In a Different Class
By Dave Tacon, Sunday Life, The Age 1st June 2008
To its supporters, home schooling is the way to foster creative, independent learning, away from the rigidity of mainstream education. Dave Tacon meets four families who have opted to teach their own children.
It’s an idyllic setting, the Grace household in the hamlet of Maryknoll, an hour east of Melbourne. In a modest house perched on a grassy slope, home-grown tomatoes ripen on the kitchen windowsill as children play in the next room. Litsa, 47, and Geoff Grace, 43, both trained teachers, sit at the family table and explain why they educate their four children - Zack, 16, Maddy, 13, Katie, 12, and Amelia, 6 - at home.
“While I was teaching, I decided the school system was not a good way for children to learn,” says Litsa. “Learning was broken up into little timeslots, which meant we had to crunch gears and move onto the next thing just because the bell rang. It’s a crazy system when you look at it objectively.”
Geoff, who is also a Presbyterian lay preacher, teaches mathematics at Hillcrest Christian College while Litsa teaches the children: “It’s learning as part of life as opposed to taking children out of life and teaching them in an institution.”
Dr John Barratt-Peacock, co-author of Voices From Home - a study of Australian home educators - says Australia, like the US and the UK has seen a “steady” increase in home education in the past 25 years. “Home educators prefer to see success in terms of character development in their children,” he says.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics does not gather data on home education, and so, Barratt-Peacock says, “there is no way of knowing how many people are home-educating.”
Families that teach children at home are required to register with state education departments but he says many home educators refuse to register for reasons ranging from “philosophical and political to the simply paranoid”.
The Graces were inspired to home-school while living in South Gippsland 16 years ago after meeting a local family with five home-schooled children. “We couldn’t believe how amazing these kids were,” says Litsa. She believes formally educated children “tend to behave in a wary manner towards adults, having had years of being told to sit down and stop talking.” These children, however, seemed confident. “They’d look you in the eye and talk to you. We thought, ‘Whatever they’re doing, that’s what we want to do.”’
The Graces try to have breakfast together at 7.15 before Geoff goes to work. After that the children tidy their rooms and feed their animals. “Then I make them run around the garden,” says Litsa, “just for fitness and to get their brain cells working. Each lap is 200 metres. They try to have that done by nine.”
The “school” part of the day takes place at “the round table” in the living room. It begins with a Bible reading and prayer followed by group lessons on condensed versions of Shakespeare; Latin and Greek word roots; and biographies of famous artists, politicians and Christians.
Zack studies maths, science and essay writing in preparation for next year when he will go to Hillcrest Christian College to study for the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). Amelia used to watch Play School or work alone while the older children completed their school exercises but this year she will attend the local primary school for one term.
“We like each of our children to have a go at school, so they know what it is all about,” says Litsa. “After all, it is the common experience of most people in our culture.”
Litsa jokes that she once worried she “was raising freaks who wouldn’t be able to socialise” but she found her children integrated well when they attended school. Her three eldest enjoyed formal schooling. Maddy “would not have minded continuing” but wasn’t given the choice. “I would have had a bit of a battle on my hands if she had been very insistent but she wasn’t,” says Litsa.
Monash University researcher Glenda Jackson describes three types of home schooling: structured curriculum, which recreates a school environment in the home; natural learning, which is child directed; and eclectic learning, which combines the two. Jackson says the little research that exists indicates “Australian home-educated children have achieved an equal or higher-than-average [academic] result to their formally educated peers”.
The Graces’ approach to home education is eclectic. “In the afternoon, they do ‘delight-directed study,”’ says Litsa. “I believe the most effective learning takes place when we’re just talking and the kids are asking questions. For example, they might ask, ‘What is a cloud?’ and we’ll have an impromptu science lesson about condensation.”
The Graces’ syllabus diverges from formal schooling when it comes to some of their science textbooks. Alongside physics and chemistry books from Oxford University Press are science texts “written by [US] home-schoolers from a Christian perspective”.
Litsa says her children are “intelligent-design believers” but Geoff says they also learn Darwin’s theory of evolution. “It would be foolish of us to say, ‘Look, we don’t want you to know about evolution because it’s evil.’ Intelligent design is an interesting opportunity to investigate how science works. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a literal creationist.”
Over the other side of Melbourne, in Woodend in the Macedon Ranges, 15-year-old home-schooled Marlon Dean explains that he never fitted in: “School was so horrible. It felt like I was submitting myself to be tortured every single day. I couldn’t stand it for so many reasons.”
A gifted child with an IQ of more than 140, Marlon was bullied at his local school. He says he disliked formal education from his first day of school. “My mother remembers that I got up at midnight and dressed because I was so excited about learning. But when I got there, everyone was just counting and doing the alphabet.”
At six, Marlon’s reading skills were at the level of a 12-year-old and his auditory memory was at adult level. “Whenever I wanted to learn something new, we were always doing something else. You could never choose what [or how] you wanted to learn or how fast you wanted to learn it.”
While his sister, Devin, 13, and brother Kyle, 10, continued mainstream primary schooling, Marlon’s mother, Corrina, resolved that her eldest son would not be attending year 9. Corrina, a primary school teacher, admits her decision “was not a lifestyle choice. He has wanted to be home-schooled since he was in prep.”
“By the time he got to year 8, it felt as if we had been pushing him into an environment he didn’t like. Bullying was only part of the problem. The main problem was the inflexibility of his teachers and the school in general. He was forced to sit through lessons in topics he had learned three years earlier.”
These days Marlon works in his room during regular school hours. He has designed his own timetable and a spreadsheet of ongoing projects. His primary goals are reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History Of Time, studying Auslan - Australian sign language - and working on the corporate identity of his father’s carpentry business. Writing a sciencefiction novel, fantasy novel and superhero comic as well as studying the periodic table are on the list. His resources include the internet, local libraries and his subscription to New Scientist magazine. He will also work through specific textbooks with his mother.
“I don’t have the validation of an A-plus. Normally I’m fine with it but every now and then I have periods of doubt,” says Marlon.
Corrina appreciates that her son does not have the same need to socialise as his peers, although Marlon has “a few friends from my old school who drag me out of the house to go to the movies”.
Last year, Marlon attended c1aymation and drama classes locally and went on a camp in the Victorian snowfields, organised by the Home Education Network, a support group for home-schoolers. Although based in Victoria, the network also includes interstate members. It has no religious affiliation and its membership is diverse. “There are social opportunities all the time,” says Corrina.
Marlon expects to complete his VCE through adult education and to study science at university. “I know that what we are doing is right for us and right for Marlon,” says Corrina. “He’s like the boy he was before he started school, so I don’t care what other people think. I just know we’re happy. As long as the government allows us to do this.”
Since July 2007, all Victorian home-school parents have been legally obliged to register with the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority. Those in NSW have had to register with the Office of the Board of Studies since 1990. Teaching qualifications for parents are not compulsory.
The Beilharz-Kramer family of Templestowe Lower in Melbourne’s north-east have exclusively homeschooled their four children, Zeke, 16, Hannah, 14, Josiah, 12, and Raphael, 9. Violin maker Volker, 46, says he and wife Nicki, a 41-year-old violinist, have “a difference of opinion” about compulsory registration. “I’m a little more in favour of it,” says Volker. “It gives legitimacy, a sense that this is another path you can take. The worst-case scenario would be that home-school families are inspected to see whether they are meeting academic standards. This is anathema to us - one-size-fits-all education is the wrong approach.”
Volker admits he was nervousn when Zeke was unable to read a card given to him for his ninth birthday. By the age of 11, however, Zeke as reading novels such as the Redwall and Star Wars series. “People expect that natural learners will grow up into some kind of caveman,” he laughs.
Nicki’s suspicion is that Victoria’s compulsory registration may lead to stricter controls: “In Germany you can’t home-school. It’s illegal - people get their kids taken away from them. That’s scary. I know people in other states who have had an inspectors come in. It can be demoralising.”
Registration in NSW means home educators receive a visit from a Board of Studies “approved person” (AP). Families must also keep a diary to prove they are covering key learning areas. Gerardine Crowley-Butler, 46, of Berowra in Sydney’s north, registered as a home-schooler when she took her son, Jack, then 10, and daughter Nicola, then 7, out of primary school five years ago.
The AP cheeked the learning area for adequate light, ventilation and learning resources. The Crowley-Butlers were told they had “gone overboard with extensive resources”, which includes computer classroom-type environment with books, a television and DVD player and even a Bunsen burner. The family’s chickens, mice and dog are incorporated into their children’s education. They breed and sell cockatiels, spurring discussions of “nature over nurture” and “ethics and profit”.
Gerardine, a disability and palliative care worker finds registration at odds with her own educational philosophy. “We are required to ’school’ for the same hours as in mainstream education. This makes the kids and me laugh, as learning happens all day every day of the year. As a state, we fail many, many children who go to school. We don’t register parents to raise or feed their children properly. Do we need to register when home educators are so proactive?
During the week Sunday Life spoke with Gerardine, she and her youngest, Harry, 7, made polymers, built a model aircraft carrier from straws and studied buoyancy, and had an impromptu discussion about the size of atoms. There were also lessons in introductory Indonesian, a visit to a respite and palliative care centre and a game of neighbourhood cricket. Gerardine sees herself more as “facilitator” than teacher and claims “there’s no such thing as a typical week”. Her children learn at their own pace, directed by their abilities and interests.
Nevertheless, this year Nicola, 12, wanted to attend year 6 at her old primary school “at the urging of her friends”. She ventured back for one term before returning to home schooling, a decision Gerardine says was left up to her daughter.
Gerardine’s decision to home-school has caused friction with other families. “It was quite an emotional time with Jack being told his mother was ‘a loser’ by one parent,” she says.
Like Gerardine, Litsa Grace wishes more parent would home-school: “I often talk to mothers who are thinking of doing it and say, “Do it! It’s fantastic! I have never done anything more satisfying in my life.”
“Or challenging. Or frustrating at times…” adds her husband.
© Dave Tacon. Reproduced by permission