This autumn we are publishing several new books, including Making Waldorf Crafts by Nina Taylor, World Tales for Family Storytelling by Chris Smith and Creative Form Drawing with children aged 9-12 years by Angela Lord.
Continue reading New Books for Autumn 2021By Anna Dusseau, author of The Case for Homeschooling: Free range home education handbook
“The Ministry of Magic has always considered the education of young witches and wizards to be of vital importance. The rare gifts with which you were born may come to nothing if not nurtured and honed by careful instruction.”
Dolores Umbridge, Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban
So the prime minister ordered a PR campaign to ensure that schools reopen on time in September (Sunday Times, 9 August 2020) and boy, have we felt it. The fact that government pressure has now swung in the direction of our “moral duty”, accompanied by wildly emotive terms like “personal and social harm”, is no surprise. It can’t be easy maintaining a line of attack based on the importance of academic progress, when the very goal towards which you are desperately herding your metaphorical sheep turns out to be a cliff edge. Do I need to actually say “A Level results scandal” out loud here? Surely not. What the government ultimately wants, though, are bums on seats come the start of September, and not a mass homeschool exodus or – worse – for education to become a spectator sport over the coming months. Children, the theory goes, are better off in schools, and risking exposure to a deadly virus is as nothing compared to the lasting damage of missing valuable instruction from “those who have been called to the noble profession of teaching.” (Rowling, 1999) Are you convinced? I’m not.
As a basic counter-argument, the overwhelming benefits of home education are readily available. Few studies have been conducted on homeschooling in the UK because, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, little interest was taken. In 2002 however, extensive research by Paula Rothermel revealed a jaw-dropping 64% of home educated Reception aged children scored over 75% on their PIPS Baseline Assessment, compared to just 5.1% of children nationally. Yet this astonishing statistic does corroborate with National Literacy Project assessment results, which found 80.4% of home educated children scored within the top 16% band on the normal distribution curve. Academically therefore, the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of home education, to say nothing of the benefits to global wellbeing including less anxiety, more sleep, steadier family and friendship bonds, and higher personal motivation. Home education is a holistic choice increasingly taken by families with the kind of humanistic internal compass essential for healing the modern world. For example, Jada Pinkett-Smith homeschools her children; Victoria Beckham does not. So, to Professor Chris Whitty’s comment that missing lessons “damages children in the long run” (BBC News, 2020) I would simply say, where are your facts?
Of course, ‘missing school’ and ‘home education’ are two separate things but actually, in the case of the government’s aggressive ‘back to school’ campaign, the distinction isn’t so clear. Whilst state schools have only existed for around 150 years, the shifting face of convenient adult discourse regarding what is ‘best’ for children stretches back and back. In the 15th century, clergyman John Mirk popularised the concept that “children should be seen and not heard”, whilst the industrial demands of the 1800s preferred “the devil makes work for idle hands” – a biblical justification for child labour. Now, the focus is school and the buzzwords we hear – “accountability”, “achievement”, “potential” – boil down to the same thing; an adult-centric argument of economic convenience.
Because, when school is wrongly advertised as the only place to receive an education, it no longer becomes a place where learning happens, but a tool of social engineering which has the monopoly on where learning happens and what is taught (Illich, 1995). The popular leftist attitude that British schools are becoming “drill and kill” (Guardian, 18 August 2020) obedience factories for the working class misses the point entirely. School has always been a socially divisive propaganda machine, and ‘the people’ have always been too busy making ends meet to challenge this.
Coming back to September, and the question mark that hangs over the ‘back to school’ message that currently bulldozes our newsfeeds, we find an alternative viewpoint in a recent tweet from Dr Nisreen Alwan. “Schools are workplaces where loads of households mix,” she writes. “Pandemic messaging about schools that only talks about ‘risk to children’ is dumbing this obvious fact down. Children’s best interest is in having healthy adults to look after them. Acknowledging this is essential to trust.” And trust is the point. Schools are a necessary part of our socio-economic reality, but the government has hugely overstepped this. Attempting to frog-march the nation back to school and deliberately cultivating the false impression that educational alternatives such as home education are “all very well for middle class liberals, but not for you” presents a clear message; the public can’t be trusted to think for themselves. I put it to you that the current cabinet, in representing the ‘best’ that private school elitism has to offer, reflect also the values at pinnacle of that belief system: stark social inequality, narrow-minded reactivity, and intentionally divisive fear-mongering masquerading as public welfare. I hope our prime minister will discover, like the fictional Umbridge, that people aren’t universally passive, and that all those “happy little faces” (Rowling, 1999) looking up at him on his frequent school photo opportunity visits can, in fact, think for themselves.
Anna Dusseau is a writer and homeschooling mum of 3. Her first book The Case for Homeschooling: Free range home education handbook is out now and can be found on Twitter @NotTheSchoolRun.
You can read more articles by Anna on the benefits of home education on Anna’s blog homeschoolguru.org and on her website annadusseau.com
References:
Melissa Benn, Drill and kill for England’s state schools while private sector goes progressive, The Guardian, 18th August 2020
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd; new edition, 1995
Hugh Pym, Coronavirus: missing school is worse than virus for children – Whitty, BBC News, 23rd August 2020
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Bloomsbury, July 1999
Jeremy Selwyn, Boris Johnson: Children Suffer More by Staying Home, The Sunday Times, 9th August 2020
As we face weeks, and perhaps months, of uncertainty during the Covid-19 crisis, Martin Large explores the ways in which Hawthorn Press’s titles can help with home schooling and staying at home:
“Over a million UK families were thrown suddenly into the deep end of home schooling on Friday 20th March, the day the government closed schools as a Covid-19 public health action. So, families now have an unexpected but unique opportunity to try out home schooling – to make creative use of the time, and to counter cabin fever.
Hawthorn Press has practical books that can help with home education such as educational text books, crafts, seasonal projects, storytelling and literacy.
Early learning and movement?
Sally Goddard Blythe offers stories, songs with 2 CD’s, rhymes and exercises for early years brain development, attention, co-ordination and balance in Movement, your child’s first language.
Learning to write and read?
Parents of children aged 6-8 years will find Writing to Reading the Steiner Waldorf Way a creative, fun way of introducing literacy, from drawing the letters, to movement, telling stories to then writing and reading. Creative Form Drawing For the Four Temperaments with Children aged 6-10 years offers colourful pre-writing exercises.
Every family is a storytelling family and every child a storyteller?
Interested in telling nature stories? Then The Natural Storyteller has stories for telling orally. Using the story maps, you can easily tell the stories without reading and become a family storyteller. You can build up a repertoire of stories to tell your family, and impress your teachers on returning to school. You can find world stories in 147 Traditional Stories, for children aged 7-12 to retell, and storytelling tips.
Seasonal Nature and Craft
Books such as The Children’s Forest offer stories and songs, wild food, recipes, crafts and celebrations for all the year round. Families can enjoy these, with seasonal things to look out for on your one walk of the day, even without going to the woods!
If you have ever wanted to try a new craft but never seem to find the time, now is your moment. Crafting is a great way to spend time with your family, or to lose yourself in to counter feelings of anxiety or loneliness. Making with your hands is a great way of giving children the creative life skills for navigating this age of disruption. We have the books, including Making the Children’s Year, Making Simple Needle Felts and Making Peg Dolls and it is still possible to buy supplies online, such as felting things from The Makerss. There are also countless online tutorials springing up where you can join like-minded folk and make things together.
Something for parents
Lastly, grown-ups may enjoy our online monthly Meet Make Mend darning circle. We meet online on the third Monday of each month at 7 p.m. Registration is free, through Eventbrite. The next workshop will be held on Monday 27th April – keep an eye on our social media for details.
We hope that you and your family will not only survive but thrive on this home learning journey. Keep well.”
Childhood is not a race to accumulate all of the consumer goods and stresses of adulthood in record time.
I have often wondered if as a nation we treat our dogs somewhat better than we treat our children. Everyone knows that dogs need regular exercise, time to run and play freely outside. The same is true for children. Yet when walking in my neighbourhood wood or on the local moor, passersby are nearly always accompanied by dogs, rarely children. This phenomenon is a small but significant example of a much wider issue. Our social structures and cultural norms not only do little to encourage opportunities for outdoor play, they provide little or no protection for what ought to be totally sacred: childhood itself.
Kim John Payne argues in his book Simplicity Parenting that the wealthy industrialised West is an increasingly hostile place for children and young people, albeit in far subtler ways than in other parts of the world. The effects are not necessarily subtle. If you are familiar with educational debates you have probably heard a great deal in recent years about anxiety, stress levels, attention deficits, challenging behaviour, depression and even self-harming in young people. Payne expresses the underlying problem in a particularly striking way: many children in the United States and United Kingdom are suffering from a form of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Not as a result of a single traumatic event, but a gradual build up of stresses and strains as they are rushed through every aspect of learning and development, with no time to simply be, to rest, to process or to experience in their own natural ways. Education is entirely adult-driven, co-opted by commercial and political interests, and parents are literally buying into an approach to learning that is wholly dictated by people whose expertise lies in cultivating financial profits, not well-rounded human beings.
Building on his work with children in Asian refugee camps, Payne describes how youngsters are showing signs of a ‘cumulative stress reaction’ to immersion in the ‘media rich, multi-tasking, complex, information overloaded, time pressured’ existence we now call normal daily life. This is manifesting in all varieties of health problems. We have all experienced how periods of high tension can dramatically alter our physical or mental state. It can also alter our personality, morphing us in mere seconds from our ordinary selves to our worst selves, with sudden outbursts of negative emotion or behaviour. Thankfully these moments are usually short-lived and as we return to calm we regain a sense of self control. Payne asserts that in children if even moderate levels of excitement or stimulation become a permanent feature of daily life, never counterbalanced by interludes of peacefulness, predictability and even boredom, stress can act as the catalyst, which turns what might have been only a quirk or tendency into one of the dreaded ‘disorders’.
Seen in this light, the solution becomes obvious. First and foremost we must reduce the stress in the daily life and environment of our children. This can be done by a process of ‘simplification’. He describes this process in terms of four areas that can be dealt with in turn: the environment, rhythm, schedules and filtering out the adult world. As with any transformation the first work is inner work. He advises parents to attempt to recover their dreams, to re-acquaint themselves with ideals of family life held dear before reality and its inevitable rush and clutter took over. This imaginative picture can be used as inspiration for change. From there, one can begin with what is do-able and capitalise on success in small steps to progress to the bigger, more important ones.
Modifying one’s physical environment is the most tangible and perhaps manageable step in the process of simplification. When it comes to stuff, the first order of business is quite simply to get rid of it. Or at least as much of it as possible. While acknowledging the pressures that are pushing them in exactly the opposite direction, Payne urges parents to drastically reduce the amount of possessions their children have or have access to. Whether with toys, books, clothes or food, decreasing amount and variety in a child’s surroundings can help to instil the lifelong lesson that it is ‘relationships, not purchases, which sustain us emotionally’. After all, ‘nothing in the middle of a pile can be truly cherished’. With fewer choices and fewer distractions children have both physical and emotional space in which to develop their powers of attention, concentration and imagination, a greater depth of engagement with and an appreciation for what they have.
By gently turning our family’s attention away from the temptations of passive entertainment and instant gratification and toward more hard-won yet meaningful experiences, we encourage qualities and capacities that will be of both immediate and lasting benefit. These qualities can be further strengthened by increasing rhythm in daily life. Payne points out that any regular activity, event or chore can be made more rhythmical. The certainty of rhythms and rituals create ‘islands of consistency and security’ which punctuate the day and ground the child in space and time and within the family world. They are like the ‘place set at the table. An unquestioned invitation to participate, connect and belong’.
The same principles apply to how we organise and fill our children’s time. As with too many toys, too many scheduled activities, particularly ones with fixed rules, can stifle a child’s ability to be creative, independent and self-motivated. We have become so busy ‘enriching’ our children we have forgotten to allow them free, unstructured time in which to discover what they really love to do. Here again, balance is the key concept. It is not the particular activities themselves which cause problems, but pursuing too many at once, too intensely, or at an age which is not developmentally appropriate. Sports, for instance, can be a wonderful education in teamwork, cooperation, leadership, skill and self-discipline. But if imposed too early, organised sports can lead to burnout and young people can be robbed of pursuits that at a later stage would have been immensely rewarding. When it comes to our children’s schedules, then, we must pay attention to what, when and how much, remembering that as much as programmed events can be ‘enriching’ the spaces in between them can be equally so.
In a chapter entitled ‘Filtering out the adult world’ Payne discusses how worry, always a part of parenthood, seems in the last few decades to have come to define how parents relate to their children. Our ‘fears and concerns for our children have eclipsed our hopes for them, and our trust’. One of the key contributors to this is over-exposure to media and the hyper-sensationalism of bad news. Anxiety sells, and it is being delivered, nicely packaged for maximum impact, right into the heart of our homes and bursting out of multiple screens all clamouring for our attention. The diet of fear and exaggerated risk to which so many of us have become addicted is compromising our sense of perspective, and that in turn is polluting the way our children see the world. ‘Too much information doesn’t ‘prepare’ a child for a complicated world; it paralyses them.’ Much has been written about the harmful effects of television media in recent years and Payne makes as convincing a case as any of the merits of ‘kicking out’ that ‘black hole of a house guest’. Unrestricted television and other forms of screen media work against simplification at every turn.
This fully revised edition of a book, which a decade ago inspired a movement is very accessible and brimming with valuable insights. Whether dipped into and out of as a reference or read as a comprehensive step-by-step guide, it will appeal to parents who are uneasy about the status quo but need practical suggestions for change. Likewise it will appeal to those dealing with specific problem behaviours but seeking a different set of answers from the conventional, frequently medication-based approach to child health. Payne’s observations and recommendations are made with great empathy and respect for the challenges parents face, as well as their motivations. Harnessing ‘the power of less’ is certainly an important step in re-attuning to the true needs of children today, to seeing the world from their perspective and ensuring that perspective is allowed to matter.
Maria Lyon
This review was first published in New View Magazine, issue 91, Spring 2019: www.newview.org.uk
As the pace of life accelerates, with too much stuff and too many choices and too little time, children are feeling the pressure. Simplicity Parenting is a book is for parents who want to slow down, but who don’t know how and for families with too much stuff, too many choices and too much information. Here are four simple steps for decluttering, quieting, and soothing family dynamics so that children can thrive at school, get along with peers, and nurture well-being. Using the extraordinary power of less, Kim John Payne, one of the world’s leading Rudolf Steiner/Waldorf educators, offers novel ways to help children feel calmer, happier, and more secure.
This book is a wake-call for all of us who have misjudged what children need and can handle, and who have wandered so far from the best practices that we are raising neurologically damaged and emotionally stunted human beings as a result.
– Steve Biddulph, author of The Secret of Happy Children
Payne asserts that many of today’s child behaviour problems come from TMS – Too Much Stuff. ‘All children are quirky, that’s what makes them lovable, who they are. But these cumulative stresses slide those quirks along the behaviour spectrum into disorders – the dreaded “Ds”. Simplicity Parenting is a way to slide the child back down the spectrum. They go from having a label back to being lovable and quirky.’
This is a new and revised UK edition of the #1 US Bestseller, Simplicity Parenting Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kid, published by Random House Penguin in 2009.
