Author Richard F. Miniter has an article about the revolution in home-schooling that e-readers make possible. His idea is that children can be kept home, away from the faux-egalitarian, inaccurate-propaganda-laden classroom and taught to educate themselves on their own by reading a book a day and writing an essay on it.

He brings up the example of a special-education foster child he’d cared for who was essentially unable to read, but who ended up testing at or above his grade level a year later after a course of home-schooling that consisted of daily reading with help on words he didn’t understand.

And that’s all it takes.  Hand out the reading assignment, be available, or have someone else available to examine the essay they write and perhaps send them back to the same material book for another go or two on the same subject.  Because tutoring doesn’t teach a discrete body of knowledge as much as it does a skill we don’t hear much about anymore: scholarship.  Not simply memorizing some facts about a subject, but examining it from one perspective and then another until you develop a detailed, three-dimensional view of the subject.  It’s your month to learn about the Revolutionary War?  Read a biography of Washington one day, then in the next Paine or Jefferson, Madison and Adams.  Intersperse these books with a personal account of a common soldier, a slave, a parson of the time.  Sample some fiction which portrays the period — Drums Along the Mohawk, for example.  Some of the short and breezy economic looks about the period like The Timber Economy of New England.  Maybe read the newspapers of the time.

Twenty days, twenty books, all of which a student has had to think fairly deeply about because he knows that he has to write about them, and voilà: a child knows more about the Revolutionary period than — not to put too fine a point on it — the average public-school teacher.

He thinks that the prevalence of inexpensive e-readers means that the traditional classroom’s days are numbered, as the easy availability of e-books means that students will be able effortlessly to read themselves into better education.

Because the problem with tutoring has always been the books.  A wealthy family might have had a huge, expensive library to draw from, while the peasants never did.  Even a middle-class family in America today would be hard-put to sample and then make available 300 different print books for a child every year — three children, 900 books.  But now even the meanest family can have the Library of Congress in their pocket, or their child’s backpack.  In fact, there isn’t any need to lug a backpack around any longer.

By a strange coincidence, when I was at my parents’ home yesterday opening Christmas presents, I overheard my sister-in-law talking about her own schooling experience. She’d tested so well during middle school that she’d skipped a grade, and attended the last couple of years in the same classes as her 1-year-older sister. But when it was time to enter high school, her mother said, “You’re not going to high school. You’re twelve.” When she asked what she was supposed to do for the next year, her mother said, “Um…play?”

So over the next year, she read and studied on her own. She said that she would go to the public library once a week, check out the ten-book limit, and return them all read by the next week. She taught herself to juggle and learned a number of other interesting things, and was quite well-prepared by the time she went back to school the year after that.

That being said, I think Miniter’s argument is more than a little simplistic. It’s like saying that, now that there are exercise machines, nobody will be obese ever again. Kids have to have either the will to read on their own, or parents who have enough free time that they can make them. For that matter, the availability of books has never been the sole obstacle to self-teaching Miniter makes it out to be, at least since Andrew Carnegie started throwing his money around. You don’t need e-readers to do self-directed reading education—just a good library. My sister-in-law’s school “intermission” proves that.

While I will grant that, from other things I’ve read, Miniter does have a point about the sanitization of history for modern youth, there’s more to school than just sticking your nose in books all day. It’s also where kids pick up important socialization skills—they get experience being around other people, and figure out how to interact with those people. They’re going to have to deal with other people sooner or later when they grow up and get a job, and no book-learning, whether electronic or not, is going to prepare them to face that.

And for that matter, there are plenty of other ways that new e-media technology is going to help make kids’ learning experiences better. I’ve already mentioned the Khan Academy, which can serve up thousands of school lectures on demand as YouTube videos. A parent who was concerned about what “strange nothings” other adults were whispering in his child’s ear could watch the lectures with them and discuss them, as they ought to be doing for any non-educational programming the kid watches anyway. (The Khan Academy seems to be doing pretty well, by the bye; TechCrunch reports the site is now getting 4 million unique visitors per month, up from 1 million at the same time last year.)

I do think there is a place for home-schooling, if parents have the time to do it—especially over summer vacation, to keep kids’ brains from atrophying until it comes time for fall study again. And there are a lot of great tools that can make it easier. But expecting Kindles to “kill off the classroom” is pure hyperbole.

(Found via Slashdot.)

16 COMMENTS

  1. Good article. From a high-school teacher’s point of view, the home-schooled are often … odd. This is only anecdotal evidence from having encountered a couple of handfuls of them in my life, but to me, the experience produced very inward-looking young people. The first and sometimes only question they ask about anything is “what do I think about this?” The dialogue is always that — me and the world. It’s “what do I think of Hegel?” followed by “what do I think of Schopenhauer?”, never “how is Schopenhauer a response to Hegel?”

    Also from a high-school teacher’s point of view: ereaders will change everything.

  2. You know what’s missing from Miniter’s article? Any reference at all to math. I don’t think reading twenty books in twenty days is going to teach anybody how to do algebra. He also doesn’t talk about science; ereaders aren’t going to give you any hands on exposure to science.

    There’s more to an education than the humanities.

  3. @Sherri Yes, just reading will not doing anything about math, but science is the most useless. I’m not saying this because there are few fields depending on it. It is just the most propaganda-laden of all the subject, second only to High school government courses. Only astronomy, physical geography (only cloud studies and climate in relation to locations), and chemistry have any real importance to the average person. All the rest of the branches are limited to certain career paths or interests.

  4. It’s clear what this guy’s beef is: he wouldn’t want his kids being taught stuff he doesn’t agree with: “lectures about bullying, respecting alternative lifestyles, or strangers”. He’d rather brainwash ’em at home.

    Oh, and I loved his rant about misinformation in textbooks (fair point, remember the State of Texas’ textbook revision fracas?) but hey, I bet 99-cent unedited ebooks all have GREAT, totally reliable information.

  5. The socialization argument is just straw. There are plenty of opportunities for kids to be with other kids and other adults and learn how to interact outside of school. Anyone who’s actually studied these things knows that school is no better a socialization environment than non-school ones and can often be detrimental. Bullies, bad influences, children who have no home training abound.

    I do agree that Miniter is being far, far too simplistic with his idea, though, because you right: it’s not access to books that is the sole problem. eReaders will certainly make it easier to obtain free books you can own (classics or ones with no copyright, anymore) and since many eBooks are less expensive than their print counterparts parents can spend less on some of them.

    He fails to understand that most kids cannot be self-directed learners, they need someone who can teach them. In home schooling, that’s the parent, and I would guess that most low-income parents cannot afford to stay home and be a teacher since they have jobs.

    If you’re well-off enough that one parent can work while the other stays home or the other parent can work from home, that’s awesome. I know a few people in this situation. However, they spend a lot of time with their homeschooled child. a LOT. They don’t regret it, but the process is not as simple as telling a child to read 20 books and only wandering back in the picture when they’ve written their essay.

    Someone has to choose the books they’re going to read. To do that, the parent may have to read the books themselves to know how many different angles their child is going to get. Frankly, there are plenty of non-fiction books out there not suitable for learning because they’re written with nasty biases.

    The other thing is that in order for homeschool scholarship to count kids have to meet certain standards set forth by the state they live in. That’s why there are tons of homeschooling websites and learning systems parents can buy. If kids don’t meet those standards it could affect their ability to get higher education.

    I think, at its base, the idea that eBooks can help revolutionize learning and homeschooling is correct. But how it will actually work is probably far different.

  6. Miniter piece is nothing but a home schooling promotional article. This bizarre practice is widespread, I believe, in the US but seen as decidedly weird in Europe. Keeping children away from their siblings to control their lives in such an obsessional way is unnatural and more indicative of a personality disorder with the parents.
    Couching the argument in terms of the Kindle and eReading is just a convenient new packaging for this ‘idea’.

  7. @Howard There is nothing without bias. I can guarantee you have a bias in this topic, just as much as I do. Some kids are not meant for public school life. Have you read Crooked House by Agatha Christie? In it the murder victim knew home schooling was better for his grandchild, who was responsible for his death. The socialization issue is also moot. Siblings can be home schooled together, if desired, but that is the parents’ decision. A kid can socialize with others by playing in the park, going to church, or going to other social events. Also, there is the true purpose of public schools being that it turns kids into “good citizens” instead of good citizens. Before you call me out on this, pay attention to the quotes. The first instance is a good citizen as te government sees it, not what the parents view as a good citizen. After all, most American schools are riddled more with liberal propaganda than things that are actually useful. Instead of an essay, like the post suggests, I would probably have them read as much as possible and practice mathematics, then I would drop them in the middle of the wilderness when they are ten and see how long they can survive.

  8. Bryce – Much as I respect your views, your post confirms all we in Europe find so awful about this practice.
    (I, of course, am the duly appointed representative of all Europeans on the matter .. LOL)
    That home schooling may be suitable for special, extreme, cases does not excuse it’s use for perfectly normal children in perfectly normal and adequate school districts.
    And denying a child his right to engage and mix in a vigorous environment during this critical developmental stage due to a parent’s obsessions with political views is, in my option, an appalling concept, and one driven in the main by parental personality problems.

  9. Wow… I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that the person who’d rather put his kids at a disadvantage by denying them a science education cites a DETECTIVE NOVEL as evidence that homeschooling is superior. Oh, and church is great… For Christians.

    Anyway, the choice shouldn’t be between “brainwashing” crappy public education and “superior” homeschooling. There are independent schools with a multitude of better approaches. No Child Left Behind was a disaster, but we used to have one of the best school systems in the world. Seems like we should be able to rebuild that.

  10. @Katherine The Detective novel, as you put it, was only used to show somebody who was more fit for homeschooling, than public education. Fiction does surprisingly contain more truth than the textbooks, although they are not completely true. It was not the superiority of home schooling. Take look at my comment again, I mention things other than going to church for socialization. I can guarantee you that man-made global warming is a useless subject to study, especially with the so-called carbon credits and others like it. Also, as I mentioned in a comment prior to the one you talk about, only Astronomy, Physical Geography (only cloud study and climate in relation to location), and chemistry are important to the average person. Are you going to tell me that the average person really needs any of the experiments performed in a Biology class? Does anyone even need to fully understand physics, when not all of them do not deal with machinery in anyway? How about full understanding of geology? Nope, scientists and industries that craft things from ores and metals or miners need that more than the average person. Most only need to know what flint is, compared to other rocks. Yes, there are schools with better approaches, but some are still funded by the government, which means they can be forced to shove more propaganda. As an example, look at how the drinking age become 21 all across the US, the government threatened not to provide funds unless the States did so.

    @Howard Fair enough argument.

  11. Wow, @Bryce. Shorter version of your spiel: “I am willing to rule out a number of well-paying career paths, and/or meaningful academic achievement for my children, rather than risk having them be exposed to ideas I don’t like.” Where do you think scientists come from? Trees? The stork? And since when does physics have a liberal bias, anyway? More importantly, where do you think our technological and medical progress is going to come from in the future if people like you insist on dumbed-down, religiously correct curricula?

    What on earth does the raising of the drinking age have to do with propaganda or educational mandates? If you’re going to defend your arguments, may I suggest you bring up an example that’s actually, like, related to federal education standards?

    The one thing I will agree with you on is that fiction can be a great source of insight into the human condition. It is, however, not a substitute for well-conducted studies when trying to set policy. And making your kid read books at home and then write an essay for you once a week is not, in and of itself, sufficient as an education. Electronically or not.

  12. I know I am coming in to this discussion late, but there are a few points I want to address.

    Home Schoolers come from a variety of religious and ideological backgrounds. Yes there are conservative fundamentalist Christians home schooling, but there are also liberal secular humanists who are homeschooling.

    Brainwashing occurs many places and what counts as brainwashing and what counts as instilling values probably depends on your point of view. You might think that respect for alternative lifestyles is a value, while others might think being told they have to respect them is brainwashing. The question is should the state be telling school children what they should respect? This is especially true when so many schools are failing at their most basic job of teaching basic subjects such as reading and writing, math and science.

    There are many excellent reasons to homeschool, even in a good school district. The most important is the value of an individualized education. Everyone tends to agree that smaller classrooms are better, and they can’t get much smaller than a mother or father educating their own child. Home schooling can also be good for a family that moves a lot (to ensure continuity of education), or for kids with particular talents or special needs. More than a few child athletes, actors or musical prodigies are tutored or home schooled to meet the needs of their schedule.

    Science is an important aspect of any education, though I think that actually can be thought through reading books (Most amateur astronomers I know, some of whom do real science are self taught). That being said, their are plenty of resources for home schoolers who want to take a more traditional approach to the subjects.

    Final thought is that socialization appears often in these discussions of home schooling, and perhaps the classroom has changed remarkably since I was in school (or at least is different from the Catholic Schools I attended). With the exception of a few group projects, like dissection, when I attended school, there was very little real opportunity to “socialize” outside of recess and lunch; it was better in high school, but not hugely. From my perspective, more socialization occurred outside of the school environment; going to friends homes, dealing with siblings, or being on a sports team, etc.

  13. @MarylandBill – yes, I actually know a family who homeschools – and is doing a fabulous job of it. But homeschooled or not, learning has to be experiential, not just (e)book-learning. To really understand the process of research, one has to conduct some research of one’s own.

    I would hope that all home-schooling families would make sure to enroll their children in some kind of hands-on science “camp” or afterschool program (I know the science museum near us offers specific programs for homeschoolers)

    The bigger issue:

    My mother, a former teacher (back in the 1960s) and school librarian (in the 80s) says “private schools are great for kids and bad for society”. I think the same is true of homeschooling. In theory, when everyone has access to the same level of education, and the quality of that education is good, you end up with people with a good understanding of the world, the tools to function effectively in it, and a shared societal vocabulary. When I was in public school, we recited the pledge of allegiance every day (which in my leftie town, some considered brainwashing), did experiments in science class, learned to type, pretended to be congresscritters in our civics classes, read a lot of great literature… in short, got exposed to a lot of ideas and a lot of different kinds of students from a wide range of backgrounds. It wasn’t always comfortable for all of us, but I think it was crucial in learning to navigate the world.

    Now our educational system is in trouble, but the reaction from everybody, instead of trying to fix it, is to flee (and alas, my family is thinking of private school for our daughter). The well-off children will do just dandy in their private schools and enriched homeschool environments. What are low-income people living in crappy apartments without access to great resources in their communities supposed to do?

    “The question is should the state be telling school children what they should respect? This is especially true when so many schools are failing at their most basic job of teaching basic subjects such as reading and writing, math and science.”

    Ah yes, the message for our children is: you don’t have to deal with people different than you, or help them, and you have nothing in common with them anyway… and different is bad! You don’t have to tolerate differences!

    You don’t think children bullying other children is disruptive to the educational experience? Should schools just look the other way? Great.

    I realize we’re getting a little far afield of ebooks, but this is a big set of problems.

  14. I find the quote of your mother rather telling. Public schools are not simply about providing “a good understanding of the world, the tools to function effectively in it, and a shared societal vocabulary.” They are, and indeed always have been, about shaping the students to fit the mold that society wants them to fit in. This is the reason why so many groups lobby public school districts so hard to include or exclude certain types of books, or subjects. Lets look at some of what you did more closely. Did you actually do “science experiments” in class or did you perform science demonstrations? Did a teacher ever ask you to come up with a way to test a theory? Or did the teacher say, do the following steps? How about science fairs these days that don’t allow any experiments on living creatures because it is “cruel” despite the fact that such experiments are a staple of biology? How about playing congress critters? Did you ever have a serious discussion about the merits of representative democracy as opposed to other forms of government like say direct democracy, oligarchy any monarchy? Or did it simply describe our government with the assumption that our system was the best?

    And you read lots of great literature? Of course you did, probably 90% of it the exact same great literature that every other student in your district read, and likely 70% of it is read by every high school graduate.

    Ultimately what this “good understanding of the world” really is a common understanding of the world. Its ok if that understanding is not actually rooted in reality as long as everyone agrees. And there is a difference from learning to live with and and tolerate people with different life styles and being forced to accept them. And mind you, the state is now telling us which lifestyles and differences we are to accept. At least be consistent; either accept that any difference is acceptable, or admit that the public schools are just forcing a different set of values on students than the ones their parents might want to teach.

    Here is a thought, ever imagine what might happen if people were educated differently? If some followed an education rooted in the western classics (i.e., the education that formed the roots of Western Civilization), others followed modern educational methods and still others followed an education rooted in Chinese classics, or Native American culture or various religions? Might it not be good for this country, and true diversity, not the pretend diversity that we have now, if different people were taught to think differently. Those different backgrounds might give people different approaches to problems that would allow solutions to problems that for now remain unsolvable.

  15. My husband and I love our new Kindle Fire. It’s lightweight, easy to use and has a great interface. The first thing I recommend anyone with a new Kindle do is install the nook app. We got our instructions from http://www.kindlemad.com through google. It basically unlocks all the Android marketplace apps and unlocks the device. I am one very happy Kindle owner!

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