Sunday 17 August 2014

Don't justify...just be happy!!! My home-educating and breastfeeding experiences...

My son and daughter have been educating themselves for nearly 13 years and 9 years 7 months respectively and I am one of the very few home educators who hasn't really had to justify why I think home educating is more natural than school.  The same way I didn't ever really have to justify breastfeeding even though my children both breastfed for between 3 and 4 years.  

To be honest I am not sure what I would say now if I was questioned about breastfeeding and home educating.  I know it would be different to what I would have said 9 years ago or even 5 years ago.  What I do know is that I really sympathise with people who write posts because they are so fed up of having to justify why they home educate without offending anyone, that they just get fed up and tell you the real reasons why they home educate. 

So here are some of my thoughts

Resilience
Children learn resilience from everyday life and learn it much more deeply when they are actively involved in resolving conflict or in dealing with whatever difficult situation faces them.  Bullying will NEVER fall into the category of building resilience unless it is resolved.  Seeing others get bullied will also not help children learn how to deal with conflict.

Maths - oh maths - don't get me started on maths.  I am a maths tutor, I love maths, I am a total geek but even I don't understand what the obsession is with maths.  All kids love to count.  It seems like it is built into their DNA: this desire to count steps, sort coins into like groups, collect stones and sort them into colours, or sizes or whatever.  Sorry to break it to you all but the maths your child learns at school seems pretty pointless to me unless they want to teach maths or go into a mathematical discipline at which point you are taught how to do it properly.

The fact that the powers-that-be keep changing the way maths is taught is very telling.  So is the fact that most of the time maths is taught as a separate subject taken out of context.  This makes it confusing and annoying to anyone who doesn't get maths.  Ken Robinson in his talk about Changing Education Paradigms sums it up well.  "Schools are still very much organised on factory lines...specialise into separate subjects.  We still educate children by batches.  Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are."  Watch the full talk here and he goes into much more depth than I do.  But you do have to wonder how can we have taken such a great universal language that ALL children love and turned it into a subject where more than half of children who leave school hate maths?

How children learn
The same goes for socialising and is mentioned by Ken above.  We batch children by their date of manufacture.  Why do we do this?  Why not height, physical ability, mental ability, social ability?  Why not batch them by different things depending upon what you want them to learn?  It is already well known, and has been for years, that children learn best from people who know just a bit more than them so actually do we really need to batch children at all or could we just let them be with whomever they want to be with?  That would be more natural: letting children pick who they want to be with, like we do as adults.  You need to be around people to learn how to socialise and unless you are keeping your child in solitary confinement they are socialising whether you want them to or not, whether it be at school (where they are batched by date of manufacture) or not (where they socialise with anyone they come in contact with.)

Going to school is just one way of being
I have never come across the idea that children miss out on opportunities if they don't go to school.  But turn that on its head - what opportunities are children missing out on by going to school?  The chance to learn what they want, when they want to and when they are ready to enjoy it?  The chance to really absorb themselves in an activity without having to break or move to another subject?  As far as I am concerned our education system is out of date.  Teaching facts, especially out of context, is pretty pointless. We have facts at our fingertips every day because most of us have smartphones.  The internet holds all the facts and computers do calculations really well.

This factual, shallow learning does our children a huge injustice.  We need to be teaching our children creative thinking, conflict resolution, permaculture design, sustainability, survival skills, typing, physiology (how their bodies work), etc. NOT just facts.

We need our children to have the opportunity to find their "element" as Ken Robinson calls it and we need to be aware that we don't know what the future holds with regards to what skills we need.  I am pretty sure though that we can all agree that facts are not skills.  Edward De Bono says that schools only teach reactive thinking which is also not going to serve our children into the future.  We need design thinking, creative thinking not critical, analytical and reactive thinking and we need our children to know how to treat each other with respect.

When she was younger, my daughter was occasionally being told (by some of her "friends") that she is stupid because she doesn't know maths facts or stuff that is learnt at school.  Or that she wasn't liked any more because she has done something that has been classed as "bossy."  I tell my children about the difference between a person's actions and a person themselves.  One of the foundations of many communication systems like NVC or PET is the idea -> judge the action, not the person.  These are fundamental ideas that ALL children should know.  "You did something mean" NOT "You are mean."  Then there is also the idea of communicating your wants and needs from a friendship instead of name-calling and manipulation.  Again NVC has a great set of "rules" as to how to communicate your needs:

"<name of child> I experience you as bossy.  What I need from you is to understand that I want to be heard in this game situation and want to have my ideas listened to too"

or in my child language

"<name of child> in this game you are being bossy.  I need my game ideas to be heard too before we play"

NOT

"<name of child> you are bossy and I don't like you any more" -> in this scenario no-one gets their needs met, people get upset and someone has been unfairly labelled as bossy.

These are things that I model to my children as best I can as I am sure others do, but this is not something that I am aware of being taught at school as is evident by my daughter's interactions with some of her school-going peers.

Here's the Factual stuff.
WRT home educating, watch the Ken Robinson video here, do some of your own research but most of all don't judge home educators without knowing the facts.  

  • You don't need to go to school to learn to read - my kids taught themselves to read at 11.5 and 5.5 years old
  • You don't need to go to school to socialise - socialising is most easily learnt in a natural setting where life is lived.  
  • You don't actually need to learn geography, science, maths, English or any of the subjects that are taught at school - someone else decided that curriculum and they decided it a long time ago
  • School doesn't teach you anything that you cannot learn at home

Most of us just want to left alone to bring up our kids our way without having to justify it or make you feel better about the way you are bringing up your kids.  If you don't want to know the real reasons why we do it (school is out-dated, school is 40% a waste of time, school forces kids to learn stuff too early, exams have become so dumbed down that they are pointless, etc) then don't ask because one day you may come across the person who wrote the blog I mentioned at the top or who thinks those things in the brackets and you might get more than you bargained for.

But please whatever you do, do your research.  Be happy that what you are doing with your children is the best thing for them and the right thing for you as a family.  And if you find yourself comparing yourself to someone else or trying to get them to justify their decisions about their kids to make you feel better, then you might be doing something wrong and should maybe consider re-evaluating your decisions.

None of this is meant to offend anyone although if that is your bag go forth and be offended (although also feel free to read my blog post about not being offended instead!!)  

WRT breastfeeding, breastfeeding is natural and anything else is a substitute with varying degrees of health benefits from expressing, wet-nursing, using other's breast milk via a bottle, organic formula downwards.  Breast milk is the only thing your baby is meant to have nutritionally speaking.  Less than 1% of people cannot breastfeed for medical reasons.  The rest either didn't want to or didn't know what to do because they were given bad advice by professionals, didn't research it properly, we're not given decent support from friends or family or didn't know where to access decent support.  The best way to be successful at anything is research, support and practice.  Breastfeeding is just the same.  

Again I was lucky.  Breastfeeding hurt like hell but then it got better as it usually does at around 6 weeks. But don't be fooled.  You are a mammal.  Mammals have mammary glands for feeding their babies.  If you want to know more facts go here and if you want decent advice about breastfeeding go to La Leche League(LLL), Association of Breastfeeding mothers(ABM) or NCT.

My reasons
If you are actually interested in why I full-term breastfed or why I home-educate here are just some of my reasons:

 I breastfed my kids because:

  • I am lazy
  • It was easy
  • It gave them comfort
  • It was designed for them
  • It helped me lose weight
  • It stopped me getting my periods back so soon
  • It was free
  • It is why I have breasts
  • It means I am less likely to get breast cancer
  • It has numerous health benefits for my children
  • It would make my children more intelligent
  • I don't like feeding my kids from a plastic bottle
  • It was a great way to get them to sleep
  • It can be done anywhere

I home educate my children because:

  • I wanted their natural curiosity for the world to continue uninterrupted.  They learnt to walk, talk, feed themselves and go to the toilet by themselves so I believed they could teach themselves other stuff too.
  • I wanted them to learn at their own pace where I believe deeper and more profound learning occurs.
  • I think the National Curriculum is a waste of time.  The focus on English (which we all speak); Maths (most of which we don't need to learn) as opposed to mental arithmetic (which I think is quite useful) and Science as opposed to physiology, proactive thinking skills and sustainability (or any other skills) makes no sense to me. 
  • I think exams are pointless especially now when you can only really be judged exam-grade wise against the people who did their exams in the same year as you.  The marks, boundaries and subjects just keep changing too much to give a decent comparison so making them useless to employers and academic institutes alike.  
  • I wanted them to mix (socialise) with people of all ages for the most part of their day because I feel it gives a more realistic feel of the real world.
  • I didn't want them forced to learn things they are not interested in or are not ready to learn such as reading.  I felt that I was forced to read at school when I wasn't ready and it made me dyslexic.  
  • They only have one childhood and I would like them to have fun
  • If they want to go to school it will be their choice







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