What Home Educating Parents Can Teach the World About the Nature of Learning.

By Alan Thomas
(Visiting Fellow Institute of Education,)

Why Did I Become Interested in Informal Learning?

The story of how I became interested in informal learning mirrors what home educating parents go through.

I had felt there was something not quite right about my own schooling so, originally, the research I wanted to do was into what children actually learn in the classroom. My gut feeling was that schooling was totally inefficient, that children spend a lot of time learning very little. At the back of my mind all the time was the question, “Was there something wrong with education? There’s something that really needs looking at.”

I’m a psychologist and the next job was in a psychology department at a university. One advantage of this is that I had the freedom to research what I wanted. So I thought, “Well, how do children learn? Let’s look right back to classical times, from the philosophers right through to modern day.” What I came out with was that the best way to ‘teach’ children was individually. I published an article called ‘Individualized Teaching’

I had researched philosophers from as long as two millennia ago who said that you must discover what each child knows so that you can lead them on. Even in modern times educators talking about the best way of teaching children refer to individualized teaching. The interests of the individual are paramount. Logically that is true, but if you want to teach to the interest of the individual, it doesn’t make sense to teach thirty at the same time. You can’t individualize in the classroom. But the rhetoric of classroom teaching is that this is exactly what you do. When parents go along to a school they can look at the brochures, which say ‘we aim to educate your child in relating to your child’s personal interests and needs’. This is something schools just cannot do.

I was working in Australia at this time and returned for a year to England where I went to see Roland Meighan, I was proud of my article and when I went in to see Roland. He was talking to somebody else and they said, “Ahhh, that Alan Thomas has got this thing about teaching.” I thought, why say it like that? What’s wrong with that then? He had a letter on his desk from a home educator saying, ‘would anyone like to spend a week with us living in to see what it’s like?’ Thanks to him I am here today.

I spent a week with a home educating family in Norwich. The first morning I was down early. I had breakfast, went upstairs, cleaned my teeth came back down again, and sat down with my clipboard. What happened next? Nothing happened. Half an hour later, still nothing happened. And then this boy came past me with a book in front of him, reading the book, and totally ignored me. And that’s how the week continued. By the end if you had asked me to document what I’d seen in the way of learning I would have said, “Not very much, if anything.” I offered to teach the children probability and the Mother very politely said, “Well, maybe later in the week.” And on Friday morning she said “Maybe this afternoon.” In the afternoon she said, “Well now it’s too late. It’s not worth you starting.” Very gently she’d pushed me out of teaching.

But on Wednesday a chance event happened. They were sitting round the table in the kitchen doing projects that were of interest to them. The mother was there cooking and I was sitting there with my clipboard and the conversation ranged from the political to “Can we have sticky buns for tea?” All sorts of topics came up. I thought, “Wow! This is learning through social conversation.” There were little nuggets of learning in there! Nobody knew it; they all simply accepted it somehow.

The next article I wrote was called ‘Conversational Learning’. Again, you can’t do this in a school because you don’t have social conversation in a school. You have peer/peer conversation but you don’t have social conversation with somebody who knows more than you. The teacher/pupil relationship is very set in its ways. At the end of the article I said the only way to find out more is through studying children who are home educated. I went back to a book that I had dismissed before; a wonderful book by Barbara Tizard called “How Children Learn at Home and in School.”

The book studied children who were half time nursery and half time at home, a standard thing in the British education system. They wanted to see what their language was like at home and in school. What they expected was a big class difference; that if you were middle class the level of language would be better at home, and if you’re working class the level would be better than in school. But what they found astounded them. Anybody: working class or middle class, the level of language used between children and parents at home was of a far higher standard than that used in school. Not only was it of a higher standard but also the children themselves were able to follow their own logical means of enquiry. For example one child pursued his own understanding of Father Christmas and it is hard to work out if you’re trying to be logical. It’s following an argument through, ‘how can – if’: ‘how can you do this, if that’.

Whereas in school the typical example they give is when a child walks up to a teacher with a piece of paper and says “Can you cut it in half for me please?” and the teacher thinks ‘Aha! Here’s a teaching opportunity!’ So she says “Go and get the scissors then.” And the child gets them. By now the teacher has been distracted by a lot of things and then says, “Now what am I doing now? I am cutting it in …, what am I doing to this piece of paper?”
“You’re cutting it.” The child says.
“Yes, but what am I cutting it into, in two pieces, so what am I cutting it in?”
The child says “You’re cutting it for me into two pieces.”
This goes on for a bit until the teacher says, “I’m cutting it in half.”
That child had asked the question “Can you cut it in half for me please?” There is a totally different quality of language between the two.

I went out to interview home educators. This was early in the nineteen-nineties. This was quite difficult at the time, as there was a lot of resistance to anyone coming from the outside who, ‘might dob you in to the authorities’. What started as a very small-scale research project blossomed into a study of a hundred families based in Australia and in England. I was interested in everybody; but I didn’t want to go to groups where the only purpose was religious. There was such a wide range of home educating families from extremely formal, (one family rang a bell at 9am and the children came in from the garden for the lessons to start,) to the other extreme where the children did what they wanted as in the example I’ve just given.

In the beginning, when I had about 20 families in England, I gave a paper at a psychological conference where they thought I was crazy! Then I went back to Australia and I had a phone call from somebody in Tasmania who said, “Would you like to come and do some research?” I asked how he knew about me, and he said “You were in the paper the other day.” I went down to the state library and looked up the local paper, ‘The Hobart Mercury’ and couldn’t find any reference to me anywhere. Then I looked at the ‘World News’ and there it was – “Academic Says Home Education Works!” Eventually I got a total of a hundred families taking part in the study. .

I found a majority of people doing a bit of structured work in the mornings leaving the rest of the day free. Others were completely and utterly informal, doing what the Americans call ‘unschooling,’ sometimes known in England as autonomous, and in Australia as ‘natural learning’. Others were at the other extreme where it was like school at home. I would not for a moment say one thing is better than another. The usual advice to a new home educator who hasn’t decided what to do, is to do what you think is best; start with something that’s fairly formal and see how you get on.

However, I got interested in informal learning because I think formal learning isn’t a big deal. A lot of professional educators think just taking a child out of the school system is a big deal, but it’s not really. There is no reason why anyone can’t take a child through a textbook, if they determined to. Informal learning is a different category altogether. I was interested in those parents who had started formally and had gradually become informal because they are the ones who were discovering it for themselves and were not accepting any ideology.

How Do Parents Become Informal Home Educators?

There were two influences: first, the gradual realisation that school at home doesn’t work. You don’t need a timetable. These families had started with for example, planned lessons, and then learned it was not necessary. You just carry on from where you were before. Lesson planning, curriculum planning and timetables just aren’t needed at all even if you stay fairly formal. There is no point in giving exercises because if you can do something, you can do it. There is no need to prove it over and over again. There is no need for marking or assessment because you know exactly where your child is up to. The beauty of it is the interactive element. Because you always know where your child is at, you’re not wasting any time and it’s highly intensive.

That’s getting informal already by official educational standards but it goes further than this because the parents realised that their children were learning a lot outside the formal system that they had anticipated. Because it was so intensive, most parents came to restrict teaching or structured learning to an hour or two in the morning. They came to realise that children were learning a lot outside this time without being taught. Phrases like, “I don’t know where he got that from, he just knows it,” or even “We do a course in math but more math seems to happen outside math.”

The second very important influence was from the children themselves. These are children who resist formal learning. At first this was terrible for the families. Parents told me that they were prepared to teach a very interesting lesson and the children resisted learning in this way; their eyes would become glazed, they weren’t interested! Now, there is a significant difference here between school and home. In school you don’t have all the children listening all the time, but you can’t just say, ‘well we’ll stop there and do what you want for an hour’. You have to continue to teach the lesson regardless of who is listening or not listening. But at home, the feedback that you get is acute and the parents find it is pointless to keep teaching in this way. If you ally this with the observation that these children are learning anyway outside the formal system then these children seem to be learning informally. Some of these parents abandoned formal teaching altogether as a result. This is fascinating and leads to the title of my talk; “what home educating parents can teach the world about the nature of learning”.

In schools and with professional educators everything comes from the adult, whereas home educators with children learning informally say that the child himself learns a lot using the parent as a resource.

Literacy.

A brief word on literacy; I was not expecting literacy to feature too much in my research but what I found was surprising. Parents were telling me that their children had learnt to read anything from the ages of 2 to 11. I thought it was odd., I’ve seen in other studies that say some children learn to read late without any apparent drawback. In fact, because children in this country are forced to learn to read, whether they like it or not, whether they’re interested or not, you get a rise in the standard of literacy in schools. It’s like saying that if you swim 3 hours a day then there will be a rise in swimming ability and in the same way if you go on and on about literacy it increases. However, this other research then showed that those children whose level of literacy had increased were less likely to read for pleasure.. In my research when the children learned late, (say they are not reading at nine and then they start reading,) it was said to be ‘like being on a downhill train’! Within 6 months or a year they are reading at an adult level. So when they are ready they will learn and they enjoy it.

How Do We Understand Informal Learning?

There are some people who have researched adult informal learning who describe it as ‘elusive,’ ‘evanescent,’ ‘implicit’ and very, very difficult to get hold of. Learning without knowing you’re learning is very hard to document. How many people know how their children learnt to talk? They learn to talk. You see them learning sometimes and you get glimpses into the learning process but, first of all, they are not taught. Informal learning is very difficult to pin down.

I was very lucky in the first book I wrote to meet one parent who became obsessed with keeping a document of all her child’s learning and she had a pile of exercise books, which she used to put everything down in. As she said, this was really informal learning and I spent weeks with this family when I was doing my research in Tasmania. The Mother used to say, “I don’t know where it’s all going. There are threads going here and threads going there and I don’t understand what’s happening! I really feel sometimes I want to say “right let’s get that text book out and let’s get on with some proper learning!” But she didn’t and the child continued to learn. In fact, this child learned everything except what her mother tried to teach her, which was the multiplication tables, and this was when she was ten or eleven. Now she is 17, is in college and running her own little business, teaching children fencing and she gets her money from that. Math is not her favourite subject but she has done well enough and manages things, so this completely informal approach to math does work. She did learn her 20 times table before any of the others because she found out that you could get money from supermarket trolleys. At the time this was 20 cents so when she was only about 5 or 6 years old, she knew her twenty times table very quickly. The motivation was there.

So, trying to understand informal learning is difficult. You have all these little bits and pieces. How on earth does a child in their brain, or me or you, put them all together into what becomes a coherent body of knowledge?

It seems there is informal learning which is implicit; things you pick up without knowing you are picking them up. People sometimes say, “I don’t know how I know that but I know it” and often it may be quite profound. Then there is informal learning which is goal directed.

Current Research Article into Informal Education.

At this point I decided to write an article on informal learning to try to pull together anything I could to understand it. To that end I have been collaborating with an anthropologist, Harriet Patterson, and we have just completed a long academic article to further our understanding of informal learning. This was also partly in response to an Irish home educator who said that he feared the authorities would never understand informal learning.

So we looked across the board and there is some very interesting research into adult informal learning. One piece is with people in professions. The researchers wanted to know what informal learning had contributed to the advancement of their knowledge. Now they are already qualified and working, and when they were asked to record instances of informal learning they didn’t know what the researchers were talking about. The researchers had to explain what informal learning was. The upshot was that some of these; lawyers, medical specialists, came to understand that they were picking up a large amount in what one described as ‘dribs and drabs’ without knowing they were learning it, just by being around with colleagues.

I will quote from one if I may. This is a lawyer: “All through my career I have been engaged in informal learning without being aware of it; what your researchers call informal learning. Until you actually sit down and think about it you don’t realise how much you actually do. It’s not something you give any thought to at the time you are doing it, it just seems to happen in dribs and drabs. If I come across something I haven’t come across before I can just ask a colleague because he has been around. Obviously, you can’t sit all day chatting to people, but it is important to have exchanges with people, have room for that, not just the work things – and sometimes you might get a little bit of extra out of them that you never expected.”

A lot of research into informal learning is related to work. People go into a new job and they pick up a lot of their information informally. There is some research that shows people learn more efficiently informally than if they have specific little courses designed to teach certain skills. A good example of this is a study with Brazilian carpenters who, without ever having been on a course, have a better understanding of the math related to carpentry than do apprentices who have just finished a taught course teaching the same material. That kind of informal learning must be good – because you don’t even know you are doing it! These people are simply learning alongside others who are better at it than they are and they gradually pick it up. The same is true of midwives, for example.

So we then looked at early learning. We all know that you cannot teach infants to talk, but there is very little research into informal early learning because it is assumed by the educators that, even with very young children, it is always adult led, that any learning which is of any use must come from the adult, maybe fairly informally, but the adult sets the agenda. What this article re-enforces, however, is the pro-active nature of informal learning. Children will learn what they need to. Children will learn what they need to in the culture that they are in. In other words, as somebody said, “we are predisposed to learn our culture”. Now that culture includes intellectual elements: basic math, being articulate, learning to read.

How do children learn to read informally? Well, there are words around you all the time. There are shop names, street names, and you see adults reading. It is something that you do in the culture and because it is part of what you do in the culture you are interested in doing it; hence children of three or four will pretend to write because it is a cultural skill they want to acquire. Another thing is that parents read to children, and many children just ‘learn to read.’ Not all, of course, some have problems, but a lot just seem to learn to read without being ‘taught’. This is really shocking to a professional educator! In fact the chief inspector of schools for Ofsted said, and I quote “the idea that children could learn to read by osmosis is plain crackers.” Now that really riles me because you have somebody here who is supposed to be well educated himself, but he is not willing even to think of anything else; he just goes along with one simple ideology without allowing for any other possibilities!

We made an interesting finding when looking at learning through play such as happens in Nursery schools for example. There is a debate in this country between the ‘free flow’ play people and the educational ‘managers’ who say that no play is worth anything unless it is properly managed with educational objectives within the play. And yet it was observed that if you simply leave children to play, “within minutes of being given props children are creating detailed and sustained play activities and in these activities they recreate the world they experience. They cook, they clean, they polish, they plan, they travel, they explore, they fall ill, they are hospitalised and recover, they teach, they scold, they punish, they fall in love, they get married and have children. There is hardly any area of life that can’t be found in children’s play! The way we interpreted this is that, again, it is part of the culture. Play is a way to practice being in the culture. Overall, therefore, what is coming out of this article is that informal learning is characterised by a desire on the part of the child to learn the culture. This is not to learn the culture in order to be in the culture – he is in the culture from the start. Someone has described this as being like a club, the child is a member of that club therefore he naturally becomes a member of the culture.

How Do Children Learn Informally?

Learning through play is accepted for young children. We know that children continue to learn through play after they have reached school age. And yet in schools it is looked upon as a waste of time and of recreational value only. However, there are countless examples of children learning and trying out quite complex things through play.

We tried to take this even further: how do these children actually learn then? One way they learn is through observation – by watching what people do. There was a lovely advert on the TV in Australia aiming to cut down on alcoholic consumption. It showed two little children acting like their parents. The Mother was in the house and the Father came in saying ‘oh, I’ve had a hard day!’ and this little kid of three or four went straight to the fridge pretending to get his beer and drink it. So the little girl said ‘Well I’ll have a glass of wine’ and the caption was ‘Everything you do they are watching … and learning!’ We all use observation as a way to learn and so do young children.

Another way of learning we came across was practice. You may think, ‘oh no, that sounds boring; it’s what children in school do!’ but we found that children learning informally, they do a lot of practice. There was one little girl being educated informally and we were in the car once when, out of the blue she said, ‘in six years time I’ll be thirteen’ and her mother said, ‘that’s good, how did you work that out?’ and the little girl replied, ‘I always do add ups and take always in my head.’ She was practicing. She wasn’t being told too; it was just an informal thing to do, and this was how she was able to work things out.

Another way of learning we observed was ‘intellectual search.’ Barbara Tizard used this phrase. When they are very young it is asking questions all the time; following a logical train of thought either on their own or with parents or whatever. As children grow older this seems to be extended. I have found in my research and in follow up research I am doing, that older children who are educated at home informally are able to follow something as far as they would like. One boy studied only chemistry for a year. This is advanced intellectual search.

We have touched already on learning through conversation and learning through play - which is as little understood as informal learning.

However we still don’t know how, from all these little bits and pieces of knowledge and without realising it, children come to ‘know’ in informal learning. There might be elements of teaching such as when a child asks something and you tell them, you can call that an element of teaching, but it is very different from a parent saying ‘Right, I am going to teach you something now.’

Conclusions

So what do we conclude from all this? Two things. Firstly, in so far as intellectual skills and knowledge are part and parcel of the culture, they can be acquired without being separated from all the social things that people are doing, simply as a part of growing up. The best parallel is learning to talk. Children learn the grammar of their language, which is very complex, without any teaching at all.

Secondly, the kind of learning that is going on during the first few years can be extended beyond early childhood and through to the later years. Professional educators cannot see this. Suddenly there is a cut off and children are exposed to a totally different kind of pedagogy. The first pedagogy is pro-active and informal. The second is ‘I will tell you what to learn.’ They are very, very different.

Follow-up Research.

Just as a taste of some follow up research, currently, Harriet Patterson and I are writing a follow up to my first book.. Most of the parents, no matter how formal or informal they were, now say that they could have been a little bit more informal, or they wish they had been more informal. That is a general finding no matter what else the parents say. There are a variety of outcomes. Some of the children do extremely well; top university entrance scores etc. Some are more middle of the road. What they all seem to have, is an idea of where they want to go. For example, somebody reaches ‘A’ level, or the equivalent, and you ask what university they are going to. They might say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I will go actually.’ They have learned to be responsible for themselves and to make their own decisions, whereas most people who have been right through school just continue afterwards into something.

[This article was first printed in Learning Life Magazine (definitely worth subscribing to by the way) and was reprinted here with permission from Alan Thomas]

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