First, let it be said that going to formal school for 9th grade and the rest of high school is Berit’s decision.  She is led to play the harp and she feels that her life’s work centers on both playing the instrument professionally and in teaching children to play the harp as well.  She applied to a school with roughly 1200 applicants for 100 spots in the incoming 9th grade class, and was accepted.  She plans going on to study at Curtis Institute of music in Philadelphia after high school.  Its a good plan, and we support her in following her leadings.

It s a public school, and we will have to pay a little tuition because we live outside its district.  The kids spend half the day in academics and the other half in music study.  She will have much longer days than she was used to having at home, and plenty of homework besides what she does during the school day.  I have my worries about that, but Berit feels up to the challenge and she wants to do it so much that I am shelving my concerns.  They center on my belief that stress is not a very healthy thing for kids, but – I am reminded – she is 14 and embarking on this adventure of her own volition.  I’m happy to move into a support role for her, but it is with some trepidation that I do it.

She won’t have a built in quiet time for reflection and worship each day.  She will be outside the guarded education of home.  On to being herself in the world, trying out one of her options for life.  I am so deeply proud of Berit.  I admire her sense of direction, her faith in her ability to do what is necessary to reach her goals.

Suddenly Berit is grown up enough to go away for a month to FMC at Olney Friends School for music and Friendship.  She will be going to a magnate school in the fall for serious music study too.  Over the month at FMC she’s learned to play guitar and have room mates, be on Quaker style committees, cook with a group for a bigger one, and all the interpersonal things that go with a Quaker kids conference.  She’s had the best roots I could figure out to provide, now for the wings part! Sigh

How could a curriculum be kept simple without being insufficient?
Recently I was working with a student at Westtown School who was asked to reflect, in essay form, on the testimony on simplicity in Quaker life.  He was to read the queries on the subject from the current Faith and Practice of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and one of those was “How do I manage my commitments so that over-commitment, worry and stress do not diminish my integrity”
One way this boy could attempt to satisfy the implied injunction would be to steer clear of all social engagements of his own, and use all of his discretionary time to work on his assignments.  That would occasion another query about what time and activities does he maintain in is schedule for the refreshment of his human relationships and his balance of fun with work? It is a difficult problem to solve because, for example, this boy is given homework in each subject that he studies: English, Physics, Geometry, Peace and Justice, Quakerism, and  Latin. The Geometry alone is designed to take an hour. He has two hours each evening for doing homework, and another 45 minutes during each school day.  If he devotes an hour to his math class homework, and if the other assignments are similar in their demands, how can he complete the assigned work for each evening in time? To further complicate the matter, on a recent evening, the same boy was required to attend a dinner for the track team, of which he is a member, and a dance recital.
These occurred during what was to have been his dinner time and the first of his 2 hours of study hall that evening. Although the schedule is not so crammed each evening, the time allotment given each student is the same, and this makes the assumption that each student will need the same amount of time to complete their assignments.
In thinking about how to set up an educational paradigm which would reflect Quaker testimonies on simplicity and the value of the individual, the respect for differences, etc.  I wonder what the solution might be? First, the curriculum and the timetable for its use would have to respond to that of God in each student. I’ll translate that into meeting the strengths of the individual, and providing support for the individual’s weaknesses.  How might that be done if we are educating children in groups with a teacher student ratio of 1 to 20? We might have to shrink that ratio to something like 1 to 5. We might have to open the timetable so that benchmarks could be reached at different times by different students. We might not group children by age as often, and we might want to be more selective about the purposes for which we group them, when we do. For example we might make groups for learning objectives like long division, or level 1 Spanish. We could group for developmental stage – everyone who is on the edge of puberty and needs to know a few things about what’s going on in their bodies; such groups could be further refined by gender.
The bottom line here is to center the instructional plans on the people needing the instruction, rather than on what is most expedient for those in charge of the budget, or similar focus, distant from the person-to-person work of teaching and learning.
That would mean significant change, and it would mean taking on the largely unrecognized substrata of our beliefs about what children are relative to adults.
If we honor the testimony of equality among people, we need to decouple “equality” from “sameness” in a number of ways. First, we have to dispatch the idea that adult authority over children is a necessary part of an educational system.
What would happen if childhood were respected, and cherished in school?

I have an idea for creating a community for homeschooling among Friends and I want to float it here for consideration and constructive critique in the Light.  This is essentially what I proposed to the Meeting we attend years ago with the idea that it would be under the care of that Meeting.  The proposal was not accepted but I wonder now if it could be done outside of any existing Monthly Meeting and perhaps developing as an entity – a Monthly Meeting – of its own.

In Maryland, where we live, homeschoolers have a choice of  being “supervised” by their school district or by a distance/correspondence school or group “operated by a bona fide church organization.”  Whichever is chosen by the family, the organization must review the student’s program of study twice a year to assess whether or not the student is receiving “regular and thorough” instruction in the usual school subjects. “Regular and thorough” can mean a lot of different things from unschooling to a very school-like distance learning program.  The state or district cannot prescribe what approach the family should take.  Many Maryland homeschooling families sign up with an “umbrella” group which vouches to the state and district for the “regular and thorough” instruction of the student and the family then meets with the umbrella group’s representative rather than the person from the public school district.  The most prominent of these is a non-denominational “bona fide church organization” (http://www.tlci.us).  The point here is that the required “supervision” in Maryland can range from the very minimal two brief meetings a year of the parent with the school district representative, to a very much richer and more supportive community relationship. I don’t know how it might mesh with other states’ laws, but I imagine it wouldn’t violate them.

So, the idea I propose is a Monthly Meeting for worship with a concern for homeschooling which would opperate like any other Meeting for Worship with a concern for business, but members might raise issues troubling them or inspiring them, committees might be convened and then report for things like field trips or foreign language, Quaker studies, college planning, or Quaker life at home.  The group might have weekly meetings for worship or members might belong to regular monthly meetings in addition to the home schooling one or they might not.  Students might present individual projects to the group, they might get together for shared concerns or interests, dare I say pot-lucks?  I imagine local monthly groups, which could connect in regional quarterly groups with a session at their yearly meeting or parallel to it, and even connections at a national (international?) level.

What do you think?

I left the computer for a minute while in the manage posts screen and one of my feline friends walked on the keyboard, deleting all the posts from the main page   I will try to repost them but fear that I may not have kept copies of everything.

June 16, 2008 at 1:49 am

June 2, 2008 at 6:11 pm

May 30, 2008 at 7:07 pm

May 15, 2008 at 2:44 am

When it was used in centuries past, that phrase meant educating young Quakers outside the temptations and distractions of the non-Quaker world. The idea was to be in the world but not of it. Quaker schools like Westtown, Moses Brown, Penn Charter, etc. were set up to do the job. As many have pointed out, they have all gone pretty mainstream with a minority of their faculty and student populations being Friends, and most are now separate from the Meetings which used to oversee their operation.

My husband and I are engaged in the guarded education of our children at home not terribly dissimilarly from those old Quaker schools’ original intent. We don’t like the culture or basic assumptions of the public schools in our area both because they are not centered on the development and welfare of children, and because they are subject to the winds of whatever the current reform package demands.

We want Berit and Dana to have their instruction match their learning needs (both have Dyslexia) and move at a pace that allows them to really learn, not match the pace of the group. We don’t have faith in the “special” education system, and we want our kids to see their specialness in broader terms. We are not seeking to divorce them from the modern world – they have a TV and computers, like to shop at Old Navy, etc. – but we want them to be accustomed to living simply and to living outside the consuming trends of fashion.

We are guarding their innocence and childhood too. Both of us see kids under significant stress in our daily work as educators, especially the ones who have some obstacle to smooth learning. If there is any simple thing that I have learned in 22 years of teaching it is that stressed out kids are more likely to have trouble learning and social growing (to say nothing of physical growing) than kids who have time to breathe, to inquire, and to follow their inclinations. Dana has been fascinated by birds this year and has spent whole days watching the activities at her feeder set-up. She wouldn’t have had the time if she were in regular school. I snuck in math (how many birds? which types? how much of each kind of seed?) and science and drawing, and poetry, everything in terms of birds. Berit has gone from one half hour lesson on her harp and being reminded to practice, to an hour lesson and needing to be prompted to do something else. This would not have happened in a school context. Both love Shakespeare and have no idea that its supposed to be “hard.” They are relatively unsophisticated compared to the kids I see in most of the schools, and that’s just fine. They will have decades of being adults. I’m happy that they are having a childhood.

I hope what we are doing guards them from those aspects of the world which would interfere with their learning to listen to that still small voice while they are growing up. I hope we are nurturing their ability to hear it and to respond.