Alternative Schooling
By: Sigrid Frederikdottir
As
an article on this subject has just been published and the issue of home
schooling has recently focused educational professionals’ attention on the
quality and standards of this method of instruction, it is perhaps pertinent to
consider both the advantages and disadvantages of home schooling, and the
possible improvements that certain technology is providing to help increase the
value of “opting out”.
A
useful BBC article can be found outlining the basic problems and giving reasons
why some parents want to take their children out of mainstream education and
either place them elsewhere or school them at home.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4362145.stm
I
can personally vouch for alternative establishments as I attended both
government schools and a Catholic Convent as well as correspondence schooling
and received my tertiary education from a non-residential university as well as
a residential one and am well aware of the need for some people with handicaps
or other problems (distance, illness, family obligations, etc) to seek
education from institutions that allow for a different environment or special
environment. However, although I used to uphold the idea of home schooling, I
now have serious doubts about the quality of teaching, the subject choices and
the degree of excellence that can be expected from teachers who do not have the
qualifications, or range of capability, that is automatic in a public or
private school. Special schools are not the same as home schooling. Special
schools, private schools and cultural schools have their being within a
curriculum that is approved by the educational authorities and students write
exams that are equivalent to any passed by those attending mainstream colleges
or educational intuitions. The schools themselves set a standard and are
staffed by qualified teachers ranging from language, through science to sport.
Not
so in the home schooling situation. And that is where problems are raising
their heads and questions are being asked concerning the educational
qualifications of helpers and teachers. If the teacher is just “Mom” or someone
who is paid to educate a child every day as a private tutor, is the child
obtaining the level of exposure to knowledge and the opportunity to attain
excellence in any subject, or are these finer aspects of the educator’s craft
being lost on a small number of children who are being taken out of the
mainstream and also out of the private school system and placed at the mercy of
well-meaning but often unqualified tutors who often comprise a parent without
the necessary degree in teaching a range of subjects. “Mom” cannot be your
language and your science and your mathematics tutor. She cannot get one of her
friends in to teach you Geography unless that friend has a degree in which
geography is a major subject, etc. Besides which, teaching is a profession and
parenting is a full time job, so how do children in home schooling environments
(unless they are handicapped and so wouldn’t fit into ordinary school life
anyway) cope with the great divide that will of necessity open between them and
their peers who went into society and learned from qualified personnel?
As
inner city schooling breaks down into disorder and chaos, the standard of
education in these establishments follows a likewise downturn and as political
correctness makes children the victims of moral imperatives that originate in
state ideology, the lure of home schooling becomes a viable alternative for
parents living in decaying areas on the fringes of more affluent and socially
mobile communities. The problem of bullying has become endemic and the danger
of drugs, sex and physical harm loom large and terrifying on the horizons of
many children who have no choice but to attend schools that will do nothing for
them in the long run except harden them against education itself and cause them
to become proponents of functional illiteracy as a kind of badge of honour, a
way of saying “I don’t care and I’m proud that I don’t care”.
Fortunately,
the internet has stepped in to create varieties of online education that will
possibly make home schooling less problematic and certainly improve the
standards of all children who are able to obtain extra tuition this way from
qualified, dedicated staff, hand picked for the job and brilliant at what they
know and do. In this respect, out of evil in the decaying system comes a
measure of good in an evolving alternative system.
However,
the needs of today’s technologically savvy youngsters are dependent on
computers, maths and a range of capabilities that were never part of the simple
“three Rs” that comprised “a good grounding” some
fifty years ago. Now, to be able to read, write and do simple calculations is
so elementary as to be taken for granted in the face of all the complex
operations and calculations necessary to operate certain machinery, work
anywhere from a hospital to an engineering project site and take the quantum
leap imminent on our horizon as we begin our arduous and painstaking journey
into the cosmos, down into the biological components of life and way out beyond
the frontiers of the known world of comfortable beliefs and preconceived ideas.
The
old world is dwindling as the new world is born and if children are to be able
to cope with a new world in a new century and a new millennium then they will
most definitely need formal schooling of the highest calibre with equipment of
the latest kind or they will be left behind with all the hapless children from
so-called “developing” countries, whose fate will be servitude in the machinery
of survival and a life stunted by an inability to compete. Pity these for they
have nothing to look forward to and everything to fear. If we, of the
“developed” countries, are to help them and help to stem the flow of immigrants
desperate to leave their homelands and live in the west, then our own children
need to be qualified to do so and most certainly do not need to be placed,
inadvertently by concerned parents, into similar situations of despair and
inequality by education that proved unable to withstand the powerful surge to
mathematics and science that is the hallmark of twenty-first century education
and capability. Not necessarily for every single individual, obviously, but
certainly for those who will be working in any kind of employment that utilizes
technology and that presupposes a knowledge and a
facility with high-end methodology and technique.
Humans
are constantly evolving and our evolution is intellectual and our goals and
aspirations are no longer simplistic and we are no longer “religious” in the
sense that we expect some deific power or powers to look after us and “watch
over us” or reward or punish us for what we may or may not do. We are entering
the realm of secular self-responsibility and in many ways this is a realm where
no one has really ever been before. For Heathens, this is the entry to what
would be, metaphorically, the library of Mimir, the
depths of the great well of wisdom into which Odin looked for guidance and
whose depths are so immense that not even Yggdrasil’s
root can penetrate the extremity. A metaphorical well of
knowledge whose prize is the attainment of wisdom and whose price is the
collateral of Odin’s eye. You lose something to win something else. In
life, all achievement and desire is capped with a sacrifice. Nothing comes
cheap. The best things in life are hard won and expensive.
What
many well-meaning Heathens fail to grasp is that our folk have always wandered
into places and among people who are foreign and taken their place among new
systems and learned new ideas to apply to established wisdom. This has caused
us to grow in wisdom and knowledge and to be capable of many things today that
would have been considered to be magic in the old world where we lived in small
cottages and worked hard all day and did not live long nor in comfort and
fought tooth and nail to keep hold on territory or to gain a homeland where no
homeland was. Our forebears fought the Romans as well as collaborated with them
and through this liaison learned a great deal, including the runic alphabet
which was adapted to make a people with no writing system become a people to
whom writing was a major aspect of their civilization and from whom giants like
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Goethe and Ibsen emerged in time to tower among the
figures of world history. We won our fame through endeavour and a willingness
to adapt ourselves where necessary and utilize what we learned to make what we already
knew work for us and, ultimately, affect in myriads of ways, the entire earth.
Say the name “Tolkien” and people as far away as
Home
schooling could not make another Tolkien, unless the tutors were of the same
calibre as his own and for this to happen children need formal schooling, or a
system whereby they may be touched by the genius of teachers who know what they
are doing and whose job it is to impart their knowledge to young minds.
Internet schooling is the only way this will become possible and if it can be
integrated into approved curricula and examinations then home schooled children
may even be at an advantage in certain instances. But it is essential that the
system is controlled by standards and that the children receive instruction
from specially qualified tutors or home schooling will remain the province of
quirky folk who want to exclude their children from intercourse with the world
“out there”. Cultural education can be easily taught at home with no need to
interrupt a child’s formal education. And most children desire to experience
the world and others as this is the only time in their lives where they are
able to absorb information and synthesise it on a basis of generality, before
the critical phases of adulthood impart a specificity to their inclinations and
they begin, toward their late twenties, to make decisions based on subjective
values and they look for life partners with whom to start families and they
place their loyalty within certain demarcated areas of allegiance – and, in
short, finally grow up and assert themselves both as individuals and group
members. This time based not on what they have been instructed to believe and
do, but on what they want to believe and do. If education takes this final,
inalienable right away from them in any way, then education itself fails and if
governments are responsible for removing any free citizen’s choice to do and be
then governments are failing the people who elect them into power, failing
democratic ideology and acting not as vehicles of the people’s will and consent
but as draconian machinery of socio-political oppression.
If
increasing numbers of people are removing their children from state schooling
and because they cannot afford private schooling are attempting to educate
their children themselves then the powers that be should be asking themselves
some pertinent questions on the subject of discipline in schools and in
society, on free choice of individuals and on the thorny subject of
introducing, by means of political correctness training, a plethora of moral
imperatives that are unnecessary and that are literally chasing decent folk
away from their own destinies and forcing them to become part of gated
communities and “alternative” activities because the law has become not only an
ass but also the enemy of liberty itself. If individuals feel they must begin
starting up special schools and institutions all over the place because the
government gives them no alternative then the system that upholds civilization
is failing its citizens in ways that will result in alienation and the
formation of a kind of separatism that is the enemy of progress. And if
integration, whether of people or ideas, is made mandatory and the needs of
people are made secondary to that imperative then societies as organic entities
will break up into disparate groups that float aimlessly about the perimeters
of the establishment and finally either become extinct through suffocation or
dangerous through alienation.
Quo Vadis human civilization? should be on the agenda of every educational
department in very country practising “multicultural” politics. If the answer
is that we are heading for some future blissful concourse in some future domain
of Shangi-la, then it might be a good time to do
something to stop this wanton fantasy from gaining popular appeal as it is a
mad and unworkable theory backed up by a congregation of fervent acolytes who
will enforce its ethos whether they understand its implications or not.
Humanity was not designed, it evolved. Humans, to all intents and purposes, are
part of animal life on a small planet in a sea of indifferent stars. To believe
otherwise is to court disaster and to entertain religious explanations for
scientific reality.
Education,
knowledge, skill, understanding – these are all concepts that have been vital
to the operation of groups and the functioning of communities since the dawn of
time. To neglect the finer points of that operation now is to neglect the facts
of human history and the ever-expanding insight into why we are the way we are
and not some other way, and whether there is any point in forcing us to be
“good” when we can only hope to be “good” if we are free to decide what “good”
means and we all know that the definition of concepts is part and parcel of
cultural and biological reality, both in the human and in the animal worlds. A
thing is deemed “good” when it doesn’t kill us and has a positive effect that
is decided upon by the group. If education is having the opposite effect on
children and parents, if children are being bullied to death and taught
politically correct state imposed ideology in order to make them adhere to a
certain opinion of what is “good” then it is understandable that parents will
begin to baulk at the system and want their children out of it. People are
becoming afraid of the system. The system is becoming something that will be
deemed “bad”. If enough people deem it negative the system cannot expect to
continue under threats of litigation or oppressive social punishments like
shunning. To be made an outcast when you are simply different makes the system
whereby you have been judged both ineffectual and dictatorial. We all know what
these systems can be like and many of us have experienced some of them first
hand. They affect everyone from all over the world and no race or group is
immune to the “final solution syndrome” of state empowered aspiration to make
all one and to enforce ideology upon every single individual at no matter what
cost to the elusive concept of “liberty”.
Unless
the state can provide a decent standard of education for those who cannot
afford private schooling, or who are being denied their cultural educational
needs, then the state (not the citizen) needs to reassess its policies and work
to serve the people who elect it into power. But then, democracy is merely a
function of election to power and with so many people now coming to represent
differing ideology as immigrants stream into western
democracies and demand their own kinds of cultural and educational rights it is
no wonder that there is trouble in the erstwhile paradise of educational priorities
and uniform conceptions of value and discipline.
The
solution will not be easy and in many places it will not be possible to go on as
before. The internet, therefore, offers hope for children from dwindling
cultures and backgrounds to obtain education befitting their standards and
belief systems and ways of life. Whether this will be able to keep pace with
technology and science or capable of imparting the kind of depth previously
entrusted to educational professionals controlled by the rule of law, is yet to
be established. From what I’ve seen of the home schooling scene, I find it too
risky at present to allow any intelligent child to be taken out of the formal
system. The need for advanced technology, digital equipment and science laboratories,
libraries and qualified staff in a range of subjects is definitely almost
totally absent on a day-to-day basis. There is no way of ascertaining whether
any specific child’s intellectual developmental needs are being adequately met.
“Moms” are not qualified to do this. No matter how well meaning they are and no
matter how qualified some are in specific subjects. They are not qualified in
all subjects and they are not qualified to teach them at all levels.
The
most likely outcome is more private educational facilities and enormously
expensive tuition fees for attending these as equipment and facilities are not
cheap and the range of equipment and facilities necessary to run a fully
fledged school is way beyond the reach of the average earner. Home schooling has
worked quite well for some students, but will go badly against anyone trying to
teach science, mathematics or technology by this method. And the teaching of
language is essential for writing essays and properly understanding what is
being read. Only a language teacher can do this at all school levels over a
period of some twelve years. And each teacher specialises in a single year of
development. This alone proves the inadequacy of present home schooling.
On
the other hand, the growth of TV classes and internet schools has enabled the
work of excellent teachers to be broadcast to millions of students round the
world at a single moment and so in many ways, this kind of education will
actually serve to improve where state education may have failed in specific
areas. The internet is now being used as a resource for medical and other
diagnoses worldwide, for on the spot help with surgical procedure and for
information freely available to those who cannot pay for it or who need to
belong to certain establishments in order to gain access to it. So the news is
most certainly not all bad. In fact, the news is mainly good and gives many
more people an opportunity to learn and interact with one another and share
knowledge and forge alliances where before life was mostly a closed shop to the
village or town where you grew up.
We
must embrace this new opportunity and make use of it. Take this great invention
of the internet and use it for the greater good of enlightenment and knowledge
and the gaining of wisdom that comes from the slow percolation of all that is
gathered and digested and worked out in both a single life and through the
lives of many who are affected by this wave of influence. Turn a potentially
bad news story into a good news story and travel on, journeying with all our
fellows and friends into the future, leaving sorrow and neglect behind and
building the road as we go. There is so much to do both on a local and on an
international scale that there is little time to whinge about a few things that
may be annoying us. Governments will come and go, systems will rise and fall,
but people must go on and people must go on learning so that they may survive
and so that they may understand how to some day leave everything they and their
ancestors have ever known and go literally where no one has gone before.
Are
we up to this task? Of course we are. Not everyone needs to become a rocket
scientist or a brain surgeon. There is work for every kind of individual and
there should be freely available help for people in trouble. There is. It’s
sitting out there in cyberspace and it is going to change our world and direct
the future. So don’t hesitate and move back into some sequestered space, but
instead embrace it. Our people are famous for their ability to forge ahead into
the unknown and then to make the best of what they discover there. Like Odin,
we are inveterate travellers in the realms of knowledge. And, like this
enigmatic God, we take risks and take the consequences in order to progress.
Even though the roots of Yggdrasil lie too deep to
fathom, we still want to follow where they lead. Sometimes we die in this quest
and other times we discover treasure. Either way, we are what we must continue
to be – adventurers.
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