The Paper Focus: You will demonstrate original thinking about a topic pertaining to changing concepts oflearning and human development. This is a unique opportunity to investigate and write about...

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APA Standard Format: title
Student Name
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Length: 15 pages, with 15 + references
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1. The question, and relevant background
"The question of home versus school is difficult to argue in the abstract. If ideal
homes are contrasted with actual schools, the balance tips one way; if ideal schools are
contrasted with actual homes, the balance tips the other way. I have no doubt in my mind
that the ideal school is better than the ideal home, at any rate the ideal urban home, because it
allows more light and air, more freedom of movement, and more companionship of
contemporaries. But it by no means follows that the actual school will be better than the
actual home" (Russell, 1967)
The question I want to explore is simple; in the light of new technologies, what is the
best environment in which to educate a child?
This question feeds into many of the concerns raised in the general literature on
education and childhood development, and provokes strong reaction from all parties. On one
side, evidential theorist has had a perspective on the ideal environment for learning; on the
other, ideological theorists and legislators have an interest in the system, not individual
performance. This tension has means- and ends- focused considerations has led to a deep
split; children who lucky enough to be born well off are be educated, and to enjoy social and
psychological successes. For those not so lucky, their education was a matter of rote learning
at best. For those that need it most, education serves them least well, possible solutions
glossed over by political argumentation. This is clearly unacceptable.
The central thesis of the paper will be that home school models, sup[orted by new
technologies, present a sound alternative to many of the issues that have emerged in
education, both theoretical and practical. home schooling provides a good counter to the
practices and principles of mass education, an many of the major tensions within educational
policy and practice are foregrounded within the home schooling debate. Broadly, these
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concerns are ideological, ethical, social, and logical, covering such issues as optimising the
environment for the child, being suitably and appropriately responsive to a child‟s needs, the
tension between parent and state in final responsibility for and agency over the child
development, the nature of small social groups against large ones, the effect of psychological
comfort on educational practice, and most importantly progressive against essentialists – the
theory of whether repetitive, rigorous methods like the trivium are preferable to freer,
exploratory intellectual discovery such as that embodied in Waldorf and Montessori schools.
Before going in to the literature, it is worth making a historical note. We live in a
world of far greater capabilities than even relatively recently, and which changes at a speed
previously unknown; in simple, but almost unbelievable terms, thirty years ago , children‟s
knowledge resources extended only as far as they were given by active agents and their
available resources; today, anyone with an internet connection has direct cess to the vast
majority of all human knowledge ever recorded.
We must therefore ask again the question „What is education preparing the child for,
and what is the value of formal schooling in this process?‟ The ideal graduate of a schooling
programme at present needs to be far more adaptable, and more capable of life-long learning,
than ever before, in order to thrive in the environment we can expect them to live within as
adults. The enforced and often traumatic social environment of large schools have already
been heavily supplemented by social networks, giving even those children otherwise isolated
by the system far more social stability, and such is the breadth and effects of this
communication technology tht it allows for a completel revision of our ideas of education and
schooling.
To provide something in the way of historical background, home schooling was, for
most of history, the way in which all people were educated, inasmuch as they were educated
at all. In the 20
th
century, a crisis arose; mass education became both possible and critical, as
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the world became more interconnected and more complex, and as the need for a manual
labour force rapidly shrunk, matched by a rise I the need for intellectual labour. School
systems were built around the largest possible scale, hand in hand with the trends of
urbanisation and modernisation exploding across the world, with their massive infrastructures
and population densities, relatively skills-poor workforce, and new fields of activity.
Before the last century formal education, within a school and with a curriculum, was
available only to the wealthy or privileged. For most people, and for most of history, children
have been educated at home, gaining whatever schooling they required in reference to the
jobs and lives that they were likely to face. We have succeeded in the task of mass education,
with literacy rates rarely below 95% for developed countries; and yet basic literary and
numerical ability has dropped over te developed world, as curricula becaome more about
ticking off lists than checking understanding.
2. Literature review (historical)
To start at the entirely theoretical end of the spectrum, Pestalozzi (1951) has a very
pastoral but nonetheless heartfelt and intuitive conception of the ideal environment a child
should be educated in. As we will see, this perspective lies in direct opposition to the
administrative nature of education as it is, and yet few who deal directly with children could
argue with his conclusions; that children should learn through joyful discovery, guided by
their own interests , having their learning conducted through play, and having this play
integrated into the life of the student at home. This raises a clear and uncomfortable tension;
it is hard to disagree, even with the heavy idealisation of the picture he pints, but how did
schools fall so far from the mark that he draws? It would feel almost absurd to describe a
school, of any level or position, in such terms; and if we agree with his portrait, we must
accept that something in the system has lost its way.
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In order to properly and clearly address the question, the parameters of the literature
review are a focus on the nature of the ideal educational psychosocial environment and
development practices, as well as the history of compulsory schooling. Given the nature of
global ethical; consensus on matters such as freedom of individuality and expression, as well
as the broader rights of all individuals, we are guided towards this conception of ideal
childhood.
From Pestalozzi‟s idealism, we move towards Piaget‟s direct experience with his own
children, whose development he studied and experimented with from their infancy. Piaget
brings to life a core social problem.
It is true that thinking is a social endeavour, a an increasing amount of neuroscience
work, showing that we have developed our brain size and language as a result of needing to
navigate complex social situations. A child, then, must have the viewpoints of others to
integrate and assimilate in order to function correctly, to be able to arrive at beliefs in some
kind of a rational manner. For Piaget, the central problem in a child‟s psychosocial
development was is the disequilibrium between assimilation and accommodation – those
aspects of their environment which they could comfortably deal with, integrating easily into
their worlds. For a child to thrive, this must be a balance; children must become familiar with
meeting and interacting with other people, but it is clearly best to do this in a comforting,
stable environment- simply throwing a child into a completely linen environment, filled with
thousands of people with whom the child shares nothing, would clearly be of negative impact
upon their psyche and development. However, this is not an arithmetic progression,
improving with each other person we meet, since the quality of these relationships is critical,
and modern mass schooling seem likely to exaggerate, rather than reduce, this disequilibrium.
The principal take-away from this paper is that social groups are critical to proper
psychological development, but that the size of this social group must be carefully taken into
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account; the adage that a mob‟s intelligence is that of its weakest intellectual member,
divided by the number of people in the mob, holds true over so much of history that it
provides a powerful example, just as cases of children raised within very small group nd their
difficulties adapting to new and complex environments emphasises that there is a minimum
size to the group.
To turn to he other side of the theoretical divide, we must look at Bagley‟s history of
the struggle between two broad camps within education, the essentialists and the more
loosely defined progressives. Told in 1939, the paper is striking for how familiar the
arguments in it seem, leading to the somewhat despairing thought that we have not managed
to deal with issues that were as compelling seventy years ago as they are now, no matter the
costs to billions of lives. Even the use of ideological terms to describe praxis that should be
evidence-led, which he blames hindering progress, is the same today.
The Essentialists he describes are focused on the idea that the end of education is the
information imparted, and therefore preferred a rigorous approach, much like the classical
teaching of languages and maths (in both of which fields, immersion and contextual
understanding have been shown to allow for significantly faster uptake rates than the
extremely structured, technical approach). He traces the root of their problem to the belief
that the system as it stood needed to be enforced for the essentialists, and the progressives
weakening education by diluting it such that everyone could be included – a traditional, but
unconvincing argument,...