A Potential Area for Quaker Contribution to Local Community
Dimitrina Spencer
The Oxfordshire Home Educating Community (the permanent one, not the temporary one created during the recent lockdowns) has been growing fast in recent years. Since the start of the pandemic, it has grown significantly. For example, we receive on average one or two joining requests at the main Facebook group of the Oxfordshire Home-educators (I am one of the moderators, so I witness it first-hand) every couple of days from families who are deregistering their kids from school or considering it seriously. During the schools’ lockdowns, parents were able to see what and how their kids learn at school, and many did not like what was offered. Other parents said that their kids thrived when they stopped going to school in person.
Why schools are failing is a long and interesting story, but it is not the subject of this short piece. Here, I am compelled to share only my hope that in the looming crises of education via schools, the Quaker community could one day offer a shelter to an alternative learning experience for these families who were somehow failed by the schooling institutions or who are looking for innovative ways of learning for their kids, namely, for an integrated approach that engages the whole person, including their spirit.
Parents have begun to search for such experiences more so nowadays and this search is driven by a much wider and deeper social transformation. We might have a fruitful opportunity to take an active part in shaping this transformation. It is an opportunity for us to make a meaningful contribution to local families who need us and to open new spaces for kids’ growth in the light, truth, equality and integrity of spirit, mind and heart.
I will now provide a brief account of my experience with home education (this is not what home education is for everyone), and afterwards, I will share some ideas about possible Quaker contributions.
Just like schools, the home education community sometimes has its own limitations alongside the amazing opportunities it offers to families. For two years, due to certain failings in the existing provision (at the time) of learning groups and activities for home educated kids locally (mainly to do with some groups often simply reproducing what schools do while wanting to do things differently), I have had to design and run a sort of distributed learning space for small groups of 5-20 kids between the ages of 5-11 and their siblings. I did this to deliver the sort of learning and social environment that my son was hoping for and we felt he would thrive in. It was purely driven by what he wanted, what we believed in, and what we could make happen.
Since the start of the pandemic, all our home-ed workshops have taken place outdoors, in nature. On three days of the week, our groups congregated around a central learning activity (usually a sport: football, karate, and tennis) and spent on average 3-5 hours outdoors with hours of deep free play (which is well-recognised scientifically as a very important method of learning and is rather absent in schools).
In collaboration with other mothers, I also built a small Learning Circle where learning was facilitated by us mums – and entwined with free play in the wild – children moved naturally between structured learning activities and playing, we sang with the guitar together too.
On a different occasion, I collaborated with scientists from the University and an actor and playwright who came to engage the kids in learning about microbes through creative activities and making a theatrical play about them. (We ended up quite well-prepared to meet the pandemic even though it prevented us from staging our play in the end.) We introduced a weekly poetry-making workshop, a drama class with end of term performances, and a weekly storytelling workshop (alongside learning two musical instruments, attending choir and singing lessons).
I am listing all this not to boast but to illustrate what home educators do and that families are hungry for other forms of learning, which correspond better than the school offerings (however generous or well-meaning) to what a good future might require of humans (for example, collaboration versus competition, working interdisciplinary, being able to experience, direct, and hold a creative flow, innovative way of thinking outside the box, and most of all, experiential, felt and habitual connection with nature and people’s love, care or suffering, and capacity for moral reflection on these).
The underpinning philosophy for the learning in our groups was inspired by a variety of ideas from project-based home education to unschooling and democratic education, as well as the quest for links between spiritual and intellectual development in learning. Here opens the space for potential Quaker contributions. In fact, we experienced some of it already through the Children’s Meeting in Oxford.
The Oxford Children’s Meeting was an important part of our home-ed family’s learning journey. Children’s meeting truly answered our need to learn through empathic and moral engagement. It was the best form of learning for this age group we had come across and the facilitators of the Children’s Meeting modelled respect, listening, collaboration, empathy, love, care, and friendship.
The values explored invited kids to search for themselves and arrive at experiencing what it means to be equal, truthful, peaceful, to care for peace, for refugees, and for the Earth. No wonder our son is always very sad when he cannot make a meeting – he feels present, engaged, seen, and empowered, and in contact with his own light. He glows for hours after his meetings.
So because schools have problems, more and more families choose to home-educate, and home-educating families really need spaces just like what we found in our children’s meeting.
So here is the idea. What if the Quaker community in the UK somehow opened for creating Learning Circles (not schools and not Children’s Meetings) to engage the families who are already looking for this type of learning through spiritual, moral, and emotional growth entwined with intellectual development? Literacy and maths can easily be learnt at home, facts too, but certain values, which only make sense if felt, can only be learned experientially in a community led lovingly by the light. It is very hard work organising such new ways of learning, but I am still certain that there is a space for Quakers in the UK to inspire or even open alternative learning spaces led by the light.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 509 • September 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW