‘All you can do is fill them with love.’ Photo: mrhayata / flickr CC.
Inconvenient choices
Naomi Fisher describes living out the testimony of equality with her children
Two years ago I was sitting in Esher Meeting House, in the lovely old panelled room. I was worried about my children, whether I was really offering them the best of myself and helping them to explore the world, and also whether I should send them to school after having home educated them from the start. As I sat, I had an overwhelming sense of love surrounding me, and I felt the message through my whole body: ‘All you can do is fill them with love.’
I left Meeting that day with a strong conviction, first that I should join the Religious Society of Friends (after having been involved with Quakers for my whole life) and, second, that I needed to continue to put my values at the heart of everything I did with my children, and that this might involve making inconvenient choices.
Values
Right from the start of their lives I have felt a conflict between the values that I hold and what society seemed to expect me to do with my children. I believe that children are whole people to be valued for who they are right now, not for who they will become in the future. I also believe that humans learn best when they are able to explore freely, without fear of judgement or censure. I aspire to treat children with an equal degree of respect to adults, whilst also providing extra support and care appropriate to their level of development. I also feel that forcing people of any age to do things is wrong and counterproductive to learning, and that everyone should have real choices in their life.
As my son approached the age of four, we went to look around the highly rated local primary schools. I saw how very young children were being grouped by ability, and how those who had been ‘well-behaved’ all week were rewarded with Golden Time on Friday afternoons. I saw how embedded deep in the curriculum was the idea that adults knew best what children should learn, and when and how; and that children needed to comply with this. I knew that my son was highly motivated, extremely interested in the world and didn’t need to be rewarded in order to learn, but that he might well not be ‘well-behaved’. I didn’t want his intrinsic motivation to be overturned by the system of approval and rewards that every school we visited used to various degrees.
Learning and play
So, we took the difficult step of not sending him to school. I left my job in the NHS and we continued our life of playing, exploring, visiting friends and swimming. We did not distinguish between learning and play.
We discovered that it is, indeed, possible to learn without school and without a curriculum. I have not taught my children to read, but at age eight my son started reading road signs, and now, aged ten, he is a fluent reader. My children have a wide range of interests, including: Minecraft games, economics, arts and crafts, swimming, English history, the weather, experiments, coding, Harry Potter books and films drawing, logic puzzles and making unicorns out of polymer clay. Watching them learn has been awe-inspiring, as they have engaged deeply with what interests them, collecting information from a range of sources, and retaining what they learn – because it fascinates them. Conversations this morning ranged from why water gets hard when it freezes to when England was last officially Catholic.
As the children got older we started to feel the lack of a wider community. Home educators tend to socialise in families, and this started to feel restrictive for both us and them. We felt they needed a place where they could relate to others on their own terms. I worried that I was failing them, and that they were missing out on developing independence. Hence my anxiety at Esher Meeting.
Treating children as equals
This was when I started to look for schools where children were treated as equals – and discovered to my surprise that there is a Quaker tradition of radical equality in education. In 1926 Kees Boeke and Betty Cadbury founded a school in The Netherlands based on the principle of equality, where children were responsible for their own learning alongside their teachers. School decisions were made by consensus – a process they called ‘sociocracy’. I was cheered to find that other Quakers had also felt the inconsistency between the hierarchical and adult-led approach to learning, which almost all schools take, and Quaker principles.
Sociocratic schools still exist in the Netherlands, and several are opening in other countries. Last year I attended the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) conference in France and attended workshops about decision-making through consensus – the first time I had encountered this outside a Quaker context.
But in the UK there is nothing at all; in fact, this history is generally not even known about.
There is, however, a closely related tradition of very-slightly-less-unusual democratic schools, where the decision-making is done by school meeting vote rather than by consensus. These schools share with sociocratic schools the belief that children and adults should be equal members of the school community and that learning works best when children can choose what they do. Again, there are very few schools that work on this basis in the UK, in fact only two, one of which is a boarding school and the other of which is secondary only – but they do exist in France, which was accessible by train from London, where we worked.
These schools are very different to traditional schools. They often don’t have classrooms, or formal lessons. Instead, they have rooms to play games in, kitchens to cook, musical instruments and giant mattresses to jump on, places to make things and places to chat. They have weekly school meetings where everything is discussed and decided as a community – even major decisions, such as staff appointments and the school budget.
Soft skills
The more I heard about these schools, the more I felt they might be places where the children would be treated with genuine respect. I hoped that young people would leave with a sense of themselves as competent people who could take charge of their lives. I hoped that they would develop what are sometimes called ‘soft skills’ and which I think are essential for life, such as empathy, creative thinking, problem solving and conflict resolution, and, importantly, that they would grow up to see themselves as people who could make a difference to their lives and the lives of others.
Exam results are less important to me than all of this. In the service of good exam results many young people are spending their teenage years anxious, stressed and under pressure. I wanted to step away from this institutionalised system all together, to an approach where exams can be taken if you need them or want to take them – but not simply because all the other sixteen-year-olds are taking them.
So, last April we took the decision to move to France, to try out L’École Dynamique, a democratic school in the south of Paris. We did not have jobs in France, nor did we know anyone at all. Their first day was nerve-racking for us all. The children had never been to school, and now it was in a different country in a foreign language.
When we arrived I was struck by how respectfully the adults spoke to the children, how they welcomed them without instructing them or directing them. As I collected the children, it seemed like they had grown taller and more confident just in one day. My son said ‘I think this is a school where I can do well’ whilst my daughter jumped and bounced her way down the pavement.
They spend their days playing, talking, exploring and participating in the organisational structures of the school, the judicial committee and the school meeting. No one judges how they spend their time, and no one tells them that their interests should be set aside in favour of work set by an adult. There is no division between learning and play, and as such our lives are full of both.
I’ll leave it to my daughter to sum up her experience. ‘Mummy,’ she said, ‘it’s freer at school than at home, because you’re not there all the time.’
It’s what I wanted for them: freedom to be themselves and to explore the world beyond.
Comments
There is a history of association between Swiss Quakers and exactly the type of progressive, child centred education of which you write. It was centred around the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute and the New Education Fellowship, both based in Geneva. Many of its ideas were propagated by the International Bureau of Education, also based in that city. Notable amongst the founding members of these organisations during the early twentieth century were a group of Quakers who included Marie Butts, Elizabeth Rotten, Adolphe Ferriëre, Pierre Bovet. The world’s first International School was founded by Ferriëre. The thinking of Edmond Privat, the noted Esperantist and Quaker, also had influence on this “new education movement”. In the UK Abbotsholme and Bedales Schools were influenced by the ideas coming from this now forgotten group of Quakers.
By D.Lockyer on 17th September 2018 - 14:40
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