This story is going around the internet at the moment. I don’t know who wrote it so cannot supply a link. As home educators we can give our children a very specialised educated – suited to each individual child in our family.

ANIMAL SCHOOL

An old story tells of the creation of a school for animals. In this school,
everybody took the same four courses: flying, swimming, climbing & running.

Among the students were a duck, flying squirrel, fox & an elephant. These 4
were highly motivated & wanted to get good grades so all tried very hard.

The duck did fantastically well in swimming & flying but lagged behind his
classmates in climbing & running so focused special attention on those 2
subjects. However, his feet became so sore from trying to run & his wings
were so bedraggled from trying to climb that, by the end of the year, he not
only failed both those subjects, but made Cs in swimming & flying, which had
once been his 2 best subjects.

At the beginning of the school year , the squirrel was first in his class in
climbing & running & was second only to the duck at flying. But, as the
months wore on, he missed so much school from catching pneumonia in his
swimming class that he failed everything. To make matters even worse,
because the squirrel constantly squirmed & chattered in class & had
difficulty paying attention, he was diagnosed with a learning disorder. The
squirrel was eventually placed in remedial classes & had to be medicated in
order to continue with his school work.

The fox was a natural in his running class & scored well in climbing &
swimming but, becoming so frustrated at his inability to get good grades in
flying, he began assaulting his classmates. He even tried to eat the duck!
His behaviour was so disruptive he was expelled from school, fell in with a
rough crowd & wound up in a centre for animal delinquents.

The elephant, meanwhile, developed low self-esteem because he couldn’t do
well in any of the subjects. When he sank into clinical depression, his
therapist persuaded him to try a different school that focused on subjects
such as lifting & carrying. The elephant was disappointed because careers
in lifting & carrying were not as prestigious as careers in flying,
swimming, climbing & running. Even though he always felt inferior, he
managed to make a decent living & support his family.

The SUNDAY current affairs programme was about two families who home school their children.
But it was not home schooling as we might know it.
It’s called un-schooling, where there is no set curriculum and what is pursued is driven by what interests the child.

We have heard wonderful reviews of this programme but have not been able to watch this on our computers for some reason.

Here are the links we have – trust you can view on your computers:

http://tvnz.co.nz/sunday-news/free-range-kids-15-17-video-4073333

http://tvnz.co.nz/breakfast-news/alternative-education-gordon-dryden-6-38-video-4073483

http://tvnz.co.nz/sunday-news/free-range-kids-15-17-video-4073333?ref=facebook

From Matt and Madeleine

The litany of the forces arrayed against quality state education systems is long. We believe these forces make state education’s decline inevitable. Without a thoroughgoing reformation of the fundaments of Western society itself, resistance is futile. The Borg is here.

We know that in New Zealand roughly one third of all graduates from state schools are functionally illiterate and innumerate. They cannot read supermarket shelf labels. Nor can they compare prices. We also know that on any given school day one tenth of pupils will be absent, without a conscientious reason. Truancy is systemic.

Recently we sought to interview potential candidates for a teaching position in our Christian school. These candidates were committed Christians; they were currently studying at a teacher training institution; they were zealous for their prospective careers–but they were unable to write a paragraph that was grammatically or syntactically correct. Apparently they had never learned through thirteen years of state schooling what a full-stop was, or how one was to begin a sentence. Yet, they had all graduated with “flying colours” from NCEA levels 11 through 13 in English! Sadly they were unemployable in our school.

These folk were part of another cohort of graduates from our state schools that are neither functionally illiterate nor innumerate–but they are   incompetent in even the rudiments of language and maths. This, of course, means that their ability to think, reason, encapsulate, describe, argue, and comprehend is severely curtailed. We guess that this cohort would represent another third of graduates from state schools.

Those who think that starting a new state funded programme (for example, Early Childhood Education), or shrinking classroom sizes, or raising teacher salaries, or introducing national testing will turn the tide are naive. They have not reckoned with the barrage of the secular forces arrayed against state schools.

Let’s name two of these secular forces. The first is statism–which arguably is the established religion of our day. By this we mean that for many the state or the government is the ultimate reality and force. Name any social, political, material, economic or cultural problem and within a nano-second the conversation will have become political–by which we mean that “the government needs to do something, or this, or that” will have been introduced into the conversation. Functionally our society looks to government as its god.

The spin-off effect upon state education is direct. The state’s “long term” solution to any problem is to attempt to use its schools to change human nature and action to solve society’s perceived problems. Government as redeemer translates into schools as agents of socialisation and state propaganda, not education. This is a weight which schools simply cannot bear. They both stop educating and fail miserably in socialisation.

The second secular force…Read more here at MandM

This was seen on the back of a School Bus in Nelson recently and sent to us