The less school, the better
What do Bertrand Russell, William Blake, John Ruskin, William Cobbett and John Stuart Mill have in common? The answer is that they never went to school. Yes, many of our greatest and most independent thinkers were educated by parents, tutors or by the best teachers: themselves.
Russell and Ruskin were educated at home by a series of tutors. Mill was taught by his father and by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Blake spent his youth wandering around Peckham Rye and seeing angels. Cobbett was largely self-taught.
That most un-Victorian of Victorians, William Morris, went to a chaotic early incarnation of Marlborough, where he learnt nothing, and resumed his education at home.
It is to this lack of formal education that the historian E.P Thompson attributes Morris’s revolutionary brilliance: somehow, he slipped through the brainwashing net and became a passionate enemy of Victorian competitive values.
Samuel Johnson and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were great skivers who never finished their Oxbridge degrees. Robert Louis Stevenson was of the view that “full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry” were a better education than sitting in a classroom having information drummed into your mind by Gradgrinds intent on producing obedient wage slaves.
I am certain that most of my education happened when I was on my own, reading, or staring out of the window, thinking. This is not to say I didn’t have a few brilliant teachers – I did.
And teachers can show the way, without doubt. But the way to get an education is to go out and experience life and read books. That’s it. And it is a process that should never end throughout one’s days.
It is true that two of the 20th century’s greatest novelists and free spirits, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, went to Eton, but then Eton is unusually unschool-like. The pupils are given a huge amount of choice, respect and freedom.
I offer these examples as proof of my point: as a method of delivering education, school is overrated. This was Bertrand Russell’s view. “Men are born ignorant, not stupid,” he wrote. “They are made stupid by education.”
Einstein wrote of “that divine curiosity which every healthy child possesses but which is so often weakened early”. In which case it makes sense for the idle parent to keep formal education to a minimum. Intellectual loafing centres such as Westminster or Eton are not an option for most of us.
In any case, who wants to slave all the hours that God gives to send our children to private school? And as the idle child is an anti-consumerist child, it doesn’t make sense to send him or her to school with the country’s richest families.
The problem is, I am also against the local comprehensive. This is because the comps are run by the state, which means their long-suffering teachers have to cope with a constantly changing educational ideology.
Right now the idea is targets and more targets, but doubtless the next Education Secretary will have a different set of brilliant ideas and the previous lot will be thrown out. If politicians could only leave the schools alone, teachers might be able to get on with teaching.
School terms are much too long; so are school days. The schools that produce the best results and the freest thinkers have the shortest terms and shortest days. They are not merely containment camps for pre-workers. (A thought: now that playschool has been renamed preschool by the fun-haters, why not go the whole hog and rename school prework?)
This is the spirit we need to bring to education: the less school, the better. We need to explore other options – home schooling, learning groups, home tutors.
That doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of hard work or expense. This is where idleness comes in. It is precisely a love of learning and curiosity that schools tend to kill.
So it is the responsibility of the idle parent to implant a love of education. The way to do it is to lead by example and curl up with a good book.
Too true too true…
Only problem here, is that as a parent home educating you seldom get the chance to be idle… As you are the primary carer, source of fun, interest and transportation….
Still you get to drink lots of tea whilst they run around the various scout huts, church halls and adventure playgrounds that you invariably meet up in with other home ed families.
Cheers
I agree, Steven. However, the children often think that we are idling, so that’s probably good enough.
Research shows that children are experts at learning for themselves, that they detest being ‘taught’ unless they ask for help, are great at working together to explore and learn, and in doing this they learn how to co-operate, how to accept and work with differing perspectives. These are all great survival tactics. It beggars belief that it could be otherwise. Nature is not stupid.
For myself, I always felt my role as a parent was to get out of the way of my children. I assumed they knew who they were and what they liked and that they’d learn how to act with integrity of the saw me acting with integrity.
They also learned how to wash-up, cook and clean etc etc by watching me and joining in…
It’s not rocket science!
And for those who wish to delve into the darker recesses of education, I suggest a reading of John Taylor Gattos research, which is published on http://www.johntaylorgatto.com …. what those who created Compulsory State Education said in private about what they were doing will chill you to the bone!
Their agenda has not faltered one bit…
Although we thought it would be much harder when we brought our two daughters home from school at the end of 1st and 2nd grades, we were wrong. We traded in mornings of “get up get up so you can practise, so we can eat breakfast, so we can find shoes and sock and get in the car and bo on time to school!” and afternoons of eating snacks in the car, rushing to lessons and sports, rushing home to put dinner together, rushing the end of dinner (even if we were having a great time and wonderful conversation) so we would have time to read a chapter of our current read-aloud before bed–we traded all this in for wonderful lazy mornings of books in pajamas, picnics in the backyard, and plenty of time to enjoy our piano gymnastics and swimming lessons, and still have a long loafing dinner hour (or more).
We wrote silly poems; read billions of books. Doubling a recipe was fractions; card games were mental math–our lives were free and fun.
Homeschooling unschooling is just the thing for (happy) idle kids AND parents.
Thanks for writing about home education. I explain to people that it’s like the weekend, milling around, doing laundry, reading the paper, chatting about the latest exploit on PS3, discussing anything and everything, splitting hairs.
It’s also like the summer holidays, lots of sleeping, lots of eating, but I have to find a sitter each time I need to go to the optician etc. That’s the main downside.