Informal Home Education: Philosophical Aspirations put into Practice
Alan Thomas bull; Harriet Pattison
Abstract Informal home education occurs without much that is generally considered essential for formal education—including curriculum, learning plans, assessments, age related targets or planned and deliberate teaching. Our research into families conducting this kind of education enables us to consider learning away from such imposed structures and to explore how children go about learning for themselves within the context of their own socio-cultural setting. In this paper we consider what and how children learn when no educational agenda is arranged for them and we link this manner of learning to the Deweyan ideas of learning as transactional and learning-in-context. We also use our empirical evidence to explore the notion of ZPD with regard to informal learning and to consider how children, without specific guidance, go about charting a course of learning through the ZPD. We consider the quality of informal learning particularly with regard to the educational aim of developing reflective and critical thinking, showing how these are integral to informal learning. We suggest that a much wider conception of what learning is and how it happens is needed, away from the confines of formal educational structures.
Keywords: Autonomous education ,Unschooling , Transactional , Socio-cultural , Home education , Informal learning , Curriculum
School seems unnatural. With a huge effort and cost and sometimes pain, you try to get something into children which would happen anyway (home educating parent).All children learn informally. In the first few years of life, before starting school, they acquire a massive amount of cultural knowledge including language and the foundations of literacy and numeracy. This is not learned in any organised way but simply through getting on with their daily lives in the context of family and the wider world surrounding them. Children lsquo;pick uprsquo; knowledge in ways that are unstructured, ad hoc, apparently haphazard and yet are very efficient. Our research amongst home educating families whose approach is very informal provides an opportunity to consider what would happen if children were allowed to continue in this vein of early learning through the years when they would otherwise be in school. This paper describes some of our research, looking at what and how children learn in this type of education and at the quality of such learning. Such is the apparent effectiveness of informal learning that we are led to propose that formal education, as an activity apart, is unnecessary for most children because they have ample opportunity to gain cultural knowledge informally, in their own way and in their own time. Whilst at face value this may seem a rather shocking idea, there is much within the philosophy and theory of education that can be related to our perspective on informal learning.
Home education has grown considerably in many countries in the last 30 years or so. Research has focussed mainly on attempting to establish prevalence, what leads parents to choose home education and academic outcomes, especially in comparison with school based learning. With regard to prevalence it is probable that at least a million children are home educated in the United States (Princiotta and Bielick 2006). While home education is increasingly common throughout the rest of the world, little is known of the numbers involved. Reasons for home educating generally fall into two categories: those who are educated at home from the start for religious or pedagogical reasons and those withdrawn from school for socio-emotional or academic reasons (ibid.; Rothermel 2005). There have been numerous studies of academic outcomes, generally found to be favourable (e.g., Lines 2001; Meighan 1995; Rothermel 2004).
There is, however, a dearth of research about how parents actually go about home educating on a day-to-day basis. Certainly home education covers a very wide range of styles from structured school type education through degrees of informality to a style of education which has no obvious shape at all; education without a timetable, a curriculum, written exercises, marking, testing or even explicit learning aims. The proportion of children whose education is informal in this sense is unknown and whilst it is well recognised in home education circles, as natural learning in Australia and New Zealand, autonomous learning in the UK and “unschooling” in North America, next to nothing is known about it outside the individual experiences of those that practise it. Indeed, when Thomas, first investigated home education he was interested in analysing structured dyadic teaching and was unaware of the part that informal learning might play (Thomas 1992).
A week spent “living in” with a home educating family refocused Thomasrsquo;s attention to informal aspects of learning, particularly through spontaneous, mainly social conversation (Thomas 1994). He decided to extend his research into a much broader study of approaches and methods, based on 100 home educating families in Australia and the UK. Overall, he found that parents used a very wide range of approaches from very highly structured to completely informal. As an illustration of the efficacy of informal learning, he used one parentrsquo;s meticulously detailed journal of her childrsquo;s day-to-day life from which he abstracted all references to numeracy; that part of the school curriculum generally thought to be the most heavily dependent on structure. It demonstrated clearly that though this childrsquo;s opportunities for learning were haphazard, unstructured and arose simply on an “as and when” basis in the course of everyday living, she nevertheless ended up on a par withher primary school contemporaries at age eleven. Somehow or other, all the seemingly unrelated bits and pieces had coalesced into a basic m
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