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Category Archives "Unschooling"

The Great Canadian Homework Ban goes national

September 2, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Learning, Unschooling 12 Comments

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A few days ago I posted an entry on why banning homework would be a good idea. Today, after an interview with a reporter and a nice session with a photographer, we’re on the front page of the National Post.

Reporter Anne Marie Owens contacted me after I posted on the topic and followed up on some of the comments over at Rob Paterson’s blog (where all the good conversation is on this stuff). Anne Marie used a couple of us to illustrate a nice review of recent research on the topic.

Those that read here know that we engage in life learning with our kids, sometimes called unschooling. Amanda Cockshutt is the other parent quoted in the article and she is campaigning within the school system in New Brunswick to have homework reduced. At Rob’s blog she tells her story:

Homework has been a revolting experience for us the past year. My son was in grade 2 last year and would routinely spend an hour on the “20 minutes” the teacher assigned every night. Boring? Unbelievable. When I approached the school about it, I got a huge great justification of the process, with the usual arguments about making good habits… What really got me though, was the suggestion that after 20 minutes we stop and send a note that it hadn’t been completed, after all, it was the process not the product that was important. Now, I’m no raging capitalist, but I know that we live in a product driven society. I also know from my experience teaching university, that I don’t really care how long the student took to complete the assignment, it was the product that was graded not the time it took. If the lesson that students are to learn is that they can call it quits when the time is up, then we are sliding down a very slippery slope indeed.

What’s useful to know is that there are options. If you’re in school and you think homework is worse than a bad idea, you might be surprised to learn that many educators are actually on your side, as Anne Marie’s article points out. And there are lots of teachers and local school folks that are thinking carefully about all this.

And of course, there is always the option to do what we do and unschool, homelearn or life learn. That’s a whole other trip, but one that I have never regretted taking. It’s a rich and deep experience creating and supporting autodidacts and life learners in our family.

Thanks to Alex for getting this idea started all the way from Denmark, and for Rob and Matthew and Amanda and Anne Marie for hosting and engaging in the conversation.

[tags] homework, National Post[/tags]

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A call for the great Canadian homework ban

August 28, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Learning, Unschooling 14 Comments

My friend Alex Kjerulf today has a post about homework that I am in complete agreement with. He points to this TIME magazine story which, to an unschooling parent, is no news at all.
I already don’t send my kids to school, which we can do here in Canada. It’s called unschooling. BUT if for some reason my kids did go to school I would do what I have advocated others do and that is, I would refuse to allow the school to assign them homework. It is not simply the fact that kids are overworked. There are four other reasons why homework would be banned at my house.1. They learn nothing from doing it. It is not homework that reinforces an idea or a skill, it is developing a passion for something and then having the time to follow it through that does the trick. Homework is a waste of time.

2. Schools already steal six hours or more a day from a child’s life. If they can’t do what they need to do in six hours, it is not my child’s responsibility to gives them more time. It seems to me that homework is not for kids to learn, it’s for schools to shift the responsibility. Teachers don’t get marked on how useful classroom time is, but kids get marked on whether they did their homework or not. That means a lot of classroom stuff that isn’t working is allowed to continue as long as kids do their homework.

3. Homework is an infringemnent on family time. Many of the big media that would otherwise say that homework is important also decry the fact that kids aren’t spending enough time talking with their families. It is not possible to create an atmosphere of deep family connection when parents and the kids are all working three or four hours a night at home. You need many hours together, playing games, reading books, fixing the house together, going to movies, conversing and cooking for friends to have a healthy and balanced family life. Being together only on weekends is like getting a two day pass from prison.

4. Homework robs children of the time they need to develop real skills and passions. When I was in school for example, I taught myself music theory and theology during my grade 11 year. I wasn’t taking either of these subjects at school, and I set aside a lot of homework to learn them. I failed several exams at Christmas 1985 because instead of studying, I was writing four part harmony arrangments of Queen songs and reading Martin Buber. Both of those experiences have stayed with me long after I can even remember what classes I took at school that year, and both continue to be useful in my life.

So, as we enter another “school year” my radical proposal is that those of you who want that time back with your kids, claim it back. And once you’ve gone a year without homework, it might give you the steel to rise up next year and opt out of standardized testing (which in British Columbia you can do, you know…with the support of teachers too, who really know the costs of this stuff).

And don’t forget parents, you need to set the example. Leave work at work! It’s no good having kids come home expecting some family time and have you under house arrest by your boss too!

Update: Rob Paterson has taken up the call and there are some great comments in his post from folks campaigning to ban homework in Atlantic Canada. I weighed in on a second post he has made

Update: A commenter at Rob’s site pointed to a nice post from Brian Alger from a couple of years ago on this topic as well. There’s nothing new about this, obviously!

[tags]homework[/tags]

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Some notable posts about unschooling in my blogosphere

August 3, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Learning, Unschooling

Serendipity.   Nancy White posted yesterday about why we seem to be suffering from a lack of innovation in the world, and whether it was all about the culture of control and fear.   To which I replied – in several hundred words now – look at schools.

And then today, AKMA has a nice post on a talk he is due to give to some Christian anarchists about his family’s experiences with homeschooling, and it’s lovely and concise and carefully thought through and all that stuff that I love about AKMA’s writing.

Something’s in the air, eh?

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Ken Robinson on creativity and education

July 30, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Learning, Unschooling 6 Comments

Have a listen to Sir Ken Robinson, from the TED conference, on creativity and education.   It’s a great talk filled with humour and deep insight about how the public education system does not serve creativity, children or our collective future.   Some quotes:

All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them.

Creativity is as important as literacy and we should teach it with the same status.

Kids will take a chance…if they don’t know, they’ll have a go.   They’re not frightened of being wrong…If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original…We stigmatize mistakes.

We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or more precisely we are educated out of it.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology…we have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we are educating our children.

We may not see this future but [our children] will, and our job is help them make something of it.

Go listen to the lecture and let me know what you think…

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Chaordic organizing in real life.

June 16, 2006 By Chris Corrigan Collaboration, Learning, Open Space, Organization, Practice, Unschooling 3 Comments

Kevin Kelly on the meaning of Wikipedia, from Edge.org

The bottom-up hive mind will always take us much further that seems possible. It keeps surprising us. In this regard, the Wikipedia truly is exhibit A, impure as it is, because it is something that is impossible in theory, and only possible in practice. It proves the dumb thing is smarter than we think. At that same time, the bottom-up hive mind will never take us to our end goal. We are too impatient. So we add design and top down control to get where we want to go.

That is such a lovely and concise description of the benefits of bottom up organization combined with the benefits of top down. In some ways you could see this polarity as inside versus outside as well. For example, in chaordic organizational design, you see this manifest with the principles that are developed for action which are the collective expression that comes “top down” in a sense to guide the bottom up action of the individuals. There may be a group of people that cares for these principles and, by agreement of the rest of the group, maintains them in order to creatively constrain action. In that sense the organization is top down that allows for and opens space for bottom up agency.

To see this as inner and outer, it seems clear that from the outside, the rules for action come, but they exist to support and encourage the expression of individual volition, so that individuals, acting on their own drives and passions can connect with others to take responsibility for bringing things to life.

We have a real life example of this in the community that has collected around our learning centre here on Bowen Island. Just finishing its third year, the learning centre is a place for homeschooling families to connect with others, use the expertise of hired teachers and for the kids to supplement their homelearning with up to 2.5 days a week of work with others in a class room and resource rich setting. Each family is responsible for the learning of their own children and so we have a number of approaches being used in the community. Our family unschools, and other families use curriculum to various degrees. We are involved in a variety of activities outside of the learning centre but we also come together to work with and support each other.

The learning centre program is supported by a group of parents called the planning council who make top-down decisions about how things run at the centre. They hire the teachers, and look after the finances and also set and maintain the principles of the program. One of the principles is family participation, and so the organization runs as a bit of an Open Space. If you want something to happen, make it happen. If you need help, ask for help. Connect passion and responsibility within the principled parameters of the program and we can do stuff. If what you want doesn’t fit the program, find some other parents and offer it on your own. In this way we support 20 homelearning families, all with different styles, in a common set of activities. It works really well, and is actually surprisingly little work for the planning council. I think their biggest stress is not time per se but wrestling with the edges of the principles to maintain the integrity of the intention of the program. And that, it seems to me, is what top-down should do, while bottom up is taking care of the quality of the offerings and the details. It is, in the words of our Open Space practices, holding and supporting connection, to keep the space open for creative learning and offerings to occur.

[tags]Kevin Kelly, chaordic[/tags]

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