Otherways: Home Education Network

Son had a problem trying to get the chickens to go in, some of the young ones stayed on one part of the fence and wouldn’t go round the corner to the door, even though the chickens inside were feeding…

SON: I don’t think chooks can communicate very well.
DAD: Not very well to us?
SON: Not very well to each other.
DAD: Why do you say that?
SON: Because the chooks inside should tell the ones outside to go round the corner and come in the door.
DAD: Chooks aren’t really like that when they are feeding. They are each trying to get as big a share of the food for themselves as possible.
SON: Oh. They should get some sort of a civilisation going.
- David Arnold, Violet Town

My children were playing banks and shops one day. Each had set up a desk and was conducting sales, withdrawls and deposits. The two older children decided that they would pay interest on deposits and settled on 10% as the going rate.
Their younger brother wanted to pay a flat $25 no matter how much people had in the bank.
When we explained to him how percentages work, he was outraged that the people with more money would get more interest. ‘That’s not right,’ he said indignantly. “The people with less money should get more interest so that they can
catch up!”
- Susan Wight, Bendigo

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By John Peacock, New Norfolk, Tas

Jean Lave had a problem.

She knew that the best scholarship said that schools were better than other places of learning because in schools skilled professionals taught general principles that were objective and unbiased because they were not dependent upon particular contexts or situations. That same scholarship said that other sorts of learning, such as go on in the home or in apprenticeships, for example, were second rate because they only taught people to mindlessly repeat or do as they had been taught.

Yet here she was studying apprentices in a poor African tailoring community and finding an 85% success rate, observing creative and complex learning and none of it had anything to do with teaching!

What is more, when she did the obvious and started looking at learning, not teaching, in other contexts she found similar results.

It became clear that when people are taken out of the real world of everyday, put in isolated institutions and ‘taught’ knowledge away from involvement in its practice nothing happens with respect to that knowledge.

That is, schools don’t work.

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By Susan Wight, Bendigo

Early Australian society needed and indeed the land itself demanded that people be frugal, self-sacrificing and hard-working. This was a time when there was nothing to spare. Possessions were few and were confined to absolute necessities. In order to survive people had to be resourceful and independent - they had to make and do for themselves. This was reflected in early Australian schooling which emphasised the basic academic skills and values of hard work, order, neatness, thoroughness, discipline, respect for authority and also that people be accepting of the sphere in life ‘in which it had pleased God to place them.’ Carefully chosen school books emphasised the desired attitudes. They featured parables such as the one about three boys called Can’t, Won’t and Try which concluded, “Can’t is servant to a master named Must; Won’t is a soldier under Captain Shall, and Try is a partner in the great firm of Success
and Co.” Even early in the twentieth century it was common to see a faded flour label on the back of little boys’ shirts made from used flour bags. School children meticulously copied phrases such as “Mending is better than ending” for writing practice and everything was mended, reused and recycled as much as possible. The curriculum for girls taught them how to ‘make ends meet’ as wives and mothers in their own homes. They learnt how to make (and mend) useful garments, how to make jam and pickle vegetables.

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