Category Archives: system

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The key to Learning is Freedom

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TYOC LOGO“The key to Learning is Freedom”, but what does that really mean? It means, having the freedom to learn WHAT we want to learn and HOW we want to learn it, for each of us, which includes our children. The WHAT and HOW is controlled in classrooms, which it has to be to a certain extent as there’s lots of people, little time and stretched resources, however, the same need not be true for learning outside of school.

WHAT does your child want to learn about that doesn’t get addressed at their school? HOW does your child learn best?

If your child can’t tell you then you’ll need to find out through observation. We can find out a lot about our children when we watch and listen.

Having the freedom to learn helps your child become a lifelong learner, which will assist their life long term… as nothing in life is guaranteed and we all have times of reassessing what we do and how we’ll do it and we certainly don’t enjoy other people making those choices for our lives. Being a tutor is about assisting someone else’s learning by supporting, demonstrating and eventually becoming redundant. To tutor means to help a learner learn how to tutor themselves… even to teach themselves. We want our children to become independent of us… to live their own life, make their own way, do their own washing!

The freedom to learn in a class is not and can not be present; learning is compulsory or the student is punished. Learn and you are rewarded, which is also about not being free to learn, as students learn to work for an external goal, rather than focussing on the learning alone; learning for learning’s sake.

Students wait for the teacher to teach and they are trained NOT to teach themselves. Tutoring is giving back power, and the desire, to learn, for themselves by themselves. How many times do you hear the excuse “but the teacher didn’t tell us to ….” when you know your child should have proceeded without having to be told? Or “but the teacher told us to do it this way” when you yourself were taught another, better, easier, faster way? Does it feel like a battle between you and their teacher? Do you feel they have more control over your child’s learning than your child has over their own learning? Or even YOU over your child?

Did you know that YOU are legally responsible for your child’s education, not the school? Did you know that school isn’t even compulsory, only receiving an education is compulsory. You are using the school, you’re not suppose to ‘feel used.’

Did you know that the vast majority of teachers are in love with learning and dearly love children who want to learn, but the system and procedures of a classroom prevent them from teaching according to the very best standards? Standards and methods that have been well researched and documented, such as individual learning plans, multiple intelligences, real world experiential learning, self-correcting hands on manipulatives etc. Your child’s teacher/s should be your partner/s. They are with your child for a significant portion of their waking life for 13 years. Yes they are busy, yes you may still ‘fear teachers’ yourself, but if they didn’t like children they wouldn’t do the job. They don’t want to be feared,  they want the children to learn. If you need their feedback then approach them and get it. It will help your child AND the teacher long term.

Assist, support, encourage, praise enough to keep them wanting to learn, however, the ultimate aim is to become redundant as your student, your child, rediscovers the ‘freedom to learn’ they had prior to attending school. As they do, they may view schools a little differently. You may too. Schools are NOT the only place where learning occurs, sometimes they even make it harder to learn, but here is a trick for you, if you encourage your child to learn ANYTHING outside of school (sport, art, music etc) and it’s something they  love it will increase their desire to learn, their grades in school improve, as they transfer those ‘how to learn’ skills into their schooling.

Conversely if  you force your child to learn something they don’t want to learn, thereby further limiting their freedom, their desire to learn reduces and their performance at school also goes down.

“Learning is the key to freedom” because if you can learn anything, you have no restrictions to what you can experience and that’s a liberating thought.

First day of School?

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first day of school 1980As THOUSANDS of children head off to school today, it’s a great time to remember what that institution is… it’s ONE of the venues your child attends where they learn. Your home, the world, their friend’s house, the shops… the park, the beach, the *insert here* is another. LEARNING happens regardless, no matter where they are.

However, schools deliberately try to make children learn, and this doesn’t always work… which would be fine except schools ALSO test your child’s learning. That brings stress into learning. Tutoring YOUR own child can help to reduce that stress. It can improve test results, make learning easier and school more enjoyable. Tutoring is ‘assisting a student to understand what HAS been taught’, not teaching from scratch.

As you kiss them goodbye and then wait until you see them again, see if you can remember what it’s like to be excited to go school…. remember that first flush of new pencils and new school bag…. those new books!!!! The anticipation was INTENSE, hey!!!!

Then came the stress and then the boredom…. between the stress and boredom IS WHERE YOU FIT IN!!!! Catch them at the first sign of stress and help them to cope… that’s what tutoring REALLY does.

Happy to answer any questions you have, your questions may help others. Hope today is AWESOME for everyone!

Notes for the parent tutor

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Do you remember the video for Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’? ( here’s a link for the video cliphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U) Watch this with your Schooled child and discuss with open communication your experiences as a Schooled child. Consider reclaiming your role as their FIRST teacher. Tutoring your own child is about helping them understand not just what’s taught in class but how to understand the world. What I’d love for you to know, Parents, is that in ‘their eyes’ we brought them into the world, they are only here because we decided to create them. They look to US for help on that sometimes frightening job of learning about the world but then they get put into a School and are away from us, isolated from the ‘real world’ as we call it. Then we expect them to learn in isolation from the ‘real world’ how to live in the ‘real world’. It’s not just a school thing, it’s for any family that restricts what their children can and can’t learn about, but it is also a ‘School thing’ as at no other time in our lives do we get segregated into ‘same age groups’ and forced to learn at a teacher’s pace, day in day out.

We used to have children knowing it was a lifelong commitment to another person, the way we used to view marriage. It’s part of becoming an adult to leave your own childhood behind and become ‘responsible’ for another human. Now we have a baby and go back to work, somewhere between 6 weeks and 6 years later. Women are punished socially for not returning to work in some circles, in others returning to work is the crime. Mummy Wars are the new competition that are added to the war on image that’s been playing out for decades.

Clearing up the realities for a minute, just forget about what other’s think about how you’re living your life, the reality is that no one else will do the job of ‘raising our children’ for you. Sure they’ll ‘babysit’ and they’ll ‘educate’ but as far as ‘being there for them’, well that’s our job. Delegating is a choice and the consequences can be life changing. Our children still look at us to be the one’s ultimately responsible for them until they too are grown and ready to be responsible for someone else.

How much damage does it take before you can’t reconnect with your child? Don’t let the opportunity to turn things around vanish without your full consideration. Wishing you all the very best with your journeys.

Here is the full length movie of ‘The Wall’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQE3vcwU97g

Conference Reef and stuff!

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It’s time for me to publish a post on my blog. What shall it be about hmmmm? Well I’m not really motivated to do more than say that life goes on, ups and downs…. oh we attended the Australian Unschooling Conference. It was very intense, sublime and the setting was awesome.

We swam in the warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef and although it broke my heart to be there, knowing what tourism and CSG etc is doing to the natural wonder I managed to balance out my own personal dilemma of contributing to the tourism.Once there I saw that the area we saw was fairly dull and up further was much brighter… I like (tongue in cheek) that we may have been ‘kept away’ from the pristine parts… but it’s still something I struggle with. I still feel as though a dream of mine has been fulfilled.

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Why on EARTH would you ‘homeschool’?

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Well I wouldn’t actually!

Staying home and ‘schooling’ my children would be worse than sending them to school! What I’m doing is providing my children with choices. You see a long long time ago a little 4 year old girl got disgusted with being treated as though she was a fool! Being told to stop reading so much, watching other little children being sent back out into the rain after coming to school late, just to get a ‘late note’, listening to peaceful happy children become bossy as they imitated the teachers, well that little 4 year old girl just got more and more angry!

But she had a choice. At first she chose to change the teachers and let them know what they were doing wasn’t right. Of course this didn’t go down well. There was a very sympathetic Librarian who cried over this little girl and told me she was a ‘heroine’ of hers and inspired her to remember what it was like to be a child.

Next the exceedingly grumpy now 5 year old became just like the other children and changed who she was in order to fit in. This was followed by a distraught 5 year old who realised that she was being nasty to her little brother and mother, who she loved very much… but she was free to make new choices.

We knew people who went to other schools, but they had the same problems that she en-counted; parents not comforting upset children once on school property, teachers yelling commands and ushering children like cattle, children being told to stop learning so that the class could do the same things at the same time and move on to the next activity, and the next and the next etc. There was no going back to the Montessori preschool to do extended day… and the regret of choosing Kindergarten was deep.

But the little girl had another choice…

Now, you may think that children need to ‘adjust’ to school life. If she kept with it she would get used to it and learn to fit in. You may even think that if she was older she wouldn’t have reacted this way.

So we did a bit of ‘school at home’ but she was a child who wanted to learn, she didn’t want to be told what to learn! But wanting to learn wasn’t enough… she had ‘lost’ her ability to self educate. She had been programmed to follow orders, not to generate her own ideas. Not being able to be told what to learn and not being able to decide what to learn herself meant that NO learning was happening. From being a four year old child who could read a newspaper she was going BACKWARDS fast! What a horrible catch 22 she was in! We HAD to de-school her! We found a ‘Montessori like school’ but the teacher lost his smiles once the parents left and he often yelled, was frightening and the materials were not presented correctly because no one had the proper training. So we had to school at home again…

Eventually we got into a really good rhythm… learning went from forced to spontaneous and we began introducing much loved Montessori materials, which I was trained in presenting.

The once 5 year old turned 7. You might say well that’s great, but don’t turn your back on schools! What about socialisation?

Through the broad range of home educating families we were developing a network of playdates and playmates for her, her younger brother and her mum! Together there were some 25 people we had regular contact with. Four of those children she had known through the Montessori preschool and one of those was starting at a local school after home educating for some time. The school would hopefully start a Montessori Class! 1 year of normal class then onto a Montessori class WITH her best mate! Too good to be true. It was not without risk. If the class didn’t go ahead at the end of the year would she stay at school? Would she go back to home education and have to become an independent learner all over again? What about Socialisation? She had SO MANY friends that she would hardly see and her memories of children being bossy in schools was still there.

We found out the best friend was moving and the Montessori class would never begin. After such a negative memory of schools we discussed the pros and cons and then she made her choice.

For a year she went to school. She turned 8. She was often frustrated with the fickle nature of friendships made and broken over slights and misunderstandings. She was also frustrated over the immature nature of the children, perpetuated by teachers who made choices over what the children learnt, when and for how long. Programs that sounded exciting were segregated up according to age so that some children played drums for the whole year of performing arts while others got more varied instruments.

Scientific experiments while exciting were rare and given as a display… too many children for each to have a go… easier for no-one to have a go.

I never chose for my daughter to stay home and be schooled. I never chose for her to not go to school. I chose to respect that it was my own choice to have my two children so my life must be about honouring their lives: To be the mother they need and want, to be loving, responsible, kind, caring and courageous for them.

Both of my children have now chosen NOT to attend a school. They will always be free to change their minds but their minds are currently fixed. They have several reasons for this, here are a few.

  • They want to learn and you don’t get as much time to learn what you are interested in in a classroom
  • Teachers always tell you how to behave but people know how to behave when they are with their friends and family… you learn manners from each other and it’s more gentle for young children then being yelled at.
  • Children who don’t go to school get more time to be out and about and learn how to be part of the community. We get time to talk about lots of stuff with heaps of people; in shops, at parks, with friends and their parents and their brothers and sisters. You get to talk more and it helps you to grow to be more aware of other people’s thoughts and feelings
  • If you really want to lean something you can learn it right away. It’s easier to learn things when you are interested in it. At school you have to learn what the teacher wants you to know and everyone is hurrying up to be the fastest one finished the work. It’s not really as good for learning.
  • When you learn something and understand it you can use it right away, like maths or knowing how to spell a word. At school you have to do the same work over and over again and you end up getting bored of it. Also you can forget to use it in real life. It’s much better to learn how to do something and then just use it! Worksheets with the same questions on them are not as good as learning it in real life.
So I set up a learning space in the house, use some common values that we have discussed together and agreed upon, organise for sports, science, art, music, nature, playdates, excursions, library visits and other outside the home activities, spend time with them discussing what they are interested in and supporting them in every way I can. I read the board of studies requirements and observe that they naturally learn most of it themselves! When they don’t I point out what still needs to be covered and we discuss the subject, Google for information, a game or what other relevant and interesting way to learn that information or skill and then they have finished what ‘the other children are doing in schools’… well what subjects they cover. Usually it takes about a third of one year to do a whole years work learning this way. Still they are attentive to learning on average 45 hours per week, although they are required to only do 25 hours. Apparently in schools children have on average 90 minutes of quality learning per day… 
It’s not stressful, it’s a privilege that they want me to be part of their lives and this time moves fast. To watch them learn everyday and become more confident, willing and able to be themselves is nothing short of amazing! I mean, I chose to have them but they choose to love me and all because I respect them and put their needs in the forefront of my choices. I don’t ‘homeschool’ them… I house their bodies but not their minds! They are self educating beings driven by their own curiosity and passions. My dd is obsessed with reading and science and my ds loves to create buildings, machines and factories in his mind, on paper, on the computer, with lego, with math materials… with the cat if he stays still long enough!
They are learning from within themselves that their desire to learn has a theme and they match that theme to the world around them, bringing their imagination to it, watching how others have created and discovered ideas and solutions; learning about scientists, architects, authors and engineers. They learn about the childhood’s of these creators, what they thought about and felt, what other things they were interested in and how their life’s work made a difference to others. They know that a small child playing with crayons can be the making of a designer, a small scale home movie can teach you something, just be a fun activity, can entertain others or be be a Tropfest junior entry!
No… I don’t see why ANYONE would ‘homeschool’ either! Keeping them indoors and making them do worksheets from 9-3? Actually… I don’t know anyone who DOES do that!