By Pat Farenga
There are some things that are universally true, such as all humans need healthy food, clean water, and good shelter to stay alive. Then there are things that we think are universally true, such as we must compel children to learn in school or else they will not function well in adult society. However, the education system that people all around the world are taught to believe in and support with their taxes, minds, and bodies, is not vital to human existence, though you could never tell that from the intense marketing, social anxiety, and politics that surround school today.
There have been cultures and societies that made great advances in art, philosophy, and science without any schools as we know them now: Periclean Greece, Elizabethan England, and Colonial America before the revolution are three examples. In those times, most children and adults learned from their parents, each other, and their local community. Perhaps an itinerant teacher would visit the village or town for a few weeks, but such schooling is nothing compared to modern-day education systems where every minute of the school day is measured and delivered to children in ever-increasing doses.
It is a modern-day heresy to say that schooling is not the same as education and that people can learn things in their own ways instead of attending school. But it is true, though a truth I didn’t fully understand until I started working with John Holt at Growing Without Schooling magazine in 1981. Like everyone my age, by going through the process of schooling I internalized all sorts of attitudes about grades, competition, doing meaningless or half-understood tasks, the importance of obedience to arbitrary authority, and so on, that I only questioned later in my life. And, like most, I thought school just needed major improvements that would occur through more resources and smarter management. Working at Growing Without Schooling changed my view of that and made me realize that education reform is a way to misdirect the social reforms that are needed to improve peoples’ learning abilities, such as safe housing, healthy food, and salaries and wages that stabilize family finances.
John Holt once felt that schools could be improved, but after years of advocating for changes in the classroom, he decided that was not the right way to create better education. In his book Freedom and Beyond, Holt wrote:
“Not long ago I would have defined the problem of educational reform as the problem of somehow getting much more freedom into our schools. If we could find a way to do that, we would have good education for all children. Now the problem seems larger: If schools exist we naturally want them to be better rather than worse. But it no longer seems to me that any imaginable sum of school reforms would be enough to provide good education for everyone or even for all children. People, even children, are educated much more by the whole society around them and the general quality of life in it than they are by what happens in schools. The dream of many school people, that schools can be places where virtue is preserved and passed on in a world otherwise empty of it, now seems to me a sad and dangerous illusion. It might have worked in the Middle Ages; it can’t work in a world of cars, jets, TV, and the mass media. Moreover, it seems clear from much experience that most adults will not tolerate too great a difference between the way they experience their own lives and the way their children live their lives in school. Even if the schools give up the idea that they should be preparing children for society as it is, and try instead to prepare them to live in or make a better society, they will not be allowed to go very far in that direction.”
John Holt increasingly felt that the majority of adults don’t like or enjoy being around children and decided that rather than argue with the masses, he would speak to those who were likeminded instead, and promote an alternative and give support to parents and other adults who wanted self-directed education for children. Giving children all the time they want to play, answering their questions respectfully, and having patience with their developing personalities and abilities are things every adult could do and John wanted to let people know that they didn’t have to wait for schools to change, in order to help their children learn: You can do it yourself. Though a radical idea in 1977 when Holt first published Growing Without Schooling magazine, John was aware of people who homeschooled their children many years before then. One of them contacted John through GWS and I want to share her story.
Maire Mullarrney homeschooled her eleven children in Dublin during the 1950s and 1960s and she wrote about it in her book Anything School Can Do You Can Do Better, published in 1983. Some of her children had horrible experiences in school, which would have been worse had Maire not intervened and removed her children from the beatings they were receiving. Though she only taught them at home until they were eight or nine, she wished she taught them at home longer.
Maire and her husband had no formal teaching experience but were secure in their abilities to help their children learn and, influenced by Maria Montessori’s work, they were equally secure in their children’s abilities to learn on their own. Maire writes:
“It should be evident form (sic) the first part of the book that I found staying home with interested children much more fun than either of the jobs I had beforehand.. It was the learning together that gave zest to the days …
After some eighteen quiet years of child-watching I had come to realize that school was a time-wasting and inefficient attempt to enable one generation to share knowledge with the next. When the elders felt the need to subdue the young by beating and humiliating them that went beyond mere inefficiency. It had not dawned on me that sharing knowledge was only a minor purpose of the system …”
My friend Mario Pagnoni, an early author in the homeschooling world, often said all you need to homeschool successfully is love and a library card. So I find it is ironic that today, with books, libraries, computers, Internet, television, movies, plays, music, cellphones, tablets, and all our other means of communication, we still think children won’t learn anything unless a teacher feeds it to them out of a curriculum approved by the teacher’s superiors. Why do we feel so unempowered about our abilities to learn when our opportunities to consume information have increased so much? Can too much information have the paradoxical effect of stupefying us? How can we watch our children learn to walk, talk, and reason on their own as they grow from infancy into teenagers and not see that they are learning as much, if not more, from their environment, the things they do, the people they encounter, and the emotions they feel as they do from a formal lesson in a classroom? Indeed, as Holt and many other teachers and researchers have noted, school teaching often inhibits or prevents genuine learning.
Some people, when they’ve had enough failure with school, rather than double-down and push harder on it as the institution desires, question why they should do so. They consider other possibilities by questioning what’s going on: Are schools the best way to help all children learn and grow? Is there another way?
Maire Mullarney felt powerless to change schools from within and her family could not wait for schools to get better, so she took control as best she could and taught her children at home without ANY support from places we now take for granted, such as the Internet, public programs, or private schools and tutors. Other parents around the world did this throughout the early to mid-twentieth century too, and those who left a written record indicate their children did well as adults as a result of their nontraditional educations, not in spite of them.
There is plenty of research that supports informal learning, self-directed education, children learning on their in groups and since the 1980s the documented success of homeschooling continues to grow its numbers. Unschooling, a word coined by John Holt to mean learning that doesn’t take place at home nor resemble schooling, continues to grow in acceptance by conventional higher education and in general popularity. Slowly, some educational institutions are realizing that letting children grow up in a freer, more playful environment than school, particularly during their elementary school years, is more important than schooling. New possibilities for teaching and learning abound in the world, but in school they are constrained by rules and assumptions that deny agency to students and cause a charade of learning that more and more intensive testing only exacerbates, since what is answered correctly on a school test is soon forgotten once the test is over.
If school doesn’t seem right or isn’t working for your children, you can teach them yourself, just as Maire Mullarney did in the 1950s. You have the right to do so in Ireland and in many other countries. Except, unlike Maire and those who homeschooled in the previous century—like my family—you have the benefit of mass media, professional and public services, and local and online support. Don’t think you have no possible choices besides sending your child to school: What’s stopping you from trying homeschooling and unschooling? P.F.
