Excerpt From:
Islamic
Home Schooling Advisory Network Newsletter
Volume
2 Issue 4 (October 2002)
Question
Time
At the ‘IHSAN 2002 Home Education Fair’ sisters
had the opportunity to pose some questions to Caroline Maryam Ward, as an
experienced home educator. This proved to be very popular and we hope to start a
‘Question Page’ in Volume 3 of the Newsletter, which will include replies
from a variety of experienced home educators. If you have any questions please
send them as soon as possible to IHSAN. Here are Sister Caroline’s replies to
some of your questions:
Question
1:
When I was growing up what I
lacked, I thought, was discipline. So
for me, I remember specifically for my GCSE's, I was supposed to write 10 essays
and I wrote them all the night before I was supposed to hand them in, that's how
lapse I was. My main concern with
this is how to get the children to be self-regulative. I am also worried about
them not having that discipline. I can see what it's done in my life having to
learn it at such a late age so how do you get that balance?
That’s
an excellent question! Alhamdulillah, this is a good thing to think about and I
think that the main issue is the self-discipline aspect. You were saying that
you had the goal to hand something in or you knew there would be the wrath of
the teacher there because you had a deadline and that you think that our
children would lack deadlines to produce anything. I can only speak from my own
experience and all that I can say is when the children are allowed to play until
7 without any academic pressure on them whatsoever they develop a very high
level of curiosity about many different subjects. They do not have a dislike of
reading and writing activities because they are not forced into them and there
is no pressure to take them up until that age.
In fact if my children start to want to write when they are 4 or 5 we
just let them do their scribbles but we really wouldn't push them forward at
all. They do what they want to do
so by the time they are 7 their curiosity is bursting and they then want to
study many different things and you find something that your child is really
into and you can build a curriculum around that one subject.
One of my children was really interested in Star Trek and Lego so his
spelling lists would include spellings like Clingon, Borg, Enterprise etc. The
point is we would choose the word endings we wanted him to learn and we would
look within the medium that he was desperately interested in so that he saw that
it had a purpose in what he needed to take up.
So I think that’s the key - finding their level of interest, to
discover exactly what their level of interest is, what their subject is and then
you push your curriculum built around that. Then you can get all the things in
that you need to get in around that subject area. So it’s the desperate need,
I would say, to gain knowledge in an area which will mean that the child
develops their own goals because it is their curiosity that is driving them.
Incidentally I would just like to point out that the word discipline is a
Latin word and comes from the Latin disciplina and it means to teach.
It has never actually been associated with punishment.
That was a word association that came in the Victorian times so actually
giving the children discipline is to 'teach' them, Alhamdulillah.
Question
2:
Discipline
in Islam starts from the age of 7-14 and when they are young you should be
playing with them. During their
younger years they are learning as well and one thing we should be aiming to
teach them at this time is respect and the way that we should be doing this is
by showing the children respect.
I
would stamp this approach absolutely. If you speak to children with respect then
they learn that they are spoken to in that way and will respond accordingly. We
were actually talking about the hard, factual academic learning only starting
from 7 but of course by 7 years old you would expect your children to have some
adab in the way that they behave and in their manners.
Question
3:
Up
until 7 you should teach them in the way that they wish and if they don't wish
to read by the age of 7 then that’s fine. In your experience would you say
that there is a pressure from the official side, the authorities who want to
know why your child cannot do this or that which can be quite intimidating?
Firstly my child recently had her 3 year check and the woman was really
down on me asking why wasn't she at nursery etc and for some reason I just
didn't have the guts to say to her that I was planning to home school her. The
second point is could you just say a few things about social interaction because
that's another concern I have about my daughter - I don't want her to feel
isolated.
Personally I have
never had any experience of LEA, Truancy Officers or Local Education Authority
people whatsoever and we were very visual. The children were on the doctor’s
list and that kind of thing and nobody ever came to check why they were not at
school because they had never been in the system. I believe that people that
have never been registered in school are usually just left alone.
But I do have a lot of contact with different groups such as Education
Otherwise, that have lots of reports all of the time in their Newsletters, on
their Website and their Web List, of people who are having lots of visits from
Health Visitors and Local Education Authority Inspectors etc and the main thing
is not to feel intimidated. First of all know what your rights are and when that
lady asked you why your child was not in nursery and why wasn't she doing this
or that, it was not the right time for you to be formulating your answer. But
because you know you may have to deal with official people soon, start
formulating you own educational philosophy backed up with references, with an
overall life plan for your child.
If
you start schooling your child from about 2 ½ or 3 you can actually teach them
to write and read and they can be very proficient in lots of things until they
are about 9 or 10 when they are still finding this a quite new and exciting
skill. They will continue to learn but then, after that age, they
will go through a massive cooling off period. This is the time when you want
your child to be most receptive and you want them to be doing lots of things so
by the time they are 9/10 they are winding down, they’re sick of it and they
don't want to be doing anything at all. So
the lady was right that your child would be picking up a lot more skills earlier
but what she hasn't studied, but what we have studied for years, is the long
term effects of forced early schooling. Which, actually, a lot of European
countries have turned away from and are starting to look at the Islamic model
which is play until 7. So even if the children are grouped together there is no
actual hard or factual education but they are grouped together for play and
interaction and that kind of thing. And
leading onto socialisation - this comes up so often I actually call it the 'S'
word. The great big 'thing' of modern schooling is that your children will never
be socialised unless they go and mix with their peers.
I heard a very nice answer from a Brother in America quite recently that
the local education officer came to him and said “How can you make sure that
your child will have any kind of socialisation whatsoever when he won't be going
to school?" He said that "I intend to do everything in my power to
make sure that he gets the same kind of socialisation at home that he would get
in school." And the officer asked how he was going to do that and he
replied "Well every day about lunch time I am going to lock him in the
toilet, beat him up and steal his lunch money so that he does not miss out on
any of the nice social etiquettes that go on in school". I have never met
an unsocial or anti-social home educated child and I have been involved in many,
many different groups over the last 17 years. I have however, on a daily basis,
met some very anti-social, ignorant, rude, disgusting children all of whom are
school children. I don't know if that is just a personal study but it seems to
be quite odd that the ones who are at home most of the time do seem to have a
lot more social skills and interaction. The main thing is that coming from my
discipline, which is child and educational psychology, I understand that from
the studies done on this socialisation and interaction subject that children of
2, 3, 4 and 5 are not ready to leave the mother and the safety of the home
environment and to go into an alien environment and interact with each other.
So they take on two roles- either a defensive role or an offensive role.
They learn to survive by either thinking this child will smack me so I will
smack him or they end up being a victim. Of course there are always exceptions
to the rule and everyone can hold up a child who went to school from the age of
two and continued and they are all fabulous, wonderful and fine but they are not
the majority. If you are going for a majority view you will have to understand
that if you keep your child next to you around the home until they are about
7ish and they are free to come and go or to do other things if they wish, they
will know that they have that home and secure base and until then they become
very, very secure people. There is an excellent book based around this
philosophy called “The Continuum Concept” by Jean Liedloff and it was a
study on attachment parenting done on a former American Indian tribe in the
1970s when the Indian way of life was still active.
Question
4:
How do
you organise your day, especially when you have younger and older children to
teach?
What
we do is everybody starts getting up when they get up and our first priority is
to have something to eat because unhappy, hungry children can't do very much. Then whatever activities I want to do for that day will be
brought out. For the little ones we
tend to follow a Montessori style of education where we will have three
particular activities on offer; so we may take out painting, craft and jigsaws
and these activities will be available on the table and they will choose which
activity they want to do. Mostly the little ones will go about their daily
activities after breakfast and they will wander and meander about until
lunchtime. During that time I will
do my cleaning and housework and while I am doing this I am thinking and
formulating ideas for the rest of the day.
By lunch time the little ones have had their play and are tired and when
they settle down for their naps then it is time to start with the bigger ones
Insha'Allah. In my 17 years experience of teaching them, I never gave my
children more than half an hour each day and more likely it was two hours
between everybody when they sat down and did something. Each child would have
their own file where they keep work that they are doing. Plastic wallets are
wonderful, so whatever the children are doing, whether its just a silly thing on
a piece of paper or a loose piece of work here or there, when you have this
system you can just take the paper and put it in the file and the children see
that they are amassing some kind of content. They then give respect to what they
are doing and you give respect to what they are doing as well. Then you would
think to yourself what you would want to teach today and you would have that
formulated in your mind. I have a great big file of lessons handy so wherever
the discussion has been going that day I can usually lay my hands on something
and we can elaborate and make a lesson out of that Alhamdulillah. When they
finish that some of them want to continue, some of them want to go to the
Library and some want to go on the Internet or do different activities but it is
never more than a couple of hours a day and it is not every day - usually only
about 3 or 4 days a week.
Question
5:
Are we
afraid that our children, if we don't keep them with us and raise them in our
belief system, may go away and do other things outside of our faith?
As
this is the Islamic Home Schooling Advisory Network obviously any education that
we give has an Islamic slant to it. I am not afraid but I am anxious that if I
allowed my children to go to a school that augmented different things than I
believe in, then my children would grow up in that belief system. As Muslim
parents we should be aware of that and not be afraid to address that point.
Question
6:
If we
do not send our children to state schools wouldn’t we just be isolating
ourselves and therefore the school system would never change. We cannot make a
difference by staying away, can we?
There
is always the argument that you can change a system from within but the public
school system we are concerned with here in the UK is with the Department of
Education and Employment and they will continue to merge together. The children here are educated to go into a system to keep it
going. They are not educated to understand themselves or the world around them
or how to change it or make it better. So if you agree with schooling your
children to continue in that system then you must follow that road.
If you do not agree with that and you want your children to have a more
rounded education rather than a schooling, you home educate. I also want to
differentiate between these two concepts. A schooling is something where the
children are schooled and taught to do a particular thing and at the end of the
schooling process the children will have a piece of paper with a number on it
and the number will decide where you can be useful in that system.
An educated person does not need a piece of paper to show they have a
value. Whenever you meet an educated person you feel that they have given you
something and that you have gained from them.
Maybe they don't agree with your discipline or your beliefs, your
doctrine, life or your principles, but you do feel that when you have met an all
round educated person they give you something - even if it is just something to
think about. Whereas if you meet somebody who is a specialist in one area all
they can do is talk about that particular area. They are good when they are at
work but when they are not at work they are not an all round person.
- Replies to questions asked to Sister Caroline Maryam Ward at the ‘IHSAN 2002 Home Education Fair’.
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