In an earlier post, we looked at the second myth (teacher-led instruction is passive) Daisy Christodoulou debunks in her book Seven Myths About Education. Today we move on to myth three.
Myth 3: The 21st Century Fundamentally Changes Everything
You’ve probably heard this myth yourself. According to this myth, back in our parents day, we stuffed knowledge into the heads of students. Now, however, this will just render our children irrelevant. Now we need to focus on the acquisition of transferable skills so our children can adapt quickly to the inevitable changes that our modern world will bring into their lives.
Some even go so far as to say that those taught under the old model of knowledge will be doomed to ever-diminishing manual jobs, while skills educated children will ‘whizz around the country problem solving.’
Trends which express this myth
There are some trends in education that spring from this myth. One of these is for a curriculum to be based around skills instead of subjects. An example is the Opening Minds curriculum which is centred around five essential skills rather than subjects. The skills are: citizenship, learning, managing information, relating to people and managing situations. All good skill to be sure. Skills that we certainly want our children to learn.
Another example is the New Zealand curriculum, which although it has subject areas, is fairly sparse in terms of knowledge requirements, focusing instead on skills. In addition, the curriculum emphasises five key competencies: thinking, using language, symbols, and texts, managing self, relating to others and participating and contributing.
Are these skills unique to the 21st century?
The problem with all of this is not that these skills are not important, but that these are skills humans have always needed to be successful. There is nothing uniquely 21st century about them at all! Creativity and problem solving are indeed 21st century skills. But they are not uniquely 21st-century skills. The world has always favoured those who were creative and able to solve problems. Did our forebears require these skills? Of course they did, just as much, if not more so than us.
But the real issue is the way we now propose our children gain these skills. The whole movement pushing the teaching of ’21st century skills’ has become a codeword for removing knowledge from our curricula. But this is perverse, as Christodoulou points out.
…removing knowledge from the curriculum will ensure that pupils do not develop twenty-first century skills.
Implications
Skills are not gained in a vacuum. Knowledge based curricula give our children what they need to develop the skills we all recognise are essential.
Secondly, we should be sceptical of those who argue that we need to toss out old ideas and knowledge. The reverse is true. The newer the idea, the more likely it is to become obsolete! Christodoulou points out that if something has proved itself useful over thousands of years, it is a good bet that it will be useful for the next 100 years. But something that has only been valuable for 5 years? In that case, we cannot be so certain. Therefore the newer an idea, the more sceptical we should be about teaching it in our schools. The older ideas have stood the test of time.
I’ve seen this in my lifetime. In my high school years, we did some learning in ICT. I learned to use programmes that no longer exist.
Recently we looked at Elizabeth Bartholet’s attack on homeschooling. There have been many excellent articles critiquing her thinking. One such, written by Kevin D Williamson appeared in the National Review. Williamson notes the reason many like Bartholet fear homeschooling and want it banned. School is an essential part of state monitoring.
Homeschooling inhibits the ability of the state to conduct surveillance on some families. “There is no way of knowing how many homeschooled children experience a childhood comparable to Tara’s,” she [Bartholet] writes. “But we do know that the homeschooling regime permits children to be raised this way.”
In addition, Williamson further highlights why Statists love public schooling, and fear homeschooling: public schooling is actually for the benefit of the State.
The economic argument is straightforward and points back to Prussia, the spiritual homeland of progressivism. From Frederick the Great and Johann Julius Hecker through the Progressive Era to today, schools have been treated as factories that produce what the state needs: able administrators and bureaucrats in the context of the emerging Bismarckian welfare regimes and, later, workers in the industrial economies. Schools organized this way do not exist to serve children or families: They exist to serve the state, and children are not the customers — they are the product.
Williamson argues that what is being fought over here is whether children are the property of the state, whether education exists for the student or the state, and whether there is any private realm.
Homeschooling is based on a radical proposition that is utterly incompatible with Professor Bartholet’s politics. Homeschoolers insist that their children are not the property of the state, to be farmed and dispatched in accordance with the state’s needs; the homeschooling ethos insists that the purpose of education is to serve the needs and interests of students rather than those of the state or of business; it insists that there exists a sphere of life that is private and not subject to state surveillance, and that this sphere covers family life and child-rearing unless and until there is some immediate pressing reason for intervention.
So what is the debate really about?
The debate about homeschooling is not really about educational outcomes — there are good and bad homeschooling practices, good and bad public schools, good and bad private schools, etc. — but about who serves whom and on what terms. Do American families serve the state or does the state serve them? Do we live our lives and raise our children at the sufferance of the state, or is the state an instrument of our convenience?
It’s sometimes helpful to use an analogy to stimulate thinking on fairness in taxation, and perhaps also the potential dangers of punishing wealthy citizens and treating them as the enemy. This one’s been floating around the internet for some time, but it’s a good one!
Restaurant Analogy
Each and every day, 10 men go to a restaurant for dinner together. The bill for all 10 comes to $100 each day. If the bill were paid the way we pay our taxes, the first four would pay nothing; the fifth would pay $1; the sixth would pay $3; the seventh $7; the eighth $12; the ninth $18. The 10th man – the richest – would pay $59. Although the 10 men didn’t share the bill equally, they all seemed content enough with the arrangement – until the restaurant owner threw them a curve.
“You’re all very good customers,” the owner said, “so I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. I’m going to charge you just $80 in total.” The 10 men looked at each other and seemed genuinely surprised, but quite happy about the news.
The first four men, of course, are unaffected because they weren’t paying anything for their meals anyway. They’ll still eat for free. The big question is how to divvy up the $20 in savings among the remaining six in a way that’s fair for each of them. They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33, but if they subtract that amount from each person’s share, then the fifth and sixth men would end up being paid to eat their meals. The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each person’s bill by roughly the same percentage, and he proceeded to work out the amounts that each should pay.
The results? The fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $14, leaving the 10th man with a bill of $50 instead of $59. Outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got one dollar out of the $20,” said the sixth man, pointing to the 10th man, “and he got $9!” “Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too! It’s not fair that he got nine times more than me!” “That’s true,” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get back $9 when I only got $2? The rich get all the breaks!” “Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”
The nine outraged men surrounded the 10th and brutally assaulted him. The next day, he didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they faced a problem that they hadn’t faced before. They were $50 short.
Today is Mother’s Day. And I want to use the opportunity to praise the mother who eschews career and focuses on family by running her household. I was fortunate enough to grow up with a mother of this kind. The old-fashioned kind, who knitted me jumpers with love, who made wonderful soups from scratch, who cooked healthy meals each night, who read aloud to me, who was always there. Sure we didn’t have the money two-income families had. There were no yearly overseas holidays, no fancy labelled clothes, no luxuries that the ‘cool kids’ had. But we had Mum, and we wouldn’t have traded that for the world.
And my children are blessed to have a mother of the same calibre. Motherhood is a calling that my wife has embraced with gusto. Despite having the intelligence and ability to do many things careerwise, she has instead elected to make a home. My wife stays at home and manages our household. She executes our budget ably, ensuring our single income covers our mortgage and feeds our family of 7. Every night, she expresses her love and care for us with healthy and nutritious meals. She serves our children by teaching them everything, from written English to Mathematics, from Science to baking, from how to look after a household to art. And she does this all because she loves them more than any school teacher (no matter how wonderful) ever could.
And yet, many make light of the woman who chooses this life. Somehow she is seen as inferior and unenlightened or perhaps under her husband’s thumb. She is not. We tell our young women they can have it all. But you can’t. That is a lie. The truth is, that the greatest calling for a Mum is making a home for those she loves! Young woman, if that makes you squeamish, you probably have drunk too deeply from that poisoned secular well of feminism. Young man, let me tell you from personal experience that you want a wife who wants to make a home, not a career. Only this kind of woman will create the stable anchor of love and commitment that a family needs.
Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes argues in a section on womanhood that Christians should reject the way of the world in its views on womanhood. He points out the patronizing language of those who mock the mother who gives herself to her family.
If someone talks about “economic opportunities for women,” he or she is not talking about the health and prosperity of the household, but about what money you make for yourself. Even the phrase “stay-at-home mom” is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like “stick-in-the-mud mom” or “sit-in-the-corner mom.” Do we talk about a “chained-to-the-desk mom” or a “stuck-in-traffic mom” or a “languishing-in-meetings mom”? To do fifty things in one day for which you alone are responsible, for the immediate good of the people you love, is deemed easy, trivial, beneath the dignity of a rational person, but to push memoranda written in legal patois from one bureaucratic office to another, at great public expense and for no clear benefit to the common good, now that is the life.
…
So let us remember our economics. Let us remember that all of our earning money is for the sake of the home. The home is not a flophouse where we stay and recuperate so that we can go back out and earn money, much of which we burn in the very earning of it, with eating out, no frugality, the extra car, the day care center, and so on. John Senior recommends a ‘gladsome poverty’ as a remedy for the madness that subjects the home to the hamster treadmill – labor for the sake of labor, or worse, for the sake of prestige, for a desk and a title. We must say to ourselves, “We will not subject our children to the new thing in the world, having them spend vast tracts of their waking hours in the company of people who do not love them and who will not, a few years later, even remember their names. We will not hang our children by the ropes of our ambition or avarice. We will not institutionalize them at age three so that we may place them in a ‘good school system,’ that mythical beast, at age six. We will not mount the treadmill. We do not care what our ‘betters’ think. They have no great joy to show for all their sweat and grumbling.”
We all have cultural blindspots. It cannot be helped. There are certain things that each age and culture takes for granted. Unquestioned assumptions that rule us. In a previous post, we saw Elizabeth Bartholet’s unquestioned assumption that the State has the right to shape the thinking of children. In addition, we are hampered by what C.S. Lewis called chronological snobbery – the assumption that everything now is better than before. It’s often only as we confront another culture that we start to question our beliefs and even identify our blindspots.
As Christians, we must always be on the lookout for these cultural blindspots. They may be hiding explicitly anti-Christian ways of thinking or living. One way of doing this is to study History, in particular church history. As we read widely from different time periods, we get a feel for the worldviews and thinking of different ages. C.S. Lewis regarded this as very important. He encouraged people to read one old book for every new one!
It’s natural for us to fall into the trap chronological snobbery. We think we are better than our forebears. Clearly we are in some ways, notably technological ability. Yet even this rests on the discoveries of those who preceded us. But our superiority here causes us to assume our whole way of life is better. That is, if we think about it at all. But the same sinful nature that afflicted those who came before also afflicts us. People often will point to issues like slavery, or the treatment of women in past ages to show that we are superior to those who came before us.
Not at all. We just see these particular issues clearly because they are not cultural blindspots for us. Revisit our times in a history book 500 years hence, and there will be a whole new list of atrocities and sins not least of them, in my opinion, being abortion that our descendants will note, but we are on the whole largely blind to.
Maybe, just maybe, many of our patterns of life are not better than our forebears.
Chatting with my wife after a sermon today at church stimulated my thinking on this further. In Christian circles, we all know of missionaries and full-time ministry workers who have taken their ministry so seriously that it has negatively impacted family life. We’ve heard of children shunted off to another city to boarding school while their parents carry out missionary work. In history, we read of men who were so passionate about serving God that their wives and children suffered in a variety of ways.
I’d never thought of things in this light before, but today it brought to mind the passage in I Timothy 5 where Paul is helping Timothy think through provision for the needy such as widows in the church. Here he writes, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.“
Now in this context, we are talking about physical provision, and that provision, focussed on widows. Yet it provoked this thought in me. If it is such a gross sin to fail to provide physically for our relatives, is it perhaps also a profound sin to fail to care for them spiritually? If we parents become so focussed on serving God in our careers, could we not still be in danger if we neglect the greater priority of loving and discipling our children?
Jesus castigated the Pharisees once for their failure to honour their parents. They had come up with a tradition whereby they could gift money to God. This meant that whatever help they owed to their parents could (according to them) legitimately be refused. We read of this in Matthew 15. So here a spiritual reason was given for neglecting their physical duty of provision to their parents. They reasoned it was morally legitimate to give their money to God in such a way that rendered them incapable of helping their parents. Jesus saw through this and condemned them for setting aside the law of God (Honour your father and mother) for the sake of their traditions. Indeed he said they were only honouring him with their lips, and not their hearts.
Are we in danger of doing the same kind of thing? Parents are called to a radical programme of discipling their children.
In Deuteronomy 6 we see this radical programme in outline.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:6-9
And in the New Testament, the apostle Paul in Ephesians holds fathers particularly responsible for the discipline and instruction in the Lord of their children. To withhold this is to provoke a child to anger.
So my question is this. Is it possible that we might set aside the law of God requiring us to nurture and disciple our children and replace (and justify this replacement) with that pseudo-spiritual tradition of men: “ministry”? What might that say about the state of our hearts? Let us search our own hearts and make sure we retain the priorities God has for us.
Does this mean we should have no other ministry obligations apart from family? Of course not! However, our priorities should be rightly ordered. It’s all too easy for something as unnoticed and pedestrian as family to be usurped by a ministry that might seem more important, seem to have greater impact, be more public and provide more excitement and fulfilment.
In a chapter from Hold on to your kids by Dr Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté, the authors mentioned in passing that home-schoolers are favoured applicants of some big-name universities. They go on to quote Jon Reider, former admissions official at Stanford University in California that they are desirable because “homeschoolers bring certain skills – motivation, curiosity, the capacity to be responsible for their education – that high schools don’t induce very well.”
This was twenty years ago, but interesting nonetheless. In my experience of homeschoolers, these words ring true. And I am a high school teacher.
In an earlier post we looked at Daisy Christodoulou’s book Seven Myths About Education. The first myth we looked at was Facts Prevent Understanding. Here we learned that facts are foundational to the acquisition of skill and critical thinking processes.
Myth 2: Teacher Led Instruction Is Passive
Essentially, this myth argues that direct teaching is ineffective because the student becomes a passive vessel. Instead, we need to allow children to direct their own learning. They need to learn independently to become independent learners.
Once again some big names in the past have been associated with this myth. Rousseau felt that formal teaching of reading (of the alphabet and sounds) was inappropriate and that a stimulating environment would enable children to discover reading for themselves. John Dewey felt that a child’s inclinations should determine the education process, and he is echoed in those who speak of student agency and child-centred pedagogy. Freire, a Brazilian educationalist, was opposed to drill and memorisation and spoke of co-construction of knowledge through discussion and dialogue, where the teacher was not a figure of authority but a student as well.
So what do we know about learning? Evidence does not support the idea that teacher-directed education is passive and unhelpful. Firstly we know that there are some things that are not learned naturally. Nobody learns their alphabet naturally. Nobody learns our number system naturally. Nobody learns about gravity from their own contemplation and study. The breakthroughs in civilization were breakthroughs because they were concepts that for thousands of years were not learned naturally or independently. Why would we expect each child to have to relearn these unnatural developments when it took thousands of years to get to them in the first place? We need teachers to pass on this knowledge, and we do this effectively through teacher instruction.
The second piece of evidence that Christodoulou refers to is the human working memory. Apparently the limitations of our working memory explain why humans took so long to discover some of the laws of nature. In learning, our working memories can only hold so much information and are prone to overload when there is minimal guidance.
The final piece of evidence against this myth is the evidence we have in favour of the effectiveness of direct teacher instruction. Christodoulou cites John Hattie in his Visible Learning which highlights direct teaching as the third most powerful teacher factor. She cites a major American study which showed the direct instruction method outperformed other methods in terms of academic performance and the self esteem of the students.
Once again, it’s funny how educational experts need convincing of what most laypeople instinctively understand: an expert teacher who can keep students spellbound and motivated is what our children need.
The most important job of the Christian parent is to disciple your child. Catechising your children is a great way of doing this in a systematic manner. The children’s catechism is an excellent option that is based on the Westminster Shorter Catechism. From a very young age, children are capable of great feats of memorisation, so why not get them learning good theology.
One fabulous aid in catechising your children is music. Our family enjoys is listening to Songs for Saplings. There are six volumes of Questions and Answers. The volumes are entitled God and Creation, Fall and Salvation, Christ and His Word, The Word of God, Prayer and the Sacraments and Christ and his return. The music is free to listen to and very catchy. Our kids know lots of Bible verses and theology as a result of Songs for Saplings. Simply say, “Can you go to heaven with a sinful nature?” they will start singing back, “No, my heart must be changed.” There is nothing like music for aiding memorisation of truth.
I recently became aware of a call by Harvard University law professor Elizabeth Bartholet for a presumptive ban on homeschooling.
Her concerns are outlined in a recent article in Harvard Magazine:
Elizabeth Batholet
Firstly, there are no academic checks or requirements for parents who homeschool. The implication is that children who homeschool will be shortchanged academically. Secondly, Bartholet worries about the isolation homeschooling causes, and in consequence of this, the potential for parental abuse. A third concern for Bartholet is that many homeschool families are conservative Christians who are seeking to remove their children from mainstream culture. Apparently these evil conservative Christians are ideologues who question science and promote female subservience and white supremacy! So in this third objection to homeschooling she implicitly outlines what she sees is the purpose of compulsory government education. For her, one part of state education is that it helps children to become productive members of society, but the other aspect of education is exposing children “to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints”.
The article concludes with Bartholet reassuring us that she thinks parents should still have“very significant rights to raise their children with the beliefs and religious convictions that the parents hold”, and adds that children attending a school for 6-7 hours a day does not unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas.
Does Homeschooling Hinder Children Academically?
Let’s critique the argument and begin with her point about the shortchanging of children academically. Unfortunately for Bartholet, if we are arguing a case against homeschooling on purely academic terms, the evidence supports the homeschooling side of the argument. Studies show that children who have been homeschooled tend to perform better than students in public schools. In one review of the literature on the subject, Brian Ray concluded that homeschooling children on average are “at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile.” As a teacher, who has a wife who homeschools our children, my own anecdotal experience has been that there is a certain academic benefit to the practice. My ten-year-old daughter recently picked up and enjoyed Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and read Animal Farm by George Orwell. I say this not to boast, but just to point out that she is in no way being hindered by her homeschooling education. In fact, she is most likely being given the time and opportunity to do things she certainly wouldn’t be doing if she were in a regular classroom, even at a decent school!
I by no means mean to denigrate teachers or independent schools. They certainly hold a valuable place in society. Homeschooling is not for everyone, all I am seeking to do is suggest that children are definitely not academically disadvantaged by homeschooling.
I certainly would agree with Bartholet that in some rare cases there are parents homeschooling their children who are not equipped to do so. However, given that we also have teachers who are not particularly well-equipped to educate our children, I don’t see this as a knock-down argument.
Does Homeschooling Children Leave them More Open To Abuse?
Illustration by Robert Neubecker
Let me begin by addressing the isolation that Bartholet suggests is dangerous. The article in Harvard Magazine includes a telling illustration. A girl is imprisoned in a house of books, one of which is the Bible. Meanwhile, the poor wee thing is looking out at all the public school children who are having a fabulous time. Unfortunately for Bartholet, the picture she, and this illustration paint is highly inaccurate. In actual fact, while children attending schools are in classrooms learning from 9 to 3, homeschooling children are meeting up with friends, going on outdoor field trips and having a whale of a time! Ironically, the illustration could be equally used to show the benefits of homeschooling. Because the teacher to student ratio is so good, and behavioural issues are not so much of a problem, most homeschooling families tend to get their academic work done by lunchtime, leaving plenty of time to catch-up with friends for extracurricular activities.
But let’s return to the substance of her second criticism. She is concerned with parental abuse of children. Once again, Bartholet’s argument here is based on little evidence. She cites one example of a homeschooler who was abused. There is hardly a week that goes by where I don’t read of a teacher sexually abusing a child under his or her care. This is pretty common stuff. In New Zealand, between 2015 to 2017, the Education Council served 196 disciplinary outcomes to 81 teachers for sexual misconduct. In a synthesis of the literature on educator sexual misconduct prepared for the U.S. Department of Education, Charol Shakeshaft highlights a report that nearly 9.6% of students are targets of educator sexual misconduct sometime during their school career. I highly doubt that anywhere near that percentage of homeschool children would suffer sexual abuse from their parents.
But in addition to sexual abuse perpetrated by teachers, public schools are also places where students can be sexually abused by each other. In the same synthesis of the literature, Charol Shakeshaft notes that the same report that highlights educator abuse of 9.6% of students suggests that of students who suffer sexual abuse at school, 21% were targets of educators, while the remaining 79% were targets of other students.
Finally, who hasn’t heard of the bullying epidemic in schools? Large schools can be havens for bullies. My own personal experience of moving from a small family-like independent school to a large impersonal public school is indicative. In my first term at the school, I was pushed down a flight of stairs by a thug and his friends, and then repeatedly punched in the head while girls and boys from the thug’s class looked on. Few days went by when I was not verbally harassed. Statistics for bullying, both physical and cyber are given on a website dedicated to the prevention of bullying in the States. This again is something children in homeschooling families are fortunately unfamiliar with.
So once again, with this second argument, Bartholet seems to lack any real firepower against homeschooling.
Does Homeschooling Children Prevent Them Learning Community Values and Tolerance of Other’s Viewpoints?
Her final critique, and seemingly her main concern with homeschooling is that parents might not expose children “to community values, social values, democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints”. Let’s be clear about this. What she wants, is for her pet ideas, the ideas of mainstream secular culture to be forced upon all children. Education is brainwashing, and she would rather it be the state that does it than conservative Christian parents whose views she disagrees with.
But surely, it is better for the sake of diversity and our democratic ideals that parents are allowed to instil in their children their values and beliefs rather than a one-size fits all approach which will stifle minority viewpoints.
In fact, there is evidence that one of the reasons the West progressed so extraordinarily in comparison to other civilizations was the comparative lack of absolute power of its governments and freedom of its citizens to innovate. An all-powerful and controlling government that seeks to promote a particular set of values is not good for society. All too often it ends in intolerance. Better to allow diversity of thought and process.
What I find highly amusing, is the contradiction in her argument. On the one hand, she thinks homeschooling prevents the transmission of community and social values, yet at the same time, she argues that schooling won’t “unduly limit parents’ influence on a child’s views and ideas.” So which is it? Does sending a child to a government school impact a child’s worldview and shape their values, or will it have so little impact it does not limit parents’ ability to influence their child’s views? I suspect she is being disingenuous here. It will impact children, but she wants parents to still think they are the ones in control.
It’s ironic too, that she raises the importance of children being taught “democratic values, ideas about nondiscrimination and tolerance of other people’s viewpoints” when she herself seems to favour authoritarian control, restriction of parental choice in education and a one-size-fits-all model of values transmission.
So does her argument represent a compelling case for banning homeschooling? Hardly. But it might well wake some parents up to the danger of public schools. When academics like Elizabeth Bartholet want to stop conservative Christians from educating their children at home because it tends to…well turn out conservative Christians, it might wake parents up to realise the danger of secular schooling.
