Rob's Blog

Continuing the educational theme, I was intrigued by this review of a music CD for kids about science.

For Here Comes Science contains a broad, inclusive and thought-provoking tour through science in all its facets. Songs like “Science is Real” (which explains how scientific beliefs are different from beliefs in unicorns and other beliefs formed without rigorous testing) and “Put It To the Test” (possibly the best kids’ song ever written about falsifiablity in hypothesis formation) cover the basics, the big Philosophy of Science questions.

It sounds like it’s quite meaningful. And to think, last I heard of They Might Be Giants they were singing about canaries in lighthouses and bees in bodies.

Bishop Hill links to an article about how school is prison. This is a fairly obvious idea, when you think about it. All the more so with ever tougher truancy laws. Paul Graham pointed it out years ago. IanB has all sorts of problems with the idea of mass schooling.

The idea that schools as we know them might not be the best way is certainly a trending topic among blogs I read — which probably says more about the kinds of blog I read than anything else, but still.

What are the alternatives? There is homeschooling. RenegadeParent does it, and defends it against the predations of government, lately in the form of a man called Badman who wants to regulate and interfere with homeschoolers for The Sake Of The Children.

There is unschooling, which is a particular method used by some homeschoolers. This boils down to letting children do whatever they want. It turns out they like learning and all you have to do is support them and provide them with what they need.

Sudbury Valley is a school that unschools. It seems to emphasize democracy more than I would, but basically it’s a school that provides books, space, equipment and staff to help the pupils teach themselves. They run their own projects and organise their own courses, or just read or do whatever they find interesting.

I like the idea. I think it would have worked for me. I always had my own projects, like technical drawings or programming my Amstrad CPC in Basic. I would have loved to be left alone to do that stuff without having to be distracted by boring RE and PE lessons and annoying, unruly other children. And these days I’d have almost unlimited resources at my disposal, in the form of stuff I can get from the Internet (a blogger I read regularly recently made this point but I can’t for the life of me remember who or where).

There are objections I can think of, and most of them I can answer myself. What about kids who don’t want to learn? They don’t exist. If they don’t want to learn it’s because school has taught them that learning is unpleasant. What about getting a well rounded education? It’s overrated. Yeah, so I would have programmed computers all day. So what? I probably would have achieved something, like writing a half decent computer game instead of wasting time on French I’ve forgotten and pointless geography lessons about acid rain and dormitory towns. The stuff I am interested in, like tectonic plates and geology and volcanoes, I would have learnt anyway. The stuff I’m not interested in I don’t need, and to be frank I didn’t learn in school anyway because it didn’t hold my attention. I ended up becoming a computer programmer anyway. I don’t need French and PE. Maybe I’m more rounded, having absorbed a tiny amount of boring subjects, but is that more important than what I’ve lost?

What about careers? Will an unschooled child grow up to find they can’t get a job because they don’t have the right paperwork? Perhaps, but there will be employers who will hire based on skills; there is self-employment; there are venture capitalists. Who wants to work for someone who only cares about a bit of paper, anyway?

What if your child just wants to play Grand Theft Auto all day? This one is tougher. I can imagine I might have fallen into this sort of trap. I’ve had my times of just wanting to play Elite or Civilization. But then again, I was never *that* obsessive, and would eventually get bored and want to do something else. I imagine this sort of problem either rarely happens, or there are ways of dealing with it.

In any case, unschooling sounds much better than forcing children to endure tedium. No good can come of that.

Postscript: It’s everywhere; there is even a recent Slashdot article about unschooling. The discussion there rapidly turns to how schools fail the smartest kids. But it occurs to me that even the less intelligent kids will do better with unschooling because they can learn what seems more relevant to them at their own pace and will likely turn out to be not so dumb after all because they won’t be bored and just give up.

There’s also a comment from someone who was unschooled.

I’m honestly not sure how much merit this argument has:

I think those 6 hours [at school], even if the hard academia is lacking at times, are not wasted. At the very least children learn how to keep a schedule, deal with people outside their familiarity zone, and process mundane tasks. It’s not very sexy, but these skills are are very large part of even the egalitarian [sic?] among us. I have personally known homeschooled adults that were completely unprepared to do things like deal with workplace bullies, keeping track of their time for work, or see the value in something that wasn’t ‘fun’ for them.

Update: BishopHill points out that Sudbury Valley is modeled on a school in the UK called Summerhill, answering my question about whether such a school would be possible in the UK.

IanB has a couple of great articles about education. First up, what starts out as a complaint about bias in the BBCs GCSE revision guide on religious education, ends up pointing out the shoddy, patronising writing therein:

Many people think that the Christian Church is sexist. It does not treat men and women equally.

Many people? How many? Who? Are they right? Well, the second sentence sorts it out for us. Yes, yes they are right. But the “many people” is jammed in there as a disclaimer. When you’re perpetrating writing so bad that it wouldn’t be tolerated on wikipedia, you’re in trouble as a writer. This is crap.

And what really bugs me to be honest (other than that the BBC are spending the TV poll tax on this shit) is the childish level of the writing in general. These articles are for GCSE students. They’re written for fifteen and sixteen year olds; young adults. Yes, I know that the GCSE replaced the GCE and CSE so that one exam could be taken by everyone from a young Einstein to the borderline retarded, but look at it. Look at it. Short sentences, no big words. Young people of this age are on the cusp of embarking on adult life. They should have a normal adult command of the english language.

Indeed. Expectations of the capabilities of sixteen-year-olds seem to be pretty low in general; it can’t be doing them any good. I hope IanB gets around to blogging his thoughts about the infantilisation of teenagers — it should be good.

But the tour de force is his article about the problem with schools, which I find very little to disagree with. He argues that schools are inefficient at teaching; that they take a students who want to learn and beat it out of them; and that the regimented and authoritarian nature of schools churns out people who submit to authority.

It’s my anecdotal experience that many people of a libertarian, or at least non-conformist, attitude, are people who never quite fell for the myth of schooling. People who were sceptical at the time, and who were self-educators who read books other than the ones set for them by their tutors. The schooling system is designed- intended- to stamp out dissent and inviduality, but however hard they try to do that some proportion of the victims will smell the rat, and not be completely beaten.

I always felt a bit like I did well in spite of school. I certainly read stuff I was interested in that wasn’t anything to do with school work. I felt like lessons I was interested in went to slowly, and that lessons I wasn’t interested in were a waste of time. I think student directed learning would have worked well on me. You could argue that I wouldn’t have had as well rounded an education, but honestly, the stuff I wasn’t interested in was, in restrospect, rubbish. I loved learning about techtonic plates and geology in geography class; hated the rubbish about the ozone layer.

We must set our sights on a future society that will consider schooling in the horrified way that people today consider child labour, a society in which people describe their forebears being forced into schools in the same tones as we describe infants despatched up chimneys or down coalmines.

It’s radical. It goes further than Brian Micklethwait has argued, I think. And I can’t find fault with it, except possibly that it neglects to address the other true purpose of schools: to keep kids out of the way.