Homeschooling at Wolfe Den

Number one news story on my Applenews today and it’s another load of tosh newspaper reporting about children not attending school.

I’m really tired of the excuses. Blame the children, blame the parents, blame the teachers… ‘They are lazy’ ‘it’s because of covid’ ‘they just want to bunk off’.

No. It’s because the school system is hideously outdated. The stress and pressure piled on children (and teachers) today is just criminal. A few quotes that captured my eyes…

“But perhaps the most perplexing problem facing headteachers is an apparent wave of chronic anxiety in children, leading to what was formerly known as school refusal – now termed “emotionally based school avoidance”

Stop giving it fancy names to normalise it. If a child is too stressed to go to school then that is no fault of the child and is not a behaviour problem of theirs to solve. It’s a problem of the system itself. Also literally no one with half a brain who has worked in a school is perplexed by this. It’s pretty clear tbh.

“The education secretary Gillian Keegan is also preparing an autumn offensive, appealing this summer for heads to fetch children in from home themselves if necessary.”

Oh give over. Heads have time for this? And what use is that? A child too stressed for school, having someone from the school come into their safe space at home and take them away to a place of stress and anxiety? Going on ‘an offensive’?? Sounds incredibly cruel to me.

“He has, he notes, encountered children reportedly too anxious for school but seemingly comfortable enough in a crowd at Middlesbrough Football Club on weekends.”

Yes because school makes them anxious but enjoying a trip out with friends and family does not make then anxious. School is the problem. What on earth does football have to do with it??!

And perhaps the saving grace of the piece is the only sane voice in here -

“All we’ve been measuring is results, tests, exams,” says Square Peg’s director, Ellie Costello. “I think our children have been holding a mirror up to us – the life we are asking them to live, the expectations on them, the pressures on them. This isn’t just an argument about attendance – in part, it’s about the nature of childhood itself.”

Let’s stop making kids do developmentally inappropriate things that absolutely do not serve them and they absolutely do not need to do. Let them play, be nurtured, loved for who they are, respected. Stop making them jump through hoops and take exams and get constantly compared graded judged shamed and asked to sit still and be quiet and do this do that write neater blah blah blah. The school system is to blame, not the children.

https://apple.news/AWyBkZ8XZRA2o2rVO82fLNA

But how will you be sure you teach them the important stuff?

I’m assuming that by ‘the important stuff’ we mean ‘stuff that is taught in schools’.

In todays world it is estimated that 970 million adults are living with mental health challenges, most commonly anxiety and depression.

In the UK alone 80,000 children are struggling with depression.

The world is quite literally burning.

Mothers are finding themselves increasingly isolated and overwhelmed as communities are lost.

At least 100,000 marine animals die from plastic waste every single year.

Governments are widely corrupt and greedy and interested only in subjects that serve them well.

More than 120,000 children in the UK are homeless and living in temporary accommodation.

There are still wars raging even in todays modern world.

I could go on.

I think we can all agree that the world is far away from ideal. We have become polluted, polarised, materialistic, disconnected, stressed and depressed. Do we continue to ‘do what we have always done’ and hope for better outcomes? Or do we need a real deep shift in our cultures and awareness.

In my experience at least, ‘the important stuff’ is less likely to be what we think it is (historical dates, algebra, prescribed projects, cursive handwriting… etc…) and more more likely to be;

That we are all unique. We don’t have to follow one persons list of what we should learn. We can choose to learn whatever sparks our curiosity.

That we don’t need to be measured against someone else’s idea of ‘fail’ or ‘succeed’ and that we can instead set out own goals and work towards them at a pace that suits us.

That we don’t have to ‘be good’ at everything we do. We can do it purely for enjoyment or choose not to do it.

That we don’t have to compete with each other. We can learn collaboratively, that we can offer up and seek out others strengths and successes and work together to build something greater.

That looking after our earth is paramount. The big people in government are never going to pull back their greed and take that responsibility. It’s up to us.

That compassion and empathy are essential for the future wellbeing of our world.

That creative ‘subjects’ that bring us joy are important to our spiritual growth and our mental well-being. Dancing, playing, painting, writing, these are all within us and deserve a place at the table.

That intrinsic motivation brings us to a much happier state than extrinsic motivation ever will. We don’t do things just for personal gain, we do it for personal growth.

That it’s not about how it looks, it’s about how it feels. Fighting the consumerism that is swamping us, disrupting the planet on a monumental scale and instead doing things that serve us peacefully as appose to doing things based on how we feel perceived by others.

That we can form friendships with people from all walks of life and all
ages.

That we can keep our autonomy and grow into the unique person we were born to be. Whatever that looks like.

That we can start a project and then stop if we want to. That is not failure, that is a self informed choice that preserves our energy for where we want to place it.

That we can rest our bodies when we are tired. We can be unwell without losing out on an award. That we can take our time to eat when we are hungry and move around when we want to. We can take the time to take care of our bodies as well as our bodies look after us.

Will they learn the important stuff? I guess it depends on what you think is important.

If adults know better than children, then why did we take away their play and replace it with sitting and listening and endless academics?

Play is a natural phenomenon. All children will play given the chance. Play is Mother Nature’s way of building a healthy and well adjusted brain, connecting all those dots. Play is enjoyable and fulfils the vast majority of a child’s emotional, social, physical and spiritual needs. Play is the most magical thing a child can partake in. And yet as a society, we say that play is not important. What adults have to tell you is more important. Stop playing, sit still, listen and complete the work.

Observe a child at play and you will see it is truly an incredible sight. What magic we are losing.

Really love this message ❤️

A Picture Of Regret And Forgiveness "I didn't do it!" I'd seen the boy push his friend, knocking him to the ground. He was lying there still, whimpering. His mo...

“Thousands of violent offenders are going to be created due to the lack of discipline of school.”

It’s a pretty strong message. Thousands of children have abandoned the system, and without school, those children will become violent.

Gosh where to start. It’s a lot to unpack.

First up. Does anyone really know the reasons for these absences. Has the government acknowledged the vast amount of children who have experienced high levels of anxiety around school? Because there are plenty. Unprecedented amounts in fact. And that the parents are expected to ignore their childrens primal feelings that protect them from stress, and instead bribe, coerce or even force their children into school. And that when that fails, there is little help and instead lots of blame and shame. How will those children manage in society if they are not forced through the system?

As well as this one of my most present thoughts when reading this headline, was WHY don’t those children WANT to go to school? School should be a place where children feel compelled to be, where they WANT to be, where they feel safe and connected and nurtured and seen and heard. Instead we take away their autonomy, tell them what they can and can’t wear, when they can and can’t eat or go outside, what they have to learn, how they must spend their time. We control them. We have huge class sizes and overstretched overwhelmed teachers with little time to dedicate to individual needs. I can’t help but wonder how different it would be if the school system loosened its grip on the idea of ‘educating’ and instead opened itself up to a place of welcoming and accepting nurture, a refuge for children to grow emotionally, spiritually and authentically. A place that gave up on arbitrary rules of how we must look and how we must sit still listen do all this work blah blah blah… and instead became a place of community, togetherness, a place that promoted the peacefulness and well-being that humanity needs a whole lot more that endless curriculums and testings and algebra.

Then there’s the idea that school discipline is not to be missed. But maybe school discipline isn’t the kind of discipline some parents want their children exposed to? It is rooted in behaviourism, coercion, and shaming. It promotes quietening your valid internal emotions and suppressing your feelings. It pushes competition in children, and can lead to an entirely toxic environment for young minds banded together.

Lastly I wonder if these ‘ghost children’ really are going to go on to commit heinous crimes? It even says it in the small print ‘it is impossible to prove a link between offending and missing schools‘. We know that the government has a negative view of unschool / home ed / homeschool families. Of course it is much more beneficial for the government to have children in school. It means that both parents are likely working, it means that they can teach whatever they want (or don’t want) and it means that children enter a system that ultimately replicates their working lives as adults and therefore surrenders them to the chains of what they will accept later on on life. The government will push the agenda that ‘if you don’t go to school you will be a bad person’. It’s a narrative we have already heard. What if those children are actually happier out of the system? What if school was not a good environment that bought out the best in them? What if they are learning what they want? Perhaps many of these ‘ghost children’ are not living a life of misery, doom and crime after all.

I wonder if we will take the newspapers word for it or remember that their pages very often tell only the story they want to.

I remember it clearly. It was one of many ‘aha’ moments in my school career.

The class had been working on division. At first they were sat on the carpet listening as the teacher explained it. Then they had a go on their whiteboards. Then sitting at tables to complete the work in their workbooks. The following day it was time for division again, yet when asked about a written technique for implementing the equation, the children sat silent and blank. It was clearly a moment of frustration and exasperation from the teacher. After all, only one day had passed and yet it seemed not a single child had remembered what they should do.

At break time one of the children was staying close to me. He was telling me all about space. His eyes were wide, he almost couldn’t get the information out fast enough to me. He knew so much. Facts about black holes and planets and the gasses of stars. At 6 years old it was really rather impressive. I asked him ‘wow when did you learn all that?’ half expecting him to say ‘at school the other day’ and instead he went on to tell me how him and his dad were talking about it on the sofa last night.

Another penny dropped for me.

Here was this child who had retained all this vast information from the previous day. One of the same children that had entirely forgotten how to do division apparently overnight.

I understand it now. It wasn’t laziness or a problem with the child or even a problem with how it was taught. He had forgotten the equation because it was meaningless to him. He couldn’t retain the sum because it was out of his developmental range. It wasn’t important to him. It was, perhaps, too complicated and dull.

In the school system we are expected to impart our adult knowledge into children’s brains as if they are empty headed and will catch everything we tell them and keep it there. But that’s not learning. That’s not how it works. As an adult I can confirm that if I sit in a boring lecture that I have no interest in and has no meaning to my life, I will most definitely struggle to retain that information. But if I’m interested and actively seek out something and it has real deep relevance to me, then I will struggle to forget it.

Yet in schools we insist on repeating this ‘I teach you learn’ model as if it is effective. And when it doesn’t work we don’t see the real problem. At best the teaching style is questioned and changed. At worst the children are blamed. They weren’t listening, didn’t try hard enough, not focused.

But very rarely do we stop and think clearly. Is this developmentally appropriate? Is this meaningful? Could this be learnt through play (and no I don’t mean forced learning or play with an adult agenda, I mean just real authentic play that arises freely and naturally). And most of all, do they need to know this RIGHT NOW?

I believe that if we look at these moments through the eyes of the child, we will see that much of what we ‘teach’ would never need to be ‘taught’ if we instead just allowed these children real authentic learning when the moments naturally arise. And then, they will remember it.

One of the greatest mistakes humankind has made is taking childrens natural curiosity and drive for seeking out learning, and turned that into ‘work’.

One of my favourite things about quitting work in the school system and choosing to unschool my own kids, is not having to control children all day.

The other day I was given a kids measuring tape by a friend. I was excited to ‘do some measuring’ with my daughter. Of course, she took one look at the retractable tape and had other ideas. She was a dog and it was her lead. that is something I absolutely love about children. They don’t see what we see. We have an item and we have already dictated it’s function. Grown ups are practical and sensible. But kids, nah. They just haven’t had the curiosity and imagination worn from them yet. Anything is possible.

In a school setting the measuring tape turned dog lead would not be allowed. I mean it’s understandable to an extent. 30 children, one or two teachers. Order must prevail. We must instead stick to the rules and do as we are told or else chaos would unfold. I recall the endless moments these scenarios arised. When the maths cubes were handed out and the children wanted to build and create. But no, the maths cubes are for just counting. Or when the objects handed out for organising into material components were instead instinctively viewed as objects for playing. Even when the lesson was too boring and the children wanted instead to wander over to the crayons and draw. But no, now is the time for sitting and listening, no matter if you are interested or not. The system does not allow for our deep natural desires to seek out interesting things, instead this is seen as ‘misbehaving’.

Of course these moments are widely accepted as discipline. But really it is about control. So many children and so few adults, goals to meet and boxes to tick. The children must be controlled in order to get the job done. It is another example of childism within the system, where the adults dictate how and what and when children do things with the view that anything the children would choose is simply not as important.

I can’t help but wonder how many ingenious moments we loose in the current system. How much curiosity is squashed and how many ideas and inventions are cut short.

Simply because the children must be controlled and should do just as the adults say.

Neighborhood Kids & Authentic Freedom A tale of two gentlepersons, or what I’ve learned about warthogs.

How should children spend their days?

It seems that grown ups have lots of ideas about how children should spend their days. I wonder if anyone ever thought to ask the children? I can only imagine their choices would be so different to ours.

They would choose play. Instead the system says ‘that’s not real learning, it’s not important.’

They would ask lots of questions and burst with curiosity. Instead the system says ‘that’s not what we are learning about today, let’s be quiet and listen’.

They would choose endless open spaces to run around in and move their bodies. Instead the system says ‘sit down smartly at the carpet or desk’.

They would choose freedom to wear what makes them happy. Instead the system says ‘you can’t wear that it’s not on the uniform’.

They would choose books which interest them. Instead the system says ‘that’s not on the list, that’s not in the right reading order’.

They would choose time to spend talking freely with friends. Instead the system says ‘break time is finished, it’s maths now.’

They would choose freedom to learn about something at their own pace. Instead the system says ‘you’re behind at that, you’re not good at that’.

They would choose to follow their own passions and interests. Instead the system says ‘you can’t learn that, it’s not on the list’.

Always, I’m so hopeful, that school children will get handed that microphone one day, that their voices are heard and they are able to spend their childhood days authentically and freely. How they would choose to.

Mic drop 👌🏼

When control is at its most effective, it is invisible. It can look like 'good behaviour'. It can look like quiet classrooms and silent corridors. It can look like compliant children, looking straight ahead and doing what they are told.

When we strictly control children, it doesn't matter what they think and feel. It doesn't matter if they are engaged and curious. It doesn't matter if they are interested. It doesn't matter whether what is being offered to them is developmentally appropriate. They will 'behave' themselves because they have no other option. They are under control.

It's only when you meet uncontrolled children that you realise how different they are. How they hang upside down from their chairs, and jump up and bounce every few minutes. How they burst with questions and curiosity, and wander off after a few minutes if you start to be boring. How they move from project to project, never finishing anything but not seeming to care. How they chat and interrupt, and definitely don't 'know their place'.

Sometimes I wonder if we've confused control with education. We think that 'learning to do what you're told' is a worthwhile aim, and 'following instructions' is a goal. We think that a classroom of children sitting still is success. Listening quietly and doing what you're told. Even if they are six years old.

When control is at its most effective, it is invisible. Most of us spent years at school being controlled and it started when we were young. After a while we couldn't see it ourselves. It was just how things were.

It's only when a child comes along who says No that they make the invisible visible. They hold up the flags for us all, showing us what we had lost the ability to see.

When control becomes visible, it loses some of its power. For now we can see, we can ask.

"Why does it have to be this way? "

And the question echoes down the silent corridor.

Illustration by Ruben Rodriguez, Unsplash

A friend of mine has just been accepted on a new job. It’s a complete career change. When I asked them how they were feeling about stepping into something so new, they were largely unfazed. They had chosen this new career and were excited and ready.

When we talked about how there was so much to learn in this new role, they spoke about how they would be sent for relevant training and so anything they needed to know would be covered.

It’s interesting to me that as adults we have this option to just learn on the go, learn as and when, to learn something when necessary. And yet in our school system children are viewed as incapable of this. Instead we see them as unable to make choices and take control of their own learning, and instead in need of us to tell them what to learn, when and how. And it’s then up to us to then tell them if they were any good at it or not. They spend their first 16 years being fed an endless stream of facts, figures , dates and information. A huge amount of it is not anything they need to know in order to live a full and wholesome life, and almost all of it is not something they asked to learn.

It is in this way that we rob children of the opportunity to learn things at a relevant time in their lives. We instead believe that they must know all the things we are teaching them right away.

But this is a pretty wild concept when we consider it.

Learning does not stop the moment we leave school. At 16 we can’t possibly know everything we need to know to create the life we want for ourselves. And why should we? There’s always time to learn. And it will land much more effectively when we seek it out for ourselves, or at a time when it is relevant and interesting to us.

Can we all just calm down about maths?

I read a blog recently by a fellow unschooler and this phrase just jumped right out at me.

You see, when you choose to not send your children to school, one of the first things people will say is ‘but what about maths?’. And I really want to just say… ‘what about it?’.

What people generally mean, is how on earth will I teach my child all that complicated maths? And how on earth will they get on in ‘the real world’ if they don’t learn all that complicated maths.

First up. We went through the school system ourselves right? We learnt all that complicated maths ourselves. We did it. We learnt it, we took our exams and we got our grades. So if we gained that knowledge we should be confident enough to pass that on to our own children? Right? Well, I’m going to take a guess that a huge majority of us would not feel confident. And that is because we forgot it all. In fact I even remember the phrase ‘you just need to know this for your exams and then you can forget it all’ being used by teachers at school. So really the point of learning it, was to bank it in a grade and then… forget about it. I myself achieved A* in my maths exams. And yet I don’t remember much of it at all.

The bits I do remember are the bits I use on a daily basis. Measurements, weights, quantities, money, adding and subtracting, dividing, telling the time. These are the parts of maths that are fairly important to understand and know in ‘the real world’. Intricate equations? Formulas and trigonometry? Not so much. And if I needed to know that now for a job, I would just… learn it now (since I ended up forgetting it by now already!) not to mention the invention of calculators and YouTube and video tutors if required.

When I worked in retail, every single sale season would come with endless questions from customers about ‘how much would that be with the 30% off?’. It struck me that if many adults were given a GCSE maths exam paper right now, they would likely fail or at the very least struggle, unless maths was a key player in their work life.

Children currently have thousands of hours of their school years set aside for maths lessons. That’s… a lot of time out of childhood to be spent on maths. I wonder if really it is necessary? I would say, from my personal experiences, that it is not, and actually, at a time of unprecedented mental health crisis with children, that time would be of much greater benefit spent on play, nature, outdoors, building friendships and connections, and general emotional, physical and spiritual wellbeing.

Let’s also remember that maths does not have to look like a workbook filled with sums. Life truly is filled with many natural opportunities to flex our maths muscles, and these can include practical, hands on and day to day life experiences.

Yes, maths is important. Yes, my children will learn maths. Yes, they will have the opportunity to pass maths exams if they so wish. But also, let’s just all chill out about maths.

I heard on the news today that obesity in children is at record levels.

One of the many drivers for us to unschool was ‘movement’ and for our children to honour the ability to be in tune with and listen to their bodies. This means that they are able to move lots and lots, rest when they need to, eat when they are hungry and stop when they are full.

My experience of working within the school system was that much of this is denied to children, and alarmingly I found that sitting still, as well as overriding their own huger / full cues and eating all their dinner was often rewarded with stickers and dojos and prizes.

I often wonder why we aren’t able to connect the dots.

Children wish to run and move their bodies. It is innate, it is a huge part of being a child. And yet, we condition them time and time again that ‘sitting still’ equates to ‘being good’.

How much of school childrens days are spent sat still? An alarming amount, from my experience. And yet break times and lunchtimes are squeezed further and further. A tiny window of opportunity to release energy and be free before once again being encouraged to ‘be smart, be quiet, sit still’.

Of course there are other factors in society which are part of this wider problem. Screens, social media, increasingly processed foods, a decreasing amount of free outdoors play allocated for children. But at a time when parents are more burnt out than ever, and overwhelmed with modern day life, work juggles and money worries, it seems to me that a place where children spend 6hours a day 5 days a week, should really be a place that provides rush nutritious foods and encourages movement and autonomous, intuitive eating.

And I’m not talking about performative ‘we do an extra hour of PE a week’ or ‘we do a five minute wake up shake up between lessons’. I’m talking about the real change that the system needs. An overhaul. Listen to the teachers. Listen to the children. Connect the dots. It is our childrens health at stake.

Unschooling is not just about skipping the school system. It is about reclaiming and preserving childhood. It is about freedom, play, community, belonging. It is about a rejection of childhood pressure and the push for performance and conformity. Unschooling is a mindset and a movement.
Who’s here for it?

School is Not an Opportunity, It's an Obligation - Happiness is here I love this moment captured in an image. Her arms wide open, greeting life. Totally absorbed in the moment, in her joy. […]

I worked as a school TA for 9 years, I unschool my own children. Here is why I’m not worried they won’t learn what they need to.

It’s a big topic, I’ll try and keep it brief and tight and to the point.

Firstly, what are children taught in school? Well, they are taught ‘the national curriculum’. This curriculum is basically a list of things that has been decided that children should learn. We can follow this list if we choose to, but we choose not to for many reasons. This is a list created by the government, by someone who has never met my children and does not know them. They do not know what my childrens natural strengths, interests and passions are. The curriculum is designed as a ‘one size fits all’ and is delivered with the idea that all children should learn the same things at the same time, in the same way, at the same pace and with the same outcomes. But children, like all humans, are not all the same. And I know my children far better than anyone else. They learn different things, at different times, in different ways, at a different pace and with different outcomes. And so, we free ourselves from following someone’s else’s made up list.

Secondly, and in relation to this, schools cannot possibly cover everything that everyone ’should’ learn, because everyone - quite rightly so - will have a different idea of what this should be. As an example, year 2 were learning about a ‘person of interest’ in history. Tasks included various lessons around reading about this person and writing about this person. As adults in school we pick one person, and the children must learn about about this person for several weeks. But history is stacked full of ‘people of interest’. I can find time to sit with my unschooled children and look through all sorts of books and videos about all sorts of wonderful people in history. We don’t have to stick to something that someone else decided. When people worry about ‘gaps in learning’ it’s worth remembering that we all have gaps in our learning, because there is always more to learn. School has the set pre decided list, but unschoolers have the freedom to fill any gap they wish. If we get to the end of what would be our school years, nothing bad will happen if we have learnt about a different historical person to that which was taught in school.

Thirdly, how much of what is taught in schools is necessary, age appropriate and fulfilling? How much of it do we remember? How much of it do we use on a day to day basis? How much of it would we learn ourselves naturally just living our life out in the real world every day?
I often reflect back to my year 1 class learning about pre fronted adverbials. As a successfully published book author and long time blogger, I still can’t tell you what one of those is.
I think about the lessons with telling the time and money and how flowers grow and measurements and emotions, and I wonder how that can be taught in a room with a worksheet as appose to out in the world.
I remember my own time as a student when I learnt about equations and fractions and pi and I realise I have forgotten it all and wonder how better my time could have been spent. I know I could learn this now if I needed or wanted to.
I sit and watch a fascinating Attenborough documentary about the rainforests and think about how I most likely learnt all this at school but now I’m relearning it at a time when I’m interested and invested.
I think about all the music lessons where no instruments were present or when they were, curious minds were bound and restricted by the predetermined class plan.
And I think about all the pushing that is done, the forced learning, the pressure, the ‘must be reading by 5’ and the ‘must be able to do this maths by age 8’ and I wonder if we just allowed those children to relax and unfold naturally within a supportive and facilitating environment, it wouldn’t need to be pushed or forced at all.

So no, I’m not worried about my children learning what they ‘should’. I’m more worried about them learning in a safe, inclusive, age appropriate, nurishing and nurturing environment, free from comparison and grades and pressure. Unschoolers… we got this.