Homeschooling comes of age

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the modern home education movement was in its infancy. At that time, most Americans viewed home-styled education as a quaint tourist attraction or the lifestyle choice of those willing to endure more hardship than necessary. What a difference a few decades makes. Homeschooling has undergone an extreme makeover. From maverick to mainstream, the movement has acquired a glamorous, populist sheen.

Flip through a few issues of Sports Illustrated, circa 2007, and there's no shortage of news about photogenic homeschoolers who make the athletic cut. Like Jessica Long who was born in Russia, resides in Baltimore, and is an accomplished swimmer. At 15, Jessica became the first paralympian to win the prestigious Sullivan Award, which honors the country's top amateur athlete. Then there's the dashing Joey Logano who, at 17, has already won a NASCAR race.

Even presidential hopefuls and their spouses have jumped on the school-thine-own bandwagon. Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) has offered enthusiastic support for homeschooling families, and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Senator John Edwards (D-North Carolina) told the Wall Street Journal that this fall she plans to home educate the couple's two youngest children "with the help of a tutor."

As for scholastic achievements, this national competition season was remarkable, seeing home scholars crowned as champs in three major events. A twelve-year-old New Mexican named Matthew Evans won the National Word Power competition, sponsored by Reader's Digest. Thirteen-year-old Evan O'Dorney of California won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and fourteen-year-old Caitlin Snaring of Washington was christened the National Geographic Bee champ.

Then there's Micah Stanley of Minnesota who has yet to receive any lessons in a brick-and-mortar classroom building. For the past few years, he's been enrolled in the Oak Brook College of Law, a distance learning law school headquartered in Sacramento. This past February, he took the grueling, three-day California general bar examination (California allows correspondence law students to sit for the bar), and he can now add "attorney" to his resume. In his spare time, he's finishing up a book titled, How to Escape the Holding Tank: A Guide to Help You Get What You Want. Micah is 19.

A teenage lawyer/budding author, however, wouldn't surprise John Taylor Gatto, an outspoken critic of compulsory education laws and a former New York State Teacher of the Year. Writing in Harper's Magazine, Gatto forthrightly argued that "genius is as common as dirt." Perhaps. But it's also understandable that when everyday folks hear about the homeschooled Joeys and Caitlins and Micahs, they become a tad intimidated — as if this educational choice were the exclusive domain of obsessive-compulsive moms and dads with money to burn, time to spare, and a brood of driven, Type-A offspring.

Although it's commendable when the young achieve Herculean goals, homeschooling has always been more about freedom and personal responsibility than winning an Ivy League scholarship or playing at Wimbledon. In general, it has attracted working-class families of all ethnicities and faiths, who have been eager to provide a nurturing, stimulating learning experience. Of course, the unabashedly adventuresome are always an endearing staple of the movement. The Burns family, of Alaska, set out on a 36-foot sailboat this summer to travel the world for three years. Chris Burns (the dad) told the Juneau Empire he hopes "to connect with Juneau classrooms and host question-and-answer sessions while at sea," as well as homeschool the two Burns children.

In a legal sense, homeschools serve as a glaring reminder of a complex issue that has become the stuff of landmark Supreme Court cases: does the state have the authority to coerce a youngster to attend school and sit at a desk for 12 years? Whether said child has the aptitude and maturity for such a long-term contract (or is it involuntary servitude?) remains an uncomfortable topic because, in the acceptable mantra of the day, "education is a right." Such a national conversation is long overdue, as there are plenty of signs — costly remedial education and rising dropout rates, to name two — to indicate that the status quo public school model isn't kid-friendly.

Homeschooling, after all, began to catch on with the masses because a former US Department of Education employee argued that children, like delicate hothouse plants, required a certain type of environment to grow shoots and blossoms, and that loving parents, not institutions, could best create the greenhouses. It was 1969 when the late Dr. Raymond Moore initiated an inquiry into previously neglected areas of educational research. Two of the questions that Moore and a team of like-minded colleagues set out to answer were (1) Is institutionalizing young children a sound, educational trend? and (2) What is the best timing for school entrance?

In the process of analyzing thousands of studies, twenty of which compared early school entrants with late starters, Moore concluded that developmental problems, such as hyperactivity, nearsightedness, and dyslexia, are often the result of prematurely taxing a child's nervous system and mind with continuous academic tasks, like reading and writing. The bulk of the research convinced Moore that formal schooling should be delayed until at least age 8 or 10, or even as late as 12. As he explained, "These findings sparked our concern and convinced us to focus our investigation on two primary areas: formal learning and socializing. Eventually, this work led to an unexpected interest in homeschools." Moore went on to write Home Grown Kids and Home-Spun Schools. The rest, as they say, is history. The books, published in the 1980s, have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and offer practical advice to potential parent educators.

Nowadays, there's a sea of such self-help material, scores of commercial products, and online opportunities solely dedicated to encouraging families to learn together in the convenience of their homes. Homeschooling has graduated into a time-tested choice that allows children to thrive, learn at their own pace, and which frequently inspires other success stories. As our nation is famous for encouraging immigrants to reinvent themselves and achieve the American Dream, so home education does for youngsters whether they are late bloomers or are candidates for Mensa.

Above all, the merit of homeschooling is that it allows for experimentation, flexibility, and trial and error. Here is the great contrast with state-provided education. As with all systems hammered out by bureaucracies, public schools get stuck in a rut, perpetuate failures, respond slowly to changing times, and resist all reforms. Errors are not localized and contained, but all consuming and system wide. It's bad enough when such a system is used to govern labor contracts or postal service; it is a tragic loss when it is used to manage kids' minds.

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It is not racist to insist on language skills

Gordon Brown is ruling that medium-skilled migrants from outside the EU must speak and understand English. The “highly skilled” already have to; the unskilled, it seems, may remain uncomprehending. The Home Secretary adds enthusiastically that it will help integration if we “expect people coming through the skilled and slightly less-skilled route to actually be able to speak English”.

Well, duh! This is good news (though met with whingeing from employers who fear for their cheap labour, and from Tories who find it not fierce enough). It would be even better news if there were some mechanism to put the same onus on EU citizens who plan to stay, but since that is impossible we could at least refrain from gratuitously featherbedding them by putting up diversion signs in Polish to prevent lorry drivers “coming into conflict with road workers”.

The idea that residents and workers in a country should understand its language is hardly startling, nor is it innately right-wing. This present move, announced to the TUC, has a deliberately protectionist edge to it, but it need not have had. Linguistic cohesion is more important than “British jobs for British people”. Mutual understanding is a deep, vital necessity for any society. The wonder is that for so long, perhaps for the kindliest of reasons, governments have shied away from saying so.

Perhaps it is post-colonial guilt, perhaps an uneasy awareness that we ourselves, as tourists, are chronically bad at foreign languages. Either way, we have connived at a situation that promotes waste, confusion and mutual suspicion. Ignoring linguistic incompetence just extends alienation. It is not really kind at all; it has gone on for too long, and the whistle needs blowing.

It was in December that the BBC revealed the 100 million pound cost of translation services routinely provided by local authorities, courts and the NHS. It became clear that we do not translate only for tourists and asylum-seekers (which is obvious, courteous and kind). Settled residents too are not expected to understand us: in Peterborough refuse collection leaflets appear in 15 languages, and in many boroughs it is routine for all council services to be multilingual. In Islington the NHS provided a Turkish woman with one-to-one counselling, in Turkish, to stop her smoking. She had lived here for five years. A Bangladeshi woman, speaking through a translator after 22 years, memorably said: “When you are trying to help us you are actually harming. Even before we ask, all we have to do is say hello, they are here with their interpreters. We just sit here doing nothing and we don’t need to speak in English at all.”

Trevor Philllips, formerly of the Commission for Racial Equality, huffily insisted that this is globalisation, and that translation is “not a disincentive” to learning the host language. Yeah, right. Any seasoned tourist knows perfectly well that it is, even if you are only there for a week. I feel the usual sneaking British shame at not speaking Spanish, though I have been there a dozen times; but finding myself in a small central town with a healthy resistance to ignorant Brits, I learnt more Spanish in 24 hours than ever before. It was the only way to get food, drink or a train ticket. If you have to struggle into a language, you will. If “Habla Ingles?” suffices, you won’t. And if your “community” of Turks, Poles, Bangladeshis or Brits abroad is geographically tight, you can live 20 years in surly ignorance.

The other day I heard a consumer programme complaining, in righteous PC tones, that not enough banks in Wales offer Polish language leaflets and onsite translators. It made the reasonable point that this would be good business for the banks, but went beyond that into an implication of entitlement, a sense that the Polish arrivals had a “human right” to open accounts without speaking English.

I couldn’t see it. As a tourist I humbly hope for consideration as I battle through some jungle of Croatian consonants or Russian script. But if I went to live and work in a foreign country, I would assume it was my job to grab a phrasebook and limp bravely through the administrative processes. I would not assume it was their job to accommodate me. Most Poles I meet speak good English. Those who don’t – after decades of free BBC English By Radio broadcasts – should find their own translator.

Asylum-seekers – frightened, weary and poor – need special consideration: they have complex cases to make in a country they never wanted to end up in. But we are not talking here about refugees and victims, but about people who work and thrive yet sometimes have so little interest in where they are, and who we are, that they can’t be bothered to speak to us. The assumption that services must be delivered in their own language, as of right, for years on end, needs overturning.

And no, it is not racist to say so. I love those proud school signs saying “32 languages are spoken here”, provided they all speak English too. I feel just as scornful and puzzled about British expats in Southern Spain who can say only “sangria”, and about those bygone colonial memsahibs who in half a lifetime learned nothing beyond a few scolding words of kitchen Urdu. I admire the Turkish cab driver who makes conversation to improve his English, the Polish backpacker who demands “tell when I mistake”, and our Romanian friends who crossed Europe in a rusty Trabant after the fall of Ceaucescu, speaking four languages learnt off the radio and not daring to stop because a round of sandwiches in Germany would cost a month’s salary.

Migrants are often the cream of the human race, hardy and adaptable. We should not insult and emasculate them for the sake of our own liberal angst.

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Australian Feds increasing support for private universities

THE latest round of higher education place allocations cements a plan by John Howard for private providers to be as important in tertiary education as they are in school education. Of 375 new teaching places announced by federal Education, Science and Training Minister Julie Bishop yesterday, more than 50 per cent went to Christian institutions including Avondale College (NSW), Tabor College (Adelaide and Melbourne), the University of Notre Dame (Sydney and Perth) and the Christian Heritage College (Brisbane). These colleges won just over 10 per cent of the 2300 new commonwealth-supported places, or 260 places, including 200 for teaching and 60 for nursing. Last year private colleges received a lower proportion, just 6 per cent of 4600places. Ms Bishop defended the allocations, saying they were for places in accredited courses in areas of national priority.

In contrast with recent years, when regional and outer metropolitan campuses subject to low student demand have been favoured in the allocation of new places, Group of Eight universities featured prominently this year. The University of NSW, Sydney, Adelaide, Monash, Melbourne and the University of Western Australia all were granted more than 100 places each.

Ms Bishop said allocations were based on national and state priorities and fields of workforce shortage. There are more new places in engineering than any other discipline, at 560, followed by nursing (395) and science (390). Ms Bishop said all institutions that applied and were eligible had been granted places. An unprecedented number, 15, did not apply. "This is strong evidence that we have now created as many commonwealth-supported places that are needed to meet eligible student demand," Ms Bishop said. These were the last places to be allocated under the Backing Australia's Future plan for more than 39,000 places over 10 years.

Alan Robson, vice-chancellor of the UWA and incoming president of the Group of Eight research intensive universities, said it was not surprising that Go8 universities had applied for and received more places. "I think the Group of Eight mainly are the universities of first choice for students and hence, when there is a weakening of demand, it filters less into the Group of Eight," he said.

Among regional universities, only Sunshine Coast, Charles Darwin and Ballarat applied for 2008 places. Last year several regional universities including Southern Queensland and James Cook struggled to fill their places, as did Edith Cowan University in Perth. The Government has also revealed figures showing private providers are blitzing public universities in the market for full-fee paying domestic undergraduate places.

Contrary to a recent erroneous media report seized on by the Australian Labor Party and National Union of Students, the number of domestic full-fee paying students in award courses at public universities has risen a modest 6.9 per cent, comparing enrolments for the first half of 2005 with the first half of 2006. That category of enrolments increased by 24 per cent for the private universities, Bond and Notre Dame, during the same period. Among other private higher education providers accredited for the FEE-HELP student loan scheme, domestic full-fee paying enrolments rose by 95 per cent to more than 8000.

Ms Bishop said this showed students were discerning in their choice of educators. "No eligible student is forced to take a place at a private university because there are now sufficient commonwealth-supported places. This is evidence that students are making choices based on factors other than (the availability of government places)." Quality, flexibility in course provision and the availability of niche courses might be among the factors, she said.

University of Adelaide acting vice-chancellor Fred McDougall said the institution was very happy with the additional 235 places, which fit with the university's strategic plan to increase student numbers from 16,000 to 20,000. He said most of the courses targeted areas of high demand such as engineering and mining as well as nursing and other health sciences. "Clearly, given the mining boom, it was important to get extra places in engineering," Professor McDougall said. He said the extra federal funding also allowed the university to establish South Australia's first veterinary school. "We know there is unmet demand nationally for students wanting to study veterinary science," Professor McDougall said. "A new school will help to slow the brain drain of students from South Australia who are leaving to study at vet schools interstate or overseas." ...

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