Indicative of the momentum which the home schooling movement has acquired in the last few years was a home schooling symposium at Liberty Hall on the grounds of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California on October 25th, 1986, my most significant exposure to what has apparently been a well kept secret of the benefits of home schooling. Approximately 500 registrants heard speeches by Dr. Raymond Moore, nationally recognized author and expert on home schooling; Reverend Don Sills, national chairman for the Coalition for Religious Freedom; Dr. Reed Benson, professor of education, constitutionalist and home schooler; J. Michael Smith, legal advisor to Christian Home Educators Association; Thomas Burton, legal advisor to Eagle Forum and Dr. Leonard Dalton, superintendent of the Delano [CA] School District.
Inasmuch as the objective of this chapter is to provide evidence that home education provides at least as good an academic background as the traditional educational institution, excerpts from their talks emphasizing this aspect of home education are provided. Legality, which differs from state to state, religious bases, socialization, and other topics mentioned - and important - will not be similarly emphasized. When the general public and its legislators recognize the academic value of home education, legality will no longer be an issue.
Dr. Reed Benson:
We have nine adopted children, some are in home school, some in public school and some in private school . . our test was ''what would be best for that child at that particular time?''
Some of the "whys" an increasing number of parents are choosing home schooling as an acceptable alternative . . .: I want to read, briefly, from three newspaper accounts that occurred in our area . . This one talks about a 15 year old . .: "Hatch began attending [1982] BYU [Brigham Young University] last spring . . . Hatch got ahead in schooling because his parents taught him in their home. They didn't like what the public schools were teaching . . "
[Another in 1983] captioned "Home School Student Heads for Y at 14, Its Youngest Co-ed Ever." . . . "14 year old Amy Huvington never graduated from high school, but that won't stop her from being the youngest student to attend Brigham Young University. Amy was educated at home by her mother and has already taken various BYU home study classes. She will be taking classes in January with financial help from a dean's scholarship. . . Amy's parents credited her academic prowess to intelligence and individualized attention afforded her by home study. . . .
"I do think she was a bright little girl, said Mrs. Huvington, but I think you can take any child and make him an achiever. We had our five year old tested last year and she was already reading on a sixth grade level. When children get a lot of personalized attention, they can't help but move rapidly ahead."
"At home there isn't the garbage you get in public schools and there aren't any people putting you down," said Amy, who spent six weeks in public schools.
"There is no peer pressure," Mrs. Huvington said, "The kids are much more sophisticated and cosmopolitan."
The Huvingtons emphasize writing, English, phonics, art, music and mathematics.
[BYU newspaper 1986]: "15 Year Old BYU Student Graduates With Distinction; Now Seeks Master's Degree." . . "Last June, when she was 14, Alexandra Swan completed a bachelor's degree from BYU through the independent study program. She is now working on a master's degree through home correspondence with California State University at Dominguez Hills and hopes to have this completed by this January. Swan began her home study at age five when her mother taught her to read and write. Because her parents felt a concern for her moral upbringing, she never attended a public or a private school. Swan's parents wanted to instill proper values and provide a high level of education and decided tutoring would allow their daughter to achieve these things . . At age 12 Alexandra began her independent study program with BYU. Alexandra attributes her academic success to three hours of study each day and her loving family."
This is part of the wave of the future. The other day when I was in Harris Fine Arts Building, I happened to bump into the Osmond family, and a thought went across my mind: "Here are some famous entertainers, now, how did they get their education?" Sure enough, they were home schooled!
. . If you educate a man without moral principles, you could just make him a clever devil . .
In Tennessee . . we could only get two of our children into private schools. The rest, for the first time in their lives, went into public school. . . The text books, some of them, were filled with objectionable material, the lyrics in music classes that we would not allow our children to sing, a liberal social activist teaching social studies, drugs among the students, etc. . . . Well, our experience was not as positive there as it had been in the private schools.
We . . came back to Utah and learned of a Mary Bergman that was giving seminars on home schools. . . Mary Bergman had sent two of her children, 15 years of age, into college, that had been home schooled . . I began to realize that the man that I had worked for for ten years had been home schooled himself. His mother had taught him and by the age seven he read the 9 volume history of the world; at the age of 12 he entered college, graduated, entered the naval academy, Harvard Law School, etc. [Consequently] we have been home schooling our children for seven years, and what an exciting experience!
There is only one state that does not compel you to attend school, and that's Mississippi.
Additional aspects of home schooling, legality, pitfalls of institutionalized education, etc., were also mentioned in Dr. Benson's talk. The details of these are written in Dr. Benson's dissertation, The Development of a Home School, a copy of which can be obtained by writing to him c/o the Department of Education, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah 84602.
Dr. Raymond Moore:
. . . This is a most unique and wonderful movement, because you're dealing with people who are concerned; people, by and large, that are very honest, and they're just building great children . . [who] are not only brighter than the average but are better educated than the average. . . It does not take a degreed person to teach in the home. All it takes is a warm, responsive heart, the ability to read, write, count and speak clearly . . and you will have genius.
Today there are over a million people out there in home schooling [including handicapped and migrant] . . Missouri said 33% last year alone in its state; normal children. . . There must be in the area of a half a million to a million normal, un- handicapped, not migrant, children today involved with home based education.
I went to school in San Pablo (CA) at age four and learned all my four letter words and finger signs then. I didn't know what they were about then; all I knew is that I wasn't supposed to tell Grandma.
I married a wonderful woman who had been teaching over here in the Whittier schools and she found out that the little boys; well, as a matter of fact, all the little children in her remedial reading classes were youngsters that had gone to school very early, or they were little boys, which is just about as bad, because we boys drag behind the women in maturity . .
About 40 years ago when I was the head of a small college in Japan and heading a Christian school system over there, I was consultant to the far east Air Forces . . we had a choice of sending our children over to the American school--now, that's a private school and it's a very fancy school--or teaching them at home. We didn't know about home schools; we didn't even think of home based education. We just thought, "Why send them over there on the train with all those other kids and everything, and we don't have the youngsters with us; let's keep them home."
So we did, and we have ever been thankful. Dennis went to his first school at 13 and Kathy at 9. If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have sent them at all. The only school to which I will send my child is one in which there is a balanced work- study program, in which all teachers are working daily with the students. . . The right kind of home work is work at home with parents, not taking books home. That is absolutely useless if you can have decent supervised study in the classroom, in a conventional school or at home. All of the studies show that. . Yet we go on with these conventional ideas as a bunch of insane people. . .
[In the Hewitt Research Foundation] we tried to assess the things that were really wrong. Here, I had been in the U. S. Department of Education . . handing out hundreds of millions of dollars and we could not see anything good come from it. . . We identified two things, one was the work-study thing I discussed a moment ago. I am so concerned about having youngsters work in the home at least half of the day . . as well as two or three hours of forced study, and no more than two or three hours of forced study, after they are eight or ten years of age. . . If you have a home bound child that's ill, has a broken leg or whatever, your home-bound teacher that goes out to that child doesn't teach him any more than an hour to two or three hours a week. With a parent responding to his child an hour or two hours a day . . the child will absolutely develop genius. If it's a warm, responsive child, as the Smithsonian says, and the child is in relative isolation from other children, . . . mostly with their parents . . if you give them a great deal of free exploration, like the Colfaxes did up in Boonville . . you're going to have genius; you cannot escape this. Any normal child that is given that kind of an education with a warm, responsive mother or father, or better, both, will develop genius. And not only that . . a sound moral character.
By 1972 we had identified . . school entrance age problem. . . . How early, really, should little kids be going to school? (Echoes of my wife's observations back there thirty years or more before.) . . We realized there were not very many comparative school entrance age studies, there were really very few, . . only 20 or 21. Every single one of them gave the advantage to the child who went to school late. . . . What really makes kids tick? What should determine their school entrance age? How early do their eyes mature, their vision? How early does the hearing mature? Because hearing is more important to reading than is vision. How about all of the other senses . ? How about the development of the brain, the lateralization, or the balancing out, or the working together of the two hemispheres of the brain, which doesn't happen until eight to ten or twelve? . . The child does not develop real readiness for formal education until usually after eight. So we shove the child into school, and because he cannot handle the kind of thoughtful things . . we dun[?] down the books . . . when we ought to be stretching those young minds and teaching them how to use a dictionary and really bring some children around that are learning whys and hows instead of just whats and wheres and whens. But children cannot reason out those whys and hows very much in those very early ages, so they shouldn't even be in school at all. . . I'm talking about what is called cognitive readiness: the ability to reason consistently from cause to effect . . Don't expect too much of them until they are in the age range from eight to twelve. But, meanwhile, what are you going to do with them? Let them develop sound physical and moral value standards.
We should step out boldly because we [home schoolers] have the greatest educational system in the world . . . Youngsters that are achieving, mostly, averaging in the upper quarter of the standardized test picture. Youngsters who are averaging in the upper third of the sociology picture, with over half of them in the top ten percent by a 1986 nationally normed, nationally sampled test . . There you have achievement; there you have sociability. And behaviorally, in terms of rivalry, ridicule, habits, manners, finger signs, obscenities, drugs, sex, delinquency, when you have almost a zero quotient, as we have among home schoolers, who in the world should be fussing?
If you look at the Grecians . . as they became a great powerful nation under Alexander . . . . The men had to go to war, of course. The women went to work and the kids were put out to the slaves. Today we call it "day care." I'm not saying all day care is bad, I am simply saying it is a very poor second thing to a good home. . . After several generations of youngsters getting their values from other youngsters in the care of these slaves, there were no values left. And shortly, indifference to marriage, free sex, disease, eventually homosexuality and other aspects of perversion took over until it became . . . the choice morsel for the Grecian senator was a boy prostitute. Shortly, Grecian society collapsed, as had the Sumarian society, the Babylonian society before it. Now Rome takes over . . and exactly the same thing was repeated in Rome. And it would have collapsed a century or two earlier, according to some historians, if this had not been done: Augustus Ceaser developed his Julian laws or edicts in which he insisted that young people had to get married if they were going to cohabit. . . Then Rome fell. Then the French and the French revolution fell. And, as of 1947 Carl Zimmerman of Harvard predicted flatly . . in a book The Family and Civilization . . said unless something is radically done to turn the family around in the next thirty years, our society as a free democratic society will not survive this century. Aniki Suverata, 15 years ago or so, said, "Americans have a totalitarian society. Their State controls them. Their State controls their educational program."
Youngsters went to school only 6 weeks to 12 weeks out of the year, and that's all. . In the early 1800's they started the McGuffey number one about eight or nine or ten years of age . . . along with the other readings they had, which were minimal, were much better educated than the average child that is turned out of our high schools today.
When I talk to you about this business of genius, think about these examples. . . I'm not especially proud of the fact that we have a little girl right now in the University of Maine at age 10. She started last year, or so, at age 9. I don't think that is necessary and I'd like to see some other things substituted for early university work. But we have a number of them from coast to coast that are in college at early ages, and I want to mention, as long as it was brought up to us here, about Kathy Bergman. . . Kathy was taking her public school work in Michigan, but the public schools were getting more money for taking care of handicapped kids or disadvantaged kids than for the regular ones. But they couldn't get the money for them unless they raised a certain level. Yet, the teachers were only allowed to give so many "A's," so they passed a lot of the "A's" over to these learning handicapped kids, and the good students couldn't get high grades. So Mary Bergman took her family out of Michigan and took them down to Missouri, and, part of the time, out Utah way. Well, pretty soon, Kathy was about 15 and had finished all the high school she could possibly take at home with her mother, and she applied to Idaho State University. He mother said, "Would you take a student from a home school."
They wrote back: "No."
So she wrote them another letter on another letterhead and said, "Would you take youngsters from a private school?"
They said, "Yes, of course."
So they sent her up, she took the examinations, and five years later she was teaching at the university with a Master's degree at age 20.
This year, Mississippi, . . that has not required until now any particular amount of education for its children, has one of the highest ratings in this nation in terms of overall achievement. And the highest in all the GED test scores this year [1986] was a home schooler, Tim Larsen.
I'm sure all of you have heard about the Colfaxes up here. I was talking to Dave Colfax the other day before his second son had gone to Harvard. He's now got two sons in Harvard. One is a biology major, pre-med on a $12,000 plus scholarship. The other one is a physics, specifically astrophysics, major at Harvard on at least as large a scholarship, that is, Drew, as the brother, Grant. . . There is a lesson in it for all of us. The father is a sociologist; the mother is an English teacher, but neither one of them are scientists. They probably don't know near as much about science as a lot of you. . . But they went in to raising goats, and they raise good goats, prize goats. And the boys learned biology by raising goats. . . . Grant started reading when he was nine and a half. . . What would have happened if some public school superintendent had insisted, or Christian school principal had decided, that that child must be evaluated at six or seven or eight on a test that required reading? . . . Grant took the college board tests and ranked so high he got the big scholarship. And because of that, partly, Drew was offered an Andover fellowship for the big prep school for Harvard. And Drew turned it down because he said he had a better schooling at home. Drew then went on the same year that the Bronx high school of science was developing its 11" refracting telescope, which was put in the papers across the nation. Drew Colfax was polishing his own mirrors on his big 12" refractor, and he also built an observatory to go with it. And, by the way, since the family never had electricity, last year Grant developed an electrical powered electrical system for the family. . . Dave Colfax told me that the younger two boys are even brighter than the other ones. Garth, age 16, and Reed, age 10. Garth is a black boy and Reed is an Eskimo; two adopted kids.
What is this telling us? . . The Smithsonian recipe again: warm responsive parents, virtually in isolation from other kids, and a great deal of free exploration. . . . We found out, after a few studies were made, that when the black mother responded to her children as much as the middle class white mother would respond to her children, that the black youngsters were just as bright as the white youngsters were. So I tell you the importance of this idea of parental response. . . The average child in the average school across this nation in the public domain gets how many responses a day? . . How many minutes or minutes and hours a day does the average teacher in an all day session spend in personal dialogue with each of his children? Seven minutes all day for all of them. Seven minutes, that's all. And that came right out of here from UCLA, 1983, the John Goodlad study of 1016 schools . . . In the average home school today, where mothers are reasonably responsive to their children, they respond from 100 to 300 times a day. The average number of responses in the average school across the country today is one or two. And the more misbehaving you are, the more responses you're likely to get.
We want to help these schools; we need to help these schools, and let's do all we can to do it, but let's not do it by letting them drag our children into school before they are ready, especially our little boys, who, today, because of this, primarily, find themselves 13 to 1 in learning failure classes to every girl. . . Eight boys in classes for the emotionally impaired, for every girl. . .
I am a little bit scared that more of you are doing school at home than home school. Home schooling is not school at home. . . The best home schooling is a tutorial thing . . I'm not coming here this morning to tell you that you should take the Hewitt - Moore child development center curriculum. . . When we wrote our books, we put all these other curricula in there, whether it was A.C.E. or A Beka or Christian Liberty or . . Home Study Institute or Calvert or American School . . If your curriculum is requiring you to put your youngsters into formal education before about eight, there's something wrong. If your curriculum is complying with state rules more than it is with the needs of your children, you're doing something wrong. If it's taking you . . four and five and six hours a day to sit down with their children to teach them daily, there's something wrong. Because it will burn you out; that'll be the worst burnout, really, 'cause kids will get burned out in school or whatever, and you can repair their burnouts; but you will have a hard time repairing your own as a parent. It'll burn you out and it'll burn the children out. You haven't any business sitting down in formal education more than an hour to an hour and a half a day, maybe a little bit more than that on rare occasions in actual didactic face to face and side by side teaching. And the curriculum that you get should be customized to your own children. If you have a twelve year old and your child is doing second or third grade arithmetic and twelfth grade reading, don't give them a sixth grade package! You customize to that child, . . . rigidity should not be the name of the game in the home. There was no rigidity for Thomas Edison, there was no rigidity for Abraham Lincoln nor George Washington. George's brothers went to England to the English grammar schools, but not George; he stayed home and did gardening with Daddy, but he's the one that became the president of the United States.
I want to remind you again: if you give your children warm responsive hearts, if you give your children simplest of curricula with some organization, if you give them a great deal of free exploration, I promise your children will develop some kind of brilliance. They will develop some kind of genius. It's almost impossible to escape that. This is one reason we have been working so hard at Hewitt, to get the simplest kinds of things. That's the reason a lot of you, I guess, are probably using Mathit . ., developed by an old elementary teacher who was a math genius himself. We can turn the average child around in math in a matter of two or three days. I have actually seen it done it two or three hours. . . [With] the Winston Grammar system, we can make 8 or 9 out of 10 kids love grammar instead of 8 or 9 out of 10 kids hating it.
Any one of you can do this if you have a warm heart for your child.
The family is the most humane, the most powerful and by far the most economical system known for making and keeping human beings human. Urie Bronfenbrenner, Cornell University.Urie Bronfenbrenner is the man who discovered . . that the Russians are more affectionate and attentive to their children. He's the one who found out that if your children are more with their peers than with their parents at least until the fifth or sixth grades . . if they're with their peers more, they will become peer dependent. And if they become peer dependent, they will lose self worth, they will lose optimism -- there goes your self direction in the free enterprise system -- they will lose respect for their parents and finally, they will even lost trust in their peers. What do they have left?
Jean Piaget gave us a failsafe age, about 11.7 or 12 for children to be cognitively ready for formal education. By the same token in ancient times children were not considered responsible enough to go away to school until . . age 12 for girls or 13 for boys. William Rohrer, University of California, Berklee, . . the top learning psychologist, says, (and he wrote it 15 years ago in the Harvard Ed Review) "If we could just keep our children out of school until junior high school, at least, we could save millions of children from learning failure."
Excerpts from speech delivered by Dr. Leonard Dalton,
Superintendent of the Delano (California) School District, at the
Home Educators' Conference 25 October 1986:
I was real pleased to see Joyce Kinmont out here.
Joyce was one of the first people who taught me
some valuable lessons about home schooling. I
was superintendent of schools in Box Elder County,
Utah, and Joyce was one of my home schools. I met
with her and told her all the dire consequences
that were going to occur if she continued to teach
her children at home, and she sure proved me to be
a liar. So I'm just real pleased to list Joyce
as one of my success stories. I really can't take
credit for it, but I like to call it one of my
success stories, because it helped turn me around.
One of the other things that turned me around was
my son, Randy, my number two son. . . Randy,
Mike and Pat, my three oldest sons, are into home
schooling. I always thought I was a little right
of center, but they are right of Atilla the Hun.
I mean they make me look like a "limp-wrist
liberal," let me tell you; and I'm real proud of
what they have been able to accomplish, because
the things they have achieved with their children
have also been a tremendous education to me.
Many years ago, when I used to speak against home
schooling, I guess even at that time I probably
felt it makes sense, and maybe I still do for that
period, because, you see, 20, 30 years ago, or
maybe even 10 years ago, the average parent who
wanted to teach their child . . did not have
the education of the average public school teacher
and did not have access to the technology. I have
to tell you today: that's not true any longer.
And, therefore, . . I can stand here and tell
you that I am a supporter of the home school
movement, because now I have noticed that the
average parent is probably as well or better
educated than some of our public school teachers,
and you have access to more technology to help
your children at home than we do. We can't afford
the technology you can have.
I really believe that things are changing. I was
at a meeting just yesterday, the last two days,
with a bunch of superintendents from throughout
California, and I have some good news for you .
. : California is one of the states that has
provisions for "equity" education, and I was very
pleased to notice some of the superintendents,
when the issue of home schooling came up in the
discussion, raise their hands and say, "We have
contracts arranged with our home schools where
they go ahead on what we call an independent study
program; as long as we can send somebody once a
week to come around and visit with them and chat
with them . . . and maybe find out what they
have been missing the last week."
That way it benefits everybody; the school gets
"A.D.A" (average daily attendance funding benefit)
for the kids. They're not going to fight you any
more over that, and you get your home school, and
I think those of you that aren't aware of that
need to investigate it, because there are many
states now that have those provisions. And, in
the long run, I think that's going to benefit
everybody.
. . . We are in the midst of what we consider
in education a competency movement. Every single
state is working on some kind of educational
reform for their public schools. . . [e. g.],
incentive pay based upon academic gain of the
students in the schools. There was always a big
argument over how you are going to measure that
gain. Most states, most schools use what they
call "norm" or "standardized" tests. . . One of
the things you need to learn to be able to
dialogue with public school people . . is their
language, so you can talk to them intelligently.
Let me explain the difference between norm and
standardized test as compared to criterion
reference test: Norm reference tests or
standardized tests, somewhat synonymous, are
national tests in which there are samplings of the
kind of things people want students to learn
throughout the country, therefore they never do
totally zero in on all the things you would want
your students to learn in your community. But
they are a comparison of how students do in one
state as compared to another. . . The thing
that you want to work on and you want to insist
that your public schools do, because then you
build a corollary between what you are doing and
what they are doing, is what we call "criterion
reference testing." . . Criterion reference
testing, very simply, is based upon the
performance criteria that people have agreed upon
in trying to get children to achieve, and they're
saying, "Here's what I'll accept as evidence that
your child has learned what I want him to learn;
now do it." That's criterion reference testing.
That truly tests the objectives that everybody has
for their children. The reason that is so
important to you is because of the crest of a wave
that I think you should be riding. This wave is a
competency movement wave that's hitting all the
states, and you can capitalize on that wave.
What they are saying is that we should no longer
be talking about what teachers do. I'm convinced
that there may not be any correlation between what
a teacher looks like she's doing and what the
kid's achieving. . . For years, we've just
evaluated teachers. For instance, based upon . .
nice bulletin boards, she smiles at all the
children, and all these good things, and that may
not have one blessed thing to do with what the
kid's achieving. Now we're talking about pupil
performance. Therein lies, I think, the corollary
of what we call equity education, is for you to
learn how to identify those performance criteria
so that you can take them and, if anybody
challenges you from the public schools, say,
"Here's what we are getting our kids to do; here's
the test results on a criterion reference test.
You, Mr. Public Administrator, show me, what are
you doing along that line at your school?" You,
then, are in a position to have a dialogue that
puts them in on the spot because that's what the
state legislation is starting to say to the
schools that they should be doing. You are in a
position to do that much easier because you are
working with your children directly, and you can
zero in on what we call "time on task" to see to
it your children achieve that.
When I went to Delano the board could not
understand why I would want to come to a small
district like that after having been the
superintendent in Reno, Nevada. . . .
[Response]: You people are really in trouble, and
I'm not a "housekeeping" superintendent. I love
to cause things to happen and you really need a
lot of things to happen here. They do. Delano
district is in really bad shape. They have an
awful lot of trouble, an awful lot of problems
the last few years. They, in the last few years,
have even gone as far as a half million dollars in
the red. This last year we finished with $800,000
in the black. But the thing that is important:
I'm accused many times of being in favor of change
for change's sake, and I'll plead guilty to that,
because I figure you can always go back to doing
what you were doing if that doesn't work. I'm
always looking for something to help kids achieve,
and, to me, home schooling is one of the great
movements to help kids achieve. If it doesn't
work, . . you always have the public school.
Those of you that have the energy, you have the
time, you have the spirit, you have the resources,
I think you have an obligation to give it a good
shot. But, at the same time, I think you have an
obligation to communicate those outcomes, to
identify them, to be able to defend them and test
to them and teach to them.
Just a few years ago there was a report called the
Coleman report. This Coleman report . . .
indicated that the only children that are really
going to achieve are the children that come from
upper socio-economic income homes and there is
nothing that you can do for children who come from
low socio-economic homes. Schools made no
difference. A fellow by the name of Rod Edmunds
came along and he did some research and proved
that that was all a lie. He proved that every
child can learn regardless of their background.
Of course it is going to be more difficult, there
are going to be more handicaps, in some
environmental situations, but every child can
learn. He came up with what he called the five
correlates . . to make an effective school; and
this applies to you, because you want an effective
school, even if it's your home school, you want an
effective school. . .
(1) Principal is an instructional leader . .
(2) Every school has an instructional focus.
That's what I mean when I was talking about
identifying the performance objectives of what you
are going to accept, or what anybody would
probably accept, as observable evidence that the
student has learned what the teacher wants him to
learn, and then zero in on it and teach to it.
This is what I want my child to do, now by golly,
that's what we are going to work on; we're not
going to pass anything up. . . Believe it or
not, a lot of public school teachers really do
not have an instructional focus. They put in the
time, draw their pay check and it's a shame. . .
(3) Another item that he considered a correlate of
an effective school was that there be frequent
monitoring, that is a constant checking of the
student against the objective. This is one of the
things you should be doing in your home school.
You have an objective. You say these are the
things I expect you to do in this sequence;
therefore I'm going to constantly check to see if
you have achieved it.
(4) The fourth item is what he referred to as high
expectations. . . As we run these workshops
teaching teachers these things, a lot of them
misunderstand what high expectations are. Some
teachers think, "I've got a kid in general math
and he ought to be doing calculus." That's not
what Ron Edmunds meant. He meant that there is a
continuum of pupil performance that you are
looking for and you say to a student, ". . You
did this one, now you are expected to do this one,
and I'm not going to take 'no' for an answer. Do
it." It's kind of like the movement you've seen
in terms of discipline, called assertive
discipline. This is assertive instruction. High
expectations means you don't take "no" for an
answer. You don't take the tummy ache or the fact
that you've got the sniffles or the fact that
you've got some other problem. That's the next
thing you are expected to do, now, do it! You
expect him to do it. Children will do what they
are expected to do. Several years ago at Stanford
a person did a Doctoral study in which they tested
this high expectation idea. They gave a teacher
in a public school a group of students who were
tested out in terms of ability, to be below
average, but they told the teacher they were high
average ability. Guess what. That teacher got
high performance out of those kids. Why? Because
she thought that's what they were supposed to do.
Isn't that interesting? This, I think, has import
for your relationship for your dealing with your
own children. You'll have all kinds of excuses
that you'll hear just like public school people do
about why certain things can't be achieved, but if
you've developed your curriculum on a continuum of
pupil performances and it's a logical sequence and
you have identified these observable acts that you
accept as evidence of learning, then you expect
it.
(5) Of course the last correlate of an effective
school was a safe environment. I don't know what
is a more safe environment than your home. You
have a safe environment. Schools do not always
have safe environments. We, in this last year at
Delano, expelled more children from our high
school than I've had expelled in my total career
in education since 1949. That's embarrassing to
me. It's certainly not indicative . . I don't
know . . maybe that does mean we have a safe
school, we're getting the ones that are unsafe off
the campus. But, at the same time, it's an
extreme bother to me that we have the kinds of
situations going on that we actually have to expel
students.
I wrote a satire once . . called the physician-
educator and I pointed out that if physicians were
to function like the average public school
teacher, you would get a shot of penicillin on
Thursday, whether you needed it or not, because
that's what he had prepared for that day. When,
in reality, teachers, and that includes you,
should really be functioning as a physician. When
you go to see a doctor, he has a behavioral
objective in mind for you. . Given a thermometer
you'll register a 98.6 temperature, and then he
sticks a "pre-test" in your mouth. He pulls that
"pre-test" out and compares it with his objective.
Then he looks up on the shelf and gets a criterion
referenced learning activity called medicine. .
. He doesn't consider himself a failure if you
don't get well. You come back. He just charges
you another $50.00 and reaches up and gets another
one. So, if your children don't achieve, it's not
your fault, it's not their fault. It may be that
you just had the wrong objective or the wrong
medicine. That's why you have a whole array of
medicines . . Just make sure they're criterion
referenced. Just make sure they are referenced to
the criteria you have established as your
objectives so you don't waste that child's time
any more than you want the public school teacher
to waste that child's time. What you have them do
is what we call "time on task" that they actually
do zero in on the activities that you have
established, that you are looking for as evidence
of learning.
One of my biggest frustrations as a public school
administrator is that I am a capitalist running a
socialistic system. There is nothing more
socialistic than public schools. The bell rings
and everybody moves. I don't care if you're ready
to move or not; you move 'cause the bell rang. I
hate bells so much this year in my high school I
put in music instead of bells. It cut our tardies
by 30%. For six minutes they have music they can
jog and dance to class on, then when it stops that
means they've got one minute warning. There's no
music; deathly silence; you ought to see kids run.
. . In the public school system you have a
single salary schedule. Every teacher gets paid
the same. I don't care if you're the best or
worst teacher in the system. I'd love to see,
before I die, teachers getting paid based upon
what they can get kids to do. I don't know
whether that'll every happen. That's one of the
reasons I am enlisting your aid to help put
pressure on the public schools to identify the
performance criteria, because, you see, there's no
excuse for us not doing that. The only legitimate
excuse is one we have trouble fighting, and that's
the unions. I maintain that teacher unions and
school boards are the cause of our mediocrity in
the public schools. I don't know which is worse.
Wait 'til that gets back to my school board.
That's OK. I only need two more years to retire.
But, it is frustrating, because I do want to see a
lot of changes. And I feel that pupil performance
is the bottom line and the basis for what we all
ought to be working for, and that's the basis upon
which we ought to be making comparisons between
your home school and public schools. If someone
is going to insist on a comparison, you insist
that they give you a copy of their performance
criteria. And if they don't have it, you say,
"Go back to the school and get it. Make one.
I've got one."
As a matter of fact, one of the things I want to
suggest to the people that put together this
conference is I think that at your next conference
you ought to have a "hands on" workshop to show
parents how to do this. And I'd be glad to help
you with it.
One of the things you also need to learn and get
into your language is, if you don't already have
it, because it's available to you and it's easier
for you to get than it is for us, and this is
computer assisted instruction, computer managed
instruction and computer literacy. You can get,
now, a microcomputer for your home and excellent
software; I couldn't have said that ten years
ago, but you can get excellent software for your
children to use at home at very low prices. Just
buy a little bit every year. The drills and
information on that software is directly
referenced to your objectives that you are trying
to get your children to achieve. Computer
assisted instruction is exactly what it says.
It's using the computer to drill and test and
teach your children in usually a drill or
information format: didactic, we call it, one of
the fancy words in education. Computer managed
instruction is a way for the computer to keep
track of the data of your children achieving the
work that you have for them to achieve. Actually,
it can even help you diagnose their next need.
Computer managed instruction, then, is actually a
student control system, a student management
system, that you can use to keep the records of
your student achievement and the programs and
everything you want to have go with it. Computer
literacy is just what it says. You become
literate in terms of not only the keyboard, but
maybe eventually your child can learn how to
program in BASIC. . . They even have an "Author"
system where you can write your own program
without having to learn a language, you just put
it in English. It's great! There are a lot of
things out there available to you that you should
use because it's going to help your children
achieve faster than the public school next door to
you. Because the public schools a lot of times
really cannot afford all of that. And, as a
matter of fact, even if they could afford it, a
lot of us have teachers that are scared to death
of them. Two reasons they are scared: (1) the
mechanics of it scares them and, for some of them,
(2) they are afraid it's going to take their
place. You can't really do that, but that's not a
bad idea in some cases.
. . . The original schools in the United States
were home schools. The reason public schools
started was because of the laziness and ignorance
of the parents. They decided, "Ah, I don't want
to do this; let's get together and form a school."
So, they started schools. In Quincy,
Massachusetts the first school started and that's
why some of us innovative types, who like to see
things change, refer to our classrooms as "Quincy
Boxes": box beside box, box on top of box. And
the whole idea appalls us, anyway, that there
really should be an opportunity for students to
move through the curriculum based upon how they
perform.
As an innovator in education I've started
performance contracts, course challenges, flexible
schedules; all designed to try to allow the child
who really wanted to learn to move out of the mold
and not be locked in by some bell schedule. I've
got a whole scrap book full of nasty letters to
the editor about the wild things I've tried to do
in education to free the student so that he could
exercise a little bit of free enterprise.
I was at a convention with the AASA (The American
Association of School Administrators), and a
superintendent from Connecticut stood up, and he
said -- he was talking against vouchers -- . .
"The thing that made America great was free public
schools." I thought, "That's nice, go on." But
he didn't go on, so I stood up, and I said, "In
the first place, I don't like this dialogue
against vouchers. As far as I'm concerned, if
everybody's willing to play by the same game, they
could have a voucher. But I want to tell you
something. Free public schools did not make
America great. Russia has free public schools.
They're always going to buy wheat from us. Why?
Because our free public schools are supported by
free enterprise. It was free enterprise that
made United States great, not free public
schools."
But, you see, we run our schools an awfully lot
like Russia runs their country. You're not
allowed to fail. You know, it's some kind of an
insult . . As a matter of fact, yesterday in
this meeting with the superintendents, they were
arguing about and talking about the fact that so
many of them flunked kids because they missed so
many days of school. They dropped their grade or
they dropped their credit. And I got up and I
said, "Well, that's even a policy in my district,
but I've got to tell you, I don't like it. You
know why I don't like it? Because what we are
saying with that kind of policy is that we give
kids credit for 'chair warming.' We don't give
them credit for what they can do. You've got to
be there to warm a chair in order to get your
credit."
That kind of reminded me of the fellow who wrote
the little book that has taught so many of us how
to write curriculum in a performance base, a
fellow by the name of Meager. . . He had a
little satire and he pointed out . . "If you
were driving from San Francisco to San Diego and
you had a flat tire just passed Los Angeles, if
you were in the public schools of the United
States, you wouldn't pass Los Angeles, you'd flunk
San Diego."
There is a lot of philosophy in that. We don't
give kids credit for what they do. We flunk them
for what they don't do. And that's why it's so
important that you build a curriculum and learn
how to actually write a curriculum that's on a
performance base and a continuum of pupil
performances, and that's really what we ought to
be doing in the public schools. We say to a
child, "Well, you achieved this much and you did
it pretty well, so you only got this much credit."
Instead, what do we do? We flunk them for the
whole thing. We ought to give kids credit for
what they achieve. That's more like our society.
That's more in line with what they do when they
get out in the real world, as they get credit for
what they can do, and they don't get credit for
what they don't do. We don't flunk them for
everything just because they didn't achieve
everything we expected of them.
In South Carolina I think we proved that there can
be a correlation between pupil gain and teacher
incentive pay. We did prove that you can get
every child to achieve, because we insisted that
the average gain be in every quartile in every
class. Now, let me explain what that means,
because you're going to be voting on legislation,
and that's one of the things that you are going to
want to push. When I got to South Carolina, they
were trying to say that if a teacher got average
gain in her class she could get the incentive pay,
and we said "no." That means she could just deal
with certain students and still get an average
gain. It has to be average gain in every
quartile, which means that she truly is trying to
deal with every segment of her classroom. We got
that passed. And it has made a difference
because, then, teachers have really truly paid
attention to all the students in the classroom.
I think, here, again, we had to get started
criterion reference testing. And I dwell on that
because it's important for you to understand, that
testing the performance criteria so that you're
actually testing what you're teaching and teaching
what you are going to test is very important. You
are not teaching the exact same thing that is on
the objective but you test that objective. Let me
explain that in another way: Everything you want
a child to learn is either a product or a process.
It amazes me that teachers hide their objectives
in terms of products. A product and the test
should be the same; there is no difference.
Phoenix is the capitol of Arizona. How are you
going to hide that from the kid? Who cares? If
he memorizes that the Phoenix is the capitol of
Arizona, it is. So the objective is: identify
the capitol of Arizona. The test is: what's the
capitol of Arizona? That's a product. And we
shouldn't be trying to play games with kids. A
process is: . . I'm going to give you a test of
unlike fractions and you'll multiply them. . .
You'll want to see the process of his
multiplication. For him to memorize answers
doesn't mean he knows the process. It means he
learned the answers and memorized them. That's a
process. You want to see the process. So, when
you are writing your objectives, make sure you are
communicating that difference, and don't try to
make any secrets out of hiding a product. But in
a process, the test of the objective is he doesn't
know what actual questions he is going to get,
but he darn sure better show the process. He
better show you he knows how to multiply unlike
fractions.
It's unfortunate that we force kids into a
guessing game. If they guess what the teacher
accepts as evidence of learning, they get a good
grade. If they guess wrong, they get a bad
grade. I used to run workshops for teachers
trying to write objectives in all domains of
learning: . . affective domain (attitudes,
opinions and feelings), [and] there's the
cognitive domain (factual data). . . . The
thing that's hard, and always has been, is
writing them in the affective domain. Wherever I
go across the country to run workshops I've had
English and fine arts teachers hassling me about
writing objectives in the affective domain. One
time I was running a workshop for about a hundred
administrators in West Virginia . . and a
secondary curriculum specialist stood up and was
challenging me on objectives, and, as a teacher,
you get sick of hearing yourself say the same
thing over and over. So I reached up and tried to
find a new way of saying this, and I asked him .
., "Tell me, can you give me any reason why any of
your teachers should not be willing to identify
what they are going to accept as observable
evidence that the student has learned what you
want him to learn?"
You could hear a pin drop in that room, and, all
of a sudden, I didn't even want his answer. I
looked up the English supervisor, because that's
the person who always gives me a bad time, and I
said, "Tell me, can you give me any reason why any
of your English teachers should not be willing to
identify what they are going to accept as
observable evidence that the student as learned
what they want him to learn?"
She sat there for a long time and finally she
said, "No, since you put it like that, I can't."
And it dawned on me, for the first time in my
life, I did not say "measurable." I said
"observable." You see, anything you want a child
to learn, you have a mental picture of, or you
have no business trying to teach it. Therefore,
you have an obligation to communicate to that
learner what it is you are going to accept. . .
Everybody has their favorite Peanuts cartoon. My
favorite Peanuts cartoon shows Peppermint Patty
taking a test. She turns around and asks Linus .
, "What did you answer for number 5?"
Linus said, "He was one of our greatest presidents
and one of our most beloved leaders."
"Do you really believe that?"
"No, but I learned never to bad mouth presidents
on a history test."
Schultz is a heck-of-a philosopher. Do you know
what he's saying there? He's saying, "Hey, this
kid isn't going to tell that teacher the answer
that he believes, because the teacher is going to
down grade him if he doesn't agree with the
teacher, so he's going to tell the teacher what
she thinks."
You see, that's an affective response, and I use
that a lot to help teachers understand -- and I
think it's important for you -- that you have no
business grading an opinion. But, what you say to
them is, "Given a list of presidents, you'll tell
me what you think of them. But, you better be
able to support what they did in office by telling
me what they did. Support your answer."
That's a cognitive support of an affective
response. That teacher, you see, ruined a
beautiful dialogue with the child, when, instead,
could have said that other thing and had a real
nice dialogue with him. "Well, why do you think
this."
. . . We kill the interest and desire and
initiative a lot of times with students in the
classroom. Tom Shannon, the executive secretary
for the National School Boards' Association . .
made the statement that the home school movement
is going to die out because it's becoming too
frustrating and too much in the way of
incompetence on the part of the parents. . . I
maintain that parents do not have a monopoly on
incompetence. If someone wants to visit the
schools, I'll show you an epidemic in some other
areas besides the homes. I think it's just the
opposite. I think the parents . . -- you make
some pretty strange bedfellow, I've got to admit .
. . from the extreme left . . and on the right
. . religious factions . . from my observation
-- but, nevertheless, a parent in today's society
. . is in a beautiful position, if they really
want to do a good job for their kids, one you have
never been in before: . . because you have the
technology. . Because you're better educated
than the parents were before, and . . you can
ride the crest of a competency movement that's
hitting the public schools. You can take
advantage of that to see to it that you have an
opportunity to see to it they identify their
competencies and compare them with yours. And you
can even say to them, "Well, yes, you've got a few
things there I don't have. I can make some
adjustments."
Show them you are a little flexible; no big deal.
But the thing is: they don't have their
competencies identified. They don't have their
performance curriculum. And one of the reasons
why I am encouraging you to do that is just not to
help you, but I think, in the long run, it will
help the public schools.
One of the things that I think that is important
that comes out of this is the fact that you can
challenge their work. You can actually encourage
students to challenge work both in the public
schools and at home. One of the people that also
taught me about home schooling, believe it or not,
was Randy, my number two son, because, when he was
in high school he was really frustrated. He had
to take all these courses, and he said, "Isn't
there a way I can get credit in a course so I can
take more music?"
And, since he had already had two years of Spanish
and two years of French, we went to the French
teacher and said (Randy wanted to take a third
year of French) . ., "Tell me, is there any
reason why you wouldn't be willing to let Randy
not come to your class but get the books you are
going to use . . and let him come back and talk
to you, in French, about the book he read, then
give him another one, and at the end of the year
give him the test and if he gets an 'A' or a 'B'
we'll put it on the transcript, and if he gets a
'C' or lower, we'll act like nothing happened,
because he didn't need the credit anyway."
The teacher agreed. At the end of the year,
[Randy] got an "A"; I went to the teacher and
said, "Now, are you sure he can read, write and
speak French as well as the other students that
have been here all year?"
"Yes, he can."
"What did he miss by not being in the class?"
"Well, he missed the aesthetic discussions about
France, itself."
"Is that more important, in your eyes, than the
fact that he was able to pick up one whole,
additional class on campus?"
The teacher had to admit that it wasn't. That was
the barrier breaker for my faculty there. . .
And we, then, opened up course challenges,
because, you see, having seven sons I figured I
could afford to screw up one of them and it
wouldn't make much difference. I wouldn't really
have wanted to do that with anybody else's kids,
but, you see, it did help prove that not every
student has to be on target all the time the same
as the other students. There are actually some
students that don't have to be there at all, and
can still achieve. And that's some of the things
you prove with your home school movement.
Another factor that I think is important for you
to consider is that I don't think you ought to be
afraid to talk to your school administrators,
especially after you research and find out that in
California you have an equity portion that allows
you to work with them. On the other hand, if you
just as soon don't want them to know what you are
doing, but be ready, when they find out that you
do exist, be ready with that as a bit of your
armature. Be ready with that performance
curriculum, which I think we ought to be
developing here sometime in one of the workshops.
And be ready with the date that shows the
achievement of your students so that you can be in
a very good position. Now, admittedly, there are
some states in which there is equity provision.
Admittedly, there are some states in which the
only way you could have a home school operation
and not get into trouble would be for you to
coalesce and get together and form your own
little private school. But there are more and
more states . . that do have equity positions
in terms of competencies that I think you could
take advantage of.
. . . Going back to the quote from Tom Shannon
. . "The fact that home schooling is still with
us is remarkable. To project its expansion,
however, is to strain credibility beyond the
breaking point."
I respect Tom. I've known him a long time. But
I'd sure like to tell him about strain. I don't
think that anything he's talking about in terms of
strain or straining the credibility is anything
like it has been in the past or anything as it's
like dealing with a union that is only concerned
with keeping their members employed in the school
system. I sometimes think that we run schools to
give people jobs, not to educate kids. And I
really believe that you folks are engaged in
conquering a new frontier.
APPENDIX 3
Continuation of Home Educators' Conference Proceedings.
(Leonard Dalton Home Education Symposium speech continued.)
Parents naturally have some problems that are
serious, but, by and large, those of you who are
in a position to do a job helping your kids learn
are really not the ones with most of the problems.
The ones with most of the problems are sending
them to us.
I'm concerned that some of our freedoms . . and
I don't mean to be belittling our freedoms, but
some of our freedoms have really been abused and
they are amplified in our public schools. For
instance, the freedom of expression and choice
have given us the freedom to claim victimless
crimes and a perverted life style. And there is
more protection for criminals than victims. In
this regard I want to say something about
censorship. I want you to know that, in my
opinion, censorship is not a dirty word. It
really amazes me that people give educators and
give parents who want to censor things that go in
a child's mind a bad time. It amazes me, because
. . they certainly censor their children when
they play; they don't let them go play on a
freeway. They certainly censor what they eat.
But, yet, they think, for some reason, it's okay
to let anything go into the brain that you want
to let go in there. It reminds me about that
children's story about the king's new suit of
clothes. . . Con men that came up with the
thread said that only honest people can see the
thread. Therefore, here's the king standing out
there naked, and nobody's going to tell him he's
naked because that'll suggest they're not honest.
And the king won't even say he's naked because he
doesn't want people to think he's dishonest.
Some little kid comes up and says, "Hey, he's
naked."
Then, all of a sudden, everybody decided, "Hah, I
guess we've been conned by the weavers."
Well, it's the same thing. It takes somebody
pretty innocent to come along and say, "Hey,
that's dirty. That's pornographic." Because the
rest of us are afraid to be called censors. My
wife was an elementary school librarian and she
went an awfully lot by the book reviews . . and
she learned a valuable lesson because a little
girl came up to her one time and said to her, "I
don't think I better be reading this book."
I think the title was The Diary of a Frantic Kid
Sister. And then my wife went back and checked
on it and found out the reviewers had lied! The
. . reviews she had based her order on were a
fabrication of what that book was really about.
. People will go to all kinds of devices to get
the information to your kids that are plain
pornographic . . I'm concerned, and I don't
mind standing up and telling people that, as far
as I'm concerned, censorship is not necessarily a
dirty word. Sure, back when Abe Lincoln had to
carry one Bible and that's all he had to read .
. by candlelight, sure, it was pretty hard to
eliminate any books because there weren't very
many. We don't have that problem. We have a lot
of choices now. There are many things to get
across, concepts to children, without having to
have the language that people are trying to feed
to our kids. We can choose some of the good
wholesome things for them to learn. And people
say to me, "Yes, but he won't learn real life." --
Well, that's not the real life I think my kids
need to learn. . .
In summary let me just review the things I'd like
to see you be working on:
I'd like to see you working on legislation and use
your influence to change the legislation so that
there's a definite relationship between
comparability in terms of pupil performance
regardless of where it's learned. I think you
need to stress to the people you elect to office
that it makes no difference who teaches a child or
where he learns it; it's what he can do
afterwards. It's the performance that's
important, not who teaches or where he learns it.
I think, also, you need to learn the laws in your
state and learn how to work within them until you
can get them changed. I think you need to also
take some time, for instance, to consider the
possibility, if you haven't already, of combining
with some other home schools, if that's what has
to be done in your state in order for you to have
the right to teach your children.
I'd like to see you learn the difference between
norm referenced and standardized tests and
criterion referenced testing so you can talk
intelligently to your public school people.
I'd like to see you learn the technology: computer
assisted instruction, computer managed
instruction, computer literacy and take advantage
of that.
I'd like to see you also produce some performance
or outcome based curriculum so that you can
compare that with your public schools when the
time arises.
I'd like to see you, also, set up, like I said, in
your workshops in the future to actually have
some hands-on experience learning how to do some
of these things.
I'd like to see you keep accurate records of
instruction time, activities and achievement,
investigate the possibility of combining to form
private schools.
I'd like to see you fight the negativeness of
teacher unions and the bureaucracy of public
systems and the insidious infiltration of
organizations bent on destroying the family unit
in the United States.
I think that you may be the only hope for an
intelligent society in the United States for the
future.
````````````````````
The primary intent of this appendix, as others, is to provide
testimonials that home schooling can be at least as effective in
providing a viable education as institutionalized education --
and evidence is provided that it is more so. Consequently, legal
questions, differing from state to state, are not treated in
these appendices on the home schooling movement. Those readers
interested can receive information on legality by sending a
request for it for a specified state, with a self addressed
stamped envelope, to The Hewitt Research Foundation, P. O. Box
9, Washougal, Washington 98671. The location of support groups
in various localities can be likewise requested.
Following are excerpts form the Expert Panel at the home
educators' symposium: Phil Troutt, Moderator; panelists: Dr.
Raymond Moore, Dr. Reed Bensen, J. Michael Smith, Thomas Burton
and Dr. Leonard Dalton.
[Regarding curricula, Raymond Moore:] Let's
provide tutorial more than superimposing of
conventional school patterns. . . We want less
workbooks, more free exploration. . By the way,
who was that gentleman that just came up to me?
He teaches in the Hollywood Studios for the L. A.
City Schools. He teaches them from an hour to
three hours a day, and the kids are way, way
ahead, of course. That's all they need is that
kind of personal response. . . It really
works.
(Phil Trout then repeated what the teacher
mentioned from the floor:) Many of the children
who work on the sets have three hours of schooling
a day . . and are working up to nine hours [a
day] on the set and are still excelling in their
academic subjects.
[Regarding single parent, Raymond Moore:] We have
a single mother with five girls ages 6 to 16 that
are home schooling, and I wish I could just
parade them right here right now. They are some
of the most beautiful examples of behavior and
genius I've ever seen. In Home Spun Schools, one
of our books, you'll see five families out of the
fifteen . . were single parents who were doing
it.
[Regarding "home schooling" and "schooling at
home" distinction and time parents are involved
in teaching, Raymond Moore:] Schooling at home is
the idea that [many] have of using conventional
curricula to be taught by the parent. I had one
woman come to me the other day who said she was
actually taking as much as 11 and 12 hours a day
to get through everything, counting preparation
and teaching . . This burns them up. Home
schooling . . is a tutorial arrangement which
is, for the most part, informal. The parent
witnessing by his example and his responsiveness
and simple materials . . That works much more
effectively, especially when it's balanced for the
rest of the day with hands-on work experience.
[Regarding age of beginning schooling, Raymond
Moore:] Better Late Than Early and School CAN Wait
are books that can give you data. . . We are
talking here about . . formal schooling,
usually. You start educating your child before
he is born, actually, by the way you feed his
body . . . your nervous temperament . . and
so on, you are going to determine the growth and
the nervous potential of that child. Then, when
he is born, you are responding to this child
warmly, and you are reading to him while he is
still at your breast, and maybe he is learning to
read by the time he is two or three. Who knows?
At least he is memorizing the words you are
reading. But, all we are saying is don't give
him formal, on-going instruction until at least
eight. That was the California state policy
until 1968, when Riles was in there. It's still
the official in Washington, Arizona and
Pennsylvania. . . Our Stanford research team
found that not one single state school entrance
age law in this nation was based upon replicable
research, not even one. . . Give your child
time to unfold. . . Like I told them in
Colorado the other day. There was snow out
there, and you want to shovel the snow of the
sidewalks. What do you do? You give them a roll
of tinfoil. . . No. The tinfoil isn't
tempered. You can take snow off with tinfoil, but
it's going to be a hard job. And that's exactly
what you throw on to your kids when you put them
into school before they're cognitively ready,
before their brains are lateralized and ready.
You put a lot of emphasis upon the specifically
objective side of the brain and you ignore the
creative side of the brain. The Wall Street
Journal said that the average child today at five
has 90% creativity, at twelve he has 15%, at
fifteen he has 12%, and at twenty-five he has 2%.
. . We are dumming[?] down the creativity of our
kids. . . Get youngsters into more free,
rolling, creative type of things . . at the
right time.
[Regarding peer dependency and more on age,
Raymond Moore:] At least until age 12, children
that are with their peers more than their parents
will become peer dependent. . . I'm asking
some of the public schools to lay off these
formal constraints before age eight or nine. If
they'll just do that, we'll have children that
are a lot less neurotic and much better
achievers, and also better examples.
[Regarding the success of high school transfers
from formalized to home school, Michael Smith:]
We had that situation in our family. Our
daughter, who is now nineteen, when she was
fifteen years of age came out of the public
school. And she never regretted it. As a matter
of fact, she has said that those times with her
mother . . to go over her school work, were
some of the most precious moments that she has
ever spent in her life. When she said this she
was seventeen years of age. I don't think there
will ever be any regret about that. [Raymond
Moore:] There are many children who definitely
feel rejected when they are institutionalized.
And . . if you read Carl Zimmermann . . the
way I put it, the earlier you institutionalize
your child the earlier he'll institutionalize
you. . . Kids don't care anymore what happens
to their parents. The child who wants to stay
home from school probably should be given the
chance. . . but not because he hates public
school. Make it because he loves you. As
Bronfenbrenner for this peer dependency . . is
not because they like their peers so well, it's
because they sense rejection by their parents who
send them away to school. [Leonard Dalton:] I've
been picking on Randy . . He always used to say
he is never going to let college interfere with
his education. I think now, since he was
successful at challenging that French, if he were
to go back he wouldn't let high school interfere
with his education either. [Reed Benson:]
Principals in the public schools will start
boasting between themselves as to how many home
schoolers are coming to them for specific
classes. It will be a mark of distinction that
their school has got enough to offer that a home
schooler would actually come in and take one of
their classes. [Raymond Moore:] That's happening
right now in this state.
[Regarding different age levels in the same group,
Leonard Dalton:] There is no such thing as a true
fifth grade. You take any fifth grade public
school and they've got anything from the second
through the ninth grade in there, or more. . .
When I was superintendent in Utah I had four
little two teacher schools up in the corner of
Nevada and Idaho. . . In each one of them,
thirty students, all the way from "K"
(kindergarten) through 10, and those, kids . .
did better than the average of our students in
our big schools. So grades really aren't
important. That's why this continuum of
performance curriculum is what's important.
Whatever that kid is ready for next, you deal
with. [Raymond Moore:] I agree with that very,
very much. . You have children of all these
different levels . . Use the older to help the
younger, the stronger to help the weaker. Use
your children as assistant teachers. Whatever you
do, don't ever find yourself guilty of teaching
your five year old how to tie shoes. That's a
seven year old's business. He can do it a lot
better than you can do it. [Phil Trout:] He's
closer to the ground. [Reed Benson:] The older
they get the more you need to be just a
facilitator. You need to point them in the
general direction. . . If you can get the older
ones to help the younger ones, that's a great
learning experience for both of them.
[Regarding reading motivation and a 14 year old
reader who mumbles when reading reluctantly,
Raymond Moore:] Obviously not very motivated. I
can predict what has happened to that child in
terms of the background in schooling, either that
or some emotional problems at home. Most likely
this child never did like to read and has been
pushed into reading, so I would back off of
reading and giving her something to read about. .
For example, a unit on winter, or Libya or on
Lebanon or on Nicaragua. Everything goes around
that unit, arithmetic or whatever. . Get
something they are really interested in . .
[Leonard Dalton:] One of the things we have found
that's most successful in helping kids read is
this new program of "Write to Read." . . It
doesn't make any difference if they spell right
or not. Make sure they write about a page of
something every day. Believe it or not, that
improves everything. . . Reading is nothing
more than decoding. . Have them write something
every day . . You'll improve their reading.
[Leonard Dalton:] We really don't have compulsory
education. All we have is compulsory attendance,
and that is not necessarily the same thing.