Every Parent’S Dilemma: Why Do We Ignore Schools That Nurture Children?

By Don Berg

Fact

The required foundation for effective and efficient learning is well-being.

Good News

Children's psychological well-being is supported in K-12 schools that facilitate self-directed learning.

Bad News

The psychological well-being of children in mainstream K-12 schools is consistently diminished.

Silver Lining

This good news can transform the bad news.

Why do K-12 schools that facilitate self-directed learning serve less than 5% of all students in the USA despite over 100 years of good results?

The systematic growth of school models that support self-directed learning has been stunted by hidden barriers. The hidden barriers also prevent more mainstream schools from sustainably adapting their practices to become more nurturing. The barriers are based on a theory of education that is wrong. K-12 policy makers at every level can remove those barriers by making an explicit commitment to ensuring that the schools they oversee support well-being. This book includes the ""Resolution to Build on Well-Being to Achieve K-12 Equity"" which you can take to your favorite policy makers to advocate for the well-being of all students.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Feb 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490743448

Don Berg

Don Berg is an education psychology researcher, alternative education practitioner, author, and has been active in local and state politics. His research has been published recently in the peer-reviewed journals Other Education and The Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior. He has over 20 years of experience leading children in self-directed educational settings. He is also the founder of Schools of Conscience, an organization on a mission to build the nurturing capacity of all K-12 schools. For about a decade he has been involved in politics in volunteer and paid positions in Washington and Oregon. He currently lives at the Joyful Llama Ranch in West Linn, Oregon.

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Copyright 2015 Don Berg.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

ISBN

: 978-1-4907-4345-5 (sc)

ISBN

: 978-1-4907-4344-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917103

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Contents

Every Parent’s Dilemma:

Why Do We Ignore Schools That Nurture Children?

Appendix 1:

Estimating Our Influence

Appendix 2:

Why don’t African-American children perform as well as white students in school?

Endnotes

About the Author

Every Parent’s Dilemma:

Why Do We Ignore Schools That Nurture Children?

What is wrong with the school is what is wrong with the family is what is wrong with society. We are a society that has failed to gear itself to enable people to meet their basic needs.

James P. Comer, What I Learned In School p.49 (Jossey-Bass, 2009)

K-12 schools are failing to nurture our children. But to hear the mainstream media tell it, you would think that the key problems of our K-12 system are either funding issues, diversity issues, or technical issues of pedagogy and accountability for achieving specified academic results. They do not even realize that nurturing is required, yet is absent. When critics notice how difficult circumstances (socioeconomic or otherwise) impair the capacity of parents to nurture their children, the critics mysteriously neglect to consider that a nurturing response by schools might be warranted.

Today the vast majority of parents default to entrusting schools with the care of their children for most of the waking hours of childhood, yet they too fail to consider a nurturing response to the evident difficulties schools have in fulfilling their duties to children. There are reasons for the absence of these basic considerations of nurturing, by both critics and parents, but it is time to put this ignorance behind us. Our children are not being supported, while they are in school, to meet their primary human needs or basic needs, as Yale University’s Dr. Comer calls them in the quote above. Unless we take corrective action, the lack of nurturing will surely become a monumental disaster for our society.

Fortunately, there is a growing vanguard of both individuals and organizations who have been pioneering nurturing responses in K-12, myself included. We are a small and fractious minority. Education researchers, an elite club I joined in 2011, have only recently taken our programs seriously enough to study them and early findings suggest a scientific vindication of our faith in nurturing through facilitation of self-directed learning. Our proclamations about the benefits of nurturing have been falling on deaf ears for too long. It is time for us to come together to deliver the nurturing message in a new way that can enable all of society to benefit from what we have accomplished.

I have been involved with K-12 self-directed learning communities in the forms of democratic schools, home schooling, and non-school learning communities for over 20 years. These education alternatives have been around for over 100 years, and today all of them put together serve less than 5% of the K-12 student population in the United States (see Appendix 1: Estimating Our Influence). Given how few students in the United States attend schools that support it, the influence of self-directed learning in K-12 is limited and substantive support is in short supply. K-12 programs that support self-directed learning are rare. Self-directed learning programs that receive public funding are a rarity amongst the rare; they are vanishingly scarce. When they dare to access public funds, they are under constant threat of being arbitrarily required to make important learning decisions for children, being made to take control of children’s time and attention in ways that are detrimental to the children, or summarily closed by bureaucrats who don’t understand them. Self-directed learning programs usually choose to rely on scarce private funding as a form of self-defense, thereby also reducing their accessibility.

These hazards and limitations to self-directed learning programs stem from the default, naïve concept of education that has guided almost all schooling from its inception thousands of years ago. Since the 1980’s, the hazards and limitations to self-directed learning programs have been made worse by a political consensus on the necessity of imposing testing and standardization. That consensus is simply extending the logic of the default, naïve concept of education to a post-industrial mass-market scale. Dr. Yong Zhao, Professor of Education at the University of Oregon, in his 2012 book World Class Learners shows how effectively imposing national standards and high stakes testing, as China and other