Redefining Home How Home-Based Learners Decompartmentalize Our
Communities By Lynn Marie Murphy
At the end of a home education course at the
Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto,
my professor and long-time home education researcher, J. Gary Knowles,
asked for our ideas on what the role of home educating families might be
in the context of the wider community. What are the unique ways they
enrich their communities and potentially enliven public schools? I did
not have an answer at the time, but the question stayed with me, having
particular dimension for my own situation as a public school teacher who
wants to home educate my own children, and I felt compelled to explore
the topic further.
Much has been written about how home educating
families use community resources, including public schools in some
instances. But I have yet to come across anything that details what I
feel to be the unique contributions of these families to their
communities. I understand from previous discussions with home educating
acquaintances that many home educating families are particularly active
in their communities, bringing to them alternative visions of being in
the world that include a strong social and environmental consciousness.
I wanted to bring this evidence together, to counter notions that home
educating families are insular people who separate themselves from the
wider community.
With this in mind, I searched through books and
articles for examples of home educating families who volunteer, engage
in social activism, and encourage community development. And while I have
found examples to support all of this, particularly in the interviews I
conducted, I remember feeling disappointed that more was not documented.
But the more I spoke with people and the more I read, my understanding
of what it means to contribute to one’s community broadened, becoming
more encompassing, wholistic and complex than the tangible examples I
originally sought.
I began my research informally in discussion with
participants in an online Quaker homeschooling discussion group,
initiated by author David Albert. I asked this online community of
homeschoolers the following questions: What are your experiences in
terms of how your family has incorporated community involvement with
your home education practices? What are some unique ways in which home
educating families can enrich their communities? Are there ways in which
home educating families can enliven “mainstream” education/public
schools?
Many parents found the first question easy to respond to,
citing numerous examples of how their family has the time to participate
in their communities through volunteer work, social activism, sports
teams, frequent library use, and mentoring. A couple of the mothers are
La Leche League leaders, an attachment parenting/breastfeeding support
group for families. Not only do these women serve their communities in
this way, but they also bring their children to the meetings to play
with and entertain the younger ones, providing their children with a
sense of community involvement as well exposing them to positive
examples of early parenting skills.
Another parent cleans up the local playground once
a week with her children and brings her family to monthly neighborhood
improvement association meetings. This example led me to consider that
perhaps homeschooling parents, because so many of them use community
resources so frequently, have a vested interest in keeping the community
facilities safe, clean, and accessible, and therefore are inclined to
contribute to them in this way. It was very clear to me that these home
educating parents value their communities, as well as community service,
and actively cultivate these values in their children. And there were
many examples that these values were being internalized. For example,
one homeschooled youth organized and now runs a teen book discussion
group at his local library.
Behind these specific examples of community
involvement exists a belief shared by many home educators that they
enrich their communities by being out in them. One parent articulated
this particularly eloquently: “The first and important thing that comes
to mind is that we all prevent communities from being child-less zones
during nine to three. We demonstrate quietly (or not so quietly some
days) that families can be together, that parents can nurture, play and
teach or guide all at once. We decompartmentalize our communities.”
Other parents stated that in bringing “well-behaved, curious, and
intelligent children” out into the community during what have become
known as school hours, they contribute to their communities by
“[helping] others realize there are many ways to learn.”
Another parent’s response aptly illustrates this
strategy of quiet deconstruction and consciousness shifting as a means
of community contribution. She wrote, “Even a peripheral awareness that
there are people in the community doing things a bit differently can be
enormously empowering when someone is considering possibilities (of any
kind) beyond the obvious. I don’t think we need to push that awareness,
but to be there when it begins to dawn is a contribution not to be
discounted.”
Shifting our collective consciousness about what it
means both to be in the community and to be educated is something that
came out of my interview with author and Life Learning Magazine's Editor
Wendy Priesnitz as a significant community contribution. Wendy
encouraged me to develop the “general idea” of how home educators
contribute to the community by showing how they “broaden the definition
of community, and make them better by being there.” She talked about how
home educating families contribute to their communities on a “macro
level” by being out in them. “Having families out in the community every
day,” she says, “is a really important reminder alone that citizens are
all ages and we are contributing to our local communities.” This is in
contrast to kids who are “warehoused in schools” and “are forgotten
about as part of the community.” She spoke of how “an important part of
community life is to have communities populated during the day,” and
recalled a pre-industrial, agrarian lifestyle, before the inception of
“gutted communities” with people “compartmentalized at work, school, and
daycare.”
David Guterson also talks about this in his book
Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense when he laments
the artificial environment in which children spend their formative years
as being inimical to developing community:
“Today we think of schools in some of the
same ways we think of hospitals or prisons, as buildings housing scores
of people but with only a very limited connection to the world outside
their walls. They are artifices, intentionally constructed models of
adult economic life that cut children off from the social web of their
communities. Having passed their formative years chiefly among their
peers in a world devoid of the very old and the very young, a highly
structured world best characterized as competitive and cliquish, they
are ill prepared for membership in their own communities even if
adequately prepared to function in our economy.”
And while there may be little published information
on how home educators enrich communities, there is much to suggest that
schools impoverish them. In The End of Homework: How Homework
Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children and Limits Learning,
authors Etta Kravolec and John Buell state:
“If parents were no longer held captive by the
demands of their children’s schools, they could develop their own
priorities for family life. If students were permitted more freedom to
structure their own time and to explore their own interests, they would
find it much easier to develop both an authentic self and a meaningful
social life.
We believe that reform in homework practices is
central to a politics of family and personal liberation. Taking back our
home lives will allow us to begin the process of enriching our community
lives.”
Moreover, David Albert, in a response on the
Quaker Homeschool online discussion group to a home-educating parent who
wanted to know how to make use of the resources in her community without
“disturbing people,” suggests that one of the side-effects of schooling
is our increasing isolation from each other and how we have come to
accept and expect this isolation. He writes:
“What you have described is one of the myriad of
ways schools have impoverished communities. Care for children has been
thrown to the schools or back exclusively into the family. Informal
clubs – stamp clubs, coin clubs, fishing lure making clubs, quilting
bees, sewing circles – all of which used to nurture young, interested
folks have withered. What is the age of the average member of your local
Audubon? Perhaps it would be good if you begin to consider that
‘disturbing the community’ in this way is a public service.”
In the book Creating Learning Communities,
author Robin Martin connects this isolation to schools’ focus on
cultivating individualism. She shows how it is the inherent, if
unarticulated, mission of schools to foster the individualism necessary
for materialism to thrive, through its system of grading, overwhelming
emphasis on an individual’s development, improvement and performance and
non-communal focus. This fierce cultivation of individuality results in
the objectification of everyone and everything else, and a learned
practice of othering becomes almost innate to us, a practice that
isolates us from each other.
Martin writes:
“Equipped with the tools of individuality,
students and teachers are fully prepared to face an ‘objective’ world.
Objectivity allows us to presume that reality is a fixed thing composed
of separate objects . . . If the world is made up only of objects, then
one of the necessary tasks of education must be to help us learn how to
manipulate those objects. In such a world, we do not become more deeply
connected to the earth, as it is not a living, breathing entity like we
are. We learn to make distant, rational decisions based on cost/benefit
analysis. As we do this, it is only another short step from
disconnecting from our emotions altogether as we begin to treat people
as objects also. Just as factory managers become more efficient at
moving products through an assembly line, educators are trained in
methods for moving students through the system so that they are prepared
for functional roles in the future.”
Such isolation is intrinsic to school structure
that systemically segregates children and youth according to age, with
little opportunity for natural interaction with those older or younger.
Another unique way, then, in which home educators contribute to their
communities is by challenging the artificial barriers between people of
different ages that have been constructed by schools. Many parents spoke
of how they like the fact that their children are comfortable
interacting with people of all ages, and respect those older and younger
than themselves.
During an interview, Jacqui Burke, a home education
support group volunteer and home educator, said that home education
allows her the freedom to follow “natural rhythms” of both parenting and
relating to people and how this helps to break down the barriers that
separate us from each other. She told me that she believes home
educators hold a unique position in their communities as they help
dismantle arbitrary boundaries that keep people from connecting with
each other. Jacqui stated that her daughter is able to interact with
people of all ages. She feels that this makes her daughter a positive
community member because she is someone who can “cross artificial
boundaries and reestablish natural human relations so we can have a more
humane look at the world.”
Wendy Priesnitz also spoke about the importance of
dismantling these barriers and recalled taking her children to the
library during the day where they had a chance to interact with adults.
Her angle was unique in that she framed this as being a good and
important opportunity for adults to interact on a meaningful level with
children. Upon reflecting on her comment, it occurred to me that this
chance for adults and children/youth to talk to each other in a
non-hierarchical environment is very important in forging the bonds that
hold communities together. These relationships help curb the tendency
for mutual mistrust that often exists, a tendency that is cultivated in
schools where the custodial paradigm results in adults and young people
being pitted against each other.
Jacqui Burke spoke eloquently on this, saying that
now more than ever, we are forced to identify with our age group, a
process greatly facilitated by school structures, and how this, as well
as the “pressures of modern society...force us to view society with
blinders on, [so that] we don’t see what else is around us.”
I found this a very interesting point to
contemplate, and like many norms foisted upon society, I understand this
forced identification to be economically motivated. Identifying with our
age group sets up a paradoxical, but effective, dynamic of empathy,
belonging, comparison and, ultimately, competition – a dynamic that
makes us easier to market to and therefore easier to predict and
control. This understanding is relevant here as it relates to the idea
discussed by authors David Guterson and Robin Martin that schools serve
economic interests, not necessarily community-based or democratic ones
and that home educating families are in a unique position to challenge
this.
Guterson makes the point that schools prepare
students “for economic life instead of life in a community.” His
argument is that schools prepare kids to be consumers instead of active,
thinking citizens:
“Schools are supposed to teach
critical-thinking skills in order to nurture citizens fully able to
enter into a democratic society. Business, however, prefers an
uncritical consumer society guaranteed to purchase its products. In
fact, as John Goodlad’s researchers found, less that two percent of
instructional time in many public schools is reserved for discussions
requiring reasoning skills. Goodlad concludes that for the most part
schools teach passivity. Yet even if we were systematically to change
this, replacing the entrenched curriculum of passivity with a new, more
democratic curriculum of independence – one that emphasized critical
thinking – we would still find that in the case of schools, as
elsewhere, the medium is the real message. For all our talk in the
classroom of freedom, for every in-class critical-thinking exercise,
there will always be a countervailing bell, a strict schedule demanding
movement in herds, a dark background of authority, discipline, and
regimentation that in the end constitute the truest lesson of schools
and the truest preparation for modern economic life.”
It is a convincing argument that schools teach the
opposite of informed citizenship and that, instead, they merely
reinforce the herd mentality that assures the stability of the status
quo, one that centers on economic gain and the social stratification
this paradigm necessitates as students learn to compete for economic and
social rewards.
This connection between schools and consumerism is
painfully obvious in late summer with the ubiquitous back to school
marketing frenzy. It is a necessary evil, this back to school shopping,
made “easier” by stores that now offer “Six Months to Pay!” on all their
back to school items. This is not just about new shoes and lined paper.
Now families are expected to spend money on cell phones, laptops, iPods
and super-sized backbacks that children will use to cart all the
homework that will colonize their evenings. For kids who resist school,
who hate sitting still indoors for hours at a time or who are
overwhelmed by expectations, homework or lack of sleep, there is also
back to school medication, strategically advertised in my local
newspaper last August. Lots of people stand to profit from the return to
school, emphasizing one of the more obvious connections between school
and business.
Kate MacLean, a home educating parent and La Leche
League leader, shared insights similar to Guterson’s during our
interview. She said that home-educated kids are in a unique position to
resist the trends that fuel consumerism because they are not accustomed
to being “passive receptors,” which arguably, schooled kids are taught
to become. Kate feels that home educated kids are in a strong position
to become informed citizens because many of them are accustomed to
engaging actively in the world as a result of regular interaction with
adults and “less television.”
The citizenship question arises from the premise
that schools teach the skills necessary for kids to become active,
knowledgeable citizens who are prepared to uphold the values of what we
understand to be a democratic society, and that the potential for home
educated children to become such citizens is compromised. The arguments
to the contrary, however, are very compelling, suggesting that it is in
fact the other way around.
Wendy Priesnitz acknowledges that while
homeschooling does not guarantee responsible citizenship, public school
education is almost inimical to it. “How can kids learn it if they don’t
live it?” Wendy pointed out that public schools are not democracies;
children and youth are forced to attend and have few choices around what
or when they learn. Schools can teach theories of how to participate in
a democracy, but without practicing it, the lessons are meaningless,
“How can they go out in the community and make decisions if they don’t
have experience doing that?”
Guterson, who is a teacher, believes that schools
train children to become not informed citizens but workers willing to
serve a capitalist economy by cultivating the competitive edge and work
ethic required to uphold a culture of endless production and
consumption. He challenges the widely accepted idea that schools teach
kids to be responsible citizens who know how to participate in and
uphold democracy: “Schools don’t prepare children to become even
informed citizens, not to mention active ones. Besides . . . millions of
children go to schools . . . where inequality is institutionalized by
sorting students according to academic ability, which amounts to sorting
them by social class. What’s so democratic about that?”
Bruce Arai, Associate Professor at Wilfred Laurier
University in Ontario, has found that home educators are in a position
to become active citizens. He writes, “Homeschoolers are involved in
combining a different mix of attributes to become good citizens. In
particular, they emphasize participation and the importance of family as
the basis of a different definition of citizenship.” He identifies the
importance of family – a key concern of home schooling families – as
being central to the development of a sense of responsibility to
community. He says, “The strong bonds in homeschooling families are also
thought to be the basis of deliberate and informed participation in the
larger society, especially later in life.” Arai suggests that part of
this informed participation means resisting the consumerism and
materialism that seem to be at the core of mainstream society,
values/pursuits that get in the way of meaningful community
participation.
This very concern around rampant consumerism is one
of the many reasons that home educating parent Tennyson Loeh has chosen
to keep her two young daughters out of the school system. My interview
with Tennyson focused around her desire for her children to be “free
thinkers” who know and respect themselves, and respect the world around
them. She is working to do this through modeling sustainable living,
taking her children “everywhere” with her out in the community and by
encouraging them to ask questions. She doesn’t want their minds to
become clouded with the skewed values prominent in mainstream society,
namely materialism, and believes that only in home educating her
daughters does she have a good chance of teaching them to “listen to
their hearts,” not the cacophonous messages of consumerism that invade
schools via peer pressure or school-sponsored “KFC Days.”
In terms of citizenship, Tennyson feels that home
educating her children gives her an advantage in raising “two conscious
citizens.” She says, “I think I’m teaching them to respect others and
the earth that they inhabit. I treat them with respect and kids do what
they see, not so much what they are told, but what they see by example;
it’s what they live and breathe. I teach them to care about people and
the earth. We focus much more on what really matters instead of raising
new consumers.”
My discussion with Tennyson was one of those that
helped me develop my understanding of what it means to contribute to
one’s community. By modeling and passing on her commitment to
sustainable living, she contributes to her community in profound ways
that will likely ripple out through her children.
In terms of whether home educating families can
enliven public schools, I have no doubt that they could, should the
relationship that would encourage such participation exist. But for now,
such a relationship does not seem to be of interest. Most of the parents
I spoke with, both in person and online, wanted little to do with the
mainstream education system. The ideology that has informed much public
school curriculum, including increased emphasis on standardized tests,
homework, and academic streaming, is worlds away from that which is found
among home educators, even as diverse as these parents are. This is a
topic that I will explore further as I am optimistic that the twain
shall meet. I believe that as more families become frustrated with the
homework load, violence in schools and endless demands from their kids
to keep up with increasingly expensive trends, they will be looking for
alternatives. Not to homeschool, necessarily, but to be part of creating
an education system that fosters relationships and the bonds that
cultivate safe, sustainable communities. Can home educators offer some
guidance in making this shift? I think the answer is a resounding yes.
Lynn Marie Murphy is a teacher who has worked with Aboriginal youth in the north and youth-at-risk in Toronto, Ontario. She is involved in social justice issues, particularly those that relate to Aboriginal education and youth who are psychiatric survivors. She lives in Toronto with her partner Shawn and their
three children Sabine, Simone, and Shea.
