Otherways: Home Education Network

By Fred McArdle
[This article was written when I was a lecturer in a teacher education course, and before we undertook home education. It still makes sense to me].

Competition is normally interpreted as competing in some sort of race to win, usually for self-centred reasons and to “prove” something.
Climbing a mountain or going bushwalking, on the other hand, is working together with somebody to see the scenery and to feel the achievement, to smell the scents, to breathe the air, and to present oneself with a challenge, to stretch one’s horizons. The walking or climbing is most often done in a group, where each member has the duty to support each other member, and each has the right to expect to be supported in the challenging environment, so that in the end all members have achieved and can enjoy the view with a sense of satisfaction and joy.

There is no way of knowing whether the mountain-climber or the runner is fitter or stronger, unless they enter into direct competition, which they almost certainly will not do.

Rarely would one member of a mountain-climbing or bushwalking group say, “Look, I beat you. I’m obviously superior to you.” Rather, the people who have climbed the mountain are more likely to embrace and congratulate each other, and share the joy of the moment and the achievement; they will exclaim upon the beauty of the scenery, the steepness of the climb they have all just made. The bushwalkers will probably sit down and share a drink together and share the moment in their own way.

Rarely would they stop at the end of the climb or the walk and work out how to rank the performance of the participants. Rather, they would celebrate the achievement of all the members of the group, and the fact that they all arrived safe and sound and in a fit state to celebrate, and they would look around, to see what beautiful sights there are to be seen in this world.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (0)

By Lisa Donnelly

I read with great interest the article in a recent Home Education Magazine defending unschooling to structured schoolers. In my neck of the woods, the shoe seems to be permanently on the other foot. I can’t count the times I’ve heard my fellow homeschoolers, most of whom unschool, utter conventional proverbs such as, “When you’ve homeschooled long enough, you’ll unschool.” Statements like, “I facilitate my child’s education; I don’t control it,” leave me, the structured heretic, feeling a bit like Genghis Khan, as if I am riding roughshod over my children’s natural curiosity, completely ignoring their needs and desires with my imposition of structure on their education. Not that these comments are ever meant to be in any way derogatory or hurtful. The consensus is simply that once you’ve been home with your children long enough, once you’ve seen their minds blossom and their curiosity take wing, you’ll naturally relax and let Nature take her course. Unschooling is “natural” schooling.

I couldn’t disagree more.

• Continue reading or Leave a comment... (1)

He always
He always wanted to explain things,
but no one cared,
So he drew.

Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t anything.
He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
He would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky
and it would be only the sky
and all the things inside him that needed saying.
And it was after that that he drew the picture,
It was a beautiful picture. He kept it under his pillow and would let no-one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it.
And when it was dark and his eyes were closed he could see it still.
And it was all of him and he loved it.
When he started school he brought it with him,
Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.

It was funny about school.
He sat in a square brown desk like all the other square desks and he had thought it would be red.
And his room was a square brown room, like all the other rooms.
And it was tight and close. And stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet
flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.
The teacher came and spoke to him.
She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys.
He said he didn’t like them and she said it didn’t matter.

After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt
about morning. And it was beautiful.
The teacher came and smiled at him. “What’s this?” she said.
“Why don’t you draw something like Ken’s drawing?” Isn’t it beautiful?”
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew airplanes
and rocket ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away
And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and blue, and
all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.

He was square and brown inside and his hands were stiff.
And he was like everyone else. All the things inside him that needed
saying didn’t need it anymore. It had stopped pushing. It was crushed.
Stiff.
Like everything else.

This was written very quietly by a teenage boy in class. Afterwards he put it very quietly on his teacher’s desk and went home and quietly, very quietly, took his own life.

• Leave a comment... (1)