial fees for each child registered. This gives parents the opportunity to keep young children at home, while still being sure that they are covering all the work that they would do if they went to school, and it gives teenagers the chance to do all their high-school courses from home, often while doing part-time work at the same time.

The effects of this freer approach to education can be seen in many areas of life. For example, both private individuals and institutions in America have seized the opportunity presented by the internet to provide information, in a way that the rest of the world has failed to do: this is a phenomenon which will be particularly familiar to home-educating families who discover that as soon as they step outside the narrow local school curriculum, the best and most interesting internet sites have almost always been created by people in the United States.

Most significantly, the technological revolution itself has been born out of the American attitude to education, and this provides the most pressing reason why no one should ignore the lessons that are to be learnt from what is taking place in the United States.

The Relationship Between Technology and Education
The relationship between education and technology is an interesting one. The current process of technological development began about three hundred years ago in Europe. A chain reaction was initiated in which one invention led to another, and it was most particularly in the British Isles that conditions existed for this process to take place. Thus, it was British engineers and inventors who pioneered the use of steam, who designed machines for use in cotton mills, who developed the first

 railways, who led the way in the use of electricity, and who undertook the most ambitious engineering projects. Although Britain already had a well-established educational elite, it was not from this class that the people who led this industrial revolution was drawn. Instead, they were typically people from poorer families who found that the times in which they lived gave them a chance to study and to find out things for themselves. Their fresh approach led to them developing new ways of doing things, and these new ways changed the lives of everyone.

The tension between innovators and the establishment in the UK led to a disproportionate number of the more free-thinking families deciding to emigrate, and thus it was that the United States inherited the spirit that gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. While the impetus for change has, to a certain extent, petered out in Europe, America has seen no pause in the process of development; the country embraced the development of the railways with enthusiasm, then motorcars, then aircraft, and in recent years, computers and all their related technology. The impetus that revolutionalised life in eighteenth century Britain is still driving people in countless homes across America, where there are young people tirelessly working on ways to push technology in new directions. In the United States it is tacitly accepted that these young people may not be the ones who are working their way through the state-funded school system, and it is also accepted that business will only prosper to the extent that it is able to take advantage of the new ideas developed by these young innovators.

An Education System to Suit the Times in Which We Live
The practice of sending every child to school started when people found themselves having to work in factories. On some level it made sense for children to be made to do boring and repetitive work in preparation for a life in which they would have to do boring and repetitive work later on. The past few years have, however, seen a change in the workplace; the technological revolution has progressed and machines can now do routine work at a cheaper rate than people. This means that everyone is presented with an uncertain future. Education systems are still putting children through school courses and giving them qualifications, but there is no guarantee that these qualifications will provide people with work. More and more jobs are reliant on modern technology, and the technology changes from one year to the next.

Also new to the Jamboree website: Simple instructions for how to make a noisy little kazoo in no time at all!

In these circumstances, it makes sense to give children an education that is more in tune with the culture that is driving the technology forward. This does not necessarily mean surrounding a child with the latest technology, but it does mean giving a small child a chance to develop at their own pace, and giving a young person a chance to think for themselves.

Many people send their children to school because they believe that there is no realistic alternative. This is clearly not the case. Those who are home educated, or who go to small, community-based schools, are at a decided advantage when it comes to dealing with the modern world.

The idea that children are better off not going to school can no longer be dismissed as just being an idealistic theory; over the past ten to twenty years, while schools in the UK and Europe have strengthened their monopoly on education, some of the best-educated and highly-motivated sections of American society have opted out of conventional school-based education altogether, and are now well advanced in exploring alternatives to school, better suited to modern conditions.

So far, only a relatively small number of parents in the UK and Europe have opted to go down the same road but conditions of employment and access to technology are essentially the same here as in the United States, and sooner or later it is inevitable that changes will have to take place in our education system so that children are not made to waste so much of their time by going to school. Parents can anticipate these changes by learning from what is happening in the United States.

Gareth Lewis

The topics of upcoming articles are:

• Discipline
• A Father's role
• Do Teachers Know Something we Don't?
• Teaching Electricity

Your letters and comments are welcome. You can send them either to Gareth Lewis at the following address, or to me at the address beneath:
gareth.lewis@freedom-in-education.co.uk

wendy@freedom-in-education.co.uk