Industrialisation vs Agriculture with relation to schools

I have spent a lovely day with my sisters in law and a friend of theirs today. We were chatting a lot about home ed because their friend is very interested and is quite dissolusioned with the education system. It reminded me of a quote I read recently by Sir Ken Robinson about the principles that the current education system is based on. Whenever I write things like this it always seems to turn into a school vs home debate. I am NOT anti-school. If it's right for your children, if they're happy and developing well, then school is just fine. I however, do not feel that school is the right place for us and the following quote sums up one of the many reasons why I feel this way.

“The larger argument about this is that public education arose in response to industrialism, and it also developed in the image of industrialism. If you look at public education systems in their general shape, they are a manufacturing processes. It’s a very linear process, very focused on certain types of outcome. And standardized testing is, in a way, the grand example of the industrial method of...education. It’s not there to identify what individuals can do. It’s there to look at things to which they can conform. (...) It’s based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can’t, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not. And, all the schools I know that are great have something in common — they all have great teachers and they have a commitment to the personal development of each of the pupils in the school. And that’s easily lost in a culture of standardizing. (...) So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish." - Sir Ken Robinson

 

Being a smallholder, I really liked the analogy of being a farmer, a nuturer, a facilitator. I didn't manufacture my children. They didn't come off a production line. I brought them into this world to help them flourish. If I can produce the right setting for them, they will develop into amazing people, they will learn and experience life, they will be loved and cared for and tended to. With the right conditions, I cannot then STOP them developing into whatever they will become.

 

If you plant a seed in warm soil, give it access to light, water and warmth, you cannot stop it from becoming whetever it is programmed to become. External influences such as drought, pests, lack of nutrients and early picking can damage growth, or even stop it completely and it won't be able to reach it's full potential.

 

This leadss me to the next quote that I've read this week.

 

‎"If we are right in regarding the family as a functional unity, then it cannot be in conformity with biological law that there should be this sudden break in the nurture of the child still incompletely facultised. The tendency of present day education is at an ever earlier age to supersede parental nurture by the technique of the educational specialist—who may well not even have the basic maturity of parenthood! It is as though, while the child—’growing-tip’ of the family—was developing its faculties within the home, we said—”Now at the first possible moment let us remove this young shoot and, lest it fail to grow, plant it in new soil and subject it to certain selected stimuli”. But what have we done? Cut the young developing shoot off from the sustaining and familiar sap that rises from the parental roots; severed the child from the biological mechanism through which all nutriment must pass, to be rendered familiar and so readily utilisable by the young. By the initial presentation to the child of ‘foreign’ substances we have in fact created the conditions in which allergic manifestations are prone to arise. In pathological terms, this means that we are running the risk of inducing inflammatory processes rather than the smooth digestion that accompanies an ordered process of development. We do not suggest that the child should have only what the parents have to give him, but that all foreign substances and experiences should initially be tempered by the family mechanism. The implication of this is that the family should move in an ever-widening circle of experience in which parents and child develop together.

"As things are, the greater part of the school-child’s life is spent in a common, non-specific environment, and one from which the family is cut off.The parental lack of knowledge of and participation in all that goes on at school is apt to be complete. Delivered up at the gate by its mother, the child goes to school, for a prescribed number of hours each day.There it is subjected to a routine based upon the calculated achievement of the average child and is coaxed to action within that limit.In this process the parents have no place and play no part." The Peckham Experiment

 

I do firmly believe that children learn almost everything at home. In most cases, school could be seen as an experience for a child to have in life. This experience should be a positive one, but in some cases it isn't positive and I don't believe necessary for all children.

 

 

I truly never enjoyed a single minute of my children being in an environment so far removed from family life. There were some advantages yes, a tidy house, a bit of quiet for a few hours a day, but I never felt comfortable with them experiencing that specific type of experience. Over the past 10 months I have seen the flourish. I've been a part of every aspect of their lives. I enjoyed (almost) every minute and I have definitely been more relaxed and comfortable. My little seeds are growing!