More splurging today i'm afraid, due to starting this post on the mini-tablet, which rather unhelpfully just saved this locally and i'm now copying. At least that means this had a first draft for once.
Yesterday i briefly mentioned my slight unease at continuing to see myself as part of the home ed community now that the children are both at college, because now i no longer home educate in the commonly understood sense, although of course i still home educate because everyone does and it isn't even home education and so on, blah blah, you know the spiel. One possible danger of course is that i could lose touch, to the extent that i was ever in touch in the first place, with approaches apt to appeal to children. There are, however, a couple of reasons why that might not be so.
One of these is that i may only ever have been in limited touch with the needs of children anyway, and in fact due to my moderate but not total commitment to autonomous education, this could be said to be unnecessary in any case, though a varied life wherein one is able and willing to include children is probably important. Against this might be set the fact that many children with this way of life spend so little time actually at home as opposed to hanging out or sleeping over at other children's homes or doing other stuff with them that their inclusion in the lives of other children and adults might make this less important. We have a village which raises children in this community, both physically and virtually present, and we are not just families doing things in isolation unless it either suits us to do so, we are unlucky or we have been artificially isolated by a hostile social climate as engendered by, for example, local authorities scaring people into hiding or insufficient publicity regarding the reality of this approach to parenting.
One of the failures of school is that it severs the connection between adults and children and segregates them. Part of that severance involves teachers being in loco parentis while being relatively unable to establish a natural rapport with the children, often through no fault of their own. Now, i of course do offer science, maths and other workshops for children who are not mine, and this is potentially questionable. It can lead to problems and is in danger of drifting towards schooling, something against which i strive. However, it differs in various ways from teaching. I am not waylaid by red tape and bureaucracy, by syllabi or curricula or by fear of bullying from the children. However, i see this as being part of the village. I must remain vigilant not to become "teachery", which is a risk in this situation.
One way in which i'm now trying to sidestep this issue is by attempting to participate in education in other ways. To this end, i am embarking on a concerted effort to make a series of educational YouTube videos. This project is still in its early stages and i am still learning how to put good videos together, and it is of course "no substitute for hands on" but they will improve and i also plan to link them, for people who are interested, to topic areas in the National Curriculum - it is a fact that some people do pay attention to that and i don't judge them for that although i had little interest in it myself. For those who are interested, here are the links to the two i've made so far which have not been deleted, both about soap making:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUmX7UpZ9w&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA&index=2&feature=plcp
and the second, which is more about the science (and how cheaply soap can be made!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1QAgdZ01lo&feature=BFa&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA
The other way in which i'm pursuing education, of course, is through writing books. I have plans for a number of these. So far, i've published one: 'You Could've Thought Of That', whose children's edition will soon be available from lulu.com (where the adult edition is already available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-a-ure/you-couldve-thought-of-that-a-compendium-of-ideas-which-havent-been-thought-of-yet/paperback/product-20266026.html). The second one is of course 'Here Be Dragons', a bestiary and atlas which aims both to entertain and inform. Also, of course i plan to continue the science and maths sessions, and if possible start new ones on other subjects such as classical languages and philosophy if the interest is there, for as long as at least one child wants me to do so.
So what am i saying? I suppose that you can all rest assured that i will try to make sure i stay in touch with the needs of children, and that i hope you still see me as part of your village
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Showing posts with label children. Show all posts
Friday, 7 September 2012
Thursday, 6 September 2012
We all benefit from education
Maybe this should become a regular blog. What do you think? Bettina doesn't like blogs, but i don't know why.
Anyway...
Back in the mid-'80s, there was an education bill called GERBILL - the Great Education Reform Bill. It introduced the National Curriculum, Key Stages, abolished academic tenure, started City Technology Colleges (and in fact my old secondary school became one) and various other things which at the time i thought were bad, and in fact i still maintain that they were quite negative and should be revoked. At the time, I was involved in a campaign against it and was carting a petition around to be signed. A major issue at the time was the possibility of the replacement of student grants with loans, which was phased in from 1990 though through different legislation. Also at the time, i was of dramatically different opinions regarding what i would at the time have called home education - I felt that traditional nuclear families were automatically bad and had too much power, and would tend to screw children up for life.
While getting signatures for the petition, i was confronted by a Tory law student who said to me that he thought it was only fair that the beneficiaries of higher education should pay for it. I replied that since the whole of society benefitted from higher education, i agreed completely and therefore felt reassured that he did in fact believe that it should be paid via grants rather than loans. He had no answer for that.
Unsurprisingly, my opinions have changed to the extent that i am not now convinced that any kind of university education is appropriate in its current form, judging by the apparent tendency of higher education to reduce the quality of teaching and resources and the assumption that so-called "higher" education is the best possible education compared to others, among other things. Nevertheless, I would still say that the whole of society benefits from higher education and in fact from education at a "lower" level and younger ages.
Let's go back to GERBILL for a moment. Two of the measures it introduced were the National Curriculum and Key Stages. A few years later, i would be writing lesson plans based on these (long story), and was disappointed by the low level of achievement they expected and the low level of involvement they seemed likely to engender. These changes seem to mark the beginning of the sharp decline in the quality of school education which continues today, and were the first of many reasons which ultimately led to my conversion to the idea of home education, or rather, my resolve to make the children aware of their choice to attend school or not so that they could take that decision themselves. One of the reasons for this was that the changes in education meant that, imperfect though it was, the net benefit to society from schooling was considerably reduced.
Therefore, it now makes sense more than ever to say that education otherwise than at school is of greater benefit to society than at least state schools, per child at least. For instance, a society in which language does not exist might be pre-Palaeolithic in nature. Learning would be minimally passed down from parents to children or through tribes and most would be lost. Signed and spoken language more than anything else is what makes us human and is substantially the domain of "home" education - a child which fails to learn to use language before a certain age will apparently become incapable of doing so later, or at least find it much harder to acquire grammar. The same applies to various other things children learn to do before reaching the age of compulsory education, and in fact, though to me it sounds unquantifiable, they are said to learn more than half of what they will ever learn by the age of two. In that sense if no other, "home education" makes the biggest contribution of all to the common good.
However, we all know that when people use the term "home education", they usually mean the education of children of compulsory education age without any attendance at school for lessons. This also contributes to the common good to a greater extent than schooling because children in those circumstances learn the kind of things as is exemplified by the "Three R's" and the explicit content of curricula more quickly and thoroughly than their peers at school, though not necessarily earlier or in the same order,because they are motivated when they learn, can do so at their own pace and level and the like. They also miss out on much of the harmful learning which occurs in schools and which has increased in recent years, that learning is boring, irrelevant, difficult and so forth, and they also miss out on learning how total institutions work and various other things. These are the kinds of things which are not in the common good. They lead to students who plagiarise because they are not enthusiastic about their learning and fail to make a connection between it and their lives. This is harmful to them and harmful to us all. It can be largely avoided simply by not going to school, and results in adults more likely to have qualities such as self-motivation, independence, resourcefulness, creativity, imagination and vision to a greater degree. Such people are better for the common good.
Why am i saying this now? Well, first of all of course, the offspring are now both at college, which makes me feel that i am to some extent now an interloper in home ed, though that's a topic for another post. However, just as back in Thatcher's day it was argued that the students were mere consumers of an education that benefitted only them rather than society, it is clear to me now that education which omits schooling is of greater benefit to us all than education which is considered to consist only of schooling, particularly when that schooling is of the kind which impairs truly inspiring and charismatic teachers and destroys the enthusiasm and interest of students because they bear the brunt of policy decisions made from on high. This brings me to the other point: just as Ed Balls had it in for us a couple of years ago, so today the Welsh Government is trying to do the same. This from a nation on which the Welsh Knot was imposed. There's a reason why Welsh English lacks a postvocalic R - it was imposed by Anglophone school authorities. Welsh children, having acquired their native language through home education, then had it beaten out of them by the teachers. The Welsh Government is now trying to do the same by insisting on the same irrational, fallaciously-based regime of monitoring education out of existence just as the British government destroyed the Welsh language two centuries previously. I wonder what the Welsh for hypocrisy is.
Anyway...
Back in the mid-'80s, there was an education bill called GERBILL - the Great Education Reform Bill. It introduced the National Curriculum, Key Stages, abolished academic tenure, started City Technology Colleges (and in fact my old secondary school became one) and various other things which at the time i thought were bad, and in fact i still maintain that they were quite negative and should be revoked. At the time, I was involved in a campaign against it and was carting a petition around to be signed. A major issue at the time was the possibility of the replacement of student grants with loans, which was phased in from 1990 though through different legislation. Also at the time, i was of dramatically different opinions regarding what i would at the time have called home education - I felt that traditional nuclear families were automatically bad and had too much power, and would tend to screw children up for life.
While getting signatures for the petition, i was confronted by a Tory law student who said to me that he thought it was only fair that the beneficiaries of higher education should pay for it. I replied that since the whole of society benefitted from higher education, i agreed completely and therefore felt reassured that he did in fact believe that it should be paid via grants rather than loans. He had no answer for that.
Unsurprisingly, my opinions have changed to the extent that i am not now convinced that any kind of university education is appropriate in its current form, judging by the apparent tendency of higher education to reduce the quality of teaching and resources and the assumption that so-called "higher" education is the best possible education compared to others, among other things. Nevertheless, I would still say that the whole of society benefits from higher education and in fact from education at a "lower" level and younger ages.
Let's go back to GERBILL for a moment. Two of the measures it introduced were the National Curriculum and Key Stages. A few years later, i would be writing lesson plans based on these (long story), and was disappointed by the low level of achievement they expected and the low level of involvement they seemed likely to engender. These changes seem to mark the beginning of the sharp decline in the quality of school education which continues today, and were the first of many reasons which ultimately led to my conversion to the idea of home education, or rather, my resolve to make the children aware of their choice to attend school or not so that they could take that decision themselves. One of the reasons for this was that the changes in education meant that, imperfect though it was, the net benefit to society from schooling was considerably reduced.
Therefore, it now makes sense more than ever to say that education otherwise than at school is of greater benefit to society than at least state schools, per child at least. For instance, a society in which language does not exist might be pre-Palaeolithic in nature. Learning would be minimally passed down from parents to children or through tribes and most would be lost. Signed and spoken language more than anything else is what makes us human and is substantially the domain of "home" education - a child which fails to learn to use language before a certain age will apparently become incapable of doing so later, or at least find it much harder to acquire grammar. The same applies to various other things children learn to do before reaching the age of compulsory education, and in fact, though to me it sounds unquantifiable, they are said to learn more than half of what they will ever learn by the age of two. In that sense if no other, "home education" makes the biggest contribution of all to the common good.
However, we all know that when people use the term "home education", they usually mean the education of children of compulsory education age without any attendance at school for lessons. This also contributes to the common good to a greater extent than schooling because children in those circumstances learn the kind of things as is exemplified by the "Three R's" and the explicit content of curricula more quickly and thoroughly than their peers at school, though not necessarily earlier or in the same order,because they are motivated when they learn, can do so at their own pace and level and the like. They also miss out on much of the harmful learning which occurs in schools and which has increased in recent years, that learning is boring, irrelevant, difficult and so forth, and they also miss out on learning how total institutions work and various other things. These are the kinds of things which are not in the common good. They lead to students who plagiarise because they are not enthusiastic about their learning and fail to make a connection between it and their lives. This is harmful to them and harmful to us all. It can be largely avoided simply by not going to school, and results in adults more likely to have qualities such as self-motivation, independence, resourcefulness, creativity, imagination and vision to a greater degree. Such people are better for the common good.
Why am i saying this now? Well, first of all of course, the offspring are now both at college, which makes me feel that i am to some extent now an interloper in home ed, though that's a topic for another post. However, just as back in Thatcher's day it was argued that the students were mere consumers of an education that benefitted only them rather than society, it is clear to me now that education which omits schooling is of greater benefit to us all than education which is considered to consist only of schooling, particularly when that schooling is of the kind which impairs truly inspiring and charismatic teachers and destroys the enthusiasm and interest of students because they bear the brunt of policy decisions made from on high. This brings me to the other point: just as Ed Balls had it in for us a couple of years ago, so today the Welsh Government is trying to do the same. This from a nation on which the Welsh Knot was imposed. There's a reason why Welsh English lacks a postvocalic R - it was imposed by Anglophone school authorities. Welsh children, having acquired their native language through home education, then had it beaten out of them by the teachers. The Welsh Government is now trying to do the same by insisting on the same irrational, fallaciously-based regime of monitoring education out of existence just as the British government destroyed the Welsh language two centuries previously. I wonder what the Welsh for hypocrisy is.
Monday, 3 September 2012
Empty nest 1.0
Right, so he's gone. Liz and Holly are also out. Liz and i have both felt rather aimless today because it's bloody weird not having either of them around or needing to think of anything to do with them, although to be honest that happened quite a while ago - self-sufficient and overcome by ennui for quite some time have our children been. So it's empty nest time, almost. Presumably there will be a proper empty nest moment when they both really and truly do leave home, although people say that never quite happens. Holly announced a couple of years ago that she had in fact "left home", but since she did it while loading the washing machine it wasn't entirely convincing unless we lived in a laundrette.
The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on. Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything. My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless). So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing. For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.
I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do. There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you. Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role. Now that is software in a sense. Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning. Culture and nurture provide the software. Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual. Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore. Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware. There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel. However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met. For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent. That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth. As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel. The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies. I hope that makes sense.
There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software: Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999. She has a soul but no body and she is still with us. Here are some pictures of her:
This is a ghostly image of our phantom daughter on holiday in Sussex i think. Her age here is something like nine. Here's another one of her at home:
Unfortunately, due to the annoying fact that it's difficult to point a camera into a parallel universe, the shape of her face is a bit distorted, but she's there. Incidentally, her eyes are the wrong colour in both of these. Thus we still have a child at home, but she's disabled in an interesting way: she is less existent than the other two children.
On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too: the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not. Everyone has one of these. When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells. The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth. Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you: Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert. We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways. Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex. These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.
However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist. We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences. We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example. Think of it this way. You have a child. They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen. Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead. That child would not have been able to roll their tongue. Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind. Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact). However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person. It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender. The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity. They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences. Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls. As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.
To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.
Does that make sense?
The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on. Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything. My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless). So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing. For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.
I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do. There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you. Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role. Now that is software in a sense. Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning. Culture and nurture provide the software. Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual. Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore. Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware. There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel. However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met. For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent. That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth. As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel. The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies. I hope that makes sense.
There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software: Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999. She has a soul but no body and she is still with us. Here are some pictures of her:
On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too: the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not. Everyone has one of these. When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells. The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth. Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you: Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert. We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways. Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex. These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.
However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist. We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences. We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example. Think of it this way. You have a child. They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen. Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead. That child would not have been able to roll their tongue. Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind. Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact). However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person. It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender. The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity. They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences. Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls. As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.
To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.
Does that make sense?
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