Buy Nothing Christmas?

Every year the question of 'to gift or not to gift' comes up in my family (that is the adults in the family! The kids are all for getting). As the extended family grows with more nieces and nephews, things can get crazy. The extreme pressure this season puts on people to give and receive can often ruin the intent behind said season, with people even going into debt because of this.

We question the over-consumption this season brings and the discrepancy between those who have and those who have not. When you hear that some kids are wishing for socks and canned items in their stockings this year it reminds you that there is real hunger and poverty in our communities. If you are going to give doesn't it make mores sense to give to those who need it most rather than give to those who already have?
After discussing this with my sisters, it is actually a relief to decide not to exchange gifts with one another (of course our own kids are not yet ready to give up presents from we parents). We plan to concentrate on enjoying one another's company instead and of course the good food and cheers that comes with that.

Now I have to tackle the in-law side of things!

Education for today's world

It's 8.49am and my daughter is still in bed. She goes to high school-her choice-were school starts at 8.40am. Why so early? Studies have shown that the juices of brains in this age group don't start flowing until at least noon. Like most things about public schooling, the system doesn't work for kids.
This is why I am in support of Paul Goodman's 'manifesto' below. Take a look and throw some comments our way.

1) Incidental education, taking part in the on-going activities of society, must again be made the chief means of learning and teaching.
2) Most high schools should be eliminated, with other kinds of youth communities taking over their sociable functions.
3) College training should generally follow, rather than precede, entry into the professions
4) The chief occupation of educators should be to see to it that the activities of society provide incidental education, rather than exploitation or neglect. If necessary, we must invent new useful activities that offer educational opportunities
5) The purpose of elementary pedagogy, through age twelve, should be to delay socialization, to protect children's free growth, since our families and community both pressure them too much and do not attend to them enough. Modern times pollute and waste natural human resources, the growing children, just as they do the land, air and water.
Goodman 1971

When unschooled wants to be schooled.

Without a doubt the time between ages 11 to 13 are the toughest for unschoolers. At this point kids start going, "Eh- I'm not learning as much as the kids at school. I'm bored. Nothing much is going on."
Expect to hear your usually happy unschooler complain that they want to go to school.
A little bit of preparation to meet this challenge is a good thing.
In 2005, I interviewed Sandra Dodd a seriously experienced mama and author who knows about this stuff for a radio free school show (To listen go to http://www.hwcn.org/~ap951 /three.html and click on show # 32).
The transcript was also published in Life Learning Magazine July/August 2005.
Here's an excerpt from the the interview:
"There's a learning curve that I see with unschooled kids and that is that they seem to be ahead [of their peers in school] for the first few years and then there's a period of time,roughly from about nine to twelve years of age,when they seem behind. And then after they are 12 and 13, zoom! They look ahead! They seem to be ahead again."

"In school,there is a period when children are 11 or 12 when they've just been crammed full of math facts,and geographical facts...and they just seem full to bursting with knowledge, and the kids at home might still be playing with pokemon or coloring books, and they look up and the school kids are naming places and things they don't know, they're reading text books and doing long division or writing cursive-things that you can see from across the room. "What are they doing? I don't know what they are doing. I can't do that!"

"But then what seems to happen with the unschoolers I have met and talked with, is that when their kids got to be 13 or 14, a kind of maturity comes upon them and they say, "Oh! I guess if I want to learn cursive, I'll just practise it, Is this it?" And they do it. They look at something and they say, "Is that all?" And they figure it out on their own how to do math.
They start to develop their own map of the world and history of the universe and stuff;all of the facts are starting to gel in to a model of the universe. They are understanding a lot of things and making a lot of connections. And about that time the kids as school get all burned out and realize that all the facts they are learning are only leading to another year of facts. It's like Rumpelstiltskin: "Oh you turned that straw into gold? Next room. Bigger. More straw. Oh and by the way, you don't get to keep the gold." While the unschoolers are saying,"Oh yeah! This is cool. I'm glad I didn't go to school!"

Another thing I've noticed is that when they get to be 13 or 14, they've either gotten a job, gotten a really cool volunteer position, become involved in a hobby they have so that they are in a position of teaching whether it is karate, or horseback riding, or ice-skating. They've gotten to the point where they know enough that they are a senior student and they are given a position of responsibility. If they are given something real and they are given the kind of responsibility that is given to and adult, in a way it makes them an adult. They feel that shift of not being one of the kids anymore.
And you see a change in their posture and their bearing and the way adults treat them.
..So while school kids are at the point of greatest dismay with public schools the kids their age who are unschooled are saying, "Hah! I wonder if I should go to horse camp of if I should take a college class..... and the kids in school don't have any of these options. So at the same time that they are made small, the unschoolers have been made large."

Learning Math

Why Personalized Learning?

Finding True Work

This is the conclusion to John Holt's 1978 essay Jobs Careers Work, in the #3 issue of Growing Without School (GWS).

He writes,
"To students who used to ask me whether they should go to, or stay in, or go back to college, I used to say, "Look, a college degree isn't a magic passkey that opens all the doors in town. It only opens a few, and before you spend a lot of time and money getting one of these keys, you'd be smart to find out what doors it opens, and what's on the other side of those doors, and whether you want to go through them."

I also used to ask them, "What do you want to do? Suppose you had in your hand whatever college ticket you are thinking of getting, what would you like to do, choose to do, right now?"

Most looked at me with blank faces. They had never considered the question. A few would say that they would like to be some sort of -ician or-ologist. I would reply, "OK, suppose you were one, then what would you like to do?" This stopped them.

They did not know any -icians or-ologists, and had no idea what they did or whether they themselves might want to do it. They saw these 'careers' only as slots that school might enable them to slip into.

Every year the major academic disciplines-History, English, Modern Languages, Economics, etc. have big conferences. Hundreds of people with brand new Ph.D. degrees go to these conferences, hoping to land one of the by now scarce jobs.

They hold their tickets up in the air and say, in effect, "Please hire me, someone, anyone, I'll do anything you tell me to." There is a well know name for these gatherings.

It is "slave markets."

More on John Holt and Real Work

You know I'm always writing and thinking about creating opportunities for young folks to work with adults -out in the community. In the continuation of John Holt's essay in the Growing without School (GWS #3, 1978 issue) he talks about how a great many of the people doing serious work in the world (as opposed to just making money) are very overworked and short of help.
"If a person young or not so young, came to them and said, "I believe in the work you are doing and want to help you do it in any and every way I can, will do any kind of work you ask me to do or that I can find to do, for very little pay or even none at all," I suspect that many or most of them would say, "Sure, come right ahead."
Working with them, the new comer would gradually learn more and more about what they were doing, would find or be given more interesting and important things to do, might before long become so valuable that they would find a way to pay her/him. In any case, s/he would learn far more from working with them and being around them than s/he could have learned in any school or college."

Real Work

John Holt often spoke to high school assemblies mostly in rich suburbs of big cities. He talked about the difference between jobs, careers, and work. In the Growing Without School issue #3 1978 he writes the following:
A job as I defined it was something you did for money, something that someone else told you to do and paid you to do. Probably not something you would have done otherwise, but you need the money so you did it.
A career was a kind of step ladder of jobs. If you did your first job for a while, did what you were told and didn't cause any trouble, whoever gave you that job might give you a new job. This job might be slightly more interesting, or at least no so hard-dirty-dangerous. You might not have to take orders from so many people, might even be able to give orders to a few, You might be able to make a few more choices. Then if you did that job OK for a while your boss might then give you a still better job until you had gone up the job ladder. This adds up to a career.
By 'work' I meant (and mean) something altogether different, what people used to call a 'vocation' or 'calling'-something which seemed so worth doing for its own sake that they would have gladly chosen to do it even if they don't need money and the work didn't pay.
I went on to say that to find our work , in this sense, is one of the most difficult tasks that we have in life, that unless we are very lucky we cannot expect to find it quickly, and indeed, that we may never find it once and for all, since work that is right for us at one stage of our life many not be right for use at the next..I added that the vital question, "What do I really want to do?"

What do I think is most worth doing?" is not one that the schools will often urge us or help us to ask of ourselves; on the whole, they feel it is their business only to prepare us for employment-jobs or careers, high or low. So we are going to have to find out for ourselves what work needs to be done and is being done out there and which of that work we most want to take part in.

As I said these things, I looked closely ..at the faces of my listeners...What I saw and what I usually heard in the question periods that followed, made me feel that most of those students were thinking "this guy must have just stepped off the space ship from Mars."

Work for nothing? For most of them it was not just impossible, but unimaginable. They did not know, hardly even knew of any people who felt that way about their work. Work was something you did for external rewards-..
I found myself thinking often about something Paul Goodman had written: Ours is the first civilization in history that has imposed on the elite of its younger generation a morale fit for slaves."
To which I would add soemthing that Hannah Arendt once wrote about slaves in ancient Greece. Slaves could earn money, own property,even get rich. What they could not do was work for anything but themselves;in other words, they could not fight, or vote,or hold office. They were only allowed to be what in our time most people choose to be-what economists call Economic Man, people who work only for their own personal gain.
Of course, in saying this about the young people I talked to, I am to some degree guessing (and therefore perhaps projecting). Of one thing I am certain. There was never, anywhere, a hopeful, positive, enthusiastic response to what I said. I cannot remember even one among all those students, the most favoured young people of the most favoured nation in the world , who said "Mr Holt, here's what I am interested in care about, how can I find a way to work at it?"

To be continued in the next post.