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Passing clouds of inconsequential observations.

Category: Education

  • Why homeschool at all?

    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…

    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

    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…

    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

    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.

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