Back to School!

Can You Take a Child out of School for a Year?

I recently came across a parents group arguing against longterm family travel on the grounds that “many children will never catch up after a year out of school…”

This seemed a bit bizarre to me. Firstly because the context was Emma Thompson’s plans to travel with her daughter. And one would think an Oxford-educated Oscar-winning screenwriter-producer-actress could probably add quite a bit of value to the primary curriculum.

Secondly because a lot of primary school teachers know (and will admit privately) that what’s taught in primary schools is fairly basic, and it’s the social element that’s most important.

And thirdly because it contradicts the experiences of most travelling families. Now including us.

Back to School After a Year Out!

Yup. After a year of unschooling – or a year out of school – my son is currently at school, here in Bali. Which means he’s out there learning and playing with other kids while I replenish the travel budget.

Here’s the school, err, gates we drive to on the bike each morning:

It’s a lovely school. A bunch of different nationalities and languages, including (never a given in international schools) plenty of locals. Shoes off in the classroom, plenty of lessons outside, good trips and fascinating visiting experts.

A result, essentially. We bumped into a mother and son in our favourite pizza place who recommended it. We Googled it, checked out the website, agreed it looked like fun, I rang up and off we went.

What Sort of School?

Z’s school started out as a Steiner School. Based on the educational theories of Rudolf Steiner, Steiner schools take a holistic, child-led approach to learning, and as part of this children are not formally taught to read and write until age 7.

Or, as Z put it, rather cynically for one so young, “I’m bloody glad I’m at a Steiner School. It means I’m not going to be the only one with crap handwriting…”

Ahem…

But, because the majority of parents will be sending their kids to international high schools here in Bali, some of which are very academic, they’ve also revised the curriculum to inject surprising rigour.

What do you get? I think the best of both worlds. On the holistic side, there’s yoga, art, music, swimming, sport, an approach to social studies which doesn’t flinch from the harsh realities of poverty, and some Bahasa teaching.

On the academic side, it follows the British curriculum in English, Maths & Science (which is roughly one year ahead of the US curriculum) but is above that level in some areas.

I’m pretty sure I hadn’t heard of xylem, phloem or antecedents of pronouns when I was ten.

Some First Day Nerves

The night before starting school, Z was even more nocturnal than usual. After I switched the lights off, he wriggled anxiously for a while. “I can’t sleep, Mum,” he said. “I’m worried about school.”

“What are you worried about?” I asked.

“I’m worried I’ll be behind,” he said. “I’ve hardly done any work since I was in Year 4, and now I’m going into Class 5. I’m worried about my handwriting. My maths. My English. It’s not like,” he says, accusingly, for someone who’s been campaigning vigorously for more self-led learning over the last year, “You’ve really been teaching me.”

I switch the light on. We get up. I dredge up some of the formal writing he’s done. I show him his first attempt at an essay, back in Cambodia, on the Khmer Rouge regime. Then I show him the piece he wrote about social problems in Oliver Twist.

I show him his first stab at a story. Then I show him his 500 mature, crafted words about an alien visiting Australia (in Australia).

He can see the development. “But the maths…”

“Look,” I say. “You know those papers you’ve done from time to time? They’re Year 6 papers, and you’ve been getting the top level.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Yep. I know it’s bizarre, but you did.” (Given junior can’t be arsed to learn his times tables, this came as a shock all round.)

“But my handwriting…”

Yep. The handwriting’s a bummer. No worse than it was when he started. But, err, not much better either.

He’s a southpaw, and loathes handwriting (not unusual in boys generally), so I figured I’d rather have him writing fluently, willingly and accurately on screen than unwillingly and slowly on paper, given that he should be able to do the important exams and assessments on screen.

“Do you want to take the laptop into school and do your writing on that?”

“No. I think that would look really weird.”

Right. Bugger! Alternative solution to handwriting goes straight out of the window.

“OK. Umm…” I say. Adding the single feeblest line in the parenting armoury (after umm…), “You’ll just have to do your best.”

I Had First Day Nerves, Too

Me? I’m worrying about the integration aspect.

He’s spent plenty of time with other kids over the year, but not in a school context: how’s he going to navigate the complex friendship dynamics of the schoolyard? Will he be the new kid, the shy one, the odd one out?

How will he take to having to do drills, and homework? Will he, as at his London primary, go into daydreaming mode for every subject bar science and art?

It’s the integration aspect, rather than his attainment, that has been the sole cause of concern to the folk in the family who know about education.

(Full disclosure: I taught briefly in my early 20s; my ma was a headmistress and school inspector; a relative in Australia is an education assessor; plus there’s a couple of university teachers in the mix too.)

Neither of us sleep particularly well that night…

We Learnt That Travel Teaches You to Adapt

Next morning, he gets up happily, goes in, joins the right line and starts clapping along to the school song that starts each day.

When I pick him up, he is playing goalie in an impromptu post-school game of football.

“Wow!” I say. “Have you decided you like football, then?” (He’s always hated it.)

“Not particularly,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. I figure that he’s adapting his personal tastes in order to fit in with the new school. What boys his age do, it seems to him, is play football. So that is what he does.

Football lasts three days. Once he’s made his friendships, I find him on the climbing frame with mates, drawing with one if it’s raining. Or he informs me solemnly that he is going to a friend’s house and would like me to pick him up later.

This sort of adaptability is one thing longterm travel teaches. Because, yes, the skills you learn playing with Lao children on a tiny rural island or hanging out with nomads in the wild, do transfer to the complex friendships and alliances and social networks of the school yard.

And it’s this which has been my main concern. Academically, he’s up a year in some subjects, in his year in others.

There are Things School Delivers that Unschooling Doesn’t

School is, however, delivering some important learning experiences that unschooling, the way we do it, can’t replicate. Yet, unschooling has made him more equipped to participate in this education.

For example?

He’s Working in Teams

I don’t subscribe to the view that homeschooled kids are weird and asocial (though before I found myself doing it, I’d probably have kneejerked into it, and there is a scary Christian element in the US which does the rest of us no favours: Google Quiverfull and be afraid).

I do love the way they do reading at Z’s school. Each small year group studies one book as a group. That means that each week, one kid reports on the reading, one kid leads the discussion, one provides illustrations, one identifies new words and one develops questions to discuss about real life that occur within the book. They self-assess afterwards to see how well they prepared and contributed to the lesson.

It’s a great way of learning the skills of collaborative working and discussion. And, call me a hippie, but it’s way preferable to learning about teamwork by killing other teams on the sportsfield.

Not to Mention Presenting Skills

IMHO, it would just be plain weird for Z to prepare and present a piece of work to me. But presenting to an entire class of different ages, from many different cultures, language backgrounds, is great for him.

As part of his science learning, he had to find a piece of science news, write an observation on it, print it out to go on the wall and report on it to the class. So he found a piece about a meteorite in Antarctica which might support theories that life may have originated in a meteorite barrage.

Given he had to write it, his observation was on the terse side: “Personally, I agree with the pro-meteor scientists, although there is of course the question of why this planet alone had all the right components and proximity to the sun to sustain life. For now at least, it remains a coincidence.”

Admirably succinct work for a secondary school essay. For how it played read out to a multilingual class of 9-11-year-olds, I’ll pass you Z: “It was pretty rubbish, really, Mum. Nobody in class really seemed to understand what I meant, even after the teacher read it out for me.” Lesson learnt, I guess.

Singing is Fun

Every day starts with the song, and there are four periods of music every week. Z’s enjoying singing (and miming) and I’ve caught him singing (as opposed to humming) when he’s getting on with things.

He was really happy chanting along as the school marched with their ogoh-ogoh monster in the Nyepi parade. And he’s starting to enjoy the music lessons.

Unschooling has Improved his Approach to School

He’s More Organised

Packing up his own stuff and being responsible for his own belongings when we’re changing base every few days makes keeping on top of homework deadlines, swimming stuff, lunch, motorbike helmet, sandals etc. a piece of cake. Though he has forgotten his helmet once.

He’s Better at Motivating Himself

Now, much of Z’s time at his (good) London primary was spent staring out of the window: he did not complete a single handwriting project from Nursery to Year 4.

A combination of a handful of timed tasks with working on and completing his own projects has worked wonders. This means that he can, in fact, welly through a) his classwork and b) his homework with a decent degree of motivation.

Don’t get me wrong, here. He is not bounding across the rice fields to his 40 pages of maths homework. The phrase “losing the will to live” has been uttered and he’s still fairly distractable. But I don’t need to kick his butt (much).

He Has More Confidence

A double-edged sword for his teachers, this one, particularly given we’re in Asia. I don’t think either he or his mate are really supposed to stand up and correct their teacher and am not surprised to notice that they now sit in different bits of the classroom.

He’s Good at Research

We’ve done a lot of online learning in unschooling and he’s answered some of his own questions using the internet. He’s really good both at finding information and assessing the reliability of its source and checking it.

He Knows A Lot…

Z has learnt a hell of a lot about history, geography, social studies and science. His writing has developed immensely as have his IT skills. He’s picked up a bit of some languages and a lot of Indonesian.

And, he also knows his own limitations, and that it’s his job to deal with them. Which means, for example, that he’s actually working on his handwriting rather than avoiding doing it.

On Balance…

If my parenting goal were to produce some kind of child prodigy, I’d always pick homeschool/unschool over school. It ain’t. It’s for Z to be happy, confident, himself, with a good understanding of the world. So I like the notion of combining the two.

And What Does Sir Make of It?

Sir’s take on it all? (I’ve shown him this post.) “I like my school. I prefer it to the London one. On balance, I prefer unschooling, but proper unschooling, where I choose exactly what I want to do, rather than the more restrictive type that you always make me do.”

Yeah. I’ll tell the little, err, sucker that next time he worries about his handwriting.