100 Days - day fiveteen

Oh how I laughed. Look, parents are going to sue the government for failing to provide education for their children. Having been a home educator for many years with the Education Welfare Officer breathing down your neck every now and then, demanding that you demonstrate you were providing an education for your children on pain of having them forced back into school, I did find this report most entertaining. Call it karma or something. 

I have read, mostly on facebook, a lot of posts about people 'homeschooling' during the coronavirus lockdown, both positive and negative reactions. Lots of jokes about how teachers should get a big pay rise because making two children sit down and jump through the academic hoops you have planned for them is really hard. Others saying how much their children have flourished away from the stresses of compulsory school attendance. Also home education pages pointing out that what parents are currently doing is *not* home education. It is crisis management. If you're interested Idzie Desmarais writes at 'I'm Unschooled, Yes, I Can Write', and this article on National Geographic. I hope that the experience, the enforced extended companionship of their children, has shown parents that children are people too, and that they don't need to control their every waking moment for them to be 'learning' stuff (whatever that means).

In keeping with the rest of the post, today's Book to Make You Think: Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto from 2013

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

How to get into Manchester University

Almost exactly five years ago Monkey went off to Monkey. She had an amazing year, but learned that acting was not for her. Fast forward quite some time and discovering new interests she started teaching herself Japanese, and a plan developed to go to Japan. That plan morphed into a plan to do a degree instead, which will involved a government funded year of living and studying in Japan. Where would you want to study Japanese other than at SOAS (no longer called the School of Oriental and African Studies, just called SOAS). 

So we visited SOAS:

and admired their awesome library:

We loved SOAS

Then we visited Sheffield, they had a lovely park outside their (slightly less awesome but still nice) library:

We loved Sheffield

 Then we visited Durham, and its awesome cathedral:

(I got to go too and pretend I was a tiny person):

We loved Durham (but mostly because we know it)

Tish and Monkey went to UCLAN but failed to take a photo. 

Monkey did the Manchester visit on her own.

We now have an extensive collection of university tote bags. 

Durham did not hand out tote bags:

Meanwhile, amongst all this dashing around the country, Monkey did an access course with the Distance Learning Centre. It took her about 10 months and cost about £1200. She took her exams at home with the tutor supervising over Skype. The UCAS application went in and the offers of places came back, for all five of her applications. She didn't even expect an offer from Manchester because they wanted a B in English, so it threw a spanner in the works a little. To get a place at SOAS she needed to get nearly all distinctions in her assignments, so the pressure was pretty intense for a while. 

After she finished the course Monkey had plans to fill the next six months with stuff that she had put on hold. Instead we had to move house and it interrupted everything ... except the long circular discussion about SOAS or Manchester. SOAS was the place to go, it has so many courses to offer and it is small and everyone knows each other and it's right by the British Museum and has an awesome library and a fantastic felafel stall that sets up once a week right outside. But on the other hand, if she goes to Manchester she can stay home, have hardly any expenses, save for going to Japan, not have to stress about house mates or cooking proper food or dealing the other practicalities of life (and to be honest their library is pretty awesome too). I wanted her to go to SOAS. She wanted to go to SOAS. But we want this experience to be a success, she still needs support and there would be nothing worse than her going to London and not being able to cope, so the practical argument won the day, and it is the right decision.

So this week she went to Manchester University 

(and didn't want a first day photo taken):

This photo just because it's lovely, Dad and Monkey.

Bridge Building

Neil Postman wrote a book called 'Teaching as a Subversive Activity' that was a significant influence on me when my children were home educated. I bought 'Building a Bridge to the 18th Century' several years ago and it has been waiting patiently on the list. The book is about the ideas of the 18th century and how they laid the foundation for the modern world and 20th century thinking, and what they still have to offer us in terms of the future: "I do not mean - mind you- technological ideas, like going to the moon, airplanes and antibiotics. We have no shortage of those ideas. I am referring to the ideas of which we can say they have advanced our understanding of ourselves, enlarged our definition of humanness." (p.13-14)

"The eighteenth century is the century of Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Kant, Hume, Gibbon, Pestalozzi, and Adam Smith. It is the century of Thomas Paine, Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin. In the eighteenth century we developed our ideas of inductive science, about religious and political freedom, about popular education, about rational commerce, and about the nation-state. In the eighteenth century, we also invented the idea of progress, and, you may be surprised to know, our modern idea of happiness. It was in the eighteenth century that reason began to triumph over superstition. And, inspired by Newton, who was elected president of the Royal Society at the beginning of the century, writers, musicians, and artists conceived of the universe as orderly, rational, and comprehensible." (p.17-18)

I read it over several months so have not ended up with a coherent picture of his message, so am going to give you a selection of quotes that I noted as I read. He examines ideas surrounding progress, the use of language to understand ideas:

"We struggle as best we can to connect our words with the world of non-words. Or, at least, to use words that will resonate with the experiences of those whom we address. But one worries, nonetheless, that a generation of young people may become entangled in an academic fashion that will increase their difficulties in solving real problems - indeed, in facing them. Which is why, rather than reading Derrida, they ought to read Diderot, or Voltaire, Rousseau, Swift, Madison, Condorcet, or many of the writers of the Enlightenment period who believed that, for all of the difficulties in mastering language, it is possible to say what you mean, to mean what you say, and to be silent when you have nothing to say. They believed that it is possible to use language to say things about the world that are true - true, meaning they are testable and verifiable, that there is evidence for believing. Their belief in truth included statements about history and about social life, although they knew that such statements were less authoritative than those of a scientific nature. They believed in the capacity of lucid language to help them know when they had spoken truly or falsely. Above all, they believed that the purpose of language is to communicate ideas to oneself and to others. Why, at this point in history, so many Western philosophers are teaching that language is nothing but a snare and a delusion, that it serves only to falsify and obscure, is mysterious to me." (p.80-81)

the place of information and narrative within our culture:

"The problem addressed in the nineteenth century was how to get more information to more people, faster, and in more diverse forms. For 150 years, humanity has worked with stunning ingenuity to solve this problem. The good news is we have. The bad news is that, in solving it, we have created another problem, never before experienced: information glut, information as garbage, information divorced from purpose and even meaning. As a consequence, there prevails amongst us what Langdon Winner calls 'mythinformation' - no lisp intended. It is an almost religious conviction that at the roots of our difficulties - social, political, ecological, psychological - is the fact that we do not have enough information." (p.89)

"Those who speak enthusiastically about the great volume of statements about the world available on the Internet do not usually address how we may distinguish the true from the false. By it's nature, the Internet can have no interest in such a distinction. It is not a 'truth' medium; it is an information medium." (p.92)

"I define knowledge as organised information - information that is embedded in some context; information that has a purpose, that leads one to seek further information in order to understand something about the world. Without organised information, we may know something of the world, but very little about it. When one has knowledge, one knows how to make sense of information, know how to relate information to one's life, and, especially, knows when information is irrelevant.
It is fairly obvious that some newspaper editors are aware of the distinction between information and knowledge, but not nearly enough of them. There are newspapers whose editors do not yet grasp that in a technological world, information is a problems, not a solution. They will tell us things we already know about and will give little or no space to providing a sense of context or coherence." (p.93)

and the role of education and childhood:

"In the Protestant view, the child is an unformed person who, through literacy, education, reason, self-control and shame, may be made into a civilised adult. In the Romantic view, it is not the unformed child but the deformed adult who is the problem. The child possesses as his or her birthright capacities for candour, understanding, curiosity, and spontaneity that are deadened by literacy, education, reason, self-control, and shame." (p.121)

"The whole idea of schooling, now, is to prepare the young for competent entry into the economic life of the community so that they well continue to be devoted consumers." (p.126)

Including an interesting suggestion for the improvement of scientific education:

"The story told by creationists is also a theory. That a theory has its origins in a religious metaphor or belief is irrelevant. Not only was Newton a religious mystic but his conception of the universe as a kind of mechanical clock constructed and set in motion by God us about as religious an idea as you can find. What is relevant is the question, To what extent does a theory meet scientific criteria of validity? The dispute between evolutionists and creation scientists offers textbook writers and teachers a wonderful opportunity to provide students with insights into the philosophy and methods of science. After all, what students really need to know is not whether this or that theory is to be believed, but how scientists judge the merit of a theory. Suppose students were taught the criteria of scientific theory evaluation and then were asked to apply these criteria to the two theories in question. Wouldn't such a task qualify as authentic science education?" (p.168)

It is a hard book to pin down because he covers so many ideas, and often assumes rather a lot of knowledge on the part of his readers, though the book is all the better for that, there is nothing worse than academics dumbing down their thinking. I think it lacked some kind of conclusion, just ending with several appendices of quotations from a wide variety of writers from Lord Byron to George Orwell, and an essay on why television is ruining childhood. This book, reflecting on the impact the current technological revolution is having on our society, was published in 1999 and was Postman's final book, and I can't help but wonder what he might have made of where we are now.

10 X 10 X 10 Giveaway post

It has been creeping up slowly over the last couple of months, but finally I have reached my 1000th post! It feels like a huge milestone, who knew I had so much to say. I decided to celebrate the things that I have enjoyed about blogging with a 10 x 10 x 10 post. 
Up first are my ten most visited posts:

10: Cool Aid Dying with 1031 visits
9: Cooking and Sewing Post with 1114 visits
8: Carol Ann Duffy with 1124 visits
7: for the home educators HESFES : long self-indulgent holiday post with 1216 visits
6: for the reptile fans Tegu Walking with 1123 visits
5: for the Philip Pullman fans Midsummer's day with Will and Lyra with 1496 visits
4: Engelby by Sebastian Faulks with 1158 visits
3: Luscious Lemon Cake with 1565 visits
2: an early poetry post, visited by many students I think Margaret Atwood Poetry with 3247 visits
1: (not quite fair on Margaret Atwood but combining two as they go together) Lizard Cake and Lizard Cake Tutorial with a total of 4985 visits

Next I give you, with much torturous decision making, my ten favourite books of the 462 that are labelled at book reviews (alphabetical for I could never rank them one to ten):

Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald
Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

And the final ten posts are the ten that I love, either because they mark significant things that have happened over the last few years or just times when I wrote something important to me or that I was particularly pleased with:

Don't Apologise speaks for itself, I was angry, I should write like that more often.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be is a brief post that celebrates 15 years of friendship with the Ridley Birks family. 
Two Deaths, Three Kisses and a Punchup was written in 2011 when I blogged for the Library Theatre's production of Hard Times
Monkey Quilt the Final Chapter is the result of over two years working on our beekeeper's quilt.
Favourite Moments gives the best bits from my visit to Costa Rica with my mum in 2014.
Dead Dog Poems is one of many many post written during my longstanding involvement with the Manchester Literature Festival, it was one of my favourite events.
What I Think is a course review of 'A Brief History of Humankind', of the many courses I have done with Coursera since 2013 it was the most interesting and engaging.
Night of Writing Dangerously: Monkey and I have participated in NaNoWriMo several times, and are planning to again this year.
Luggage: I have taken part in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge every year since 2012, several years I have done flash fictions, and this is one I particularly liked.
Blogger (a poem) that I wrote back in 2010

I hummed and hawed about what to do to celebrate, and thought that of course there should be a give-away. I know people visit when I post stuff and I hope you get some interest or enjoyment out of reading but I thought it might be nice to know who you all are. So here are three outrageously unique tote bags that I made for my short-lived Etsy shop, so maybe if people just say hi and leave their email contact/blog link and I will pick three people at random to send them to.

Red and Black flocked satin lined with white cotton.

Brown satin with gold spirals lined with pale pink satin.

Pink paisley satin lined with pale pink satin.

Don't apologise

Several things came together recently and left me with the need to articulate a sense of frustration that I often experience when people talk about their schooling experience. Listening to Kate Tempest the other week she was talking about hating school as a teenager, knowing that it was such a waste, but then she *felt the need to apologise* to teachers in the audience, because of course she didn't mean them, they are bound to be good teachers, who love children and helping them learn stuff and making their time in school joyful and meaningful. What a load of tosh. Why do people do this? A young woman (after admitting to being a teacher) asked a question at the end about how she might encourage her students to engage with and find enthusiasm for 'the classics' (Kate's main piece was inspired by ancient greek myth). One might rephrase the question like this: "I am enthusiastic about 'such-and-such random thing' (or it is on the curriculum and I must include it in this term's lessons), I want my students to be enthusiastic and engage with my lessons in a satisfactory way, how can I force them to do this?" Teachers don't seem to get that their enthusiasms are freely chosen. Children in school don't freely choose any of the things they learn there, why do the teachers keep expecting enthusiasm. Kate also commented, and this is something you hear regularly, that she had an english teacher who inspired her. Many people who hated school had one lesson or teacher who did give them something important; that's great for them, but does it make school a worthwhile exercise? What about the 29 other kids in the class who did not care about that lesson. What school does for 99% of the time for 99% of the pupils is to prevent them from learning stuff that matters to them.

Every time I read things in the news about this or that subject that should be made compulsory on the curriculum, because children needs know it, I just get more frustrated. Yes, lots of things out there are important, but everyone has their own little pet subject that they think is more important and deserves special attention. One of the most recent ones was teaching coding to primary school kids. What jumped out at me here was the comment 'get children interested in computing'. It is not about allowing children who are interested in computing to learn more about their enthusiasm but about obliging everyone, no matter what they might be interested in, to spend time learning to programme a computer. I use a computer all the time but have only the most rudimentary of knowledge on how it operates. But then the same is true of a car engine. The same is also true of the postal system in which I am a small cog. But *if I was interested it would not be hard for me to find out*. In this overwhelming 'information age' I have come to think that making anything compulsory has become even more meaningless. When someone finds they need to know something it is not difficult to learn, because their own purpose gives the impetus. My son Lewis manages a reptile shop. He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the animals that he cares for and sells. He did not get this knowledge because someone told him it would be useful for when he grew up and worked in a reptile shop, he has it because of his own passion and enthusiasm. 

My good friend Jill, who has written a book entitled 'So what's wrong with school', led a discussion at Hesfes about what education is for. There were plenty of people in the audience even there who spoke up and claimed an important place for whatever it was that they loved doing or knowing about. But mostly the talk was about much more abstract ideas and qualities: self-confidence and self-reliance, resilience, how to learn, how to communicate, how to find and value what you want to know, being open to new ideas and experiences and not confined by other's and society's expectations. To quote (paraphrase) the much missed John Holt, education should be about finding a life worth living and work worth doing. 

And then I watched that lovely Ted talk posted at the top, and all the people clapped at the end when the man tells them they should stop fucking with children's lives and just let them get on with the important stuff of playing, and it's almost as if they don't realise quite how subversive this idea is. Play is the way that children make sense of the word and learn the skills they need to know to function within their society. He talks about how damaging it is that the 'schoolish view' of childhood has come to predominate. People think that time they spend in self-directed play is wasted. The government in this country is pushing for younger and younger children to have their lives and activities dictated by the needs of institutions (and by extension the long term needs of the economy), school hours extend and 'after school activities' that are structured and controlled by adults dominate much of their free time. It becomes really difficult to speak up against these pervasive ideas. On the blog 'I'm unschooled, yes I can write' Idzie posted this week about how even someone committed to alternative models of learning can't escape the pressures to prove herself. She talks about how she apologises for what she has not done or not achieved, the things that conventional education values (like bits of paper to prove her knowledge), and she has to remind herself of all the important intangible things that have made up, and continue to make up, her education. 
At the other end of the spectrum you get these lovely people in America who want to rip out the bits of the textbook that they don't approve of. It's all the same really, it's about controlling what children learn, either by dictating or preventing. 

I am in NaNo avoidance mode here so the initial ideas I had have, as usual, become muddied. The gist of the post is, school is crap, don't apologise for saying so. And just in case you're not sure:


(Rant over, and I'm not apologising.)

Unrequited love

'The Library of Unrequited Love' by Sophie Divry
This was a lovely little novella, a monologue by a lonely librarian who arrives at work to discover someone unintentionally locked overnight in the library. 

I found myself picturing the hapless man, it had to be a man, probably elderly, as he sat, initially bemused and trapped, but gradually relaxing back in the armchair with his thermos coffee (that she provides for him) and letting her ideas wash over him. There aren't any apparent interruptions to her flow as she meanders through every subject under the sun. What I loved was the way it was a picture of how the human mind works, and how it makes its own connections between ideas and information. Julie wrote a lovely post yesterday on the subject of random learning and how you can't make someone find a particular thing interesting, or make them learn it, or control what someone learns from a situation, and this book felt like a fantastic example of real human learning. The librarian talks, and although her talk has a superficial feel of being random and meaningless if you pay attention there are links between everything she says, one thing leads to the next ... and this is how learning happens for children (and adults of course but we are often so busy doing other stuff we don't notice our learning any more). So starting predictably with the Dewey Decimal System we do a quick run through the history of libraries. History is her aspiration (though she is stuck in the geography section) so her talk takes in the French Revolution to Napoleon ("that uncivilised little runt") to Durkheim to Eugène Morel and then Simone de Beauvoir. 

And running through the talk is her passion for a young man who comes to the library to work on his dissertation, who she adores from afar. I felt like he was symbolic of her desire to be noticed, acknowledged, valued, by someone and by society, but his real physical presence created this lovely moment;

"I was sitting at my desk. He was sitting at a table, where he'd been working for about half an hour. It was quiet. The sky was grey. I didn't have any coffee left. Then suddenly Martin put the cap back on his pen, closed his book, stood up and walked over to me, with his calm movements and his long legs. I saw him coming, I looked up at hime (not too fast, not to let him think I had been waiting for him), he stopped at my desk, leaned forward slightly (I wonder why, perhaps he thinks I'm deaf), I could see his shirt close up, light-blue stripes, I even picked up a hint of aftershave, a very subtle one, he was right there and he asked, oh nothing much, but so politely put, and anyway, it was me he asked, even though that morning my history colleague was there, in his soft voice he said: 'Excuse me, Madame, but would it be possible to have a little more light?' " (p.57)

She sees libraries as both a place for the unloved and the unwanted:

"They're not really readers. They wander about. To the magazine corner, then to Literature. They come down here so as not to be noticed. They pretend to read. They don't make a noise, they just look for some little spot and hope everyone will forget about them. Sometimes, if they land an armchair, they drop off to sleep, poor things. I do feel a lot of sympathy for them. I call them the 'central heating refugees'." (p.59)

but also the place that offers magic:

"Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person's life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life." (p.65)

"Spiritually we can at last fill the terrible emptiness that makes us just worms creeping on this earth. Those endless bookshelves reflect back to us an ideal image, the image of the full range of the human mind. Then all paths are made plain, everything's newly created once more, and we move closer to a mystical vision of Abundance. The inexhaustible milk of human culture, right here, within our reach. Help yourself, it's free. Borrow, because as much as accumulation of material things impoverishes the soul, cultural abundance enriches it." (p.67)

So a monologue in praise of libraries as much as a love story, and I am all in favour of libraries. A lovely understated little book that you could read in an afternoon.

Damn hippy home educators

We sat at Julie's the other day and watched the pilot episode of 'Raised by Wolves' on 4oD (available for another 17 days, and a somewhat pretentious Guardian review here); it is written by Caitlin Moran (no relation to Dunk) and her sister Caz and is based (loosely) on their own childhood being home educated in a large family living on a council estate in Wolverhampton. It is being cheered in home ed circles purely because it contradicts the notion that all home educators are middle class hippy types (for visitors from America please read that as 'all home-schoolers are fundamentalist Christian types'). It doesn't make a big issue about them being home educated, though the scene where they watch from the garden when the school kids come past was excellent, it is more about family relationships. Certainly hoping they make it to a full series, the two young women playing Germaine and Aretha are wonderful.

And it ties in quite nicely with my Christmas listening which was 'Wild Abandon' by Joe Dunthorne (who also wrote the book that became the film 'Submarine'), which is about a bunch of home educating hippies. It is the story of an intentional community, started by Don and Freya and Patrick but enlarged over the years by a motley collection of drifters and WWOOFers. The story follows the disintegration of relationships as people begin to change their ideas of what they want in life and Don desperately tries to hold the whole thing together; daughter Kate goes off to college and meets a young man who's home offers all the comforts of modern life that their farm lacks, Don and Freya's marriage crumbles and their son Albert is left feeling abandoned and turns for companionship to Maria, who has all sorts of wacky ideas about where the world is headed. The relationship between Kate and Albert was lovely, siblings who grow up quite dependent on each other for company. Albert remains embedded in his experience of and love for commune life while Kate, out in the 'real world', makes a conscious decision to avoid discussing her childhood experiences. The story build towards the 'Results Party' that Don throws to try and tempt his daughter home. I liked the way that the character's little dramas were going on while the rest of life carried on regardless. Don is not a sympathetic character but he spouts some well reasoned arguments against formal schooling which are randomly scattered through the story so I felt that was his redeeming quality. I think the story succeeded because although it is witty and Joe allowed himself to gently mock some of their efforts it manages to avoid tired clichés, it created real people and a community who were trying to live their lives outside the accepted assumptions and values of society, and I can't help sympathising with people who try, it was hard and they made compromises but they didn't stop trying. 

Getting to know myself...

... or am I a figment of my own imagination?
A while ago I was pointed in the direction of the Coursera website, it offers university level courses, for free, to students all over the world, mostly pitched at people without prior knowledge and who are armed merely with a curious mind. So since March I have being studying a course entitled Know Thyself that has encompassed a variety of disciplines, but tutored by a philosopher, Mitch Green.

The first thing that the course has given me is a profound awe for the human mind. It is oh so much more sophisticated than most people appreciate. Secondly I feel cleverer just studying philosophy, and I discover this is because the concept of 'philosophy' is positively somatically marked, the word is linked in your mind with all sorts of associations that imply intelligence. We started the course with the work of Socrates and the notion that 'the unexamined life is not worth living', or as an alternative translation suggests, is 'not to be lived', taking pains to point out that Socrates probably was not advocating a cull of thoughtless people, just that their lives lacked some quality if they went about never considering the what or why of their thoughts, beliefs or actions. As a philosopher I am not sure he is such a great example, he tends to live up to the stereotype of the aloof, 'disconnected from the real world' kind of philosopher, that had given philosophy an undeserved bad name, but he was prepared to die for the idea that he should be allowed to question everything, so all credit to him in my book. Descartes on the other hand was a bit of a chicken and having made a very convincing case for the existence of a human consciousness as the basis for all knowledge (I think therefore I am) he then goes and spoils it by arguing that god exists, mostly because saying that he didn't was not socially acceptable at the time. I found myself at odds with the dualist notion of the separation of the mind and the body, influenced partly by the religious overtones but also by my reading of 'Still Alice' at the time; where Descartes says the mind can exist beyond the death of the body, but not vice versa, what I learned about Alzheimer's Disease seems to imply that the body is perfectly able to live even when everything that makes up the human mind, the thoughts, memories, instincts, wishes, all cognitive functions, have ceased to operate.

Lots of different theorists have different views on what constitutes the human mind; for Descartes our mind is our ability to reason, for Gilbert Ryle we are made up of a collection of 'dispositions' to behaviour, then for Freud our minds are made up of the Ego, the Id and the Superego. The study of the brain has often focussed on learning about it's function by seeing what happens to it when things go wrong, either with physical brain damage or mental illness. But many of them came back to the idea of introspection, Socrates' notion of an examined life, that to understand your own behaviour and actions you must examine your thoughts and attitudes. Although much of Freud's theories about human nature have been discredited psychotherapy remains an important mechanism to understanding the human mind. Different theories emerged about the unconscious and our ability to understand what goes on in the part of the mind that we are often unaware of. What emerged also was the notion of the interdependence between mind and body, between thoughts and actions, each impacting upon the other and also between our supposed rationality and our emotions. It has only been much more recently that  neuroscience has progressed and we have more and more knowledge about the inner workings of the brain on a cellular level.  I am still reading Antonio Damasio's book 'Descartes Error' which turns on it's head the idea that human beings should or do make decisions based on rationally choosing the best outcome and that allowing emotions to intervene is necessarily a bad thing, but this book makes use of  knowledge about the functioning of regions of the brain for different purposes (review coming of this book at some point, hopefully soon).

Having morphed from a philosophy into more of a psychology course and drifted briefly into neuroscience, we went back to examining the idea of deception and self-deception, not just in terms of lying but more subtly in terms of your internal spin-doctor who helps you make the best of life when it's really not that great. And finally to Buddhism and Zen and how it is more in rejecting the notion of 'self' that we can come to any sense of meaning.

I have been trying to write something of an overview of what I learned but find that although I enjoyed it the ideas were all very discrete, different views at how we humans have considered our own minds. There is a 'Cartesian View' or a 'Freudian View' or a 'Buddhist View' of the human mind, they are separate paradigms and do not lead one to another, nor did each necessarily help in understanding the next. I found that the most helpful thing were the questions that Mitch posed at the beginning and end of the course, that he told his students to always ask about any idea: What do you mean? and How do you know? You should be able to challenge yourself to question the theories and ideas that you hold and reason with yourself about them. I especially like the concept of 'Occam's razor' which states that 'among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.' The human mind is an amalgam of all the assumption it has acquired through experiences, many of them very flawed, and trying to figure out which is most of the battle. I am left with the feeling that to know your own mind certainly could be the work of a lifetime, and if you focus inwards too much you might be both tying yourself up in knots and missing something much more important outside.  What I liked most was that it felt like real studying; video lectures prepared specifically for the course, suggested reading, online discussions and feedback. It had to be done within the course schedule and there were weekly tests to see if you had paid attention and understood the concepts in the lectures so you had to treat it seriously if you wanted to 'pass'. Of the 70,000 odd who signed up apparently less than 10,000 were still actively participating at the end. Creature and I have since begun an Introduction to Psychology course together and will be starting 'Introduction to Art' next week too. I have several more in the pipeline that start later in the year. I would highly recommend it to anyone either just wanting to try something new or interested in getting back into formal education.

Mass Instruction (weapons thereof)

Most people don't realise that compulsory schooling has only been around in western society for a relatively brief period of time, since around 1870. John Taylor Gatto has been around and writing about the evils of school for over twenty years now, having worked within the system, and received awards for doing so, for thirty before that. 'Weapons of Mass Instructions' is his latest offering, and though he has a tendency to circle around and around the same arguments he does present them in a very informal and readable way. They are all arguments I am familiar with so you'll have to excuse the slightly haphazard collection of quotes that I will use to sum them up. Many years ago he sent me a preview copy of his weighty tome The Underground History of American Education (that can now be downloaded in full here), not that we were on first name terms or anything, I was just actively involved in Education Otherwise at the time and he probably pulled my contact details from the newsletter. It was a detailed history of the education system enmeshed with his own life history and experiences. This one has much the same style, skirting around some of his own teaching experiences and giving example after example of people who go their own way and what they achieve by doing so. 

In a potted version of the earlier Underground History he begins his thesis by giving us the state of America prior to compulsory schooling :
"Long before this habit training took hold, America was, by any historical yardstick, formidably well-educated, a place of aggressively free speech and argument - dynamically entrepreneurial, dazzlingly inventive, and as egalitarian a place as human nature could tolerate." (p.17)
I found his view a little idealised (I wonder if it is his way of demonstrating he is not being un-american  in his critique of such a fundamental part of their society) but he then goes on to explain how a centralised school system was imposed on a reluctant population. He claims it's purpose:
"But in the new fashion, different goals were promulgated, goals for which self-reliance, ingenuity, courage, competence, and other frontier virtues became liabilities (because they threatened the authority of management). Under the new system, the goals of good moral values, good citizenship and good personal development were exchanged for a novel fourth purpose - becoming a human resource to be spent by businessmen and politicians." (p23)
and backs it up with this quote from Woodrow Wilson from 1909:
"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." (p.23)
And thus:
"From 1880 to 1930, the term 'overproduction' was heard everywhere, in boardrooms, elite universities, gentleman's clubs and highbrow magazines. It was a demon which had to be locked in the dungeon. And rationalised pedagogy was a natural vehicle to implant habits and attitudes to accomplish that end. Under this outlook, the classroom would never be used to produce knowledge, but only to consume it; it would not encourage the confined to produce ideas, only to consume the ideas of others. The ultimate goal implanted in student minds, which replaced the earlier goal of independent livelihoods, was getting a good job." (p25)

Gatto is a big proponent of what he terms 'open source' learning, people pursuing their own ideas and fascinations and eschewing formal teaching situations. He gives example after example of people who did just that, from Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the likes, to a student of his called Stanley who ditched school in favour of learning the trades of various family members:
"A big secret of bulk-process schooling us that it doesn't teach the way children learn; a bigger secret is that it isn't supposed to teach self-direction at all. Stanley-style is verboten. School is about learning to wait your turn, however long it takes to come, if ever. And how to submit with a show of enthusiasm to the judgement of strangers, even if they are wrong; even if your enthusiasm is phoney.
School is the first impression we get of organised society and its relentless need to rank everyone on a scale of winners and losers; like most first impressions, the real things school teaches about your place in the social order last a lifetime for most of us." (p.63)

He talks about resistance from without, like the Amish community in Wisconsin fighting to preserve their way of life and values, and how little resistance there was from within:
"Once a principal in the richest secondary school in District Three asked me privately if I could help him set up a program to teach critical thinking. Of course, I replied, but if we do it right your school will become unmanageable. Why would kids taught to think critically and express themselves effectively put up with the nonsense you force down their throats? That was the end of our interview and his critical thinking project." (p.76)
John himself found many and various ways to allow his students to escape the confines of both the imposed curriculum and the school building and away also from what he saw as the enforced passivity of television consumption:
"I set out to shock my students into discovering that face to face engagement with reality was more interesting and rewarding than watching the pre-packaged world of media screens, my target was helping them jettison the lives of spectators which had been assigned to them, so they could become players. I couldn't tell anyone in the school universe what I was doing, but I made strenuous efforts to enlist parents as active participants. ...
Plunging kids into the nerve-wracking, but exhilarating waters of real life - sending them on expeditions across the state, opening the court system to their lawsuits, and the economy to their businesses, filling public forums with their speeches and political action - made them realise, without lectures, how much of their time was customarily wasted sitting in the dark." (p.93)
His own attempts at resistance and his aims to spread his ideas and understanding has on occasion been met with quite virulent opposition. He recites an incident when speaking at a prosperous high school about the realities of SAT scores, college admissions and the myths of schooling and the event was literally bought to a halt by the school superintendent calling in the police; the scene is quite surreal and yet quite believable.

He quotes this lovely analogy from a young man called Andrew Hsu who he met at an award ceremony, it captures so perfectly pretty much everything the book tries to say. It concerns the training of fleas:
"If you put a flea in a shallow container they jump out. But if you put a lid on the container for just a short time, they hit the lid trying to escape and learn quickly not to jump so high. They give up their quest for freedom. After the lid is removed, the fleas remain imprisoned by their own self-policing. So it is with life. Most of us let our own fears or the impositions of others imprison us in a world of low expectations." (p.141)


The one thing I find annoying about his approach and use of 'shining' examples, young people sailing singlehanded around the globe or setting up successful businesses or making amazing scientific discoveries, is that he ends up implying that opting out of the school system is only ok if you end up doing something remarkable. It is ok to opt out and just be ordinary, to just live an ordinary life that is of your choosing. Compulsory school is not just a waste of time for geniuses and creative types, it is a waste of time for everybody, it crushes the life out of the unassuming ones too. (Also politically he is a bit of a libertarian, an admirer of free market economics and does not seem interested in political change. For me it seems logical to extend the argument into other areas of life.) It is something that the whole home education community is guilty of to a certain extent, to point vociferously to the success stories as a justification for our opinions and existence, as if we have to be better than school, that our children have to get better exam results so that we can say 'look, we should be permitted to do what we do because we achieve within the confines of your narrow definition of success'. 

While I think that 'Dumbing Us Down' is a better book (and I will get around the rereading and reviewing it some time), it dwells less on history and more on an examination of the effect of schooling on the individual, I find that what I continue to like most about Gatto is that he just pursues the ideas. He keeps pushing and repeating, hoping that in the end more and more people will finally get the message. He ends the main section of the book thus:
"I hope this has been enough to continue weapon-hunting on your own. Writing this has made me so sad and angry. I can't continue."
Sometimes I still feel sad and angry about schools, but so long as there are people out there telling it like it is there has to be hope.

(Fourth book in the TBR pile challenge 2013)

Herland

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
This classic feminist novel, written and published originally as a serial back in 1915, is the story of an isolated all-woman country that is 'discovered' by three blokes in a plane. Hearing a rumour of such a society they set out to find it, basically assuming that when they get there they will be treated like gods and have the pick of the nubile and deprived young women. The reality is however far different and the book, written from the perspective of one of the men, is the story of their experience. 

It is very much a period piece, the language and the attitudes are very much of the early 20th century and the society that Gilman dreams up for the women is utopian in the extreme. Her aim is obviously to argue the potential strengths of women, how they might choose to organise their society if it were outside the influence of men, and to show up the men's arrogance and the flaws in what they consider to be their own superior society.

So, just quotes really. Demonstrating partly the attitudes of the men, towards women in general, but also towards this new society as they begin to understand it. It is interesting because Gilman has a subtle understanding of the nature of sexism, how some of it is blatant, some of it outrageously patronising, but some of it more understated and couched in nice language to make you think that you are in the wrong for being offended by it. Of course the three are all middle class Edwardian 'gentlemen' and have attitudes and opinions to match.

First encounter:
" 'Woman' in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother." (p.20)

Later, after much acquaintance, they reflect on their expectations:
"And we had been cocksure as to the inevitable limitations, the faults and vices, of a lot of women. We had expected them to be given over to what we called 'feminine vanity' - 'frills and furbelows,' and we found that they had evolved a costume more perfect than the Chinese dress, richly beautiful when so desired, always useful, of unfailing dignity and good taste.
We had expected a dull submissive monotony, and found a daring social inventiveness far beyond our own, and a mechanical and scientific development fully equal to ours.
We had expected pettiness, and found a social consciousness besides which our nations looked like quarrelling children - feebleminded ones at that.
We had expected jealousy, and found a broad sisterly affection, a fair-minded intelligence, to which we could produce no parallel.
We had expected hysteria, and found a standard of health and vigour, a calmness of temper, to which the habit of profanity, for instance, was impossible to explain - we tried it." (p.81)

Van, the narrator, talking to their guardians:
" 'We like you the best,' Somel told me, 'because you seem more like us.'
'More like a lot of women!' I thought to myself disgustedly, and then remembered how little like 'women,' in our derogatory sense, they were. She was smiling at me, reading my thought.
'We can quite see that we do not seem like - women - to you. Of course, in a bi-sexual race the distinctive features of each sex must be intensified. But surely there are characteristics enough which belong to People, aren't there? That's what I mean about you being more like us - more like People. We feel at ease with you.' " (p.89)

Terry, the obnoxious one, continues to rail against them throughout the book, learning nothing:
"Terry persisted. 'They've neither the vices of men, nor the virtues of women - they're neuters!'
'You know better than that. Don't talk nonsense,' said I, severely.
I was thinking of Ellador's eyes when they gave me a certain look, a look she did not at all realise.
Jeff was equally incensed. 'I don't know what 'virtues of women' you miss. Seems to me they have them all.'
'They've no modesty,' snapped Terry. 'No patience, no submissiveness, none of the natural yielding which is a woman's greatest charm.' " (p.98)

Education thoughts:
" 'We try most earnestly for two powers,' Somel continued. 'The two that seem to us basically necessary for a noble life: a clear, far-reaching judgement, and a strong well-used will. We spend our best efforts, all through childhood and youth, in developing these faculties, individual judgement and will.'
'As part of your system of education, you mean?'
'Exactly. As the most valuable part. With the babies, as you may have noticed, we first provide an environment which feeds the mind without tiring it; all manner of simple and interesting things to do, as soon as they are old enough to do them; physical properties, of course, come first. But as early as possible, going very carefully, not to tax the mind, we provide choices, simple choices, with very obvious causes and consequences. You've noticed the games?'
I had. The children seemed always to be playing something; or else, sometimes, engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered at first when they went to school, but soon found that they never did -  to their knowledge. It was all education but no schooling." (p.106)

It's only right at the very end that they seem to come to some understanding of the gulf between their societies:
"In missing men we three visitors had naturally missed the larger part of life, and had unconsciously assumed that they must miss it too. It took me a long time to realise - Terry never did realise - how little it meant to them. When we say men, man, manly, manhood, and all other masculine derivatives, we have in the background of our minds a huge vast crowded picture of the world and all its activities. To grow up and 'be a man', to 'act like a man' - the meaning and connotation is wide indeed. The vast background is full of marching columns of men, of changing lines of men, of long processions of men; of men steering their ships into new seas, exploring unknown mountains, breaking horses, herding cattle, ploughing and sowing and reaping, toiling in the forge and furnace, digging in the mine, building road and bridges and high cathedrals, preaching in all the churches; of men everywhere, doing everything - 'the world.'
And when we say women, we think female - the sex.
But to these women, in the unbroken sweep of this two-thousand-year-old feminine civilisation, the word woman called up all that big background, so far as they had gone in social development; and the word man meant to them only male - the sex." (p.137)

In a way I ended up thinking of the author as one of the women in Herland. She mocks the men quite gently, making them struggle to deny or hide the failings of their own masculine society, when the women around them see through their evasions and avoidance of certain subjects. Where the three men are constantly harping on about the way these women ought to be behaving and what is wrong with their way of doing things she coaxes them quite slowly into an understanding of a different way of thinking about women, never criticising them directly, just nudging them to acknowledge the alternative. While the perfection of the society irritated me somewhat, it was illogical to think that illness and crime would disappear completely, her picture of cooperation was inspiring. What was also interesting was her level of ecological consciousness, the care the women took of their environment and the understanding for a need for balance and respect. At a time when the thoughtless plunder of the world's natural resources was not really questioned this was also quite radical. While dystopian novels are all very interesting I do enjoy a nice utopia sometimes, it is a bit more encouraging.

HESFES - long self-indulgent holiday post

Being at home with your children can be a difficult choice, it is easy to feel isolated, not so much physically isolated but more mentally, because you hold these weird opinions that are not shared by others around you, or society in general. When you tell people you home educate they treat you as if you are crazy, so home educators have always needed a way to get together for mutual support and information. Nowadays they gather at campsites all over the country, but in the past there very few, mostly small, local gatherings ... but then in 1998 came HESFES. It is ten years since the last time I went with my kids. 

It is run by Andy ... and here he is:

I won't embarrass him by making this a post to sing his praises but will just try and give you a flavour of why people want to go and spend a week sitting in a field with a bunch of wild children. We were saved this year by the sunshine. There had been a river running through the site the previous day, but by the end of the week even the largest of the muddy patches was completely dried. About 1500 or so people descended on the Mid Suffolk Showground to spend the week chatting about home education, their kids, the evils of school, how to deal with the LEA and to debate serious stuff ... but also to sing and dance, to make crafty things, to learn something new, to play games, to listen to poetry and write poetry, to listen to music and make music, to sit around the fire, to have mass water-gun fights, to make new friends and chill with old ones, to watch films in a solar powered cinema (Groovy Movie) ... and generally pretend the outside world doesn't exist for a while.

Firstly you need a tent and a little patch of grass to pitch it on ...

then you need some means of brewing your tea ...

and a fearlessness in the face of arachnid invaders (this is close up, the spiders were *really* tiny) ...

 

it's more fun if you have a toddler to chase round the field ...

and a teenager in a cool hat ...

much of the time can be spent just walking up and down the field to get fresh milk or going for a shower or to sit at the cafe and watch the world go by or just for the hell of it...

but sometimes people will gather in one of the marquees...

and dress up in silly clothes (this is Andy again, being the compere)...

...to perform in the now legendary HESFES Children's Cabaret.

This is Bea doing jazz tap-dance:

This is Oliver and Casey doing Hallelujah:

This is Charlie and Georgie doing the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch:

This is Harrison playing some weird japanese music on a weird japanese instrument:

This is Mags singing Pink:

and this is the appreciative and enthusiastic audience:

Thursday night we had the most excellent performance from John Hegley and Diego Brown and the Good Fairy ...

then as we wandered back towards the tent we stopped off instead in the Groovy Movie tent to watch Hettie Hatstar, here she is singing a song about giving birth to a clanger:-) ...

then on the last night (after the obligatory and awesome performance by the HESFES band of Another Brick in the Wall, will link to a video when someone puts one up on Youtube) we sat around the fire until the wee small hours and tried to outdo the teenagers but failed again ...

but even the most determined partiers flake out in the end ...

Within ten minutes of leaving the kids were all asleep in the back of the car. I arrived home with my hesfes shawl completed, one book read, a new friendship bracelet, a tiny wire-and-bead basket and a blister on my foot from Zumba class ... and having had a wonderful holiday. Can't wait for next year.