Transcript with Naomi Fisher (only lightly edited, expect typos etc.)
Ben
Hello, and welcome to Ben Yeoh Chats. If you're curious about the world, this show is for you. Is the traditional school system failing us? And what can we learn from a child-led way of education? On this episode, I speak to Naomi Fisher. Naomi is a clinical psychologist who has studied how children learn. Her work focuses on the importance of agency and choice and putting children in control of their learning and allowing them to flourish. Hope you enjoy the show. Please like and subscribe as it helps others find the podcast.
Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Naomi Fisher. Naomi is a clinical psychologist. She has written a book, "Changing Our Minds: How Children can take Control of their Own Learning," which is an excellent look at self-directed education, or some in the UK would say home education, or in America homeschool or unschooling. It also covers a brief history of educational thought. Naomi, welcome.
Naomi (01:03):
Thank you, Ben. It's great to be here
Ben (01:06):
Over 20 years ago, we studied experimental psychology and neuroscience together and then you went off, did some PhD work with autistic people and children. So tell me what you've learned and how you've ended up thinking about children and education and the route to where you've got to today.
Naomi (01:25):
What's happened to me since you mean.
Ben (01:27):
Yeah. Or even during.
Naomi (01:29):
Or even during, yeah. It's been a long way. It feels a long time ago that we were studying experimental psychology together. So I went off and did a PhD in autism and then I went on to do my doctorate in clinical psychology. I started working as a clinical psychologist and then I had my children. My oldest child is 14 and my youngest is 11. I had my own unusual education experience because I actually went to 11 schools when growing up. So we moved around the world. I went to schools in Botswana, I went to schools in the Congo, I went to like a state comprehensive school, I was at a boarding school. I really went through-- I was at a Steiner school at one point. I really got to try out the full range of educational experiences.
I think what that did to me was kind of fostered a slight cynicism about the claims that the education system make because as I moved from school to school, I would find that each school had quite strong an ethos about how they thought things should be done and they tended to think this is the way things always should be done. In fact, they make a big fuss about it. The thing I remember most is that I was at an international school in the Congo where no one had uniform. We came back to the UK, everyone had uniform obviously, and it was quite strictly enforced and it became an issue immediately. We were having our skirts measured as we came in the door and if your skirt was too long or too short you could be sent home. I don't remember at the time thinking this is really weird because my last school we all just wore jeans basically and nobody ever worried about it. So in fact, skirts weren't really a thing. It's weird that you made us wear this thing and now you are making it into an issue if we don't wear it the way that you want to wear it.
So I think that a kind of theme running through my whole life has been asking questions about control and why we control people and particularly why we control children. So to come back to post-study in adulthood, I did my clinical psychology doctorate and I then started working as a clinical psychologist. I had my own children and I quickly discovered that many of the things I'd learned as a clinical psychologist weren't as straightforward and simple as I thought they were. I couldn't just apply them to my own children. Also, as my children grew, I started to feel this real clash between what I'd learned as a psychologist and what I understood about how children grew and developed and what was going to happen to them in the education system. So my son was a very-- He's July birthday, summer born, very active little boy, not really interested in reading, writing at all when he was sort of approaching four. So we actually had a place for him at the school down the road; excellent primary school. I went long for the introductory day and they gave us a list of keywords and they said, "Can you teach him these words over the summer?" So I had my three year old and it was a list of words like, 'the, but, if.' They were completely out of context. I looked at this and I was like, "Wow, all of his learning up to now has been in context, meaningful for him because he thought he wanted to learn things. And suddenly, I am meant to bring this into our relationship of where I'm presenting this list of random words and I'm saying, “You need to learn how to read them." Why would I do that? What's the point actually? Won't I be teaching him things like actually reading isn't meaningful? Because it's such a thing for me that we learn when something has meaning for us.
So to cut long story short, we decided to home educate him and his sister as she came along too. And the more I did that, the more I was thinking all the time of how I thought psychological theory and what I was seeing happening in my children, that there was a really important story that needed to be told here. That I thought that the way that schools run doesn't take account of what we know of human psychology and human development. It actually in many ways makes learning hard and that maybe if we didn't do that, maybe things could be a lot easier.
Ben (05:44):
Yeah, that's really fascinating. And I guess that rolls into things like over testing and how schools are and all of that. I hadn't understood that you traveled and been to quite so many schools yourself so that's almost like a mini case study and cross-cultural studies as well as the catalyst of your own children and therefore reality coming up against theory. And obviously reality is the truth. It made me think that also in our studies if you go back in time to the time of Piaget or even before you refer to the school that Tolstoy built, that today there are kind of two broad schools of thought which have these deep historic roots. One of them-- I think they might call it constructionists, but in even words they tend to argue for this schools based, rules based, fact based, curriculum based system, where from facts and these kind of learn knowledge does everything flow.
Then the other school of thought which I guess you could call progressive, but in the sense tends to be child centered, emphasizes child agency and choice and curiosity driven learning. Has actually been around probably for longer actually, if you go back all the way to thought. Some people can even trace it to ancient Greece thought. A lot of your ideas seem to center close into the second school of thought but seem grounded in your psychological studies and things. I was just interested in what you think is maybe misunderstood and how you arrived there from, was it observing both your children and autistic people and just knowing, well, these are how we're meant to, or you seem to develop. We use real world situations, we learn in situ, we don't learn these kind of funny stripped down psychological tests which are very important for psychological models but don't affect how our learning works, and then this kind of joy or learning or curiosity which we see and I think a lot of people see in very young children. You can't stop them asking questions and things. And then this observation that a lot of people have, it stops them. It stops partly because parenting or adults or the system kind of tells it to stop. So I was kind of intrigued how that all catalyzed and come together and whether you'd have any comments about my characterization of the kind of history of those two schools or thought was approximately correct.
Naomi (08:21):
Yeah. I mean, when people say to me, which they sometimes do, "Your ideas are progressive," I generally say, "I think there's a different school of thought that's progressive." Because I think for me, the thing that is key about the way I see education and the way I see thought and learning and child development, is that how the child feels about what they're doing is really important. How the kind of center of the child being the person who is exploring the world. I love this idea from Alison Gopnik, “A child is scientist.” Child exploring, child asking questions, child hypothesizing. And I could really see that in my young children. It was just happening all the time. Then I came across the traditional ideas like the... I was interested because they used cognitive psychology to back it up.
They say these are cognitive science ideas and I was like, "That's really interesting," because I studied cognitive science for a long time and this is one part of it, but they didn't boil it down to this. When we did learning memory and cognition they didn't say, “We've stopped learning. This is how it works. This is the model. What we need to do is seat the children in rows, tell them what to do, test them frequently, do lots of retrieval practice, and they'll all get good test results and that's learning.” They didn't did they? What I basically learned in those courses was that learning's really complicated and that there's loads of different things going on here. I remember actually a supervision we had particularly at university where we were talking about learning and our supervisor said, "It's so easy to just reduce children down all the time. We're kind of reducing them down to this set of boxes.” But they're actual children and they're people and they're complex and they've got so much else going on. When we start reducing them to a set of boxes, what have we lost? And of course, I wasn't a parent at the time and I don't think I really got that until I had my own children. It's much easier to reduce children down to a set of boxes when you are not living with a three year old and seeing how it doesn't fit.
But I really wanted-- Part of me, whenever I see something that doesn't jive with me; like this particular thing about the best way for children to learn is to seat them in rows and tell them what they need to know. When I find something like that that doesn't jive with me, my first instinct is to understand why they say it. I want to go and find out. So I go and read all the stuff about why this is right. I read all the books and I listen to the podcasts and I really try and get in depth about why they think this is right, because when I understand why they think that, then I could start to develop my own critique. So that's very much what I did with that. But I thought even when I read-- because I also read about the kind of more progressive people, and I still felt that often in the field of more progressive education there's still something missing. And it's still who is in control of this whole process. You can read very progressive educators and it's all about how to form this, how to get the children to do what we think they should be doing.
So let's give you a really good example. Lots of schools are set up along the lines of children spending loads of time on outdoor play. That's their ethos and they have this idea of childhood they would definitely call themselves progressive. They would say, "Childhood is all about play, particularly about outdoor play; unstructured, outdoor play. Let's provide them with loads of time to play in the forest and we'll have sussed childhood." Obviously that's not. That’s a gross characterization of what they do but that's the ethos. Then you come across the child who wants to spend all their time playing on Minecraft and the child who doesn't want to be in the forest; who finds that quite kind of-- They just don't know what to do with themselves where they're unstructured play in the forest.
And then the model doesn't work because although it's meant to be this model for everybody, in fact, it only suits certain children. I think you find that across the board. When the model actually meets the child and when they meet a whole range of children, then that's when you see the problems. So that's why for me the key thing I always ask when I'm looking at any educational model is, "Does the child have agency here? Can they choose to leave?" And if they can choose to leave, then I think that makes all the difference. I think this is what is a big difference with home education and kids in school and I think you see parents go through this learning process when their kids don't go to school or come out of school, which is that children at home have a lot more power because they're in their homes. They have their stuff upstairs. They have their things that they do. If they really don't want to do what you're doing with them, generally they can stand up and walk out, and they do. Whereas at school they can't do that. Just that simple fact means that home educators have to get alongside their children in a different way. They cannot rely on control, peer pressure, "You can't leave this classroom because there's nowhere to go. If you get up and walk out, there will be consequences." They just can't rely on that. So they have to find a different way forward.
Ben (13:34):
Sure. That makes a lot of sense. So under this language you got traditional schools and we can come back to maybe how Victorians kind of set it up to control their population to read and write because they needed to power the industrial revolution and all of the thinking around that. You might have progressive schools but they may not be child centered or child-led .
Naomi (14:01):
Well they think of themselves as child-led.
Ben (14:02):
Yes. But if you force people to be in the woods, that's potentially the same errors as forcing people to be in the classroom because the child doesn't have agency and the learning is not child-led. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I've now met - like you - and actually to my initial surprise, many people who were unhappy at school. So I was pretty happy at school. I go back and ask a lot of my friends there and things. Again, this is not a significant end, you probably have the study. But I would say at least half of them weren't that happy and then another quarter were kind of neutral. So I would say maybe half was sort of saying, "School, average to below average." Another quarter was sort of, "No average, that's fine." And then maybe only a quarter were in my camp who actually actively got quite a lot of it. And I reflected that that's a really small number. Then I've seen some studies which seem to say-- Well, the surveys are always a little bit tricky, but seems to kind of hone in on the same number.
Now I've met many people who are homeschooled-- They tend to say this in America whereas in the UK they prefer home education to that distinguishing between the structure school, or in the US they might say unschooled people or some people say deschooled if you've been in school and then that-- who have turned out to be pretty happy growing up. I'm not quite sure maybe why I've met quite so many now, but I have, and they've gone through a different route and they've ended up roughly in the same place given all everything. I think actually every one of them I've met have had essentially their curiosity intact and everything else, not saying that some other typical schoolers might not have, but some of them it seems to have died out which I kind of also find really interesting.
And I guess maybe another blob for me is seeing people who are either autistic or have had other needs or learned differently or things like that. I've seen a lot of them now also if they've been able to go into a different way of learning or system outside this institution and they have flourished; obviously not for everyone and everything and there's all of these complications around it. I've also found that observation really interesting. If the stats system is not working for so many people, why can that be and can we not do more about it? I don't know whether that resonates with you and if you've heard of any thoughts around how that is or whether you feel that's maybe right in the kind of work that you've done.
Naomi (16:43):
Yeah. I think it's really interesting that you say that so many of your peers weren't happy at school because I'm thinking-- I can't remember where you went to school, but I think you went to somewhere that was perceived as an excellent school, right?
Ben (16:57):
Yes.
Naomi (16:57):
The interesting thing for me was that in my tour through 11 different schools of the world, I went to schools that I really loved and I also went to schools that I really hated. So I had that experience for myself. I particularly had the experience actually of having been mostly socially okay at school and I went to one particular school where I was suddenly the outcast. It was when we came back from Congo and I went into this school where they had all been together as a class since they were like five. It was one of these schools where they kept everyone together. I went there and I was the one that nobody liked and it was horrible. But what was so interesting for me is that there was a boy in the class as well who nobody liked. I remembered from previous school experiences that there were so often the child who nobody liked and nobody would play with, but I'd never been them before. I remember that moment of thinking I haven't changed. I'm still the same person.
At my last school I had friends, I was happy, I was a valued member of the community. Here, I'm the outcast that nobody wants to have anything to do with. And it just made me think even at the time at 14, the environment that you are in makes such a difference to different people, but also that there's no fixed right environment for people. We can't provide one environment which is right for all young people and children. It's a bit like the Forest school. Parents go and see these schools and they think this is so lovely, it's so beautiful. Then the child gets there and they're like, "This isn't for me." So a school that for you could have been wonderful and excellent and exactly what you wanted for one of your peers could have been a frightening and hostile place, and it's the same school because it's about what we bring and how that interacts with our environment.
Ben (18:55):
Exactly. And that's it. My school is really high regarded and actually let me follow my curiosity a lot. I ended up doing A-level art, as well as theater, as well as sciences at A-level...
Naomi (19:07):
Which is amazing because you’d have to wait to university to do science.
Ben (19:11):
Yeah. Actually, I still did theater and all of that. But I know a lot of people who were unhappy, so it definitely does that. And I still remember the silly quirks which I sort of felt like that. "Like wow, uniform." I really clearly remember that you couldn't wear a colored jumper and it just seemed really ridiculous to me, but also it is not something which I know impacted me that much, but I still remember to this day. You wouldn't class that in any form of trauma, but the fact that I remember something so clearly from almost 30 years ago obviously had that sort of impact. Then I really see it now thinking about the autistic community because it's so obvious that autistic thinkers often don't work very well in school institutions.
But then I observe that and I observe it in a whole range of autistic thinkers and it strikes me that a lot of what applies to them actually applies to people who don't have such an autistic cognitive profile as well. So it kind of goes the other way. It's kind of like, "Yeah, well, what should we be learning for what autistic thinkers might do or need or think?" Some of that might be sensory. Some of that is following the center led for where you are there. So I guess I'm kind of interested in what do you think are the barriers in the system? I think in the UK the government has made it harder. The US is sort of a movement which depending on the state, seems to go sort of in parallel and fly under the regulatory radar, but they have a slightly different cultural ethos in some of them and actually they've also got a faith based things for that. So it'd be interesting what you think are the barriers and maybe what we could do or think about making it easier or particularly if you're interested in this kind of area.
Naomi (21:12):
Well, I think it's interesting that you bring up autistic thinkers then because I really think that autistic adults and autistic children highlight the drawbacks in the system. Clearly they show us that the system doesn't work for everybody. And unfortunately what happens often is that there's a kind of attitude. We kind of say, "Well, okay, so these people have special educational needs. They're different. They need something different, but it's okay for everybody else." I don't think our system is really okay for most of us. It works on its own terms, but that's because the terms that have been set are usually quite limiting. We are basically saying, "How do we get children to get to this end where they pass their GCSE and they pass their A levels?" That is the aim of this whole system that we're doing. For most kids that's what it's like. It's not always that there are some exceptional schools which don't take that approach.
But once we've defined that end point as we want you to get the top grades that you can in these GCSEs, then we've limited what we are thinking that this child is going to do through their education. When I talk to parents of autistic children or of children with special education needs, they're often more open to thinking about different ways of doing things I think because partly they can see so clearly that their child isn't going to thrive in that convention system. Whereas it's harder for parents who maybe think that their child might do well in the system to see the emotional damage that it's doing to them or the other damage. And I suppose the other part of my puzzle of what came in for me was that I worked as a clinician. I'm a clinical psychologist. I work with adults as well as young people and children. I know as a psychologist that when somebody comes along feeling powerless and feeling they have no control over things, it's associated with all sorts of negative feelings about themselves and also all sorts of difficulties with making changes in their life that they might want to make changes about.
It just seemed weird to me that we sort of induce that sense of powerlessness in our children. That we say to them for example, "You can't wear a colored jumper." Educationally, I can't see what the justification would be for saying, "Everybody has to have the identical jumper." It's control. It's about controlling young people. If you go to school from the start and maybe particularly if you're a relatively high achiever and therefore you get lots of approval at school and lots of validation, you kind of slowly get into this system of control. By the time you're 17 or 18 you are so used to being told exactly what you have to wear, exactly how you've got to cut your hair, the shoes you wear; all of that kind of stuff. You don't even really question it anymore because it's just how it's always been. I suppose that was something I really noticed coming in and out of the UK system. A different system didn't have those requirements and seemed to manage fine. So why did the UK think it was so important to have that control?
Ben (24:24):
I guess it's that all about agency. I'm not from the school of thought so probably I'm going to do that argument weaker. But I guess someone like the Michaela School or something would argue, "Well, uniforms make this certain culture, you follow certain rules, and that will help learning. You have less choice..." Describing it badly because to me it's like that is a controlling systems and you're preparing people for the workplace, but what sort of work you want them to do. But there is this idea that I think they argue, fun rules or routine and then they go fast to say that knowing a lot of knowledge comes through that. And I guess maybe it's because it's roots of just understanding. I think you mentioned this in the book; just a tiny slice of what behaviorism or Pavlovian learning has done, which is not the whole of learning. It's a certain section of learning for a certain thing and they've carried it through to a very far conclusion in a straight line drawing of just two or three little dots which are definitely true in themselves.
Naomi (25:39):
Tiny slice is a lovely way of putting it because I think it applies to the cognitive stuff as well.
Ben (25:45):
I mean, it's obviously true in its little thing.
Naomi (25:47):
It works. That when people say, "There's not a problem with the science, there isn't a problem with the behavioral science as it is defined and how it is used. There's not a problem with the cognitive science." The studies do show what they say they say that's absolutely indisputable. The problem is that when that becomes your approach to childhood and learning and education and everything, when you talk about creating a culture, I suppose my question would be, why do we want to create a culture of conformity? Because that's what we're doing. We are creating a culture of conformity and our people often say, "We set up these rules and regulations and things and children will learn these things and then they'll carry them all the way through life." Well, okay. But you know, carrying the-- I don't know how useful that is in terms of let's train our children to conform and not to question and to do what they're told without making a fuss about it.
Well, that only takes you so far in life really. I'm sure I'm not alone-- I know I'm not alone in this kind of feeling. I observed in my peers which was that we went through all the process of education. We were all high achievers at university. That's why we were there because we'd done well in the system. We got to there and then you come to the end and then you're like, "Well, now what? People have basically been telling me what to do all the way through this system. Now I've got to the point where I'm not being told what to do anymore and I'm maybe 24. I've never really made big, significant choices about my life." And I think it's really at odds with the cognitive neuroscience findings which are showing that in order to develop that system in your brain; the prefrontal cortex, the part that enables us to make decisions, we need those experiences. Have you read Sarah-Jayne Blakemore's work about the adolescent brain?
Ben (27:39):
Not yet.
Naomi (27:39):
I think her stuff fits so well with what I talk about because I think what's happening when we have self-direct education is that we are giving young people lots of practice in making those kinds of decisions; in making decisions for themselves. We know that part of the brain matures in an experienced dependent way. So if we give children lots and lots of experience of doing what they're told, keeping the rules, not stepping out of line, then that's what they're learning. It's all learning, I suppose. I'm frustrated at the way that schools define learning as the stuff that's in the curriculum because I think we have to look at everything that a child is doing at school. They're learning from all of it. Actually from my own memories of school, what I learned outside the classroom has stuck with me much longer than the actual stuff I learned in the classroom.
Ben (28:30):
Sure. Obviously I'm going to agree with all of that. I guess I'll go a step further. When I look now out into the world and you think about what governments or people claim they want; so innovation, new ideas, creativity, critical skills thinking, they've got all fancy terms for it. But you think where do new discoveries come from? Where do you push ideas which haven't been thought before? Well, they don't tend to come from conforming to the system. They do not tend to come from a bureaucracy because by their nature they are, "Well, whatever the rules are set for me." So when the rules are wrong, either scientifically or morally, if you've been told to just conform to them, well, that's no good because you'll be following something as a false premise.
You need to somehow have learned to question something either scientifically, morally, or whatever. A school system or any system which has taught you just to obey doesn't get there. And I think this is where it goes to the roots I briefly mentioned, or we mentioned; is Victorian roots. Because they did or purposely wanted a system of control. We can argue rightly or wrongly about how important that was for the industrial revolution where people were a lot poorer and no one could read and write. But to use a system which has basically... I don't know what-- Maybe you would probably know more, but hasn't really evolved in 150 years of thinking whereas the cognitive science, even educational pedagogy in its kind of small fields seem to have gone on a quantum leap in knowledge the way we school has not.
And there's not too many areas. Although there's some like maybe buildings, actually. We haven't seem to made a quantum leap in there. But in a lot of the knowledge rich industry, I find that's really fascinating about why is it? Do we not seem to know? Again, there's not been huge worldwide studies on it. But I would guess if you could do a controlled trial of a few thousand people who go through some form of child centered learning in any of its variation, and you control that to some control form in any of its variations, I think you'll end up with better outcomes for those. And maybe the academic outcomes of having that will be roughly equal. But I think all of the other outcomes in terms of critical thinking or happiness or anxiety and all of those from what I'm thinking would be higher. I would strongly bet quite a lot on that hypothesis, but I haven't seen the study. I don't think the study will be done.
Naomi (31:27):
No one's done the study.
Ben (31:27):
Why are there not 10 thousands of those studies as opposed to...?
Naomi (31:30):
Because school is the invisible intervention, isn't it? I didn't realize until I thought about not sending my children to school. I didn't realize that everything I had been taught in my developmental psychology courses at university, in my PhD, everything, assumed that all the children were at school and didn't even mention it because the assumption was that they were always at school. It's been such an interesting ride for me watching my own children but also watching children around me because of course, I now know lots of other children who don't go to conventional school. Thinking to myself, "Wow. I wonder how many of the things that I was taught as child development and how humans develop was actually child development in the context of school." Because 30 hours a week is a massive intervention. We do these controlled studies for psychology interventions. It's one hour a week. We think that 12 hours once a week is a lot. In the NHS that's a lot. 20 sessions is quite a long term intervention.
They're at school for 30 hours a week and nobody ever set up the random control style at the beginning. The Victorians definitely didn't say, "We'll, just see if these children are in a rich learning environment where other people are literate.” That is really important because people always say to me, "Are you saying children will just learn?" No, you need these things in your environment. Of course there are children all over the world who aren't learning to read and write because their environment doesn't have the necessary information for them to do that. The adults around them can't read and write. That's part of what the Victorians were working with.
The Victorians were thinking, “We have a largely illiterate population. We need them to be literate. Let's get the children in, we can deliver this, and they will learn how to do it.” And it worked. But we are not in that situation now. Our population is largely literate. We don't know what children learn when they don't go to school simply from being around other people, following their interests. It was such a moment for me when I was looking into this when I was thinking about not sending my children to school. I looked at the research done on self-direct education and on schooling and I was thinking, "Wow. So if it really is true that you don't have to go to school and you come out at a quite similar place but without having had lots of the difficult experiences lots of people have at school, why don't more people know about this?" Because people feel trapped in school and I think that's a serious issue. It's definitely an issue for many autistic people and parents of autistic children. That they feel like, "This is really going wrong. I think this is doing a lot of damage to my child but I don't think there's anything else I can do. We are told school is the only way.” I think schooling works and I think the most effective thing it teaches us is that we must be schooled. We have to go to school, and we are taught that right from the age of three, right through until we're 18.
Ben (34:28):
Yeah. I guess there is another way. I think anecdotally if you go back to the Victorians, their rich elites didn't do the school system.
Naomi (34:36):
They had something different.
Ben (34:37):
So there is a sort of not quite paired control, but you can see how, and they did quite well. And I think I do see some studies that's not necessarily always child-led, but tend to be these small group mastery type of things but often are actually very influenced by what the child wants to do. It's often like a child and adult choose, or there's a sort of selection of choice. It's not a hundred percent child-led, but it's not, "Oh, we're going to do this." So they end up if they want to do maths all week or whatever they go, "Okay. We'll do that." So it's not quite a hundred percent 0% curriculum or that. It's interesting now if you think about it sort of maybe turning to some of the practice rather than in the theory and we can go a little bit as to what it might mean to deschool. But even if you're not-- I guess I'm moderately a techno optimist about the world and I think people miss a lot about how children use technology in the same way that I think people were really worried about reading newspapers a couple of hundred years ago and things.
So for instance, I spent I'm pretty sure hundreds of hours in the worlds of Minecraft with both of my sons; one who's more of an autistic thinker, one who's probably a little bit less of an autistic thinker, and I've seen whole worlds open up. Some of them have used this kind of discord chat thing, there's a whole community out there. It's not necessarily adults excluded, but most adults I know, certainly if you're over the age of 40 will typically not know anything about these discord communities and they are some of the biggest communities in the world. I learned so much about creativity, what they might think, how they think, and some of these decisions that you make in a world of digital pixels, but which actually does reflect our own world. I was wondering what you think about how people use technology as well, or I guess it comes to what you sort of said earlier. You can lean into technology or you can lean into time in the woods. It kind of depends on how the child is learning. But do you find that people, parents or families are almost-- they can be too technology phobic if that is what their child is learning?
Naomi (36:51):
Definitely. It's one of the number one things that families come to me worried about. Screen time is what they say. "I'm really worried about screen time. They've got way too much screen time," particularly if children come out of school. Because when you're in school, you have all these hours every day when you can't be on your device because you're at school and you're not allowed to take your device with you. Then you come back and you have to be in bed by a certain time. Your whole day is structured in a way that means that you can't spend eight hours of it playing Minecraft. And then the child's now home educated and they will be--
Ben (37:23):
They can do eight hours playing Minecraft.
Naomi (37:25):
They can spend eight hours playing Minecraft. I also have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours playing Minecraft. Some of the best memories when my children were little were us all playing Minecraft together. I think there are many different ways that children use technology. But I do think that fear-- When I talk to parents who are frightened of it-- and I talk to a lot of them, they often have very little idea of what their children are actually doing on it. Typically they'll say things like, "It's so isolating. They're not connecting with other people. It's passive." They have all these words that trot out. None of them really make any sense to me when I spend time with my children on a screen because it's generally not too passive. Minecraft is certainly. If you're passive, you're not going to get anywhere in Minecraft. You just get there, you sit there, and nothing happens until you're killed by a zombie or something. You have to be active. But also, there's so much that children can do on their devices. It's a place where they can feel really competent. One of the theories I write about in my book is self-determination theory and I think it's a lot of what underpins self-direct education. It says there are three things children need or adults need in order to have this kind of intrinsic motivation. It's autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Competence is this kind of feeling, "I can do it." Doesn't have to be being good at something. It's this sort of sense of this is something I could do. I think you see children getting that in Minecraft when they don't get it anywhere else.
I often work with parents whose children are really unhappy at school, are really struggling and video games are the only place they're really happy and their parents are worried about it. I think that's so sad because the only thing which is really bringing this child to life is the thing that their parent is trying to limit. So I always say to parents, get alongside them, sit with them, learn how to play it. And they say, "I don't know how to start with Minecraft." I say, watch the YouTube videos. There are loads of YouTube videos showing you how to get started with Minecraft. Just go in there and have a go. I've actually played enormous numbers of video games with my son in particular. My son is really into video games. The interesting thing is that neither of my children have limits on how much time they can spend on their device and that has always been the case. My son now at 14 is spending a lot of his time coding. So he played games a lot and now he is making games all the time, writing games. He's taught himself how to code using Codeacademy and he's in game development basically, most of the time. My daughter isn't really into spending any time on a device. She's into making stuff and she always has been. She's into constructing, painting; she's really creative with her hands. People often say to people, "What about addiction? Aren't you worried about addiction?" And I mean, we both know as psychologist addiction is about so much more than the 'thing.' You can be addicted to all sorts of things. But it's not just about the 'thing.'
Alcohol is a prime example. Alcohol is all around in our studies. Some people are addicted to alcohol, some people aren't. Why is that? It's generally about everything in their lives and the way that they're using alcohol. I do see some children who I think are using withdrawal into a video game because the rest of their life is so unhappy and they are very attached to it. Parents will say, "We try and get them off it and they shout and scream. They must be addicted." And I'd say, "No. You need to think about what's going on in the whole rest of their life. Let's think about that. Let's make that better." Limiting the thing that they really enjoy, banning it, or making it restricted, isn't going to make their life happier. We can pretty well guarantee that. I think the more that parents lean into it, the less fearful it becomes because the more they can see what their children actually do.
Ben (41:16):
It's their happy place. My youngest has taught me-- In fact, both of them have through these YouTube videos because a bunch of them teach better than most teachers. A whole range of esoteric thought from wars in China, how the US Senate works, to the latest in alternative proteins. Actually, the sheer variety.
Naomi (41:41):
It's amazing. And then they bring it out, don't they?
Ben (41:43):
Exactly.
Naomi (41:44):
And it's such a surprise. They're like--, and you're like, "Oh, okay."
Ben (41:46):
"Yeah, I didn't know that." Why should we persuade? You made this point in the book. That's kind of what-- I would use the term, that's what adulting is. Adults you go, you find this thing and you... I think adults spend probably-- Most people in knowledge work industries if they're gone into that, they're on their screens eight to 10 hours. Some of it is in Excel spreadsheets, but some of it is on Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is. I'm interested what else practically maybe our own stories then? So I did a lot of Minecraft, you did a lot of Minecraft. We do some handcrafting as well. But what else have you learned from your children do you think? What are a couple of pivotal things or skills or maybe anything which has surprised you or not surprised you?
Naomi (42:27):
Okay. So there are loads of things that have surprised me. One thing that surprised me was when we started out with this, I had the assumption which I think lots of parents have which is that play-based learning is great when they're younger and that our system cuts that off too short, too early. Four or five is too early to stop playing to try and channel them into more formal education. So I thought, "Well, let them play for longer. And by the time they're about seven, they'll probably be ready for some more formal work." You read about education systems in Denmark where they don't start more formal education until eight. And I was like, "Okay, that'll be fine. They get to seven." In no way were they in any way interested in any kind of formal work. In fact, by the time they got to seven, I would say that the gap between them and what a school child was doing had widened. And I was perhaps thinking it wouldn't. I was thinking that they would mature and it would sort of shrink. Actually, it just widened and widened and widened. Because what I saw was that they were developing in a different way.
Both of my children learnt to read much later than I would've expected them to. We are very literate environment. I learnt to read at the age of about three. I love reading. We have books everywhere. I thought that they would be reading early. My son learnt to read between the age of about eight and 10. The first word that I knew he read-- well kind of, he looked at a sign on the road and he said, "Does that say zombie?" Now you're going to get the reference of why he was able to read the word zombie. It didn't say zombie, it said zone. Minecraft is this amazing game where everything has the name underneath. So he started reading things like obsidian and all these words that he learned from Minecraft and it took a long time as well. People sometimes say, "They start learn to read, it all clicks into place." And I was like, "Okay, we've started to learn to read. Now it'll all click into place." It was actually about two years before he was a fluent reader. Now, he's a really fluent reader. He's just read the Lord of the Rings. He's an enthusiastic reader. He reads books for pleasure all the time and yet he wasn't doing that. So I think that really surprised me.
The other thing that I saw which I think is really important is how lots of children sort of cycled round to doing things in a way that I think school stops people doing. So talking particularly about imaginative play. I noticed that lots of children that I saw around me would've been either, they were autistic-- They might have had diagnosis, might not have had diagnosis. But many children weren't playing imaginatively in those early years which as a clinical psychologist, been taught looking for this, looking for them to be playing imaginatively in these early years really important, they should be doing all this. Quite a few of the children I saw around me weren't doing that. They were much more interested in facts and feelings or Minecraft or doing other stuff. But what I would see is that as they got older, they would start playing imaginatively. At a much later age like eight or nine, at the point where many schooled children had really moved on from that stage completely. And it was often connected to the video games they played. So I'd see a lot of children playing real life Minecraft, real life Plants versus Zombies.
And again, their parents would have sometimes a slightly denigrating approach to that. They kind of say, "Well, it's not like real imaginative play because it's derived from this other stuff." But I would be like, "It is real. It's in their imagination." In fact, I think a lot of imaginative play goes on in Minecraft. And I think for lots of autistic kids in particular, that's where loads of imaginative stuff goes on and it's not really seen by the adults around them because what they're looking for when they're thinking about imagination is tea parties and playing school and all this kind of teddy bears and dolls. As play gets more sophisticated, if children were allowed to continue to play without being stopped from doing so, we haven't really got a roadmap for how that becomes so much more sophisticated and that was just a moment of real insight for me and interest.
Ben (46:40):
Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So I'm going to ask for two free pieces of consulting, if I may then.
Naomi (46:47):
Okay.
Ben (46:48):
So one is a question of again, practically around this area. I have a lot of discussion with people around giving children this wide choice. So parents often feel like, "I want to have a basic level of maths, or you've done it with reading and things like that. I want to give them choice, but that." And I guess the sort of pure child centered way of thinking is that, "Well, you keep the environment rich and they will fall into it in terms of reading and things like that.” But I hear a lot particularly on the math bit as well, and maybe reading has come from that time. How do you balance or do you even balance some of the things you might want to expose your children to? Maybe because you just really love it yourself. So I guess part of it is I do my sort of things like podcasting and children may or may not naturally pick up yours. But I do get this thing from others that just talk about, "I'm really worried. I need to do this," or to what level can you shape a curriculum or not on your thinking around that? Then my second question around this is maybe this tends to be sometimes a little bit more for people in an autistic profile, but not only is-- Sometimes we all-- whether actually adults or children, is we kind of lose control. I really don't like the word tantrum because actually in my view, mostly it is not. It tends to be a sensory overload or something hasn't gone things, or it's not triggered in that.
So we work a lot on trying to get regulation and emotional regulation and we can talk about the development of that in that. But again, I know a lot of people within this and particularly, I guess within a home education environment they're kind of worried about, "We don't have the techniques and methods for dealing with dysregulation or where it goes really wrong." Some people might hit out or some people might do whatever there is. So I guess those are my two thoughts that you have from your field and your experience. So one is I guess the kind of more positive learning aspect. How do we think about giving that really wide range of richness and is it okay to nudge or not, depending on all things? And the second is on the other side of like when things are slightly going wrong, when they do it or people get dysregulated, how should we think about that? Is there a different way? This is probably because they would've exhausted all of the other things that they're normally being told about this type of behavior and this has led to it which is why they're now thinking of that. So I think we can assume that a lot of the 'regular ways' have been done.
Naomi (49:41):
Okay. So let me start with the maths. So a lot of people say that to me as well. They say, "Isn't it so important that we can't just leave it up to chance." I usually say, "In my opinion, things that are really important are too important to make children do, because we know-- I don't have the studies to mind, but we know that an awful lot of children finished the school system thinking they can't do maths or actually not able to do basic maths. You can be taught maths for 11, 12 years and come out in the end still struggling with basic number concept. It isn't a guarantee. So the way I see self-diverse education really is that we are providing the opportunities and the environment for learning to occur. The moment that we bring in compulsion we have messed that up a bit, basically. The moment we've said, "You must do this," we've taken away some of that ideal intrinsic motivation environment which is going to change the child's relationship with that thing. So some children might be like, "Yeah, I love maths. That's great. I don't mind if we're going to do math every morning because I really enjoy it." Okay. That's fine. That child's intrinsic motivation probably won't be bother. I actually was a math lover and I was a bit like that. What frustrated me in maths was I was always like it was just boring because I'd done it all. Once I was allowed to accelerate in maths, I love maths so I would be doing maths for the joy of it.
But also, there's nothing in self-directed education which says you can't offer stuff, make suggestions, have it in your environment. The bit that you can't do is compel them to do it. So we have maths and stuff around. We had like maths manipulatives when they were little and those-- whatever they called them, can't remember. You know when you have all the different number cubes and all that kind of stuff, we had it all around. You by doing this podcast, your sons are going to be exposed to that as a thing that's happening. If they're interested, they know how they can go and learn more about podcasting. They may never be, and they may not choose to. If you said to them, "You must learn about podcasting. One of my aims for your education is that you will come out of this able to make a good podcast at the end of it," the likelihood is that you would immediately-- I don't know what your sons would be like. But certainly if I said that to my children, that will probably pretty well guarantee that they weren't going to learn how to do podcasting.
Ben (52:07):
In fact, never podcast ever in their entire lifetime.
Naomi (52:13):
Exactly. When you have a child like this-- my son is like this, I think they're such a gift because they make you really alert to any kind of hidden agenda. My best Minecraft story is that I read stuff about Minecraft online when my son was quite young and I thought Minecraft would be great. I thought we should do it. I suggest it to my son and he would not even look at it. For like a good year afterwards he was like, "No, I downloaded it. I bought it on the iPod. I downloaded it." I said, "Oh, let's look at this game." He was like, "No, I'm not interested." And that was kind of his approach to suggestions from me at this stage in his life. Every time I would bring it up, I'd try to casually bring it up and he'd be like, "Nope, we're not playing that boring game." The only reason we got into Minecraft was we were at some gathering, he saw another child building a house in Minecraft and he was like, "Oh, actually I’d quite like to have a go at that." Didn't comment. Didn't say anything about the fact we'd have it on the iPod for a year. But he had to come to it in his own way. And I think that's the case for so many kids. He has played Minecraft. He's sort of almost coming to the end of his Minecraft playing now, but he has been playing Minecraft for like eight years and it has developed along with him. It's amazing to see they start code... They can code and everything in Minecraft, but I almost killed it at the beginning by being too enthusiastic.
His math story is really interesting because I learned from things like the Minecraft, I learned that I needed to really keep back off. Provide opportunities, but don't push them. Don't make them a compulsion because the moment you do that, you've introduced that element potentially of resistance. So he did no maths at all until he was 12. I didn't introduce any kind of formal mathematics. We had workbooks, I had them around, but he wasn't interested. Didn't want to look at them, didn't want to do it, so I didn't do it. Then he went to this place that he's at now, the Self Managed Learning College in Hove where they have learning advisors and where you can you can say, "I want to learn this" and they will help you do it. And the learning advisors will do a group. So they do one-to-ones on you, but again, it has to come from you. They're not going to say, "Right now, you need to do math." He started doing maths, he absolutely loves maths. He's now two years in and he's working sort of above a GCSE level. Having done nothing and really nothing until he was 12. I think it's just because he watches videos like you're saying about YouTube. He looks up videos about maths on YouTube. He watches stuff. He even at some point said, "I'm going to go back and just go through the whole of Khan Academy and look at all the earlier maths in case I've missed anything” because he's motivated.
So when you are motivated you learn these things in a whole different way. I think because the school system takes away that motivation from children, because it says, "This is what you have to learn, we decided what you're going to have to learn," things take a really long time and they have to be done in a slow and ponderous way. Then because we are mostly schooled, we come out thinking that's how it had to be done. We think you had to have 12 years of maths, for example, or you'd never be a mathematician. But actually I think a lot of that early stuff is what people are learning is maths is hard, maths is something that I'm not really good at, I don't know how to work this out. They're learning all those things along with the maths. If we just back off from it, they don't learn those things. But I don't think there's anything to stop parents having an influence. Sometimes parents sort of equate unschooling or self-direct education as we don't do anything unless they bring it. That isn't what it's about. It's just about it's here round, but we don't make you do it. We don't insist.
Ben (55:56):
It's the agency point.
Naomi (55:57):
Yeah.
Ben (55:58):
What happens when children get dysregulated sort of the other side?
Naomi (56:03):
So, okay. I guess it's another thing that's important to know that that isn't something that schools have got sassed.
Ben (56:09):
Not at all.
Naomi (56:11):
So it's not like we're-- The maths people are going to say, "Well, they math at school, they'd be doing maths." So lots of children have math down.
Ben (56:18):
Isn't this even worse, like go and sit in isolation on the naughty step or something?
Naomi (56:23):
Yes.
Ben (56:26):
At least maths works for some people in school. I think dysregulation bit works for basically no one, but anyway, I'm interested in your thoughts.
Naomi (56:36):
So, one way that I find helpful to think about this is basically that what happens is that when children have accumulation of stresses around them, they get pushed over the point of what they can manage and we come out of the window of tolerance. Do you know about the window of tolerance idea? Should I talk about that briefly?
Ben (56:55):
Yes.
Naomi (56:56):
So the idea of the window of tolerance is that we all have a zone in which we can cope with psychological stresses. We can cope with the things that happen to us. We're calm and engaged, we're able to learn. If something happens, we're able to manage it. We're able to be flexible within that zone basically. If things happen that pushes out of that zone, we go two ways. We either go into the fight or flight response which is a kind of danger response. It's the kind of I need to fight something or I need to run away, or we can go into a kind of more shutdown response; a freeze response or the foreign response which is kind of like going floppy, submitting. Those are all responses that are designed to keep us safe. That's the survival part of our brain. It's a pretty primitive part and it's basically our brain trying to keep us alive. It's responding to threat and it's responding as if the threat is a wild animal. If you're about to be attacked by a lion, really your choices are-- Well, with the lion fighting it's probably not going to be great unless it's maybe a baby lion. But you're going to run away, you're going to fight it, you're going to freeze hope it doesn't notice, or you're going to fall and you're going to play dead. And you're going to hope that it'll just kind of back you around and then go off.
So when children go out of their window of tolerance they go into this zone where they're not really processing information rationally anymore because when you're in your survival system, your point is about keeping yourself alive. It's not about listening carefully to what's being said to you. So I think what parents can often find is that if their children have quite a narrow window of tolerance sometimes, and we expect toddlers to have a narrow window of tolerance. We know that toddlers often get out of their window of tolerance because they're offered the wrong color cup, for example, or because their food is slightly darker or they haven't got chicken nuggets today, or the chicken nuggets are a slightly different shape to how they're meant to be, or it's dinosaurs rather than chickens. All sorts of things can push children out of their window of tolerance and then they have these meltdowns. We expect children to grow out of that relatively quickly and lots of children don't. This is a bit like I was talking about before that we have this kind of schooled form of thinking about how development should happen. That by the time children are four or five they should be past this stage. They should not be going into these meltdowns anymore. They should be able to regulate themselves better. Loads of children can't. Loads of children need more help with it.
So I think the number one thing for me is seeing that as distress, seeing it as an overwhelmed child, and seeing it as a situation which you're not going to be able to rationalize that child out at all, you're not going to be able to punish that child out at all, you're not going to be able to do something right and then it will all go away. Effectively in that moment it's just about we need to calm the nervous system down, we need to help soothe you, to help you bring yourself back into this window of tolerance because lots of children can't do that. Once they're into meltdown they don't know what to do with it and it's really frightening for them. The big shift that I find parents make is if you're just seeing this as this is distress and that there's nothing that I can-- This isn't something I've done because parents will often say, "Why are they behaving like this? It's bad behavior." It's not bad behavior. There's nothing intentional about this. This is the child showing you that the demands of the situation is too much for them. They cannot manage the demands of the situation whilst keeping themselves within their window of tolerance. And so you see this.
Ben (01:00:29):
That makes a lot of sense. Based on my own experience I would say that is true. The ability to regulate back down before you can do anything. I have a pet theory, actually. So we say it's in children. I actually think a lot of adults don't really have this nailed either and that's why you see in the workplace even these kind of-- I guess it comes out in what we interpret as either bullying or harassment or this anger and these things. But actually if you think about it as how we think of a toddler, is actually a lot of adults go out of their window of tolerance. They don't have the mechanisms or they're out of it and then they're in this other system which leads them to all of these 'irrational behaviors.' But it's this other thing.
Naomi (01:01:15):
Yes. Because they're not thinking rationally. The survival system cuts off all that rational thought because you cannot afford to think rationally when there might be a lion about to attack you. You just have to get out of there.
Ben (01:01:25):
Yeah, exactly. So this happens a lot more. Great. Did you have something else you wanted to comment on that? Otherwise, I have another couple of questions.
Naomi (01:01:33):
No. I was just going to say I think you're right. And I think that one of the things that happens at school perhaps is that children are learned to kind of not show that distress, but they don't necessarily actually learn how to manage it. Because you have to not show things at school, don't you? That's the kind of key thing at school. You need to not show if you're feeling distressed because everybody will notice and you might feel... There are all sorts of reasons.
Ben (01:02:02):
Yeah. We talk a lot about it in communities I speak to about-- Essentially they say the word masking because there's a lot of masking and actually we talk about in that. But I think it’s true actually there's masking overall for everyone to a certain extent.
Naomi (01:02:17):
I think schools are full of children masking and workplaces as well. I mean, actually, that's what you have to do. It's a functional response that humans need to have these kind of different ways of being in different situations. The problem is when it means that you are squashing down your own emotions in order to project that kind of different way of being
Ben (01:02:39):
Yeah, that makes sense. So I have a couple of questions in from readers, listeners, social media, Twitter. Please follow Naomi on Twitter if you are a Twitter type of person. So one was around COVID and the pandemic. I guess this actually had two parts. One was whether the experience of home education was maybe more resilient or different I guess, for those already doing it? And then the other one is like it gave people, I think a glimpse maybe as to how bad trying to do school at home on Zoom didn't work versus this other thing. And then the second question I have which has come through this which you haven't touched on is I guess the kind of potential critique of saying, "Isn't this just the kind of rich person, middle class person way of doing that? If you have a lot of resources, if you have the privilege or luxury of doing that.” And I guess there's a hint or truth to that because of the system, but I'd be interested-- I think you have a much more comprehensive view and how that maybe isn't just the case. So one I guess is thinking around the pandemic and the second is this just a rich person's thing?
Naomi (01:03:50):
Yeah. Okay. So the pandemic. Really interesting what happened with the pandemic. Families responded in so many different ways as I think you said in the question. Many families tell me that they were quite horrified to see what their children were doing and also how hard it was to keep their children doing the stuff they were meant to be doing for school. And I thought that was really interesting because I think it was like the control that goes on at school was suddenly brought into homes. You know how I was saying how a child at home has much more power than a child at school and that therefore I think any home educated child is going to be more autonomous than a schooled child unless they're from an extremely-- there probably are some homes like this, unless they're from a very strict and controlling home who deliberately set out to be very strict and controlling.
But with COVID, suddenly the classes were happening, the children were behind the computer screens, and it was up to the parents to try and keep the children on task. The parents discovered how much the children didn't really want to be on task or how much they weren't really interested in what they were doing. And so I was actually really hopeful for a time with the pandemic. I was like, "Maybe everybody will realize that we should be doing things with children that doesn't require this degree of control that we don't even see." I think it's weird that we don't see the control in a whole set of six or seven year olds all seated in rows, all dressed in the same clothes, all in one classroom of other children their age with one teacher at the front. We did it. We were all put through that system and so we don't see it as controlling. But if we came from another planet we'd be like, "This is a really odd thing that they do to their children. They dressed them all up in the same way and they make them all sit at the same desk and then they make them all do the same thing." But that control is invisible to us because it was done to us. So I was quite hopeful about that with the pandemic. But actually what happened was lots of parents or few who can send them back to school where we haven't got to do the control bit ourselves, but there were also parents who found that their children were much happier once they were out of school. And I think that was a bit of a revelation for parents who had thought that their children were just the way they were, quite dysregulated generally, or quite unhappy, quite stressed.
Then suddenly school stopped and their children were at home. These were often the parents who gave up quite early on with them making them do the Zoom stuff which is what some parents did. And they would be like, "Wow, everything is more relaxed. House is much more relaxed. Things are generally much more relaxed. Why are we doing this? Why are we making them go to school?" So I've known quite a lot of parents who haven't sent their children back to school after COVID for that reason. But I think the question also was whether the impact of COVID was less on home educated children? I think that's very dependent. I don't think that's necessarily the case because most home educated children do go to see other children. They go to groups, they go to outings, they go to visit places, and all of that stopped.
So I think that for lots of children their lives became much more limited. I think they were probably less affected in a way than the school children because they usually already have friends online. They already had connections with other children online and often their parents would have already had a more relaxed attitude to screens which probably helped, because by that point everything had to be via screen. I talked to quite a few schooling parents who were really worried about the amount of time their children were spending on screens during COVID. And I was like, "Well, this is the only thing that they can do that connects them with the rest of the world." I mean, in a way isn't it amazing that when we had this lockdown we had it at a time that we were able to make these connections via technology because if we hadn't been, our children really would've been very limited. But I think the impact is variable. It's probably as many impacts as there are children.
Ben (01:07:45):
Yeah. And in some ways everyone's agency was lowered or taken away for various reasons--
Naomi (01:07:50):
Yeah. Completely it was.
Ben (01:07:51):
Regardless of that. And so, I mean, that is why arguably all nations were stressed along with everything else. I think it was through the agency framework along with everything else.
Naomi (01:08:02):
Totally. And I think our ideas of what choices we had about our lives and our children's ideas of what choices we as parents had about their lives were really shaken. So yes, we didn't know or did we? I didn't really know that the government could simply say, "All right, everybody. You have to stay at home. We're closing everything down." It was a shock to know that they could do that and that that could happen. But I think it was a shock for children to see that that could happen to their parents because younger children in particular think their parents are all powerful. They think their parents are the ones who can make things happen. And suddenly, their parents also can't go out the house or can't go to work. It's a huge psychological shock across the board really for everybody.
Ben (01:08:48):
Yeah, exactly. Is this just a rich person's thing?
Naomi (01:08:53):
Yes. I was going to go on to privilege. So I get asked this a lot. One of the things that I always say is that if you spend any time with the home educating community, you will discover that the way it's perceived from the outside and the people who are really in the inside are very different. So home education or homeschooling in particular in the press is usually portrayed as something which people do to try and hot house their children, to get them into Oxford at age 14, or to allow them to develop some very special skill like tennis or golf, or that they're going to be these kind of supercharged children with this very intensive program. A very high percentage of children in the UK at least. I don't know about the US and I don't actually know about the research. But I know from my own experience and from surveys that I've seen, a very high percentage of children who are home educated come out the school because they are absolutely not managing school.
So some of those children are excluded or in some cases their parents think they're heading for exclusion and they take them out before that happens. These families are not a privileged group of families at all. In fact, I think that the group of families who I've met the least probably in my experience have been the more privileged families and that's because they have the capacity to move their child to a private school. For example, move their child to a school that's much smaller, where you have smaller classes. They have many more choice by virtue of having the money. And actually, families for whom school is really not going well at all, home education is one of the cheapest things that you can do as an alternative because it doesn't require you to pay school fees. Also, a lot of these parents that I talk to, if your child's having a really hard time at school or if your child has significant special needs, it's very difficult for families to continue with two parents working. So people often say, "Well, you have to have a parent at home." Not everybody can afford to have a parent at home. But actually, having a child who's really unhappy at school pretty well requires you to have a parent at home as well because parents will tell me things like, "I would drop the child off at school. I get to work within an hour. There'd be a call saying, 'Can you come in, please? They're having a meltdown.'"
One parent I talked to from my book said they're on the porta-cabin roof. Child's always on the porta-cabin roof. They would call me to come and get my child. And she said, "My employer said to me, 'You're going to have to choose between answering the calls from the school or this job.'" And she was like, "Well, there's no choice." I can't say to the school, "Sorry, just leave him on the porta-cabin roof. He'll be fine." So I think there's a real misconception about who home educators actually are. I think there's a very high percentage of special educational needs and a very high percentage of actually less privileged families who are doing really the only option that they can do when school isn't working for their child because it is a cheaper option than other choices. But I think there's obviously always a certain amount of privilege in being able to make a choice. I don't think you have to have abundance of stuff in your home to make this choice. There are lots of home education groups where people go and where you can pool resources basically with other families.
I know of parents-- I know many single parents who've made this choice and who've made... People do all sorts of things to work around it. Just in our example, I gave up work in order to home educate my children. I gave up my job in the NHS which was actually my dream job in the NHS. It was exactly the job I wanted. The way we made it work was that I worked in the evenings and on Saturdays. So I set up a private practice. My husband would be at work during the day, he would come back, hand the children over, and I would go down the road and fit in a couple of clients. It was really hard work. I would not recommend it. I used to buy lucozade at the local shop on the way back and I'd literally be chugging it down because I just had a whole day with a five year old and a two year old and now I was going to go and see clients. People do these things of kind of working around it because it's like we need to do something. I think you'll find that families from all over the walks of life are doing it.
Ben (01:13:19):
Yeah. That's my experience too. I think it echoes in the US where-- Although there's also a US group which are a little bit faith based in this as well.
Naomi (01:13:27):
Yeah. That's different. I don't think we really have that group in the UK. I've talked to Americans. They always assume we do, but I haven't met many people who are home educating for religious reasons as their major motivation.
Ben (01:13:42):
Great. So I have a little section of overrated and underrated. So I'll give you some quick fire and you can say overrated, underrated, or you can pass, or you can make some comments. I actually think now having had this conversation I know what you're going to say on all of these. But we can see how they go. So overrated or underrated, a government set curriculum?
Naomi (01:14:08):
Completely overrated.
Ben (01:14:14):
No redeeming feature whatsoever?
Naomi (01:14:16):
I don't think it does. I cannot think why the government would be setting a curriculum.
Ben (01:14:23):
So overrated, underrated, exams? So I guess we would say we have talked about the fact that we're over tested. Is there any place for exams or testing? Can it do anything or is it pretty much like a waste of time?
Naomi (01:14:40):
I think there's a place for exams as a kind of entry to other things in a very practical way. I think part of the problem with our GCSE and A-level system is there's far too much invested in it and it's used almost as a way of evaluating whether you are a good and worthwhile person or not for the rest of your life, whether you're going to be a loser or a success. That's how it feels. I would like it if exams were much more like the driving test. If you want to be able to go and drive you need to show that you have a certain level of confidence in driving, but nobody thinks that that test indicates anything about you as a person, apart from whether you can drive or not. I can say that because I failed my driving test three times.
Ben (01:15:23):
I can't even drive.
Naomi (01:15:25):
Well, there you are. So I don't think you should just be able to go out and drive. We need to have competency based tests for things, but I don't think we should be rating everybody against each other in the way that GCSEs do because GCSEs aren't actually a competency based exam. It is about where are you in the spectrum of everybody else. And I think we need to get rid of this idea that everybody does these exams when they're 16, everybody does these exams when they’re 18. What I would like to see is, so young person would like to go to be a games designer or something. In order to do that, they need to demonstrate that they have certain levels of literacy and numeracy. So they do those because they can see that that has a point and that's the next thing to do. I haven't got a problem with entry requirements and stuff like that and demonstrating competency, but I think that's the real problem with these high states exams. I see so many young people who think that their life is over because they're not going to do GSCEs at 16 for example. They think that this is it. There's such a high stakes feeling around that whole period of development of adolescence and I just think that's really unhelpful.
Ben (01:16:36):
Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So overrated, underrated, social media? Although I guess we could go social media overall and then social media within children.
Naomi (01:16:48):
Well, I have mixed feelings about social media. Social media in particular I think can be a source of lots of bullying for young people. I do have concerns about the way that if young people are being bullied at school and everybody's on social media, that bullying basically continues around the clock 24 hours 7. My approach generally to technology is the parents need to lean into it. Parents need to know what's going on. I think social media's an amazing tool but I think it's only as good as the people behind it. It's not a thing in itself. If your child's in a community where they're being bullied a lot, then you might want to rethink whether they're actually always being accessible by that community.
Ben (01:17:38):
Yeah. So that's neutral. All right, that makes sense. And then overrated, underrated, technical colleges or a schooling where it's kind of more I guess, skills based? There is sort of this, but you're maybe learning carpentry or coding or something. We don't have such a great tradition of that here in the UK or at least not anymore, but at least the concept of having more-- I don't even really like the term technical college, but it is more of a skills based type of learning or maybe apprenticeships.
Naomi (01:18:11):
Yeah. More of an apprenticeship based model. I think those would be great if we had more of those for young people. And I think that would go alongside-- I mean, again, I don't think that should be enforced on anybody. I don't think it should be a, "This is what you have to do." But I think if young people are doing something that's meaningful and that they find rewarding, then I think we would have... Many adolescents would have an easier ride and society might have an easier ride with them. But I also think it's about getting away from this idea of academic exams being the be all and end all and being the kind of market... There's a nice YouTube video by Ken Robinson. You know his work?
Ben (01:18:48):
Yes.
Naomi (01:18:49):
One of the things he says is we have this weird system which puts being a university professor at the top of the hierarchy. The skills that we teach children in school are all these academic skills which I use every day as a university professor. But actually, I'm this tiny part of society. There are so many other things which we don't prioritize in the same way. It's like we measure everybody against this benchmark of how far did you get towards being a university professor? How many qualifications did you get? I would just love it if we could see child development and education in a much wider way.
Ben (01:19:24):
Great. Okay. So coming up to the final couple of questions. What projects are you working on now? Do you have another book or ideas? Obviously you're running on your own consulting? What's happening today?
Naomi (01:19:40):
Yes. So I've actually just finished my second book on self-direct education yesterday. I sent if off to the editor. And that is on neurodiversity and self-direct education. So it's called “A Different Way to Learn” and it's going to be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers next year, I hope. I interviewed lots of families with neuro divergent children of all types and also young people. I also interviewed neuro divergent adults about their experience of school. So as compared to my first book which was more theory based, it's a lot more experienced based. I hope it will give parents the confidence because often parents will say to me, "But my child's autistic and I've got all these reports that say they must be in school. If they're not at school..." It's so common. I've heard people say so often with autistic children in particular, "They have to be in school to learn how to socialize." And I'm like, "How does anybody-- That's not what school is for, for a start. But also, have you talked to any autistic people about their experience of socializing at school? And really what do you think they're learning through it?" So I'm kind of trying to give accounts balance to that. As you say, I'm doing webinars at the moment and I'm thinking of moving in to do some online courses about how parents can help their autistic children with various different things like anxiety and trauma.
Ben (01:21:03):
Great. Well, I look forward to reading that. The final question then is, do you have any life advice or advice for parents and families in your experience maybe who are thinking about this or any other observations that you've had about the world?
Naomi (01:21:23):
So I think my number one advice for parents would be trust your instincts about what your child needs and how your child is. There are a lot of parents I talk to they say, "I think that my child is really unhappy or I think that my child needs these things, but the professionals are telling me that I'm wrong." I think you need to just retain your knowledge that you know your child better and you probably have a really good sense. You don't just know your child better, but in most cases you share genes with your child. Therefore you often have a kind of intuitive understanding of the experiences that your child is having and that you can get inside their heads in a way that professionals often can't. So I would say really listen to your instincts, give yourself space to think about what you think as sort of apart from what everybody tells you, you should be thinking. The other thing is lean into the things that your child likes; whatever they are, lean into them and embrace them because this is a short time of life when they're like this and when they're young and it is an amazing opportunity to connect with them if you choose to do that rather than choosing to pull them away from the things that they love.
Ben (01:22:29):
That sounds excellent. So follow your intuitions and follow your child's interests.
Naomi (01:22:37):
Pretty well. Yeah.
Ben (01:22:38):
With that Naomi, thank you very much.
Naomi (01:22:42):
Thank you, Ben.
Ben (01:22:44):
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