Lift Up Your Hearts!

Better Than School by Nancy Wallace (Larson Publications, 1983)

Child's Work:  Taking Children's Choices Seriously by Nancy Wallace (Holt Associates, 1990)

These stories of the education of Ishmael and Vita Wallace have been high on my list of favorite books since our own homeschooling days.  Recently I re-read them both, confirming my suspicions that the Wallaces—flying by the seat of their pants in an era when homeschooling was almost unheard of, and often illegal—discovered many of the principles now refined in Project-Based Homeschooling.

The last time I read about the Wallaces' struggles with onerous regulations and imperious school boards, I noted how blessedly out of date it was, for although there are still those in the United States who would make homeschooling illegal again if they could, for the most part homeschoolers here can rest in the knowledge that the right to direct the education of our own children is recognized in all fifty states.  This time, however, I read those parts of the books with renewed interest, since Switzerland, while much more advanced than the U.S. in some areas, is woefully behind us in this.  Some of the Wallaces' experiences and arguments may turn out to be relevant, or at least to give inspiration.

Don't you just hate it when you read an inspiring story from the past and have no idea what happened to the characters in subsequent years?  With Vita and Ishmael, at least, that question can be answered by visiting their Orpheo Duo website.

Here are a few, somewhat random, quotations.  You really need to read the books to get a good sense of the story, however.

Walking into the meeting knowing that we had a majority [of the school board] on our side was a lot better than not knowing what to expect, but I guess I really wanted more than that.  I wanted the whole board to admit that we were doing a terrific job with our kids and to be interested in our approach to education.  After all, there was a lot the public schools could have learned from us.  What disturbed me the most was that not only were two of the board members completely uninterested in what we were doing but they seemed to want the kids to go to school no matter what.  When I wrote about this to John Holt, he responded with some very insightful remarks that I'll never forget.  "One of the saddest things I've learned in my life," he said, "one of the things I least wanted to believe and resisted believing for as long as I could, was that people in chains don't want to get them off, but want to get them on everyone else.  'Where are your chains?' they want to know.  'How come you're not wearing chains?  Do you think you are too good to wear them?  What makes you think you're so special?'"  (BTS, 114-115)

It always puts me on edge when people talk about Ishmael as being "gifted."  I get even more uptight when they politely inquire whether Vita is "the same" as her brother.  No, Vita isn't the same.  Her personality is quite different and so are her interests and ways of learning.  But most important, neither child is an aberration—a creature born from a normal set of parents but with an extra set of wrinkles on its brain.

True, even I am struck when I see Vita, who is five, happily typing away at a story on the living room floor, or hear Ishmael, at age nine, alluding to Hamlet or Macbeth; but at the same time I know that Bob and I had a lot to do with the way the kids are—they weren't born that way. ... Now if Ishmael had become a math whiz while growing up in this house, which was almost barren of numbers before we took him out of school, I'd seriously begin thinking about "giftedness" or brain wrinkles, but that never happened.  Instead, we are raising two normal kids who happen to enjoy reading and writing. (BTS, 135-136)

Neither Ishmael nor Vita slept through the night until they were about three or four years old.  Not only did they liven up around midnight, but they always insisted on company. ... Finally, we managed to hit upon a fairly satisfactory compromise.  Ishmael first, and later Vita, would sit in bed and listen as Bob and I took turns reading to them.  We read thick books with few pictures in the hopes of boring them to sleep. ...  The big trouble, though, was that the kids didn't bore easily.  Often we had to read for hours at a stretch—but at least Bob and I insisted on reading the books that we liked.  (BTS, 136)

It was a really scary thing to face up to the fact that we might risk being labeled criminals or child abusers by moving casually into a state which might, for all we knew, prohibit homeschooling or have such stringent regulations that we couldn't possibly meet them.  As I anxiously researched New York State's education laws and court precedents, I had visions of Peter and Brigitta Van Daam, home-schoolers in Rhode Island.  Thanks to the TV screen at a neighbor's house, I had watched them bravely waving good-bye to their children as a policeman drove them off to jail for failing to comply with the state's compulsory attendance law.  I thought, too, of the Sessions family in Iowa, in and out of court for years while fighting to keep their boys out of school, and of John Singer, the father of seven children in Utah, whose battle with school authorities ended tragically when he was shot to death in a battle with some sheriff's deputies.  (BTS, 238)

[A]s musicians usually judge the talent of young beginners, these children were not at the start unusually talented.  I know some of the tests by which musicians try (to no useful purpose) to measure and judge musical talent in young children, and by these tests and measures I don't think either of the Wallace children would have been called more than average.  They have gone as far as they have not because they began with unusual talents but because they have the good luck to have parents who love and make music, because their mother is herself a very sensitive, understanding, patient, and skillful teacher, because they have been much encouraged without being in the least pressured, and because—since they don't go to school—they have time to work on music as much as they like.  (BTS, Introduction by John Holt)

Vita and Ishmael are impressively competent at their chosen work, so much so that some readers may think this is a story about prodigies and consider it irrelevant to their own children or children they know.  Child's Work is, indeed, about Vita's and Ishmael's skill at music, composition, art, and writing.  Yet if this were all that Nancy had to tell, the book would not be as useful as it in fact is.  For Nancy, the most interesting question about Vita and Ishmael is not, "What can they do?" but "Why have they been able to do so much; what conditions have allowed them to flourish?"  If we think of Vita and Ishmael as prodigies, we avoid having to think about what helped them become as competent as they are.  What if all children had the time to experiment, to pursue their own work, to draw on the resources around them?  Might we then discover that children's capacities, and their ability to find work they love and pursue it wholeheartedly, are greater than we ever dreamed?  (CW, Forward by Susannah Sheffer)

When we first took Ishmael out of school nobody had yet had enough experience to tell us what was "normal," what was possible.  In the beginning, at least, we had to discover it all for ourselves.  Eventually, what came to seem to us the most normal was, in fact, our biggest discovery, and one that in many ways led to all the possibilities that homeschooling has since opened up for us.  It was this:  that when Vita and Ishmael are busy, they are simply busy.  Despite the ways and attitudes of the rest of the world, they refuse to see a distinction between schoolwork and everything else they do.  They are genuinely baffled when people ask, "But what do you do just for fun?" as if to imply that doing anything of real value and importance couldn't by definition be classified as giving light-hearted pleasure, and that after a hard day's work, we all need a change.  "But why?" I see Vita and Ishmael wonder.

Once, when a reporter came to interview Ishmael, he was so amazed by Ishmael's bemused attitude that he said, "Oh, come on now, isn't there anything you have to do that you don't like?"

Ishmael thought and thought, his chin resting in the cup of his hand.  Finally, to save time, and almost certainly because I was feeling desperate to appear at least somewhat conventional, I said, "Well, you don't really like math that much, do you, Ishmael?"

"Yes, I do," he said.  "Algebra is really beautiful—at least when it works."

"What about taking out the trash, then," the reporter persisted.

 "Well," Ishmael said thoughtfully, "I haven't done much of that.  I'll have to try it."  (CW, 5-6)

"Always do your own work.  Never copy other people's."  This lesson haunts most of us throughout our school years.  It is one that, until Vita and Ishmael managed to teach me otherwise, I accepted without question.  Yet now it seems to be one of the major misconceptions about learning that the schools perpetuate.

When we take it for granted that there is a clear distinction between knowing and not knowing ("Vita can't yet read"), we tend to become so sure of "right" answers that we don't realize the importance of allowing children to discover for themselves what is right and to develop their own solutions and their own methods for arriving at those solutions.  Out of impatience with our children's tentativeness, as John [Holt] puts it, and a suspicion of their chosen methods, we all too often threaten their ability as scientists and separate them from their own curiosity.  Once humiliated by my second grade teacher, I lost all sense of the meaning of multiplication.  It took me years to rediscover it.  (CW, 54)

As writers ... Vita and Ishmael used us the way Bob and I use each other, as colleagues rather than simply as teachers.  Vita didn't want unasked-for help with spelling, but she certainly wanted help with style and clarity, even at four or five.  (CW, 61)

I remember John Holt on one of his visits to us, pacing the kitchen floor and saying with some agitation, "Some people just don't understand!  Tennis would be no fun at all if we simply hit the ball whenever we liked.  It's the court, the net, and even the rules of scoring that make the game worth playing at all."  As if inspired by the very limitations ... that [literary] forms establish, Vita and Ishmael have always experimented in their own writing with different literary styles, imitating (or more accurately, intuiting the rules of) the grammatical structures that the specific form demands.  (CW, 63-64)

John Holt wrote, "We do not ask or expect a child to invent the wheel starting from scratch.  He doesn't have to.  The wheel has been invented.  It is out there, in front of him. ...  A child does not need to be told what wheels are and what they are for in order to know.  He can figure that out for himself, in his own way, in his own good time. ... The whole culture is out there.  What I urge is that a child be free to explore and make sense of that culture in his own way."  (CW, 96)

[S]o often our expectations lead to disappointment and sorrow.  Yet if we were absolutely detached from the world—even if we had no sorrows—that would be terrible.  I'm convinced that we were born into the world in order to live in it and be attached to it, and if attachment to other people and things gives us sorrow, all that means is that happiness is not the absolutely most important thing in life.  (CW, 96; Ishmael Wallace, age 14)

Project-Based Homeschooling:  Mentoring Self-Directed Learners by Lori Pickert (independently published at CreateSpace, 2012)

Janet's enthusiasm over Project-Based Homeschooling led me to be sure I read the book while I had access to it in Switzerland.  I had to get over some misconceptions, and I found the ideas intimidating, but I agree:  it's a must-read for homeschoolers, and in truth important for all parents.  Maybe for everybody.

The Misconception  Way back when, in our homeschooling days, a popular approach was called Unit Studies.  Here's an essay on unit studies as they relate to what's now called Classical Education; it give a pretty good idea of what they are about.  Basically, you pick a topic you hope your child will be interested in, and integrate the teaching of all subjects into a study of that topic.  At the time, I found the method too structured, too school-at-home, and too much work.  I assumed project-based homeschooling was a re-working of unit studies.

I was wrong.  There are similarities:  a child working on a project is integrating many disciplines and skills together.  But project-based homeschooling is an excellent example of why unschooling, well done, is absolutely not the "let the kid play video games all day" approach its detractors think it is. 

Projects of this sort are the child's idea and the child's responsibility.  That doesn't mean, however, that the parents are off the hook.  It seems to me that the work involved in observing and coaching a project is much harder than following a curriculum.  Which leads me to ...

The Intimidation  I love the ideas.  I really do.  But even as a do-it-yourself, lone wolf kind of homeschooler, this is out-of-my-comfort-zone thinking.  Probably because if Earth is my comfort zone, art projects are somewhere around Neptune, and so much of the examples here involve using art materials.  The author seems to think it natural to work through one's ideas by making a painting or modelling in clay.  I don't believe I've ever in my life even thought about doing that—and I've live a lot of years—so the idea of coaching a child to do so leaves me queasy.  Fortunately, Lori Pickert was kind enough to explain, in a comment on Janet's review, that "if drawing and painting make you nervous, there’s still building, writing, designing t-shirts and websites, putting on skits, making brochures and posters, etc. etc. etc.—it’s more about helping kids figure out a way to help others learn and along the way that reinforces what they know/don’t know and how you collaborate, share, etc."

Also, she's careful to give the neophyte a break:

Surprisingly often, people will champion self-directed learning for children but not allow those children's parents the same freedom and respect.  It's their way or the highway, and you had better start doing it the right way (their way) right away.  Your kids should learn at their own pace, follow their interests, and you should trust that they'll eventually learn everything they need to know.  You, on the other hand, should get with the program, right now, 100%, or else.  You don't need to have your own opinions or ideas; ours will suffice.  There's no time to experiment and see if these ideas work for you; take it on faith or you're part of the problem.

If your child deserves to learn at his own pace and have his own ideas, so do you.  Whatever you champion for your child, make sure you also give to yourself:  the right to follow your own path, work at your own pace, follow your own interests, make mistakes, and try again.  Whatever you want for your children, you are far more likely to help them achieve it if you live it yourself.

It's hard to do justice to the project-based homeschooling concept without taking a lot more time and effort than I'm willing to put forth at the moment—not to mention that I'd need the book, which presently is some 4500 miles away.  However, I do have some excerpts, which I copied down before relinquishing the book.

The quotes

Helping your child direct and manage his own learning does not mean immediately giving him complete control of his entire curriculum.  You can balance assigned work with self-chosen work.  We are talking about that essential portion of your child's learning life that you will devote to helping him do his own self-chosen work—you get to decide how big that portion will be.

There are many things you can do to help your child direct and manage her own learning, but perhaps the most important one is choosing how and where to put your attention. ... Think about what you value most, because that's what deserves your attention.  Your child will respond by doing more of whatever earns your focus.

Creative work requires big chunks of unscheduled time.  It requires freedom to explore, to try different things, to just think and imagine—and it requires a relaxed mindset.  It is impossible to take your time and explore an idea in many different ways if you feel pressured by a lack of time or someone else's expectations.

I agree that this is the ideal, though I can't help thinking of all the really great creative work throughout history that developed under intense pressures of time, patrons' expectations, and even hunger.

Better-quality art supplies make for more beautiful representations and encourage your child to put more care into their making. ... High-quality materials arranged beautifully send a message to your child that his work is important and valued. ... They say, "Your work matters.  You deserve the best." ... Quality materials inspire quality work.

If you have more than one child doing project work together, they may need to learn to trust the abundance of materials in the art studio or workspace.  They may want to glue thirty buttons to a single piece of paper—they would rather use up all the materials than risk having them used up by someone else.  Rather than setting limiting rules like "three buttons per person per day," you might want to ride it out and let them see that when they use things up, they'll be replaced.  (It can help to start by offering cheaper materials first.  Popsicle sticks come to mind.)

A child who draws, designs, creates, and builds every day is more likely to feel confident and optimistic about his skills.  The more practice he has, the more fluent he will become. The more it's a part of your ordinary routine, the more likely he is to be able to articulate his ideas the way he envisions them.

Giving your child a lot of isolated, one-off experiences (say, with weekly themes or random field trips) is like giving her one plastic brick, one wooden block, one gear, etc.  She has a handful of things to construct with, but what can she make?  The pieces don't fit together.  Your child can't combine them to make something meaningful. ... Having a series of isolated, stand-alone experiences—at trip to the orchard, a visit to the planetarium, a day at the zoo—lets your child learn a little bit about several different things. ... Moving from one opportunity to the next, she never gets the chance to dig below the surface.  Having a series of experiences that connect meaningfully to one another allows her to begin to do more challenging intellectual work.  A trip to the orchard, a visit to a local farm, interviewing the produce manager at the grocery store, back to the orchard, talking to the local extension officer, dissecting and sketching apples, planting an apple tree, going to the nursery, visiting a different orchard at the university—all of these experiences connect to one another.

I can appreciate the need to go into depth—without believing any less in the importance of having many, varied experiences.  It's the breadth of experience that leads to further interest that leads to the desire for depth.  I guess it's one of those profound truths for which the opposite is also a profound truth.  (I learned this concept from Gretchen Rubin, but apparently Niels Bohr was there before her.)

Remember to let your child's ideas take precedence. ... Don't take over.  Don't flood him with your own ideas; write them in your journal and save them for later. ... Keeping track of your own ideas can help you stay alert to possibilities, but make sure your child is focused on his ideas, not yours. ... If you have a particular thing in mind—an answer, an idea, a plan—then you may miss your child's idea, question, or plan.  He'll figure out quickly that you're thinking of or fishing for a particular answer or response, and he will either stop driving the project and focus on pleasing you or shut down rather than offer up something he suspects may be wrong or not what you want.

When she's working, it's inevitable that she'll become stuck, make a mistake, or become confused.  Help her by modeling how to work through it rather than just giving her a solution.  Don't straighten out her thinking for her—let her tease the knots apart by herself.

If you see your child headed off in the wrong direction, don't jump in to correct him.  Wrong turns can lead to great discoveries, and self-caught, self-corrected mistakes are more likely to be understood and remembered.

When he's frustrated or angry about something that went wrong, don't cheerlead and don't become upset yourself.  Project calm acceptance (things will go wrong; it's inevitable) and optimism (you can always find another way; there's a solution somewhere).  Suggest to your child that he can put his work away and look at it again tomorrow if he's not ready to try something else right away.

Avoid empty, nonspecific praise:  "Great job." "Beautiful drawing." "Good work."  Make statements that describe your child as a powerful learner. ... "That was frustrating when the wheels fell off, but you didn't give up and you fixed it." ...

Let your child talk about his work.  Rather than praising him with words, show him with your actions how much you value what he's doing.  Listen, pay attention, and always follow through when you make a promise. ...

Instead of praise, focus on building a family culture that appreciates, celebrates, and cultivates meaningful work through daily conversation, sharing, dedicating time to it, and giving it a place of honor in your home.

You help her reflect on and assess her work, so she can judge whether she has made her best effort and reached her goals.  But she gets to be the judge.

Reflecting is crucial for transforming a simple learning experience into a larger experience about learning how to learn.  In project-based homeschooling, we build reflection into the learning process.  Rather than stopping with a finished product, we invoke that slow learning and build in an extra step, which sends us back to consider, refine, and revise our ideas and the work.

In project work, you can't just keep taking things in—you have to put something out.  You have to create, you have to build, you have to interpret.  You have to share.

Ouch. This is why I can't keep taking photographs without organizing and editing them for others to enjoy. This is why I mustn't continue to indulge in the pleasure of doing genealogy research without taking the time to present the data in a way that others can understand and appreciate it.

If you want to help your child learn how to finish—and it might be the most important lesson in this book—you must become a person who finishes.

Keys for finishing:

• Show up.  Commit to making the time and using the time.
• Use small goals to accomplish big goals.
• Set yourself up to succeed:  put a system in place.
• Aim for learned competence.  ["Value effort over end results.  Accept that people who do challenging work are always going to make mistakes along the way.  Focus on nurturing the habits and attitudes that support strong thinking and learning."]

Your core values must align with your goals, which must align in turn with your everyday choices.

Really listen to what adults around you say about children—not their own children, but children in general.  Many adults think very little of children and their abilities and motives—possibly because they think very little of themselves and their own abilities and motives.  They transfer their negative beliefs onto children.  If adults thought of themselves as strong, capable learners who enjoy challenges and want to contribute, presumably they would see children the same way.

The Follow-Up  There's much more information on the Project-Based Homeschooling website.  Here's a quote I like from an article on boredom.

We want [our children] to choose intellectual, creative activities—in general, we want them to choose higher-value ways to spend their time. But how do we support that?

Parents bemoan the fact that all their kid wants to do is watch TV and play Xbox. Yet the heart of their home is set up to look like a shrine devoted to exactly those two things. There’s a TV the size of a twin bed and every chair in the room—the most comfortable chairs in the house, by the way—[is] arrayed around it in rapt devotion. The Xbox is nestled alongside.

When you compare that shrine to screen-based entertainment to the area of the house devoted to their child’s other interests....  Oh, wait. There is no area like that.

The Connection?  I think it's no coincidence that Project-Based Homeschooling reminded me of the early days of unschooling.  Recently I re-read Nancy Wallace's Better than School and Child's Work and was struck by how much the education of Ishmael and Vita Wallace was very much an embryonic form of this concept.

The Conclusion  As I said, I'm indimidated, because this approach appears to have a steep learning curve. But I'm sure it could be of value in my own projects, so I plan to look into it further. I'll end with one more quotation, one that epitomizes the unschooling philosophy as I remember it, and shows how much the term has morphed over time, at least in the minds of the news media and the general public.

Children, even when very young, have the capacity for inventive thought and decisive action.  They have worthwhile ideas. ... They want to be a part of things.  It's up to us to give them the opportunity to express their creativity, explore widely, and connect with their own meaningful work.

Many parents and teachers agree readily that children have these abilities, but they want to believe they can (and perhaps should) blossom naturally with no interference from adults.  Traditional educators think this will happen in the child's free time—presumably sometime between the school bell ringing in the afternoon and bedtime, in and amongst homework, extracurricular activities, team practices, and play dates.  Many parents want to believe it will happen if their child has adequate free time.  They hope their child will drift naturally away from the TV set and the video game console toward literature, nature, and science.  They know that their child is intelligent and creative, and they expect—or hope—that deep thinking, rich exploration, and a strong work ethic will follow.

We can do better than that.

Rather than expecting children to seek out a balanced life all on their own, we can help them live it.  We can create an everyday life that prioritizes what we value most.  We can help our children grow up experiencing creativity, inquiry, and making ideas happen as part of their normal, everyday life, from their earliest days.

We can help them live a life based on learning and doing.

While I've been here for Daniel's birth, I've had the privilege of joining the family for their noontime and evening family times.  They begin with a general picking up of toys, followed by the meal.  Family devotions, based on those in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, come immediately after lunch, and again in the evening after bedtime preparations and some play time (if the former haven't taken too long).

Two of the most amazing parts of the procedure are individual prayers with the children—Joseph spontaneously started praying for Daniel as he is prayed for by the adults—and singing time.  The latter has been a growth opportunity for me despite all my choir training, because it's done a cappella.  Normally I don't find singing the alto line of hymns to be difficult, but singing without accompaniment is much more of a challenge.  Nonetheless, it's been awesome.  Even our three-part harmony is lovely, and it was really great when Porter was here to add the tenor part to our soprano, alto, and bass.  The kids don't sing with us—yet—but are taking it all in.  Joseph has memorized several of the hymns and can occasionally be heard singing parts of them as he goes about his daily activities.  (We have another grandson who sings or whistles a lot, too.  Recently he was overheard moving seamlessly between Funniculi, Funnicula and Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.)

With all due respect to Sunday School/Children's Church, Vacation Bible School, and the many and varied children's music programs available, I think this integrated family prayer and singing time is an unbeatable foundation for a strong spiritual and musical education.

Not to mention a whole lot of fun.

Vivienne's post is overdue, but it's long, and getting written in bits and snatches.  So today I'll record a Joseph story before I forget it.

Early this morning, Joseph awoke and went into the bathroom to get dressed.  He seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time in there, so I peeked in (the door was open) to discover him sitting naked, counting the holes in the laundry hamper.  In French.  I backed out and left him alone, though I made a point of listening.  He counted 115 with no trouble, which was impressive, given how squirrelly French counting gets past 69.

But this hamper might have been designed just for Joseph, because the air vents are not just holes, but shaped into circles, triangles, and rectangles.  After the first enumeration, Joseph began again, this time counting the triangles....

There's never a dull moment around here; it's time to write them up that's scarce.

The question of the day is, why have I been writing mundane book reviews when I could be telling more grandchild stories?

This one is again about Joseph.  I wish I could have recorded the moment, but there's no more certain way to break a mood than to bring out a camera.

While Vivienne naps, Joseph takes a rest in which he doesn't need to sleep, but must play quietly by himself for two hours.  This is a lovely, creative period for him and he has no trouble filling the time with activity.  When quiet time is over, especially if Vivienne is still asleep, Janet usually goes in and they enjoy some one-on-one time together.  Joseph particularly enjoys working on the blackboard that was his "gift from Vivienne" when she was born, and that's what they were doing when I walked in on them yesterday.

The room was (no surprise) a mess, and Janet was helping Joseph pick up.  She would write on the blackboard, "Please bring me the sheep"; Joseph would read the sentence, go get the sheep and put it where it belonged, then wait for Janet to change the sentence:  "...the other sheep" or "...the boy and the dog" or "...two hens."  Not a very efficient way of picking up toys, but totally delightful to Joseph—and to Grandma, who never tires of watching this barely-three-year-old blow her socks off.

(All our grandchildren blow my socks off.  This is why I am usually barefoot.)

The next time I came into the room they were writing numbers.  Janet would write, say, 3,725,304 and Joseph would read the number.  (He crowed with delight at 111,111.)  Then it would be Joseph's turn to write.  After a while, the game morphed into Roman numerals.  At one point, Joseph wrote vii, and I explained that that was the lower case version, whereas VII was uppercase.  But when Janet wrote VII, she drew the top and bottom lines all the way across, as I was taught in school.  The game then transitioned into Greek letters, and Joseph wrote an alpha, added lines above and below, and announced it was an upper case alpha.

I did not overtly correct him, but exclaimed over his logical thought processes.  Janet, however, noticed that he was quite aware from my reaction that he had done something "wrong."  He didn't fuss about it (though sometimes he does when corrected), but grew quiet and tentative for a while as they continued writing the Greek alphabet.  No wonder she and Stephan prefer not to correct him, but to let him adjust his own model of the world over time.

After the journey from reading to large numbers to Roman numerals to Greek letters, it was back to cleaning up, then playing with/fighting over the Brio train set with his sister.  Which event is "normal"?  Around here, both of them.

Oh, one more quiet time story.  Joseph had been disobedient and surly over some issue, so Janet told him I would not be able to help him pick up after quiet time.  When cleanup time came, he was distressed, and kept begging, "Count in French!"  (When I'm helping, I count each piece of the train set, or the Legos, or puzzle, as he and Vivienne put them away.  Depending on his mood and mine, I count in English, French, or High German.  We all miss Dad-o, who would count in Dutch for them.)  Finally, I took pity on him, and told him, "Joseph, I can't count in French for you today, because you disobeyed and had a bad attitude.  But, you know, you can count in French."  At which revelation he picked up all the toys, cheerfully counting past 50 in that language.

I'm not sure, now, whether Hooker and Company... is a favorite picture of Joseph's or just a favorite name. He seems to have a preference for long phrases, or at least he practices them more. During today's naptime I overheard him repeatedly reciting (while playing with trains) the Albert Anker title, Heinrich Pestalozzi and the Orphans in Stans.

One thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is how absolutely clear and distinct is Joseph's diction, which I find unusual for someone just a month past his third birthday.  It makes me feel guilty for my own sloppy speech!

I also catch myself using unnecessary "child speech"—not baby talk, but the simple way adults usually talk to beginning speakers, such as, "say 'please.'"  Like any three-year-old, Joseph needs to be reminded to ask politely, but it appears to be just as easy for him to say, "Please, Grandma, may I have some more milk?" as simply, "please."  And now that he has caught on to that, the reminder, "what do you say"—or a pause, or similar actions that parents use to get their children to say please—will often evoke the whole sentence, with "milk" swapped out for the appropriate word.

When did "different" come to require a diagnosis?

The child who once was an energetic boy now has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  The shy kid who likes math and science more than his classmates do is "on the autism spectrum."  We have conflated normal-defined-as-average with normal-defined-as-free-from-disease, and view with suspicion anyone who strays too far—in any direction—from the common herd.  It's a very contemporary diagnosis, too:  today's hyperactive child would likely have been an admired leader in Viking society.

We are learning, possibly too late, of the dangers of narrowing the once-vast diversity of life on our planet, especially in agriculture, where nearly every Thanksgiving dinner is dependent on a single breed of turkey—turkeys so stupid as to be unable to reproduce without human intervention—and where one variety-specific disease could wipe out nearly every existing banana plant.  I believe we have a similar problem in the human population, where for all we talk about the importance of diversity, we are identifying more and more people as abnormal—people who would in an earlier day have been considered merely quirky, or even honored for their differences.  We then attempt to "cure" them by squashing them into standardized boxes, the most common of which is school.

I officially gave up on the psychiatric profession's labels when I discovered hyperlexia:  "the precocious ability to read words without prior training in learning to read typically before the age of five."  If children aren't reading by the end of first grade, schools and parents begin to worry, and yet reading before kindergarten is a problem?  What's with that?

The proximate inspiration for this post was observing grandson Joseph, age three, as he is learning to speak.  His speech is much more echolalic than I am accustomed to, and because that is yet another psychiatric diagnosis, I was wondering if I should be concerned—though it's difficult even to think of a child who speaks two languages as being "behind" in speech.

Now that I'm where I can observe Joseph directly and interact with him I can laugh at any concerns, though I doubt that would stop the psychiatrists from labelling him.  His speech is definitely different from that of the average child his age, and so is the way he is figuring out language patterns.  But it's not bad; it's just different.  And fascinating.

Instead of repeating words and short phrases that he hears from other people, then gradually putting them together into longer and longer verbalizations, Joseph remembers, and repeats, entire sentences and long passages, such as the name of one of one of his favorite Frederic Church paintings:  Hooker and Company Journeying through the Wilderness from Plymouth to Hartford in 1636.  Really.  With such things as these as his basic language building blocks, it's not surprising that his approach to speech is unusual.  Instead of creating phrases of increasing complexity by a more additive method, he starts with a long sentence, takes it apart, and puts it back together.

Recently he and I were watching the people walk up and down a main street in Zermatt; more precisely, we were observing their dogs.  "Here comes a dog," I said, and Joseph repeated, "Here comes a dog."  Then he expanded with, "Here comes a white dog."  Later, he proclaimed, "Here comes another dog," and still later, "Here comes a little, white dog."  Same pattern, expanded from the inside out.

It is my totally unverifiable theory that Joseph started out thinking in large chunks of language.  For example, "put your shoes on" is associated, as an entire sentence, with the act of putting on his shoes.  Thus, whether describing his actions or asking for help, "put your shoes on" has been the phrase of choice (sometimes modified to "no put your shoes on").  Gradually, however, he is dissecting these chunks and discovering the recombinant possibilities.

It's fascinating to observe.  It's different.  It's not normal-defined-as-average.  But it's certainly not a disease.

This quotation from an interview with Anne Fine set me to thinking.  (H/T Stephan)

[I] hate the way that we have weeded out the things that I remember made my heart lift in primary school, and were transforming in my secondary education. I mean, we did so much singing when I was at school – folk songs, hymns, we sang everything. But now that seems to have gone, along with the language of the Book of Common Prayer and so much classic poetry. And school days are horrifically long if pretty well everything you are doing lacks colour and style, just for the sake of 'relevance' and 'accessibility'".

Music was a big part of my own elementary school, though not being British we missed out on the BCP.  Music lessons started in grade four (of six) for strings and in fifth for band instruments.  Chorus started at about the same time, and in two of the three schools I experienced, we were singing three-part harmony.  (Occasionally four, as in one school we had a set of older boy twins whose voices had mostly changed.)  These musical activities were optional, but what stands out most in my mind in contrast to today is that nearly every classroom had a piano, and many of the teachers could play it.  (So could some of the students, and we were allowed to use it some ourselves outside of class.)  We sang patriotic songs, folk songs, hymns, Negro spirituals, and children's songs.  And most of these we read out of music books.  Not that we were specifically taught much in the way of reading music, but we were expected to absorb basic skills simply by observing the relationship between the printed notes and what we sang.

I should note that these were not "music magnet schools" but ordinary public elementary schools in a small village/rural school district in the late 1950's and early 60's.

Our own children had a fantastic music teacher in elementary school, there's no doubt about that, and their musical education outside of school was far greater than mine, with the availability of private music lessons, youth orchestras, and excellent church choirs.  And being in the South, their high school chorus still sang the great Western choral music, which had already been all but banned in the schools we'd left behind in the North because it is largely church music.  So I'm not complaining about that.

But something great has been lost in general education if there's no longer daily singing in the classroom, children graduate knowing nothing of the music of the past and without the most basic music-reading skills, and adults would rather attend a concert or plug into an iPod than raise their own voices in song.

I don't think, based on the interview, that I would like Anne Fine's books.  But she's spot on in the quote.  "Relevance" and "accessibility" are two of the dirtiest words in the educationist's vocabulary.

What were your musical experiences in the early school years?  How have they affected your adult life?

Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett and David Wilezol (Thomas Nelson, 2013)

It is the best of times and the worst of times for education.  From preschool through higher education, there has been a steady decline in the quality of public education in at least the half-century I’ve been observing it.  If my father is to be believed—and he was always a very reliable source—it’s been declining for a lot longer than that.  He was frequently appalled at my generation’s ignorance of basic history, geography, and literature.  (He’d have said the same thing about basic arithmetic, but he was surrounded by engineers.)  It doesn’t take much observation to realize that today the average American’s grasp of those subjects makes me look brilliant.

At the same time—and my father would concur—in some fields, for some people, knowledge and ability has soared.  As a science fair judge, he was blown away by the scope and quality of the research done by high school students.  His own high school had offered no math beyond trigonometry, and it was rare among high schools to offer even that.  My high school offered only one Advanced Placement course—and that for seniors—whereas our children had at least a dozen to choose from, beginning as freshmen.  And yet only a few students were actually prepared to take advantage of the generous offerings:  back in fifth grade, I would have said the expectations of their teachers were well below those of my own, and far below those of my father’s.

Despite the best efforts of educators to mush us all into a sameness at any level—better all low than some higher than others—there has always been an upper class and a lower class when it comes to education, and there always will be.  What I’ve been noticing is that the highs are getting higher, the lows are getting lower, and the middle class is rapidly descending—much as is happening with economic measures.

I’m hoping the economic situation does not lead to revolution, but there’s a crisis and a revolution coming in education and I say, bring it on!

Except for Catholics, for whom parochial school was usually an option, and the rich, who had their exclusive, expensive private schools, for as long as I remember—and a long time before that—sending one’s children to the local public school was the assumed, unquestioned, default position.  About 40 years ago Protestant schools began to flourish as well, as more and more Christians found themselves less and less happy with the values being taught in the default schools.  Secular private schools arose to meet the needs of parents of the hippie generation who wanted a different approach to education for their children.  And then came homeschooling, for which there are nearly as many reasons as there are homeschoolers.  Even public schools got into the act, with magnet schools and some—though pitifully limited—choices offered to families.  What all these new options have in common is that more parents and students are now thinking about what’s best for their situations and making informed choices, even if they end up in the default position anyway.

Bennett—former U.S. Secretary of Education—and Wilezol wish to see the same thing happen at the level of higher education.  Just as our public schools have consistently consumed higher and higher sums of money for lower and lower return, so college tuition has risen explosively and yet left an unconscionable population of young people with staggering debt and no employment beyond what they could have found with just a high school diploma.  Everyone from parents to high school guidance counselors to college financial aid advisors to President Obama is urging high school students to make college the default option, and Bennett says this is a disaster waiting to happen—or rather having already begun.  College education, he says, is likely to be the next “bubble,” and when it bursts it will be as bad as the housing bubble.

If I were rating solely for the ideas presented in this book, it would receive five stars.  But the writing could have used a better editor—more than once the same story is presented twice—and the sheer quantity of numbers thrown about is overwhelming and wearying even for a math geek like me.  But even though I’m skeptical of some of Bennett’s numbers—if only because he sometimes uses the same statistic to bolster opposite points—there’s more than enough convincing evidence to prove his thesis.

Everyone considering attending (and/or paying for) college within the next 20 years should read this book.  Now.  What’s best about it is that the authors present facts, figures, philosophies, and scenarios but fall short of (better, rise higher than) answering the title’s question either yea or nay.  Whether or not college is “worth it” is a complex issue comprising such questions as, “for whom?” “for what purpose?”  “which college?” and “at what cost?”  The objective of Is College Worth It? is not to dismantle the higher education system in the United States, but to rethink it, above all encouraging students and their parents to put aside their prejudices, do their “due diligence,” and choose what is best for their particular situation, rather than simply taking the default. 

Reading the first section of the book, it is tempting to wish that Bennett was not so focused on the “return on investment” of a college education in purely financial terms.  Isn’t college all about growth and maturity and broadening one’s horizons?  Has someone who choses homemaking, motherhood, volunteer work, or working for less than his or her maximum potential income wasted a college education?  “Yes,” and “not at all,” the authors would say later on, but for many reasons the economic calculation is more relevant than ever before.  Students have been sold a bill of goods—by those who should know better—that going to college will guarantee them higher-paying jobs.  On average, this is true, but “average” includes doctors, lawyers, and petroleum engineers, which masks what happens to anthropology, religion, and women’s study majors, let alone the 40% of first-time freshmen who fail to graduate after six years of college.  College costs have skyrocketed, a fact cleverly hidden from students by college financial aid offices, which class as “aid” whopping loans that “don’t have to be paid until after you graduate.”  It’s astonishing how many college-bound teens have graduated from high school without realizing the effect on debt of compounding interest.  Then again, they’ve been lured by the siren song of, “it’s an investment; you’ll easily pay it off once you’re earning a paycheck."  Which is patently false for an increasingly worrisome segment of the population.  They’re defaulting, they’re mad, and all they can do is Occupy Whatever and whine that the world is unfair.  To be fair to them, it is our generation that let them think that college was a time for lavish living, wild parties, and little work—all on someone else’s dime $100,000.  Now the bill has come due, and they realize that much of it was on their tab after all.

How did we get to the point where college is where children go to become morally and financially wasted?  I suppose my generation—the ill-named flower children—deserve much of the blame for the moral degeneration.  But the proliferation of massive, crippling student loans is of more recent origin, and Bennett puts that at the combined feet of the Federal government and the colleges themselves.  Intentions were good, but you know the rest of that saying.  The dramatic increase in student loan money has fueled not only correspondingly increased tuition, but has led colleges (who have no stake in the loan repayment) to push loans on students who have no reasonable expectation of being able to pay them off.   In order not “to leave (Federal) money on the table,” colleges have every incentive to accept students who are not fit for college, and to lower academic standards so they bring in student aid dollars for as long as possible.  More sickening still is the use to which much of the increased tuition money—not to mention alumni donations—is being put:  the proliferation of obscure departments, enormous sports facilities, luxurious dormitories designed to wow prospective students (our own University of Central Florida is a recent case in point), and obscenely high salaries and benefits for a few super-star professors and administrators while more and more classes are being taught by poorly-paid adjunct professors with no benefits.

It’s a situation that’s bound to blow up sooner or later, and Bennett predicts (and perhaps hopes, for the sake of necessary if painful correction) it will be sooner.  It was a decade or so ago that a math professor friend prophesied that someday parents would wake up to what they were actually getting from their extravagant college outlay.  We’ve been a little slower on the uptake than he expected, but the time is coming.

There is some good news:    First, contrary to common belief, there are many good, well-paying jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree.

One study conducted by Georgetown University found that by 2018, nearly fourteen million jobs will require more than a high school education but less than a bachelor’s degree. … In 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics identified twenty jobs typically requiring less than a bachelor’s degree that had a median salary of $50,000 or more, far above the median annual wage of all professions of about $34,000.  These included air traffic controllers ($108,000), dental hygienists ($68,000), and geological and petroleum technicians ($54,000), jobs that won’t disappear anytime soon.  Many of the jobs on the list were in health care and technology, two fields repeatedly shown to be in the top echelon of fastest-growing economic sectors throughout the next decade.

What’s more, many of these are jobs that are now going to non-citizens, because too few Americans have the necessary skills.  Bennett’s strongest plea is the establishment of an apprenticeship/certification system to which students with the appropriate interest and ability can be directed in lieu of four-year college, or even earlier.  Instead of struggling, languishing, or partying through college, these students could be bringing home a respectable paycheck years before their age-mates graduate with massive debt, a room in their parents’ basement, and a job as a Starbucks barista. 

Best of all, thanks to the Internet, higher education is even now in the throes of a revolution similar to that which opened up pre-college education.  The monopoly claimed for centuries by the brick-and-mortar university model is becoming increasingly available for free—or at least for a whole lot less.  There are still some bugs to be worked out, but the handwriting is on the wall.  The following story is long, but worth the effort to type it in.

One of the men responsible for what may be an Athens-like renaissance in higher education is Sebastian Thrun, Google’s vice president and pioneer in artificial intelligence and robotics.  Known in science circles for his engineering feats—like Stanley, the self-driving car—Thrun is using his technological prowess to make quality higher education available to the world.

In 2011, while teaching a graduate-level artificial intelligence class at Stanford University, Thrun lamented that his course could reach only two hundred students in the suburbs of Palo Alto.  So, he decided to offer his own free online class, with the same homework, quizzes, and tests that he gives to Stanford students.  He announced the proposal with a single e-mail.  Before he knew it, he had a flood of takers. … “Usually I reach about 200 students and now I reach 160,000.  In my entire life in education I didn’t have as much impact on people as I had in those two months.”

By using online videos and educational resources, Thrun’s class was being accessed by students from all corners of the world.  In fact, the students translated the class for free from English into forty-four languages.

Until now, an overwhelming number of these students—many in developing countries and lacking standard education credentials—never would have had a chance at a Stanford-level education.  Yet their appetite for quality education was strong.  When Thrun began testing his new hoard of students, all of the students taking the class globally and at Stanford, the top 410 students were online students.  The 411^th top performer was a Stanford student.  “We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student,” Thrun said.

Realizing the potential at his fingertips, Thrun launched Udacity, an independent online education company that provides high-quality education at low cost to virtually everyone.  … There are no admissions offices, and anyone can sign up.  After the class, students can choose to certify their skills online or in one of Udacity’s 4,500 testing centers for a fee….

The classes are structured much like university classes, but instead of traditional types of lectures, all-star professors give video presentations that directly engage and challenge students.  Thrun is using technology not only to transform educational access and curricula but also teaching.  For the past thousand years, professors have been lecturing at students.  “[It’s] like trying to lose weight by watching a professor exercise,” quips Thrun.  Now he is leading a new charge—interactive, student-focused technology education. …

As you can imagine, Thrun’s enterprise has rattled the foundations of the education establishment.  His critics say that a Udacity certificate is worth nothing, and how can one know the true identity or scholastic work of a student on the free-for-all jungle that is the Internet?

[Thrun] said Udacity has already partnered with more than twenty companies that verify and accept the certificates of course completion.  Some are already hiring graduates of Udacity courses.  [I would add, who cares?  Hire the person for, say, a three-month probationary period.  Either he can do the work or he can’t.  If he can’t, let him go; if he can, what does a certificate matter?]

We asked Thrun if his enterprise and others like it will be the end of higher education as we know it—exclusive enclaves for a limited number of students at high tuitions.  “I think it’s the beginning of higher education,” Thrun replied.

Much of traditional American higher education prides itself on a false promotion of diversity, opportunity, and excellence.  But to our knowledge, with one class alone, Thrun has provided a level of diversity, opportunity, and academic rigor not seen before.  People from any country, any background, and any income level can receive an elite education at virtually no cost.  We have been talking about equal educational opportunity for years.  This may be its true advent.

Bennett still finds plenty of scenarios under which it is best to go to college.  If money is not an issue for you—or more likely, your parents—you are one of the few who can afford to choose your school and your major without regard for future earnings potential.   If you’re a very good student and can get into one of the elite universities, it’s probably worthwhile to take on some debt, because even though those who know assure me that the quality of education even at Harvard has declined considerably, the quality of the school’s name, its students, and the connections you will make there still translate into financial reward sufficient to enable you to repay your loans without undue hardship.  But if you’re really, really good, you may want to find yourself a way directly into the workforce—such as the son of some friends, who because of his expertise in a narrow field was offered a job straight out of high school making more money than most college graduates.  He lives a good life in California, loves his work, and has already advanced significantly in the field.  Despite his parents’ fears, it would have been foolish for him to waste four years getting a degree.

What about those who can’t afford college tuition, won’t be going to an elite school, and still want to go into a field that requires a four-year degree or higher?   Think about getting creative:  Pick up what credits you can through Advanced Placement, community college, or online classes, particularly those credits that are required but in which you have little interest, then transfer to a four-year school for the last year or so.  You’ll save yourself a lot of money, and it’s the junior and senior courses in which the interaction with professors and fellow-students is most important.  (Just be aware of credit-transfer policies.  Sometimes state universities are excellent, and required to accept community college credits.  Unfortunately, you’re likely to find your community college colleagues less inspiring than in high school, and the courses less rigorous, which is why it’s better to get credits in courses you don’t care much about.)  If you’re considering post-graduate education look for a less-expensive undergrad school that is still good enough to impress the school you want to give you your final degree.  And if you want to major in the fine arts, or gender studies, or something else with few job prospects, consider taking a second major, or otherwise acquiring skills to fall back on while you are awaiting a job in your dream field.

Or, you could do what we did, and what our children did:  choose parents whose own parents paid for their college educations, and who felt an obligation to pass on the blessing.  But I suspect even that is no longer sufficient.  Students today need to be much wiser, and more creative in their college choices than we were, and than our children were.  On the whole, that’s a good thing, a needed wake-up call.  Following  the default actions of the crowd is rarely advantageous.  Parents, too, need to consider that spending money on a child’s pre-college education (private school, high-quality homeschool materials, specialized camps, educational travel) may in the end be more valuable than saving extensively for college.  Note to parents:  that’s not a go-ahead to buy an expensive boat or golf club membership, unless your child happens to be Jacques Cousteau or Tiger Woods.  Note to students:   above all, get out of your heads the idea—no matter how widespread among your peers—that the purpose of college is to party with your friends.  (Unless it’s on your own—unborrowed—money; then, as you please.)   You can buy a LOT of beer with just one semester’s tuition payment.

The bottom line is:  go into the post-high school decision well-informed, well-prepared, with your eyes wide open.  A good place to begin is by slogging through Is College Worth It?

For the sake of all else I have to do, I took the Front Porch Republic off my feed reader, but I still get, and read, their weekly updates.  Which means that sometimes ... often ... I get caught.  This time it was a piece by Anthony Esolen, who turns out to be the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, a book highly recommended to me but which I still haven't read, though I have requested that our library order it.  I hope they acquiesce, because reading just one of Esolen's essays made me long for more.  Hence less was accomplished this day than intended....

What I read in this week's FPR update was Play and No Play, which is but the latest in a series entitled Life Under Compulsion.  Of course I then had to read the whole series:

2012-10-08  Life Under Compulsion

2012-10-22  From Schoolhouse to School Bus

2012-11-06  The Billows Teaching Machine

2012-11-19  If Teachers Were Plumbers

2012-12-03  Human-Scale Tools and the Slavish Education State

2012-12-17  Curricular Mire

2012-12-31  Bad Universality

2013-01-21  The Dehumanities

2013-02-11  The Itch

2013-03-11  Music and the Itch

2013-05-13  Noise

2013-06-10  Play and No Play

It's not as if I want to suck up all your time, too—but it wouldn't be time wasted.  You can always quit after the first one....

Life of Fred:  Apples (and a whole lot more) by Stanley Schmidt (Polka Dot Publishing, 2012)

Grandparents like to buy presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents especially like to buy books as presents for their grandchildren.

Grandparents love to give books about subjects that their grandchildren love.

Now it gets complicated:  What books do you give a grandson whose number one passion is numbers?

(video link)

So you ask, and you search, and you discover ... the many volumes of Life of Fred.  The story of little Fred Gauss, the five-year-old math professor at KITTENS University in Kansas, twists and turns through mathematics from basic addition through fractions, algebra, calculus, and more—along with an incredible assortment of other facts about science, history, behavior, and almost anything else Stanley F. Schmidt's somewhat quirky mind can think of.  It's not intended for preschoolers, but it's a story with a lot of math in it, so there's hope.  What's more, it's a story about a small child who thinks about numbers a lot—and children like to see themselves in a book.

So far I've read the first two Elementary books (Apples and Butterflies), all three Intermediate books (Kidneys, Liver, and Mineshaft), and also Fractions, the first of the fifth-grade books.  (Elementary and Intermediate takes the student through fourth grade, if you follow the suggested timetable.  Not that we trouble ourselves with things like that.)  I confess that I did not stop and do the math, but skipped the problems for the sake of getting through all six books in a day and a half.  If you really want to learn the math, you must do the problems and not just read the stories.  (It isn't that much work:  one of the features of LoF is its avoidance of drill-and-kill.)  If I ever get LoF:  Statistics, I'll be sure to work all the problems, because I never did understand statistics, despite getting a B in my college course.

I'll say this:  I like math, and I was a math major in college, but never until now have I read a math textbook at any level that I would be happy to re-read.  Which is good, because that's the way preschoolers like their books.

There are only two things that get on my nerves a bit about LoF:  (1) Schmidt makes no attempt to keep his opinions about life out of the books.  There's nothing either unusual or wrong about this; all stories and many textbooks have the same feature.  But some parents are bound to disagree in places, and should be prepared to discuss the issues.  Which would be a good idea, anyway.  For example, some parents have objected to Dogs (volume 4 of the Elementary series) because of the implication that some dogs die at the end of the story.  (2) Despite Schmidt's insistence on good grammar and use of language in the books, e.g. pointing out that "alot" and "alright" are not acceptable words, I've noted more than one occurence of "different than" instead of "different from," "associate to" instead of "associate with," and the use of "their" as a singular pronoun.  I know he's a math teacher, not an English teacher, but he could use an editor.  It's an opportunity to diverge into your own grammar lessons—but it's yet another reason to make sure you know what it is your child is learning.

What will a three-year-old think of Fred?  Will he enjoy the math story?  Will he learn anything from it?  Will our other grandchildren, who are old enough to do the problems woven into Fred's adventures, learn the math as well as the author advertises?  They already have a great math curriculum, but mathematics, like history, deserves to be learned from several angles.

Time will tell.  All can say at this point is that I certainly hope our grandchildren find Life of Fred to be valuable, because then I'll be able to read the rest of the stories myself.

The Romeikes have lost the latest round in their fight to keep from being sent back to Germany, where homeschooling is considered a sufficient reason to take custody of children away from their parents.  The ruling is being appealed.

On the bright side, the court did rule that "parents do have a right to direct the education and upbringing of their children."  However, they also said,

“Congress might have written the immigration laws to grant a safe haven to people living elsewhere in the world who face government strictures the United States Constitution prohibits,” the court ruled. “But it did not.”

[Attorney Michael] Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens—yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.

“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely—but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Actually, it makes plenty of sense—if you consider only political expediency.  Immigration "reform" that supports an economy fueled by slave labor is considered a politically savvy move, while offending an important ally—Germany—is not.

I can venture more with Davie than with another:  he obeys in a moment.

Thus the tutor in one of George MacDonald's novels explains how he dares take his young pupil on dangerous explorations to the roof of an old, crumbling Scottish castle.  Davie was allowed the exciting and perilous adventuring because his tutor knew that when he said, "Stay here until I return," Davie wouldn't go wandering and possibly falling off the edge.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Lift Up Your Hearts! knows I am a fan of Free-Range Kids and Lenore Skenazy's movement to restore for today's children some of the freedoms enjoyed by previous generations.  Parents are hovering over their children as never before:  they're afraid to let them out of sight, to walk to school, to ride bikes with their friends; afraid to let them risk getting hurt, even a little, whether they be infants negotiating stairs, children using knives, or teens travelling to a foreign country.  (Yet we expect teens to be sexually active, drive a car, and serve in the military.  Go figure.)  However, manageable risks and small hurts are necessary to growth.  Without them, our children don't learn to tell a reasonable risk from a ridiculous one, and we find that sparing them the lesser pain has made them exceptionally vulnerable to serious, even fatal, wounds.

Why do we bubble-wrap our young people?  The reasons are many and complex, but one of the greatest surely is that we no longer trust our children.  And why don't we trust our children?  Primarily, I would say, because they have not learned to be trustworthy.

They are not trustworthy because we have not given them the opportunity to learn obedience.

Obedience is an unpopular concept these days, perhaps because it conjures up images of harsh punishment, restricted lives, and children who go wild at college when released from their parents' strict rules and constant monitoring.  Or of totalitarian societies and blind adherence to evil laws.  ("I was only following orders.")  But no matter what ugliness it has been deformed into, obedience to a trustworthy and legitimate authority is a beautiful thing.  It's what makes society work.  From traffic to taxes, from banking to environmental protection—when enough people decide that the rules don't apply to them, disaster is not far off.

The Connecticut Science Center has ruled that children under the age of 16 must be supervised by an accompanying adult at all times during their visit.  Why such a ridiculous restriction?  You can blame the lawyers, of course, but what it boils down to is that the museum has learned that it cannot trust that demographic to obey the rules of the house, let alone the rules of common courtesy.  When that happens, people—and expensive equipment—get hurt.

Similar restrictions have sprung up all over, ostensibly for the safety of the children.  I'm not sure I entirely believe that excuse.  When our children were young and energetic, people would sometimes tell them not to do such-and-such a thing, explaining, "I'm afraid you'll get hurt."  Well, maybe; it was pretty clear to me that what they were really afraid of was that the children would break, not their legs, but some material possession.  Be that as it may, young people—at an age when some of their ancestors were supporting themselves, raising their own families, fighting in wars, and even commanding ships—cannot, apparently, be relied on to walk through a museum without damaging something.

Thus the free-range childhood movement has two major fronts on which to fight:  (1) Convincing society that our children can and should be trusted to handle themselves at least as well as children did a generation or two ago, and (2) Preparing our children to be worthy of that trust.

As we explored Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii, I noted that there were no age restrictions on the trails; it was up to parents to decide how much to involve their children.  The trails themselves were safe enough, but often a sheer drop or a boiling spring was only a few feet away.  A child of any age who could be counted on to stay on the trail, and to freeze at a parent's, "Wait for us!" command, would have the freedom to enjoy an unforgettable experience; one who was accustomed to thinking of rules and restrictions as flexible could easily end up dead.  Too many of the latter will cause doors to slam shut for the former also.

"The world has changed," is the spell invoked to justify increasing restrictions on young people.  By this is mostly meant external changes, such as more sexual predators, more kidnappers, more terrorists.  (I'm absolutely convinced that the problem actually is more news coverage of these very rare crimes, but that's another issue.)  The world has changed, indeed, but what has changed most is closer to home:  our children are no longer growing up knowing and following the rules of proper use of stoves, knives, guns, hammers, saws, ropes, candles, campfires, boats, and other items they used to encounter—and be required to use—in everyday life.  Parents are also more reluctant—perhaps in fear of the evils that have become associated with distorted ideas of obedience—to teach their children respect for authority, and the importance of following legitimate rules.  If we want our communities to accept that our children are competent and trustworthy, it's up to us to make sure that they are.

(There is, I acknowledge, the opposite failing—teaching our children never to question authority, never to ask if the rules are legitimate.  But that is a different issue.)

Political action can pry open society's closed doors for our children, good publicity can pry open parental fingers from a death-grip on their children's leashes, but only deliberate parental effort can prepare those children for freedom.

Why wrestle with how to express this story when thduggie has already done it so well?

Back in 2010, a German family was granted political asylum in Tennessee, because they had been homeschooling their children in a country that prosecutes, fines, and removes children from homeschooling parents. This immigration judge sent a strong message to the world: America is still a country where Liberty is writ large.  Today, the same family stands in danger of being deported back to Germany. Whether the appeal stems from a fear of offending an ally, or a fear of having immigration offices overrun (by legal immigrants), the message is the same: “We’re scared of our Liberty.”

The Romeike family's plight should be of concern to every American, because a threat to liberty, even—or maybe especially—on the part of an ally, is a threat to us all.  American homeschoolers, even though they currently enjoy educational freedom in every state, should be very concerned:  if our courts rule that educating one's own children is not one of the most basic human rights and responsibilities, that precedent could (and probably will) be used to attack our own hard-won liberty.

This is not, however, just a homeschooling issue.  If the forced removal of children from stable, loving families is not considered by the United States to be a heinous act, no one dare consider his family safe.

Even Al Jazeera has noticed the case.  Their article is actually the best summary I've seen of the situation.

I'm not, in general, a petition signer.  But today I registered with whitehouse.gov (a simple process) so that I could sign this petition to allow the Romeikes to remain in the United States, where they can educate their children without fear of unthinkable reprisals.

Here is the text of the petition:

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that the Obama Administration grant full and permanent legal status to Uwe and Hannelore Romeike and their children. The Romeikes, a homeschooling family represented by HSLDA, were granted asylum in 2010 because Germany persecutes homeschoolers with fines, criminal prosecution, and forcible removal of children from their families. Every state in the United States of America recognizes the right to homeschool, and the U.S. has the world’s largest and most vibrant homeschool community. Regrettably, this family faces deportation in spite of the persecution they will suffer in Germany. The Romeikes hope for the same freedom our forefathers sought. Please grant the privilege of liberty to the Romeike family.

If 100,000 people sign a petition within 30 days of its creation, the Obama Administration will officially respond.  As of today, almost 60,000 more signatures are needed by April 18 in order to reach that threshold.

Please consider signing the petition, writing President Obama and/or your representatives, or otherwise publicizing the Romeikes' dire situation and this opportunity to set a precedent for or against not only our basic educational freedom, but even more, our commitment to Liberty itself.

Update 5 April:  Here's a brief chronology (full article) for those who want more information but don't want to sift through the articles.  (Emphasis mine.)

German law mandates that children attend a public or state-approved school. The local mayor informed the family that they would face fines and could lose the custody of their children if they did not attend school. The parents also faced potential jail time.

The government fined the family heavily and at one point seized the children to force them to attend school.

After trying to secure an exemption from the law, the Romeikes fled the country and immigrated to Tennessee in 2008. They had been fined well over $10,000 by the time they fled and faced escalating fines if they continued to homeschool their children.

The family applied for asylum in the United States and an immigration judge granted it to them, citing a well-founded fear of persecution if they returned to Germany.

However, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), appealed the ruling to the Board of Immigration Appeals.

The board overturned the original judge’s ruling and ordered the Romeikes deported to Germany. The Romeikes appealed their case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where their case will be heard April 23.

Thanks to a recently-renewed (and most welcome) acquaintance with a friend from some 15 years ago, I've been wandering through the darker days of the past and reading stories that make our own darkness seem like daylight.  I don't regret the reminders that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," even those who are otherwise doing good, or even great things, even churches.

But the point of that gloomy introduction is to point out how much I needed this homeschooling pick-me-up, this shining return to the bright, solid beauty that still clings to the human race, no matter how fallen it may be.

From Celebrating a Simple Life:

The pediatrician asked if Ivy [her four-year-old daughter] was start[ing] to learn her colors (she's known those for at least a year), if she could count (into the teens in two languages), and if she was able to ride a tricycle, etc. 

In the mean time, Ivy took out the magnadoodle that is in the exam room, and wrote her name.  Then she asked me if I could show her how to write her name. 

"But Ivy, you already know how to write your name.  You just did it!"
"No, mommy!  How do I write my name in GREEK?"

The pediatrician said, "So...  I guess you won't be putting her in school either?"

Nope.