What school is doing wrong.

And also some of what it's doing right. All in one podcast.

The beginning of the end of schooling, for our family, was online learning.

In March 2020, as people began to realise Covid had arrived in our city, the school my children were attending switched to online learning basically over one weekend, and at the same time the pre-school I was working at did the same.

It was my chance, our chance.

I had never been a fan of school. I was reading John Holt while pregnant with my first child, we called ourselves unschoolers when I didn’t send P to nursery at age 3 and then didn’t send her to school either at age 5.

But then.. life got in the way. We moved a lot. I was exhausted. My second child had complex needs we were only beginning to unravel. Heck, we all had complex needs!! I was also getting sick with a cancer I wouldn’t discover for at least an entire year.

I don’t need to justify why I sent my kids to pre-school. But I mention it because the reality is that I didn’t really want to do it, but I also felt like it was the only way I was going to regain some of my self in that moment. I felt like I was failing my eldest, and I needed a break from my youngest.

But nobody needs a reason or a justification. Life under capitalism is fucking hard and we do what we need and want to do to make it work.

Anyway - back to online learning in the spring of 2020. It was an utter drag. My son just point blank refused (he was 5 so it was kind of ridiculous to expect him to be into it), and my daughter, who had previously loved school, loved her friends, was adored by the teachers.. well, she tried for a while and found it soulless and missing everything she had enjoyed about school.

It was our chance, and we took a leap into homeschooling. I don’t want to sound like I’m thanking Covid-19; I’m absolutely not.

But since it was happening, it felt like my chance to do something I’d started off doing and that I’d had to veer off course from. I was well enought by then, I had a community, supportive (homeschooling!) neighbours and friends.

This week I finally got around to listening to Odessa, a podcast about how the pandemic affected a high school in Odessa, Texas. Or at least, that’s what the podcast says it’s about but because all I do is look at things from an unschooled lens, I think the podcast is actually about the way schooling makes no sense and is just structurally flawed. And the way the pandemic brough this into stark focus.

I recommend listening, but a brief synopsis is that the podcast follows a high school teacher, a couple of students, the award-winning marching band director, and the two school nurses, throughout the 2020-2021 school year.

The interesting thing about this is that Texas mandated in-person attendance for those kids who wanted to come in, and so you get to compare the in-person kids with the kids who chose (sometimes freely, and other times because they had to work while also attending school) to stay online in September 2020.

When my children’s school went online in March 2020, even my school-loving 8 year old was no longer loving it anymore. This is precisely what happens in Odessa too, because it’s an open secret that a majority of children enjoy school not for the academics, but for the other stuff: the clubs, the marching band, the sports teams, and the ways they get to hang out with their friends.

A few months into homeschooling, I remember asking my son if he missed school and he said, “Only recess.”

Even in this podcast, there is a general awareness by the adults and by the young people, that the glue that holds school together is not actually the entire point of school: the draw of school is not the schooling, it is all the other stuff.

Of couse, my unschooled brain goes straight to: given that we know this, that the things kids miss about school, to quote the podcast, “had almost nothing to do with actual school,” that the draw of school is friendship, connection and a sense of belonging, then why not make these elements THE MAIN THING?

It feels like such a no-brainer for me. And anyone who has had children in school and then homeschooled for any amount of time knows that kids don’t miss school for school but for “the points of connection,” to quote Odessa: the ways it serves as a ready-made meeting place and a central locus of community.

Kids miss community, and perhaps getting together and finding belonging through shared interests (like the marching band is for the young people in this podcast). Very few of the kids miss the academics, and in fact the head of district schools interviewed for this podcast, says outright that the biggest predictor of academic success is engagement in extra-curriculars.

I want to let that sink in. He states that the biggest predictor of academic success, as far as he can see, is NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ACTUAL ACADEMICS.

I checked this, and while I can’t confirm that this is the biggest predictor, there are studies that show the many ways that extra-curricular participation correllates with academic success in school, as well as with other positive outcomes like attendance, good mental health, and the likelihood of carrying on to higher education.

What’s interesting to me is that because our school-obsessed society is so fixated on keeping the kids on track, we walk around assuming that school HAS to be about academic learning. That academics have to be what learning is centered around. I mean, what else is there?!

The answer (or one of the answers) is literally right there within mainstream schooling, and still people aren’t willing to see it: make schooling revolve around children and young people’s interests, and shared, non-coervice, optional pursuits.

WE ARE ALREADY DOING THIS. That is what extra-curriculars are. What if we made these the main event?

Odessa was all sorts of emotional for me. I felt the pain, sadness and loneliness of the young people who were forced to stay home, who felt isolated from their peers, like their last few school years had been robbed from them. I felt the struggle some of them were experiencing due to having to juggle a job and schooling because of their family’s suddenly precarious economic status. I felt the drowned hopes when one young person interviewed gave up on her dream of college. I struggled with the stickiness of young people getting used to being alone and almost stopping wanting to be around others - a sort of habituation to introversion, that seemed really common during this time. I also completely understand the stress and worry around being in-person, especially for those more vulnerable to Covid-19. I felt so grateful that our experience of Covid didn’t have any of these elements, or at least not to an irreversibly harmful extent.

Ultimately, this podcast highlights something that perhaps was not intentional: the fact that a pandemic brought to the light the cracks in an already massively problematic system.

It’s not that Covid put a functioning system under undue strain; it’s that the school system is rooted in coercion and compulsion to perform academically which is enabled only by essentially bribing children with extra-curriculars, recess, and the threat of isolation and loneliness.

When the ability to sustain this bribe falls away because people need to stay home, schooling is stripped to its most basic elements, to its academic skeleton. The illusion of the emperor’s clothes falls away, and we realise that nobody is there for the emperor himself.

We see that the kids who were innately into academics can easily do those from home, and perhaps really thrive at home. (I don’t want to take away from the children that actually did so much better at home than at school.)

But for the majority of children who perhaps don’t get to have a choice whether to go to school, or who are lured by their friends and non-academic activities, well - when you take the lure away, you lose them.

And school is exposed for what it really is: not that fun.

And if this isn’t the biggest reason to make schooling non-coercive, interest-based and rooted in connection, I’m not sure what is.

Ok people, here are my usual weekend links…

What I’m reading

I finished reading God Land by Lyz Lenz, and it was really interesting! It may not be for you if you’re a staunch atheist (Lenz is Christian), but as a secular person who is also super interested in religion, I found it fascinating.

Also I loved this post.

womensrights_news

A post shared by @womensrights_news

What I’m listening to

My post from last week was about why I’m divesting from parenting, and this podcast about the ways we parented throughout history was pretty interesting (although it’s very Western-centric and their conclusion is, See? We parented terribly and everyone is fine! whereas my conclusions is, We parented terribly and look at us now.)

And since we’re here I may as well recommend Robin Grille’s book Parenting for a Peaceful World, which counters some of the arguments in this podcast, but also reinforces others, and also dismisses the whole Good Old Days theory of childhood whereby everything was great and we didn’t obsess over parenting and still kept our children alive, and children were obedient but also treated respectfully, and at the same time more protected and also more free (clearly a very scientific theory! ha!).

mumologist

A post shared by @mumologist

What I’m watching

If you haven’t watched any of Natalie Wynn’s video essays, I really recommend them. I listened to the one about JK Rowling this week. Heads’ up it’s political, and philosophical, and also hilarious and infuriating.

What my kids are into

As I write this, P is at her youth theatre class getting ready for their final show, where she will be acting and singing. I cannot express how in awe of her I am - putting herself out there like that (literally on a stage!! eeek!), and following this interest that continues to grow and expand.

L got into needle felting and has made quite a few cute little needle-felted animals and creatures. I bought this needle felting wool some time ago and this starter kit is pretty good.

Hilariously, we unearthed a card game we started making over a year ago and got back to working on it again. It was an interesting example of losing interest in something, and not being pushed to finish it, and then re-discovering it. I quietly thanked my 2023 self for not obsessing over the kids finishing or not finishing things.

And also…

One of you asked me about the homeschool co-op we are part of here, and I wonder whether you’d like me to write about this next week? How it began, how it works, what we do all day.

Another request was to talk about Trello.

Pls let me know below and if there is enough interest I will write more, or make a little video for next week’s post.

As always, I’m open to feedback on topics you might like me to dig into.

I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your weekend!

Fran x