Education

Why homeschool at all?

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As if there is not enough to worry about these days the BBC asks How do I home-school my children? and provides suggestions for some resources:

Surely the only TED Talk needed is the one by Ken Robinson

If a parent has delegated the legal responsibility for the education of their child by registering them with a school then the school should be providing an education for the child. If a parent is not happy with the education provided by the school they can deregister the child and relish the responsibility for educating their own child in anyway they see fit. Deregistration is a simple process with which the school has to comply. The otherwise than at school option has been successfully educating children for decades – it rarely does, and in my opinion never should, look like school at home.

Education Otherwise has produced a leaflet with useful advice for parents with children affected by the current school closures which is being distributed via local authorities and from their website.

This is what home education should be like…

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Having become increasingly alarmed by people trying to replicate school at home and all that nonsense it is reassuring to see someone doing it right.

Think of all the lessons learnt while doing this.

The fascinating story of Nancy Dupree

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The Vinyl Factory blog listed a BBC Essential Mix by the Australian group The Avalanches. Their mix included a couple of pieces by Frank Zappa and Wild Man Fischer so I had a (brief) listen. One of the tracks was a strange piano and children singing piece about James Brown credited to Nancy Dupree…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzWAylk7G5Y

Intrigued one turned to the Interwebs to find out more….

Nancy Dupree
Nancy Dupree

Nancy Dupree was a music teacher in New York in the 1960s. Seeing that the children had no interest in the official bland and boring curriculum she encouraged them to start writing their own songs related to their lives while introducing them to the music of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone et.al…

She even persuaded the likes of B B King, Muhammad Ali and Roland Kirk to visit the school and talk to the children.

They produced enough songs to record a whole album which they called Ghetto Reality. Encountering Moses Asch she badgered him into releasing the album on his Folkways Records label.

She was eventually sacked from the teaching job, ostensibly for refusing to wear the required high heels, and was alarmed to see the school call the police to remove the children protesting about her departure.

She subsequently worked in various jobs, made recordings of her poetry, associated with the Black Panthers, wrote a play and died of leukaemia at the age of 44.

More…

The Guardian

The recordings are available from:

Folkways

Apple Music

Spotify

E is for Education

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Who does not love learning something new? I know I do and these days we have so many opportunities to satiate our lust for learning. Alas for most children they do not get to learn very much as they go to school. Why this is still the case remains a mystery. There can be no logical reason for herding children together who have nothing in common other than the fact that they were born around the same time and live in the same area. It is a patently silly idea that has never worked and never will work. Successive governments keep coming up with some novel idea they claim will make it work – usually involving doing more of what is not working now… more testing, longer hours, shorter holidays etc.

Learn!

Fortunately here in the UK one need not bother with such nonsense. The law requires that parents provide their children with a suitable education. This can be in any form that suits the child and the family. Attendance at school is not a legal requirement. The original thinking was that there would be an education service along the lines of the health service – available to all as and when required.

A good school, in short, is not a place of compulsory instruction, but a community of old and young, engaged in learning by co-operative experiment.

The Hadow Report (1931)

Such a radical idea was crippled by the machinations of the church, existing school system and the limitations of post war funding and was, alas, never realised in the 1944 Education Act and that “triumph for progressive reform” was a pallid interpretation of what was envisaged and possible.

One looks forward to the day when the nonsensical schooling system is disrupted and we can start to build something better.

Home Education Errata

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Whilst one should try not to gawp at the car crash that “home education” (whatever that is) has become…

A popular meme amongst the faithful followers is the quote “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” which is often attributed to [wikipop search=”W. B. Yeats”]William Butler Yates[/wikipop].

According to the Quote Investigator the quote should be attributed to [wikipop]Plutarch[/wikipop]

Scratched Pages

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I have had a “Coming Soon” page up on the Scratch sub domain for a year or two. I had not bothered much with it after learning that the update to the splendid Scratch was going to be using Flash which was so very wrong. Even Adobe seem to be nudging towards other more appealing options.

As there has been a noticeable increase in visitors looking for Scratch related pages lately I have started remaking them. Just why there should be such an increase is a mystery. Possibly related to the publicity surrounding the launch of the Raspberry Pi one of those “educational” curiosities where you push your computer to one side so you can use the Raspberry Pi, assuming you have a suitable power supply, keyboard, monitor etc. to work with it. Alternatively you could just use Python and Scratch etc. on your computer.

No doubt my humble contributions will be modified and scrapped several times but I will have fun making the videos and the music to accompany them wp-monalisa icon

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49859543″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=557fc4″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Manchester’s Truancy poster

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While heading in to town with my unschooled daughter we had a chuckle at a poster that had appeared by the bus stop…

The Truancy The Facts website mentioned on the poster links back to the Manchester City Council site. Alas their school education appears not to cover [wikipop]proofreading[/wikipop] and so they happily start a sentence with And and insert, random commas which, make no sense at all and a trip to the website reveals some bizarre paragraphing:

And so you will probably be better off not bothering with school at all if this is what they have to offer. Ho Hum.

Worst Website of the Weekend (or perhaps ever)

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Even allowing for the expected degree of incompetence and stupidity that masquerades as an education system…

Welcome to the functionality that has been provided by Student Finance England!

Functionality Drivel
Functionality Drivel

As if having one of the most convoluted log in procedures ever devised involving multiple emails, a customer reference number (I am not a customer), a password and a secret answer (which was SXMLAR38 so what was the secret question?) is not disturbing enough one is then dropped into the most ridiculous illogical exercise which actually amounted to nothing more than answering half a dozen questions.

Are we done already?

Who knows?

Tick what?

HInt: The question is “Do you have other sources of income?” The answer will be either “Yes” or “No”.
Note: Even if the answer is “No” you are not allowed to ignore boxes that do not apply you have to type £0.00.

And so it went on, too tedious to dwell upon, but apparently my experience was somewhat different to Martine‘s but not in a good way.

Perhaps they should shake out a few more slackers further down the ladder. They do provide a guide to error messages which includes:

This message is caused by a system error, and Student Finance England is working to fix it. Please ignore the message

Ho-hum.

No keyboard connected. Press any key to continue.

Elect

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The Guardian’s [W:Ben Goldacre] piece today threw up some interesting links. The VoteMatch site is like an online dating service for you to be matched to your ideal local candidate. One particularly taxing question was the old tax breaks for educating children outside the school system….

I remain open minded about such things. While the BNP were in favour the Lib Dems (my ideal match apparently) were not…

It looks like a close call between Lib Dems and Greens but the local Green chappie, a teacher, has ruled himself out with a leaflet that promises to protect the education system; which is about as un-green a system as one could possibly devise.