Scholé news October 2018

Dear friends of Scholé, for some time now there have been more and more enquiries from editorial offices interested in unschooling.

This is a completely new development, and it brings both opportunities and risks: the risk of being lumped together, without scrutiny, with people who reject the state, truants or publicity-shy sects, as has often happened before. Or else an opportunity to question the apparent lack of any alternative to schooling and to draw a wider public’s attention to self-directed forms of education.

To help a journalist from the Kurier, whom I am meeting next Tuesday, prepare for our conversation, I sent her the following text – in addition to the liberal British rules on home education:

WHITE SHEEP, PLEASE STEP FORWARD!

Before the introduction of compulsory schooling for all, which was a milestone in the development of our civilisation, education in today’s sense was reserved for a few wealthy people who owned books and could afford private tutors. Since the invention of the internet, anyone with internet access potentially has access to the world’s knowledge. The historic turn to the digital age has above all put school, which for so long held the monopoly on passing on knowledge to everyone, under severe pressure. The first generation to grow up with the new medium was already better at using it than their parents and teachers at primary school age. These children discovered that they were able to acquire new skills without the support or instruction of adults, and to outstrip their parents and teachers with ease. Naturally, this had a lasting effect on their self-confidence!

Teachers whose authority rested primarily on knowing more fell into an identity crisis. Tried-and-tested frontal teaching no longer worked, because the classes they had to teach were becoming ever more mixed. Depending on their background and socialisation, even children starting school show ever greater differences in development. Even a second compulsory year of kindergarten will change this situation only marginally at best, because already today it is not significantly better in regions where many children have attended kindergarten for three or more years.

In the classic school system based on external discipline – that is, year groups, fixed curricula, tests and marks – the loss of authority of parents and teachers has had fairly devastating consequences: helplessness among many parents, rising job dissatisfaction and burnout rates among teachers, mental disorders of all kinds, bullying, violence and resistance among pupils who are partly bored and partly hopelessly overwhelmed. Millions of newspaper articles, studies and books have been published about these problems, and thousands of remedies have been proposed and some of them tried out.

If people finally stopped focusing mainly on mistakes and problems, as teachers have always done, and looked instead for successful examples of a new, contemporary educational culture, the picture would be completely different. Then the current mood of doom could quite quickly turn into one of optimistic new beginnings! Here are just a few examples.

There are teachers in the state school system who realised decades ago that their pupils needed healthy food, freedom of movement and emotional security more urgently than class tests and homework. They set up play corners, prepared healthy snacks with the children, highlighted their strengths, and introduced cross-subject and later even cross-class teaching. They went out with the children as often as possible – into nature, into workshops and exhibitions. Far from suffering, their charges’ school performance even rose noticeably, in step with the children’s well-being. The administration, however, remained unimpressed. Relentlessly fixated on problem cases, it made life difficult for these personally committed teachers with ever new restrictive regulations. So far, then, the winners have been those colleagues who simply worked to rule without regard for the welfare of their charges. Once, when I wanted to go on an outing with a larger group of children, I asked an experienced teacher where we could go. Her answer: “No idea. We haven’t been on any outings for over 20 years, because as a teacher you constantly have one foot in court.”

That is why today we face the absurd situation that the most committed and successful teachers (have to) hide, because their successes rest precisely on having disregarded restrictive official rules on their own authority!

Alternative schools such as Waldorf or Montessori schools, whose founders gave priority to children’s natural needs a hundred years ago, are something you have to be able to afford. Although they also serve society as a whole well as a safety net for school dropouts, they are not only starved of funds but are also increasingly regulated in the direction of mainstream schools. In their Sunday speeches, professors and education politicians like to conjure up at length the need for holistic learning, individualisation and the free unfolding of potential, yet free or alternative schools that actually follow these principles are left out in the cold or even persecuted.

An even more glaring example is the unschoolers. The legal option of registering children for home education simply by filling in a form was until recently largely unknown even to youth welfare offices and public health doctors. There are still only a few families in Austria who, encouraged by research findings from neurology, psychology and linguistics, make use of this legal option and simply keep their children at home. In this way they can have the experience, astonishing to outsiders, that children continue to grow joyfully on every level when the people around them accompany their natural individual process of unfolding as sensitively as during their first years of life. Experience shows that only particularly aware and attentive parents are capable of this. Yet although they have been seeking cooperation with the authorities for years, the administration and the media prefer to lump these committed people together, without scrutiny, with people who reject the state, truants and publicity-shy sects.

Of course there are black sheep, inside and outside the school system, from whom children must absolutely be protected. But constructive new insights can only be gained from positive examples! So isn’t it high time we finally honoured the white sheep and researched the variety of successful examples scientifically? As an observer not directly involved, I have done this on a small scale on my own initiative. In the process I have become increasingly aware that unschoolers, whose children are allowed to live out their natural talents in a completely self-determined way, are the bravest pioneers of a new educational culture – one that makes peace between humans and nature. We will need them to meet the challenges of the future. For the global destruction we are leaving to the next generations is entirely down to people who were particularly successful in the conventional teaching system geared towards rivalry and competition…

We look forward to seeing you again! Alexandra and Melanie

INVITATION TO THE 2ND MEETING ON EDUCATIONAL FREEDOM

The 2nd meeting on educational freedom will also be held under the motto WHITE SHEEP, PLEASE STEP FORWARD, since at the first meeting we talked at length about the dark sides of the school system. With everyone who feels drawn to it, I would very much like to do a constellation on this occasion:

Monday, 29 October, 6 pm MARKHOF library Markhofgasse 19, 1030 Vienna

Book tip – “Lernen ist wie Atmen” (Learning is like breathing)

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Together with two unschooling mothers, Gudrun Totschnig and Sigrid Haubenberger, we published it ourselves.

We all feel that the time is ripe for this many-voiced account of how unschooling can be lived in practice. Order your own copy on the GAIA marketplace, with a 10 % discount for members. The book is in German.

BUY THE BOOK