Our home-schooling roots

Montana is still in the throes of a negative sum conflict over home schooling that most states and Canada have solved decades ago. Here both sides lose. Our district loses the average daily attendance count from home schoolers, and this reduces funding. Home schooling parents lose their property tax investment in education for their children, and end up paying double in the time/money crunch.

No one benefits from the current conflict over the home school movement.

Twenty years or more before I first set foot in the one room country school of my childhood, farmers in Mud Creek Valley had organized to end home schooling. Busy farm life of the 1920s meant sporadic schooling, if at all, for the children of rural America. The school was considered an extension of parents' teaching and training in socialization.

I remember starting my first day at Montgomery School in first grade, in the late 40's. There were a dozen others in the school, grades 1 – 8. I looked around, and saw a desk with a name carved in the blond maple surface. It belonged to an 8^th grader named Jimmy, strong and angular, old for his grade. I was shy, and I quickly adopted my hero. I had my trusty pocketknife.

Quietly and carefully, while the two 8th graders were reciting, I carved my name (DaviD) starting with a forward capital D and ending with a backward capital D. I almost got spanked at school, and did get a good tongue lashing at home. No hiding that crime. For every school day the next several years, until I outgrew the desk, I had to face that dyslexic spelling.

Human interaction was integral to our learning environment. We learned reading with older students reading to us, and they practicing their reading. They watched out for younger students' safety on the school sledding hill in winter, and the younger ones learned to trust older ones' judgments.

No one questioned the government's essential role in supporting this alternative to home schooling or no schooling. The government was us--the community working together to build something of value for the next generation--with funds from property taxes. With uniquely human interaction in a mixed age group of a dozen or so students, we had space to build social learning skills.

Over the following decades, the strong bond of ownership between school and family has changed. Schools have grown larger, age stratification has become mandatory, and parent roles in formulating school policy have diminished. Choices of school curriculum, and administration are more likely to come down from state or even federal government than from the local community.

For some parents, the disconnect is enough that they choose to withdraw their children from district enrollment to school them at home. That's where we are now, and everyone loses.

This is not the only solution. Other states are looking at partnerships with mutual benefits. My daughter works for the Delta County School District in Colorado as a science curriculum coordinator in the "Vision School" home-school network, an arm of the district. Parents can choose to register with the school district. If they do, the district reimburses costs for materials they purchase, up to $500, provided the materials do not promote a particular religion. At their discretion, parents can have their children enrolled in extra-curricular activities and participate in standardized tests. Parents can choose and pay with district funds a teacher to serve a group of home-schooled children in particular subject areas. The district provides a building for this service. The district receives state funds for the Vision home school network based on numbers of students enrolled, just as in the regular classroom. Everyone wins.

Both sides should be winning here. We have in Big Horn County the skills and the community support to catch up with Colorado and other states. It's time to brainstorm rationally how we can all win. Marketers are making millions promoting wedge issues that stalemate support for home schooling linking with school districts. Both sides can start examining the distortions and allow truth to win for the good of all the children. Now may be a good time to transform this conflict so the families of Montana have reasons to trust their school districts, whether they home school or not.

Check this web link: http://www.visionhcp.org/

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034

Why kids learn

Enormous attention is paid to how we humans learn.  Less to why we learn.  We learn best when we feel OK.  It's the emotional factor: when we feel safe, secure and respected by those around us, we have the right space in which to learn. This is a foundational truth for our species. 

Things are different in the world of lizards and snakes.   Theirs is a world where it's kill-or-be-killed.  Greed reigns in the lizard world.  But this should be different among humans—we were created to learn to look out for the good of others.

I'm a bit skeptical of Bush's "No Child Left Behind."  This program was mandatory, and well-funded at first, but while it is still mandatory, is no longer funded.

I'm similarly concerned about Obama's "Race to the Top."  Both these well-funded education reform programs diminish the extensive research into how emotional intelligence drives all learning.

Both were set up with prioritizing the "Three Rs" not alluding to the research demonstrating the emotional and cognitive learning is foundational for the "Three Rs,"and neither program paid much attention to emotional and social learning.

Both programs heavily depend on evaluation of instruction through cognitive tests.  This testing projects a vision of the ideal adult: one who can compete financially in the world today.  It's not far removed from lizard brain thinking.  It's even in the rhetoric: learning for survival.

 But education reform should prioritize learning beyond financial success.  Unfortunately the federal government's education department is crammed with people from the business sector.  Education models were shoved aside in the Obama administration's education department to make room for the profit model for education.  I have little hope for long-term results from this emphasis.

While teaching English in China in fall of 2002, I sat in an academic conference on English language instruction in a major Chinese city.  A paper was presented that discussed how students can best learn conversational English skills. They discovered that a sense of safety and security was critical: students learned best in a low stress, socially inclusive, accepting environment.

The same observation applies to Chinese education in all subjects.  For millennia, Chinese schooling ignored social and emotional intelligence in learning.  In my two years' teaching there I saw fear of failure routinely used as a prime motivator.  This approach worked passably well for learning to read or write another language.  It also worked to enforce government control of the population.  But not for learning conversational English skills.

Chinese education is now trying to reform:  away from nationalized, centralized curricula; away from frequent testing and teaching to the tests; away from evaluating teacher competency based on students' achievement test scores; away from a cultivated fear of failure.  Ironically, our education system seems to be adopting the patterns Chinese educators are leaving behind.   

Interestingly, all we would have to do is access the most important and influential document in our civilization here in America:  the Bible.  Loads of the content of Jesus' teaching and service to humanity is based on emotional and social intelligence learning.  Read the Gospels.  Find the stories.  Virtually every one of his parables is a social commentary, teaching humans how to treat each other with respect and honor.

Is the dumbing-down of American education the result of our national obsession with the myth of redemptive violence?  Get them before they get us.  Watch your backside.  Learn to survive at all costs.  Remember that TV and movie action dramas are designed to appeal to our lizard brains. It sells better…

I teach at Crow School.  I know the parents and faculty there. I am grateful for the many teachers and parents of Big Horn County who model and promote the kind of education motivation that really works.  We have a school district that continues to prioritize performance arts and athletics, where students build emotional intelligence through learning trust and cooperation skills.  We need to pay better attention to the research that demonstrates the importance of this learning.

--
David Graber
Hardin, MT  59034

www.greenwoodfarmmt.org

Pickpocket Politics

It's when one political party spins political news of the opposing party so that we the people become concerned we are about to be victimized.

Remember the old 50's theater screen announcement, "Watch for pick pockets!" just before the show starts? Knowing in advance when this line was flashed on the screen, the operatives would time their entrance to carefully watch for hands reaching for pockets. Then each pickpocket would have a target, and know exactly where the valuables are located on that victim. Pickpockets depended on a good theater manager concerned enough about thievery to flash that warning on the screen. The problem was complicated by bringing this concern to consciousness in the crowd and created the ideal environment for pickpockets.

Our media today, whether wittingly or not, has become part of our burgeoning problem of pickpocket politics. We are now down to the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections. Pickpocket political paranoia is just beginning to heat up in the media. Watch, listen, and laugh at it, or cry, for our country.

They'll be taking your social security! Destroying the economy! (the left wing media)

Socialized medicine! Failing schools! Gays in our military! (the right wing media)

But trust us, we will protect you from gays, terrorists, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers, Muslims, Jews, Frenchmen, Mormons, Irishmen, Japanese, Germans, Russians, illegals, non-English speakers, you-name-it ethnic minority. (all our media)

We hear the particular sound bite that tickles our fancy, and our hand dutifully goes to our pocket. It's as if the pickpocket sentry dutifully notes identifying marks to guide the operative to the correct victim, and we are had by our own fears of being had.

Investigations reveal the big moneyed interests in keeping us, the people, hyped up with indignant rage over how the bailout money was spent, how the health care reform laws were made, how the school reform package was assembled, how the wars are (were, or will be) going. Multiple billions from this small group funds political parties and fringe pressure groups to keep our dander up, and it pays off handsomely. For one example, look up "Koch reality scare" on Alternet, Ha'aretz, Guardian, Consortium, Huffington, Newsmax, Human Events, or your favorite non-mainline media source.

The mainline media, including NPR, FOX and talk radio, is largely bought off by these few who own billions in the energy and transportation sectors and the military/industrial complex. They have vested interests, and manipulate news to justify firing of honest reports who depart from their corporate party line. That small group needs the wealthiest 10 percent of our country as well as many of the middle class to cooperate with the scary language to make the scam work. Many of us who get duped are well-meaning, honest people, just like the manager of our local theater in 1955. Others, the few who are the real source of our pickpocket politics, scream against government regulation, and then scream equally loud about their patriotic fervor, and then further, rip us off.

In contrast, there are about 100 of the wealthiest, but responsible, loyal citizens of our country. Many, led by the Gates family, are members of "United for a Fair Economy" (look this up). They signed a statement earlier this summer promoting a large tax increase. Remember seeing this in the news? Know why not? They also repudiated the "End death taxes!" pickpocket proclamation of a decade ago.

Few are the politicians who avoid pickpocket politics. These few process decisions based on principle and truth instead of power and influence. We have them in Montana, and a few other states. Yes, some are in congress, in both parties. But I must confess that all I have heard so far from the "Tea Party," and disappointingly much from the new Republican platform "Pledge to America," are the alarms of pickpocket politics: legitimate concerns timed and phrased to end up building big money power and influence, and rip off our tax moneys.

Here in Big Horn County live people whose values are old-fashioned and honest. If we do spread pickpocket politics, it's not because we have selfish motives. Many of us have learned to be wise to the alarms. This more rational, careful commitment to the common good pervades our schools and college, the county officials, the farming and ranching community, the reservation, the Crow Tribe, and the variety of religions practiced here.

This is still God's best place. There's a lot about life here, not just on the back 40, that I'd just as soon not see change, especially under the paranoid pressure of pickpocket politics.

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David Graber
Hardin, MT
Sept 24, 2010