About the Site

Subscribe to the Free E-Newsletter    Over 1000 subscribers 

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

Welcome to the September-October issue of the Freedom in Education newsletter. The topic is 'Schooled by Leisure', and it discusses the origins of the word school - in fact I think you will be surprised to find out what 'school' really means!

At the bottom of the article you will see an advert for our new publication 'Entelechy'. Entelechy is a word which has rather fallen out of use these days, but its meaning is quite unique: it comes from an Ancient Greek word meaning 'the vital force which drives a person towards self-fulfilment'.

I personally think that an education is not complete unless it has taught one something about life and fulfilment, as well as all the more conventional subjects like maths, science, literature, etc. The quest for Truth has been going on for as far back as history goes, and I concur with Sir Walter Scott when he said that 'all learning is as moonshine, compared with the learning of the heart.'

To explore this aspect of education has been our endeavour in creating 'Entelechy'.

On the Jamboree website you can take a look at the September updates, and the October updates will be put on-line soon.

Wishing you all the best for a great October!

Wendy

Schooled by Leisure

It recently occurred to me to look up the origin of the word school. I found that it is derived from the ancient Greek word, Skhole, which meant either leisure, or the things done in one’s leisure time, or the place where one spent one’s leisure time. In particular, it was a word used to describe learned discussions and disputations that took place between a teacher and their students.

This is far removed from the modern meaning of school, but it does strike a chord with my own experience of education. When I first started teaching I automatically followed the example set by my own teachers: standing at the front of the classroom, telling children what to do, reprimanding them when they did not do the work that was set or did not behave in the required manner. I couldn’t help noticing, however, that this approach was remarkably unsuccessful – to the extent that, rather than learning things, it was obvious that many pupils declined in their ability the more time that they spent in my lessons. When I tentatively mentioned this to my colleagues I found that it was not something unique to me: within the school environment it was considered normal that the majority of pupils went into decline after they were ten or eleven years old. When it came to the end-of-year exams I did indeed find that my pupils did just as well as all the other children in the school.

Upon reflection, I had to admit to myself that this approach to schooling was a totally unacceptable waste of children’s time, and I started to feel less inclined to follow the behaviour of other teachers and to pay more attention to what the children in my class were saying. To my surprise, I found that the more responsive I was to the ideas put forward by my pupils the more successful they were at learning new things: they did not necessarily learn things that were on the school curriculum, but they did learn something, and, perhaps even more importantly, they retained their enthusiasm for the process of learning itself.

When I started teaching my own children at home, this went a step further; to the extent that the original definition of school – leisure time – would have been an ideal description of our lessons. We never followed a set curriculum, each of my children decided for themselves what they would like to study, nobody was forced to write anything down if they did not want to, there was no assessment and no testing. The time of the day that we called ‘lessons’ was, in fact, the most relaxed and leisurely part of the daily routine and passed in chatting, drawing, painting, reading aloud, looking through books, having cups of tea, and just reflecting on life.

Far from this resulting in a lack of education, I now count my own education as only having really begun properly when I started to teach my children at home, and I am sure that they benefited at least as much as I did. Furthermore, over the past few years, I have been fortunate enough to meet and to hear from many other people who have been through a similar experience, and who have independently come to the conclusion that education is something that comes about through allowing people to do what they want to do and to enjoy their times of leisure.

This is in no way an attempt to undervalue the importance of hard work: when it comes to learning a practical skill, nothing can take the place of dedication, application and continual practice – but it has always been recognised that practical skills on their own are not sufficient, either for the well-being of society as a whole or to us as individuals. Everyone assumes that at some level of society there are well-educated people who are taking decisions and making sure that everything in the world is well-regulated. It is assumed that these people, by virtue of their studies and their qualifications, are wiser than us and that they can be trusted to run our lives for us. But we do not have an education system that fosters any of the qualities of wisdom or common sense that would be required to make this possible; children at school are given no leisure time in which to acquire an education.

Everyone is very distressed about the current state of the education system, but rather than facing up to the true scale of the problem, people are still hoping to find solutions by making schools even more organised and regimented than they are already. The experience of people who have had the courage to take the education of their children into their own hands, however, is that educational standards will only start to improve when the basic conditions required for education are restored, children need an environment in which they feel safe, happy, relaxed, and free from pressure: a place of leisure.

Gareth Lewis

Letters

Your letters and comments are welcome. You can send them 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

[ June 07 ] [ February 07 ] [ December 06 ] [ September 06 ] [ August 06 ] [ July 06 ] [ June 06 ] [ May 06 ] [ April 06 ]