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Independent teaching away from schools finds favour among expats
Julian Tian works from home. His schedule is relaxed and flexible, although circumstances regularly take him to central Beijing, away from his suburban home in Tongzhou and the extensive library of reference materials he keeps there. He is 6 years old. His mother, Mikayla Tian, is an American mother living in Beijing, who has chosen to home school her son. Lessons take place at home, but the pair spends a lot of time on outings, said Mikayla. "We go to museums; Julian is very interested in Darwinism, so we often go to the natural history museum. He goes ice-skating, swimming We meet a lot of people," she said. "If I go to the store, he goes to the store with me and I put him to work." Mikayla tries to make sure Julian is exposed to a wide range of social experiences from early on. "Whoever I meet, he meets them too," she said. As a result, Julian can talk quite comfortably to people of any race and age, she said. Mikayla also leaves it up to Julian to decide when to study which subject. "He tells me he's most alert at night, so he's decided to do math every night before bed-time," she said. "I let him be the guide for that." About two years ago, Mikayla had no idea that she would become a full-time teacher of her son. Initially, she and her husband enrolled Julian in a local Chinese pre-school, specialising in art and music training. They were taken aback, however, by the school's approach to discipline. "All the kids were getting spanked or sent to the bathroom to eat because they'd done something naughty," Mikayla said. "And then there's the names! They'd call the kids stupid." Mikayla was upset, but not ready to give up straight away. She spoke with other parents, but was surprised to find they had no objections to the system. "They said, 'this is China, you know.' Or their response was, 'it's good for the children to be spanked, I'm glad, my son is really naughty'." Mikayla said. She did not make headway speaking to the school's principal. He said the entire system could not be changed for the sake of one child. "I think the last straw was that we were really seeing Julian's spirit vanishing," Mikayla said. "He wasn't curious about anything anymore, he didn't want to go to school; he didn't want to learn anything." Mikayla began home schooling out of necessity, but quickly discovered it had a lot more to offer than she had realized. Best place for learning Educational theory on home schooling, which abounds in the West, is based on careful observation of individual learning. It questions the assumption that a space devoted entirely to learning is the best place for learning to happen. Prominent educational theorist John Holt, who died in 1985, was a strong critic of the classroom's impact on children. In his book "How Children Learn," Holt said the anxiety of being tested and fear of failure, punishment and disgrace drives children from the material they are studying. Instead, they learn strategies that fool teachers into thinking they know what they do not. Home schooling advocates argue that the classroom, with its pre-ordained academic curriculum and system of scoring, forces pupils to spend a lot of time studying things they are not necessarily interested in and also restricts their freedom to investigate the things they are curious about. Pupils must keep up with a standardized academic itinerary, and are constantly told what to do and how to do it. Home schoolers argue the classroom environment erodes the child's natural curiosity and sense of self-determination. This is what Mikayla aims to overcome in her own home schooling programme, which she has designed to give Julian as much autonomy and freedom as possible. She is pleased with the results. During recent weeks, for example, reading lessons have been sidelined to allow for some physical chemistry. Now the six-year-old can talk about atoms and quarks. Most importantly, he enjoys all of his lessons. Mikayla also believes traditional schools' focus on academic subjects is misguided. She believes an important function of education is to produce a socially adjusted, responsible person. "You could have no schooling at all and still be a responsible, kind person," she said. "The life skills we all need to learn are so complicated, and there's no way to look at a book and learn them," she said. "You have to find it out for yourself. Even though a million people can tell you over and over again how to be, how to act you have to have those experiences in order to know." Mikayla said that the classroom can isolate children from those life experiences. She hopes that excursions will help Julian to develop confidence from a young age. Mikayla's approach stands in stark contrast to the Chinese emphasis on discipline and conformity, which she sees as being over-controlling. In Beijing, she has had to look to the expatriate community for like-minded parents. Even then, peoples' reasons for choosing to home school are more often practical than ideological. Often, their child cannot speak Chinese, but the international school fees are too expensive. Mikayla has seen many parents embark on a home schooling programme only to give up further down the line. "I think if you don't have the passion to home school, it might not be a good thing. You have to give up a lot, and to accept that, and a lot of parents can't," she said. "It's a one hundred and fifty thousand per cent a full-time job!"
(China Daily 08/11/2005 page13)
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