4 May 2005

Deschooling

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.

“Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions that claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.”

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

What Illich was criticising was the way schools (and other similar public agencies) turn us into slavish consumers who must depend on professional producers (whether government bureaucrats or corporations) to tell us what’s good or right for us. When homeschoolers take responsibility for their own education, they are resisting what he called “approved measures of social control.” You could say homeschooling is a form of deschooling in practice, because we see education as a lifelong commitment to formal and incidental learning utilising new approaches that foster life values, not dead knowledge.

I would take that to mean values that express love for God in heart, soul, mind, and strength - and love for our neighbour as we love ourselves.

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2 May 2005

Books that influenced

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.

I am looking back at early influences that might have moved me towards my current understanding of schooling and education. Back when I was a secondary student - maybe 16 or 17, I had two pretty progressive teachers: Mr Lee taught English, while Miss Pillai taught literature.

Miss Pillai was strident in her political views and occasionally ran into trouble with the authorities, but she made us understand that literature wasn’t just words and stories, but ideas that shaped society.

Mr Lee who was more laidback, lent me books. Like Herbert Kohl’s 36 Children, John Holt’s How Children Learn, and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. Lee and Pillay were a couple who shared a modest apartment not far from the school they taught in.

Those paperbacks packed a wallop. I don’t think I understood fully what these authors were saying, much less grasped how radical these books were then in the mid-70s. I don’t think I understood how influential these men’s ideas were -not knowing any better - but I was utterly sold on their arguments. They were questioning conventional wisdom about schools, how kids learn, how process and substance were two different things, and yep, they certainly made me ask the same questions although I couldn’t see how anyone could beat the system.

In some ways, you could say these early ideas made it easier for me to ‘deschool’ and homeschool my own kids when the time came. Since then there have been other books, but that’s a story for another time.

What early influences led you to homeschool?

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