Freedom vs. Compulsion in Education

It’s time to rethink education.  Here’s an entertaining video that discusses it well, and then you can read the post from Carrie Piper about one mom’s experience with education.  You can see her blog at http://learningandlivinginliberty.blogspot.com/ 

Reposted with permission from Carrie Piper

I have been evaluating how I REALLY feel about freedom & the use of compulsion in education & life in general. A few weeks ago I read “The Leadership Education Continuum” by Diann Jeppson & Jodie Palmer (in the appendix of Leadership Education:The Phases of Learning by Oliver & Rachel DeMille) and listened to the free workshop you can download at Leadership Education Family Builder.

This really got the thinking! This continuum is a cyclical diagram that shows how the stages, 7 keys & 5 environments of Leadership Education all work together.  I cannot reproduce it here, but it is on page 301 of Leadership Education. The diagram shows the Freedom Agreement running across the center. I interpret this placing as a hinge of sort. It is the unifying practice that holds everything together. The mortar of a brick building, the eggs in a cake. So I ask myself. Just how am I living this principle? Have I fully accepted it?

Well, let’s define it first. It is basically the idea that personal freedom to pursue one’s own education works. It produces an individual who knows freedom.

WARNING! Soapbox Rabbit Trail Below

 (I do not mean having a head knowledge of the definition of freedom. I mean knowing it deep down in your bones so that it becomes a part of who you are and it sickens you when you see freedom being violated for yourself and others. These types of people are far and few between these days! It’s obvious they are a minority in elected officials if they are there at all. We allow our freedom to be hampered everyday.  For example, you cannot build on your own property without permits and paying the permit fees. You cannot start a new business without some sort of licensing, fee and government oversight.  This is not freedom. I read recently that 1 in 5 jobs in the USA is involved with monitoring the behavior of other people in some way. That is just wrong! )

 It also produces a person who loves learning because all they have learned has been intrinsically motivated, not coerced. Compulsory education makes an assumption here. The assumption is that freedom does not work with education. Reading, math and the like must be learned using coercion, a closed environment from which there is no escape, rewards for compliance & punishments for non-compliance (aka independent thought). The Freedom Agreement assumes that freedom in education does work and with superior results!

 Now when I read this I thought I agreed totally! I am a TJEder! We’ve been home educating this way for almost 4 years now, and even before I found TJEd, I was very relaxed in our methods. But then I hit a bump in the road.

I wrote here about how La had said she wanted to work on her math facts in order to be able to do Life of Fred. I thought, “Great! This is working! I can stop worrying about whether or not she will ever learn her math facts and move on in math!”

 ~ Here comes the road bump ~

This lasted less than one day when she burst into tears saying she doesn’t want to do this anymore! So no more work on math facts!  I confess I was shocked and disappointed.  I tried to figure out what went wrong.  After some soul-searching and prayer this is what I discovered.

1. I was emotionally invested in her accomplishing this which made it my goal, not hers. 
2. When we went to practice the math facts, I used a method that I thought would produce the quickest results. I failed to take into account her learning style and temperament.

This was inspiration with string attached. You see, it became all about me. All about relieving my silent fear that, she will never learn _________, if I don’t require it. I had crossed the line of freedom in her own education. I was pushing and using compulsion techniques. This is when Inspire not Require becomes manipulation and I need watch this in myself.

So, I still need to work on accepting the Freedom Agreement. I need to daily remind myself that it is my job to expose, inspire and help our home to be a learning environment. It is her job to learn, grow, and move through the phases at her own pace.

So why do this? It’s much easier to buy a curriculum, make sure your child is “on track” with everyone else, or yield the freedom to an “authority” of an online school.  I struggle through this because I want something better for my daughter. I want her to know freedom in her bones, to function within freedom, to have a deep love of learning that will last a life time, and be practiced in the skills of a scholar.

I need to trust freedom, trust my daughter & trust the guidance of my Lord God.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” 

2 Corinthians 3:17

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

By Jacqueline Smith  

  

Our education system in America must change.  We continue to tax the people to school our children in a broken, progressive, socialistic system.  I love education, and I love all the children in this great country, but an unsustainable system that is not producing the results we need in our country must end, and a new system emerge, or more accurately re-emerge.  

Dr. Brooks

I recently attended a wonderful event called ReValue America.  This class was taught by Dr. Shanon Brooks of Face to Face with Greatness, and hosted by Chad & Christy Watterson.  Because I have known Dr. Brooks for some time, the information was not unfamiliar but reminded me of the path I must take in order to put the values, the culture, the Americanism back into the heart of our country.  And it begins with a different type of education for the whole family.   

We school our children in literacy and skills.  We want them to have good jobs.  But we have killed their creativity.  We have thwarted the genius that all children have within, by saying they must have these skills, or those skills, without any core values, without a sense of the virtues that keep our country headed the right direction.  Throwing good money after a bad system will not fix our problems.  (School Equalization is just a bad bandage to a bleeding artery, that pulls at the heart-strings, but is not the solution.)  Money does not make children’s test scores increase.  It has been proven that our rate of return for our dollar is not very high, especially in areas like Detroit, but even in Utah we are only seeing about a 67% ROI.  (67 out of 100 children graduate)  So what happened?  Are the teachers that horrible, are the classes that under-funded?  No.  We have lost our culture over the last 80 years in America, and we must get our culture back.  Attending this class and implementing a new way of thinking and a new lifestyle of education will be the greatest impact on liberty.  I call upon 9.12 groups, tea party groups, and all other liberty-loving groups to schedule this event.  If we are going to be the ones that bring liberty back to our country, we better understand more than just the founders writings, but what the founders were reading for a decade before they became founders.  We will need an understanding much richer than anything we have received to date.  

The Fourth Turning is upon us, and our time is limited.  In order to have the type of impact on our society that great leaders of the past have had on their time, we must be educated in human nature, forms of government, family and society.  We must have public virtue being exemplified in our society again, and being taught to our children.  We must understand what it takes and begin getting a liberal arts education.  (Don’t worry, that will not make you a liberal in political terms.)  I discussed this on capitol hill at the Tax Day Tea Party Rally.  

I don’t have the answers, but I know that together we can find the answers, if we are educated.  We have an amazing group of people who have created a strong coalition with Utah Rising, but our efforts must not be lost by focusing only in the political arena.  Glenn Beck has it right when he discusses the 9 Principles and 12 Values.  We must focus on bringing that type of thinking back into the forefront of our country.  

If you live in the Utah area, and you are interested in attending one of these classes, I ask that you send us an email, so we can keep you on a list until our class is put on the schedule.   

I have had this video for a while, but I thought it appropriate with this article.  Enjoy.  

Thomas Jefferson Education on Glenn Beck

By Jacqueline Smith

As many of you know, I have been homeschooling my children, and educating myself using The Thomas Jefferson Education, sometimes known as TJed.   The class being referred to in this clip is being taught here in Utah (Wanship) by the founders of  The Thomas Jefferson Education system.  This will be a wonderful free event.  Please make plans to attend.  It is on Friday afternoon April 30, 2010.  Do your best to take some time off work and attend this special event, you won’t regret it.  You must RSVP for this event, at our meet up site by clicking here.

We are in a leadership crisis in our country, and the only way to change direction is to become liber.  Liber is the latin word for tree bark.  You see, tree bark was used to write on.  It is also the root word of library, and liberty.  In order to be a free people, we must be educated, and we must educate ourselves in the classics.

It will take leadership to move not just our political arena forward in America, but our enrapreneurs, our educational arena, our media, our communities.  To understand the leadership model of education, I highly recommend attending our TJed for families event.  Dads …. you need to come, too.  A family that learns together has much more impact on the world.

For more information, please visit our Education Resources here.