(find Laurie's bio at the end of this essay)I made the decision to homeschool in tears, as an act of desperation. My gifted first-born son had negative experiences in public school, and then, later, in private school. As a last resort, he started homeschooling midyear in 4th grade. Within two weeks I realized that this decision which had terrified me was probably the best decision of our lives. In that short time my son’s love of learning returned, and his attitude toward adults changed from anger and resentfulness to appreciation and intellectual curiosity. I gave his younger brother the choice, to school or to homeschool (even though at that time I wanted homeschooling). At the end of third grade he chose homeschooling, and never looked back. My sons, now post-college and married, still express their gratitude for being homeschooled, and their wives have also reaped the benefits. This is because they are each lifelong learners with an open mind and a contagious appetite for learning. This is the result of homeschooling with a self-directed approach.
Recognizing the positive changes homeschooling gave my family, I help others. In addition to teaching creative-based classes for children, I consult with families and offer support, assistance and mentoring, in the sometimes difficult transition from school to homeschooling and in the homeschooling process. At an initial consultation parents have many questions. After speaking with them, they express surprise. Their expectation was a discussion about state requirements, filing paperwork, curriculum standards, testing and reports (information I keep freely available on my website, which parents often need to discuss). They had no idea, they tell me, that the conversation was going to be about educational freedom. Educational Freedom! This is a new concept for nearly every parent; in our conversation it becomes obvious that they have never experienced educational freedom themselves!
Many families struggle with school. I encounter loving, hard working families, with children who aim to please their parents and teachers, and yet they feel anxious and confused. When I ask the kids, “At school, can you be yourself?” they laugh at the very idea. “Of course not!” they reply. Then I turn to the parents and ask, “How can they be expected to do their best if they can’t even be themselves?”
What is the freedom to be yourself? Does that freedom include the freedom to learn what you want to learn? To learn what you feel an instinctive urge to learn? To learn things you have a personal need to know? Or must we consistently ignore innate educational desires and learn only what others (who may never know us) choose? How many times can a child’s questions be ignored or put off before they stop wanting to ask?
Children in schools today are powerless. The most common comparison children, especially teens, make to school is prison. I remember that feeling well. I remember kids having to raise their hands and ask permission to use the bathroom and then be told no. A boy in my 4th grade class wet the floor because the teacher refused to let him go to the bathroom before a test. If this incident, more than fifty years later, is still etched in my mind, even though I sat on the other side of the classroom, imagine how that boy felt. Children were arranged in size order, made to wait in line, follow a dress code, remain silent and immobile, sitting still hands-on-desk eyes-facing-forward. Classes were ranked according to level - every student knew who were the “gifted” kids and who were the “dumbest.” Kids at the lowest level were reminded of their status daily. I was in the most advanced group, yet I do not remember learning anything there. All of my learning came from home; none of it came from school. Any freedom I experienced happened outside of school, most especially the precious freedom to learn.
Even with this knowledge about where my own learning came from, I resisted homeschooling. My oldest asked me to homeschool him when he was preschool age. He must have heard it from another mom, because I never mentioned this as an option, and said no without a moment’s hesitation. I told him he would find his friends at school and at home I would teach him as much as I could. Even then I assumed that his education would not come from school (after all, mine didn’t) but it wasn’t until many years later, when I started to homeschool him, that I looked back on this conversation and realized I had sent him to school entirely for social reasons. Once we became a part of the local homeschooling community, I discovered how few the opportunities are for social awareness and growth in schools. A key moment for me was when my 11-year-old son joined the homeschooler’s chess club, which met Friday mornings at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. Parents sipped tea and coffee while kids flitted from table to table playing chess. Passing by my table, I stopped my son and asked him why he didn’t play with two kids his age. “Them?” he gestured to the kids I meant. “They’re just beginners. That’s the kid I want to play,” and he pointed to a seven-year-old. “He’s the best player in the room!” I suddenly saw my “age prejudice,” a limiting view that assumes children should be with their own age. My son had already moved beyond that, able to see people individually without judging them by their age. The more my kids homeschooled, the more socially sophisticated they became. Instead of the lonely, one-sided experience that many wrongly assume is homeschooling, they became citizens of the world, seeking learning experiences from diverse sources, actively engaging with people of all ages from all walks in life. They took multi-aged, multi-level classes with other homeschoolers, and attended college classes as high school students. They became comfortable with a far wider age range than schooled students who are typically stuck with just their own age.
Schooled teens are often resentful of adults in authority whose job is to tell them what they can and can not do for much of their lives. In contrast, homeschooled children and teens are genuinely interested in adults who they view as potential learning resources and mentors, rather than unfeeling authoritarians. Instead of fearing arbitrary rules or judgement, homeschoolers are respectful and curious about the work and life of adults. Perhaps this is because adults have the freedom to respect them in turn, and are willing to listen and engage, rather than expecting blind obedience.
Schools tell children to learn in order to pass a test, get good grades, and pass all their courses to get promoted to the next grade and the next, all so they can get into a good college. The pressure to get good grades and to take increasingly rigorous courses often obscures the learning that is most desired, replacing work that feels like play (learning we love) with constant worry and stress. Subjects like art, music, dance and phys. ed., often get short shrift (maybe one period a week in school), while required courses demand daily study in order to get that grade, often requiring short-term memorization for tests instead of developing real skills and creating memorable experiences. Subjects are separated rather than combined as naturally occurs in life. It is not possible to study science, for example, without simultaneously learning math, English, history (biographies, discoveries, inventions), and art as it’s needed to document experiments, nature studies and more. Every subject makes more sense to encourage this natural combination of subjects, rather than to separate them. A homeschooled student entering public high school expressed surprise that in history they were studying the European Middle Ages but in English they were reading 20th century American literature. “Why aren’t we reading Chaucer?” she wanted to know, having experienced this natural association of subjects as a homeschooler. When topics also intersect with a student’s interest, self-direction results, which may start to quench a personal hunger, and lead to an ongoing state of creative learning.
Creativity is absent from most school curricula, reserved for the arts which are, at best, offered as half-year once-a-week electives. Yet creativity is a highly valued skill in the workplace, and many careers, such as science, rely on this skill. In order to solve problems, create new solutions, and succeed in general, we need to think creatively. We need to access divergent resources, and open our minds to access a “creative flow” where new connections are freely made. This is a natural process for young children, and yet in school we learn how to be un-creative, how to follow orders and score well on a test, to repeat what has been praised and avoid what doesn’t belong. In a test-driven system, students are discouraged from coming up with new, creative thoughts and solutions. Just as academic subjects should be taught together, where they naturally join, so should the arts be combined with the academics. Creative thinking, and creative flow, is a learned process that can be practiced and honed. It encourages individual expression and individual connection to the work. More time is given to artistic expression, to day-dreaming, brainstorming, researching with the goal of creating. My students have made board games on topics from science and history, written historical fiction plays, made puppets and performed shows in handmade puppet theaters, and learned history through art. I’ve overheard parents refer to these courses as “extra” or “fluff” and then add, “But you wouldn’t believe how much my kid learned!”
The uniformity of standardized education assumes that children should all receive the same education and all be treated the same way. People have said to me, “You always treat your sons the same, don’t you?” as if any other way is unthinkable. But I didn’t treat my sons the same, because they weren’t the same. One was extroverted, talkative, and acted on a whim. I was always trying to teach him self-restraint. The other was shy, introverted, slow to speak, and I was always encouraging him to come out of his shell. To treat them the same was to ignore their very uniqueness. To love them equally, and unconditionally, I had to treat them individually. They reached for different experiences, learned in their own ways, and sought out environments that worked well for one, but not for the other. I never expected them to end up in the same profession or even have the same lifestyle. To offer them the same identical education would have been an exercise in futility.
Educational freedom, through homeschooling, allows families to travel the world while they learn directly from many cultures. It allows families to teach their children a non-racist curriculum aimed at social change. It allows families to accommodate children with learning issues, giving them the support they need to surpass expectations. It allows us to make creativity a natural part of every day. This freedom allowed my children to honor their individual choices and endeavors, which motivated and expanded their learning. As a homeschooled high school student, my older theater-loving son designed and built a set for an Off-Off-Broadway show (part of a Youth Company), created the costumes for the dream sequence in a Lehman College production of Fiddler On the Roof, directed a contemporary one-act play, and studied world history by reading plays from ancient Greece to medieval Asia, to anti-apartheid Africa, to the contemporary London and NY stage. Later he attended NYU Film School and became a writer. My younger whale-loving son studied marine biology from age two to twenty-two. As a homeschooled teen, he danced ballet and tap, learned kung fu and kendo, and went on whale sails to identify whales. After attending college on the shores of the Atlantic, he became, much to our surprise, a blacksmith! Then he spent years assisting a house builder. Now a massage therapy student, he is building his own small blacksmithing forge. When your head can follow your heart, the learning never ends.
The path of educational freedom had an astonishing effect in my own life. As I fought for the rights of my children (and others) to have this freedom, it rubbed off on me. I started to discover the things I truly wanted to learn, and the things I wanted to teach. I experienced my “Aha” moment in middle age sitting in a children’s theater, and, after years of hard work, became a teacher of playwriting for children. My life direction changed once again. This level of personal transformation and self-discovery is an essential part of learning. It is the highest experience that learning can give us, leading us to see the world differently, and also to see ourselves and others with new eyes. This awakening comes most easily when we seek it with eager hearts and minds, when we can give ourselves over to that personal learning path. It does not happen when we learn in a prison-like environment and “learning” is forced upon us. That sort of “learning” precedes forgetting.
My mother, a professor of education at Hunter College, gave her entering freshman education students a standard 6th grade test. The majority of her students come from NYC public schools and had taken and passed this test as sixth graders. If you have ever watched the TV show Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? you know the flabbergasted feeling of seeing these kids rattle off facts that elude us. They name the moons of Saturn, the capitals of all the US states, and so much more, in less time that we could guess. My mother’s freshmen students felt that same frustration when they all failed the sixth grade test. My mother gave her students this experience to help them question the value of the standard sixth grade curriculum, and the value of testing, especially when hard-working college-bound students don’t retain and remember the material seven years later.
What is a memorable learning experience? Thinking back over my life, I have a handful of learning experiences that truly changed me and the way I saw myself and the world. These experiences remain alive in my mind today, many years after they happened. Significantly different from my schooling, these unforgettable learning experiences never came from a textbook, and never happened seated at a desk in a crowded classroom. They were nearly all hands-on experiences, and, in every case, something I chose and reached for that felt like an adventure even if it was daunting, that held personal meaning for me even if it took hard work, time and effort.
Our country is founded on the very idea of freedom. Freedoms initially guaranteed in our constitution have been expanded (with much hard-fought work) to apply to women and people of color. How far do we have to go to expand our freedoms from religion, speech (and other first amendment rights), to include education as a right (and not as a compulsory regulation)? How much more work must we do to apply these freedoms to children?
Implicit in the gift of freedom is the freedom to make mistakes. This is at the very heart of learning. If we are not free to make mistakes, then we are not free to learn. To avoid making mistakes, we must only copy and memorize, only mimic and imitate. We can never discover who we really are, because in our attempts at discovery we might make mistakes. We might try something new and fall on our face. We might have to try again and again, over a lifetime, making new or similar mistakes, in order to discover something new around us and within ourselves. To offer freedom is to allow people the freedom to make mistakes, to choose the wrong thing before they discover the right thing, and to allow them to make that determination for themselves. It is the gift of free will.
This gift of free will may be the greatest gift we have. It allows us to give, and to take. It allows us to help, to heal, and to harm. It allows us to learn, and to grow beyond “mistakes,” to change our wrongs into rights. To take away the amazing gift of free will is to impose a prison. Our children are our future. Why do we choose to limit their minds with an imposed curriculum chosen by others? Why do we test them constantly and fill them with the fear of making mistakes? Why do we not allow our children to voice, and then choose (with our help and encouragement) the learning they think is best for them? Knowing full well that mistakes will be made, free will is still the greatest choice we can give. Educational freedom is the most generous choice we can offer our children, and also the most exciting and limitless choice we can give ourselves.
Author’s bio: LAURIE BLOCK SPIGEL is an educator and former homeschooling parent, teaching popular classes to homeschoolers. She creates innovative curriculum, and takes a creative, child-led approach in group classes. In addition to consulting services and help for parents and students (including portfolio and transcript advice, college applications and essays, child-led curriculum planning, and more), Laurie maintains a free website,
http://www.homeschoolnyc.com , with resources, activities, projects, and everything you need to homeschool in NYC. She has lectured at international conferences on alternative education and taught child-led workshops around the world. Her book, Education Uncensored: A Guide for the Aspiring, the Foolhardy, and the Disillusioned , is part memoir and part handbook. It offers an overview of major academic subjects as well as techniques, insights, and examples of multidisciplinary, child-led curriculum that defy grade level.
