The Social and Academic Advantages of Homeschooling | 52

Episode Intro [00:00]

Rebecca:

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about home education is that they aren’t properly socialised, and that home-educated young people can’t get into university. I think those are two of the big ones that I see quite a lot.

Ellen:

There is no environment as nurturing as home. We often find parents will say, ” We were really struggling with this. My child was struggling with, say, maths at school, and we couldn’t get anywhere. And we’d come home, and all of a sudden we were behind in maths, like a year behind. Which is a funny concept, because in homeschooling there’s no such thing as behind. The child is where they’re at. But they’ve come into homeschooling, and they’re saying, ” My child is behind. And then all of a sudden, they’re free to ask questions.

Rebecca:

It’s really important that we give young people agency, because we know that when it comes to intrinsic motivation, that motivation to get up and do the thing that could be hard and that maybe you don’t really want to do, but you know it’s good for you, we know that having that agency and that control is really helpful.

Produced intro [01:04]

Voiceover:

Welcome to the Future Learners podcast, the home for parents and students thriving with homeschooling in Australia. Your hosts, Brett Campbell and Ellen Brown, are the co-founders of Euka Future Learning, Australia’s largest online K-12 homeschooling provider. Join them as they guide you from uncertainty to complete confidence. Let’s get into it.

Introduction [01:27]

Ellen:

So today I have the absolute pleasure of being able to speak to Dr Rebecca English, who is one of Australia’s most respected researchers in home education. Unlike a lot of people who are finding out how many kids are homeschooling, one of the things that really attracted me to your work, Dr Rebecca English, is the fact that you have looked into why families started homeschooling, and what that looks like for the long term outcomes for children themselves.

So today’s podcast, if you’re with Euka and you’ve got that feeling like all of us parents, am I doing the right thing, or are my kids going to be okay? Or if you haven’t started homeschooling and you’re thinking about homeschooling, this will be a great podcast for you, because we’ll get some answers to some really wonderful questions. So welcome.

Rebecca:

Thank you so much. That was such a lovely introduction. I feel like it’s a different person you’re introducing.

Ellen:

I think one of the interesting things about you and I is that quite often we’re in the same publications. When there’s interviews, or you might see things on TV, or you might read things in newspapers about homeschooling, nearly always you’ll see Dr Rebecca English and this is what she’s saying. Many times we find ourselves in the same publications, and to have this chance to actually combine forces is really interesting.

Rebecca:

Wonder twin powers activate.

What the public gets wrong about home education [02:59]

Ellen:

That’s right. So look, you’ve spent years researching homeschooling families. What do you think the wider public still gets completely wrong about home education?

Rebecca:

I think one of the biggest misconceptions about home education are that they aren’t properly socialised, and that home educated young people can’t get into university. I think those are two of the big ones that I see quite a lot.

I’m also surprised by how little journalists know when they ask you a question. Ostensibly they’ve been doing some research for this story they’re writing, and they still have some, my grandfather used to call it wacko the diddle, so wacko the diddle questions for you about homeschooling that you just think, I could never have predicted that. That’s random.

How Rebecca came to research homeschooling [03:45]

Ellen:

So what brought you into the space of homeschooling? Homeschooling is a little bit trendy now, and certainly more common now, but you’ve been in this space for a long time. What drew you to this part of education?

Rebecca:

Okay, so actually my first degree is a Bachelor of Business majoring in advertising. So I’ve always been really interested in consumer behaviour. But I got to the end of an ad degree and I said to my parents, look, I can’t, I will be terrible in advertising. And then they said, look, why don’t you do teaching?

So I went back to uni and did teaching. And then while I was doing that I was working in some really tough schools. All of my experiences were with really low socioeconomic schools, with really disadvantaged young people.

I got to the end of my time and I knew I wanted to do a PhD. My PhD was really intense. I looked at international students who come to Australia into secondary schools, and I met some young people who were very privileged financially, but quite underprivileged emotionally and socially. It was really a harrowing experience, and I wanted to do something completely different.

I found myself unexpectedly pregnant. I’d been told I couldn’t have children with number one. And then I was doing all sorts of research around being a gentle parent, and how to not be a parent like my own parents, and wound up finding out about homeschooling. I was surprised at 33 years of age to learn that you could homeschool in this country. I had never thought about it.

So I decided to do some research. But because it’s so odd, I went to my dean and I said, look, I really want to research homeschooling, find out why parents are doing it. I know it’s small. And her response to me was, she really didn’t mind, as long as I also looked at the impact on women’s lives. So that’s really how I started.

Ellen:

Okay, so what year was that that you did that?

Rebecca:

I then had the baby and started doing interviews not long after I’d had her. So 2011, 2012. So I’ve been looking at this for a really long time now.

Ellen:

I think that’s a really interesting story, because my own journey into home education had the same kind of moments. I also worked with kids that were moving into the juvenile justice system, and in that, having that time where I thought, education has to matter. It has to be so relevant. It has to make sense. It has to answer that question that you’ll find in every one of the Euka lessons: why does this matter? That had to be answered as a teacher before I could ever put a lesson in front of those kids.

But then when I had my own younger three, that opportunity to go, wait, what? Homeschooling? I can actually make some choices about this. Same kind of thing, where you have that moment of what is going on in the classroom and what is going on when you’re trying to educate. And now I have my own precious person. It makes it a very personal journey, not just an intellectual one.

Rebecca:

I like the question too, because as a sociologist, we’re always researching why is something presented as truth, and who benefits from this being presented as truth. And I feel that really aligns with what you’ve just said about what you’re writing into your lessons. It’s beautiful.

Why the homeschooling population has changed [06:56]

Ellen:

So does the dramatic rise in home education surprise you?

Rebecca:

No. But that said, if you’d asked me a couple of years ago if we’d reached peak homeschooling, I would have said yes. But I don’t think that anymore.

I think what’s interesting, and I’m sure your data would back this up, is how the community has changed over the intervening 15 years that I’ve been really looking at this. We’ve gone from parents who might be more religious or more ideological in their decision to homeschool, to very much more what I term accidentals, the people who kind of fell into homeschooling. This was never their intention.

Queensland data bears that out, and so too does the trend of the numbers at different grades. We’re seeing much more young people who have had quite extensive experiences in school. In the numbers in Queensland, there’s actually more in secondary than there is in primary. So it used to be something where maybe you play around a little bit, run a few risks with primary, but then things get serious and you send them to high school. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.

So I think that has changed. I think the community makeup has changed. We see much more highly educated, professional families choosing it now. So I think it’s a really interesting space to be working in.

Ellen:

Absolutely. We see the same thing. What we’re actually seeing, as in all things with the cycle of the way everything works, when I first started moving into homeschooling, people were choosing homeschooling for their young ones, right from while they’re still toddling around, and easing into homeschooling. And like you say, off to high school quite often, that was the case.

We have seen, obviously, our high school area in Euka is our biggest cohort of students by a long shot. But we are starting to see a trend, like you say, of intellectual people, and people who have seen perhaps friends’ children going through, or their own experience going through high school, and going, I think I could do something different here. So we’re starting to see the younger grades starting to come back again now in numbers. So that’s been interesting.

Rebecca:

I think what’s interesting too is when you follow the forums online, more and more people are saying, I’ve got this three-year-old, I’ve got this four-year-old, how do I start now in order to ensure success through that journey? So yeah, look at us patting each other on the back. We’re finding exactly the same thing.

Parents are already teaching the most important lessons [09:25]

Ellen:

I just think it’s so interesting that you say that, because I always smile when I hear a parent say, I’ve got a three year old and I want to start homeschooling, where can I start? Because it says to me, I’m already thinking about how to give this child a wonderful education.

And the second thing that makes me smile is they don’t realise they’re already doing it. They’re already teaching that child the most important lessons the child will ever learn. They are taught by parents at home. I always use that as an encouragement for parents that are nervously stepping into homeschooling, and I say, you’ve already taught your children the most important things. It’s just the topic’s different. As long as we can support you with the topics that you want to cover, then you’ll have no problems at all with that.

Rebecca:

Absolutely.

What agency means [10:16]

Ellen:

So there’s a word here that I’m really interested in. It’s actually new for me as well. One word that appears repeatedly through your research is agency. For parents who’ve never heard that term before, or me, what does agency actually look like in the life of a child, and why is it so important?

Rebecca:

Well, when we’re talking about agency in an academic sense, what we mean is your ability to control your world and your surroundings. And in terms of education, it’s your learning experiences.

So what we know from the way that curriculum has changed over the last 20 years since I’ve been out of the classroom, is we’ve moved away from giving that agency to teachers and young people to negotiate learning around topics that are of interest to that group of young people. We have centralised and standardised curriculum. We have centralised and standardised pedagogy, through things like that program we had in Queensland, where it was basically, you’re in lesson three, term four of maths in grade six, this is basically what we’re doing. So that takes away that control and that power to manage your own lives from teachers and young people.

It’s really important that we give young people agency, because we know that when it comes to intrinsic motivation, that motivation to get up and do the thing that could be hard and that maybe you don’t really want to do, but you know it’s good for you, we know that having that agency and that control is really helpful.

So in a home education setting, agency might look like, I really need you to learn about, I don’t know, algebra, but making it about something to do with something that’s of interest to that young person. Bikes, or cooking, or something like that. It’s about saying, here is the work that you need to get done for the day. How you arrange your time is totally up to you.

So really it’s about looking at home education from a perspective of tasks to be completed, rather than time to do it. To provide that agency gives that young person the motivation, and it teaches them how to manage their learning in their own world in a way that suits them, which obviously has benefits later on in life.

Ellen:

I absolutely love that. As a parent myself, we all know the minute you say you’ve got to do this, it’s the last thing they want to do. But if you say, I’ve got this, this and this that needs to get done by this time, go for it, things get done. I think the same with learning, like you say, trying to ensure that there’s relevance in what they’re learning, but that they have some choices around how much time they spend, or even how they learn.

One of the things that we’ve really worked hard on is to make sure that within a lesson there is a component of the reading of the content, but then there’s a practical, hands-on part of a lesson, or there is a digital activity lesson, or there is a downloadable activity sheet. And that kids, even through that, that word agency, I love that and haven’t used it before, but that they have agency in the way that they even attempt their learning, or display their learning, or show what they have learned.

Giving choice to a child who has never had it [13:22]

Ellen:

How do parents encourage that? Because as a parent, you don’t want to be one of those, just do as you please. How much choice? How do you work with a child that, say, they’ve come out of school, there’s no agency there, and then they come into homeschooling and it’s all of a sudden like, here you are. How do you balance that as a parent, or help a child to learn to manage time like that?

Rebecca:

That’s a really interesting question. And technically, schools do do it. As the kid gets older, as the young person gets to be more towards the senior phase of learning, schools should be being more hands-off. It’s really like teaching a young person to ride a bike, isn’t it? We hold on, we hold on, and then eventually we let go. And that’s really what it has to be like.

In my own experience, and I know the plural of anecdote isn’t data, but my children have never been to school, so they’ve always been homeschooled. So it’s been really easy for us to just kind of increase the workload.

But when you’re coming out of school, you do need to remember that your young person needs time to adjust to a new workflow, and a new experience, and a new day that isn’t arranged around what the teacher says when the bell rings, those kinds of things. So giving them some time to get used to that, but making sure that we’re targeting their learning to things that they are interested in, helps. And so does even setting limits around screens. That’s a big one.

You don’t have free time until 3:30 in the afternoon, and only then if you’ve completed all of your tasks for the day. Once they’re done. You can do them first thing in the morning, you can do them half an hour before 3:30 rolls around. But ultimately helping them to learn to manage that time in a way that suits them.

Some people need a deadline in order to get their work done. Some people can jump in straight away and just do it. It really has to match that young person’s needs. I think I just waffled then, I’m really sorry.

Ellen:

No, it was really good, because it’s not only from research but from personal experience. It makes so much of a difference when you know that the person who’s giving you some advice is actually living it. I think that’s always been a big one. For all of us parents, it’s helpful to know that.

When a child needs to feel safe before anything else [15:41]

Ellen:

So many families that come to homeschooling, they’re coming because they’ve had a really difficult time. They’re anxious, they’re burnt out, they’ve got some learning challenges, things going on. From your research, what happens to children when they finally feel safe enough to learn again? How do you see their ability to learn in the setting where they’re uncomfortable, to this homeschooling setting?

Rebecca:

That’s a really interesting question, because what the research shows is that school can’t, or school refusal, is strongly correlated with anxiety and neurodivergence. So a lot of these young people who are coming into homeschooling because they are school can’t, are coming from a background of high levels of anxiety, high levels of stress, depression, all sorts of neurodivergence rolled in there as well.

So it’s really important that we understand and honour that young person’s need for space, for agency, and also for healing after this very stressful experience. There is no way that a young person who is significantly anxious is going to be able to jump straight into formalised lessons, like we’ve seen in school, in a homeschool setting.

I think parents need to remember that it doesn’t have to look like school either. The school that we did when we were at school, and the school that I taught in, is not what school looks like today. We need to go back to much more of those older models where it was more integrated, where young people were much more interest-led, where this young person had the chance to say, I’m really interested in bikes, what can I do to make my learning about bikes?

If you really think about it, there’s lots of opportunities for that young person to engage with bikes as a concept. That teaches them maths, that teaches them science, that teaches them English, that teaches them history. All of these things come together under one concept, if we’re sort of clever about it. And there are lots of opportunities for people to access resources that will help them to do that.

So I think really honouring that child’s need for space when they’re school refusing and quite anxious, and even if they’re not fully school refusing but quite anxious, and then also honouring their needs. We know from data that governments produce that a significant number of young people, more so than is representative in the school population, come to homeschooling because they have a neurodivergence. So we need to be working with therapists, we need to be working with psychologists, to ensure that that young person has their learning needs met in a way that works for them as well.

Working with professionals outside the school system [18:13]

Ellen:

Absolutely right. And just a plug for our next podcast with Lisa Boland, who’s a child psychologist who also homeschools. So it’s really important, like you said, to seek out professionals.

I think sometimes when you’ve got a child in the school system, and especially if the school has got funding and things like that organised for their child in school, sometimes you can feel a little bit lost when you exit the school system. And all of a sudden you think, my child had… Unfortunately, and I’m not saying this is in all cases, but quite commonly what we hear is that funding that they think their child had, and this special person that was in the school with them, wasn’t necessarily with them all the time at school.

So we certainly get feedback from parents saying, engaging a professional outside of the school system has been so much more beneficial than what they thought their child was getting in the school system.

The other thing that you mentioned that I thought was really important was, it’s interesting how the media is very excited to do stories about school refusal, or truancy, but not ever looking at the root cause. Like you were just mentioning, there’s something going on there. Because on the whole, school’s a great place to be. You’ve got a heap of friends, you’re doing activities, you’re entertained all day long. School can be a wonderful experience. But if a child’s not feeling safe or heard, or their needs are not being met, then it’ll come out in school refusal, it’ll come out in anxiety. So it’s sort of a building kind of situation there.

Teachers are leaving for the same reason [20:03]

Rebecca:

We also see that in teachers, right? Teachers are leaving the profession in droves because they also aren’t happy. We don’t talk about teachers as school refusing or school can’t, but in many ways they are. They’re just as anxious as the young people in their care.

It does go back to agency. If we want to fix this issue, we need to go back to giving teachers agency over those classrooms, to negotiate with the young people in their care. If the government really wants to reduce the numbers of homeschoolers, it’s really not a hard thing to do. All they have to do is re-engage teachers with their classes, give them the capacity to manage that learning in the way that we home educators do.

We’re able to create learning experiences that meet the young person where they are. And teachers would love to do the same thing. They just don’t have the capacity to do that. So it’s a wholesale problem that we face, unfortunately.

Ellen:

I think that’s interesting. I think we’ve probably got to the point now with governments that they seem to have moved away from, we need to try and stop people going to homeschooling. There seems to be a greater shift in support now.

Certainly we’re seeing that in Queensland, where they’re actually meeting with homeschooling families regularly and saying, how can we support you? How can we help you? We have seen in our Queensland families that are coming through just a comfort in that, that all of a sudden it doesn’t feel like the educational police are on their back.

I think that’s a wonderful thing, because it is so much better to know that we can have options for people that work for people, rather than think we all have to do things the same way, because our experiences are different and the way we learn is different.

No environment as nurturing as home [21:57]

Ellen:

What I was saying there about safety, there is no environment as nurturing as home. We often find parents will say, we’re really struggling with this. My child was struggling with, say, maths at school and we couldn’t get anywhere. And we’ve come home and all of a sudden we were behind in maths, like a year behind. Which is a funny concept, because there’s no such thing as behind. The child is where they’re at.

But they’ve come into homeschooling and they’re saying, my child is behind. And then all of a sudden, they’re free to ask questions. They’re free to be able to say, I don’t understand something, let’s go back and look. And they go scooting ahead. It’s so interesting to see that that environment change can be such a huge one.

Rebecca:

It’s not shameful to admit I don’t know my eight times tables, because who are you embarrassed in front of? Mum?

Ellen:

That’s right. I always find it surprising when a child that’s been very anxious, they’ve been out of school quite a bit, or a child who’s got a mental health trouble or whatever’s going on, and they’ve missed school, and then you have the opportunity to engage with that child, and the child will say, I’m hopeless at maths. And you think, no, you haven’t been. You’ve missed steps in maths.

It’d be like me saying I’m hopeless at speaking Japanese. Which I am, because I’ve never actually been taught to speak it.

So trying to help kids, that’s probably one of the things that I love about seeing kids homeschooling, is that growth in belief about themselves and their capabilities. That they’re not limited anymore by who’s in their class, or by what their teacher thinks that they’re capable of. I think that’s a really beautiful thing.

Parent engagement and working towards mastery [23:43]

Rebecca:

A hundred percent. And also the capacity of parents to work one on one with that young person. We know that in education, engagement with parents is one of the best predictors of success, right? And there’s no more engaged cohort than a parent who sits down with that young person and says, why are you struggling with eight squared or nine squared? Oh, it’s because you didn’t fix up on your times tables. Let’s go back and let’s figure out our times tables, and that will help you to see that the little superscript two doesn’t mean times eight by two, it means eight times eight.

And you’re able to have that conversation, and you can keep having it, because there’s no bell that’s going to ring to tell you that after 70 minutes maths is finished.

That’s another aspect of schooling that’s quite strange. We work towards mastery in homeschooling. We don’t work towards mastery in school. After 70 minutes, maths stops mattering. It’s time to have lunch, or it’s time to do English, or it’s time to do business studies, or whatever other subject you’ve got to go to. Which is, when you really think about it, a really strange way to manage learning. It doesn’t make any sense.

In homeschooling we aren’t limited by that. If you’re working really nicely on geography, let’s keep going. Why do we have to stop at Australia’s capitals? Why can’t we then move on to other countries’ capitals, if this is where you’re really interested right now? Or, this isn’t working, let’s try something else and come back to it later. There’s no rules around how long you have to spend on something.

Ellen:

I absolutely love that. I do know that new families will often say, my child’s finished in an hour or two. And I think, well, that’s okay, because we’re not waiting for the bells and recess and lunch and library and handing out sheets. All of those things are gone.

And then I’ll have another parent say, all we did yesterday was build the 3D digestive system from recycled materials. And that just makes me smile. I think that child will always remember how the digestive system works, because they built it.

Task oriented, not time oriented [25:42]

Rebecca:

They happened to engage deeply with the task. It’s about being task oriented, not time oriented. And schools are time oriented. But most jobs these days, they’re actually task oriented. If you get all your work done early and you’re working at home, you’ll put the load of laundry on. The boss doesn’t care, because you’ve got your tasks completed. So that’s how we have to think about it. In many ways I think homeschooling prepares you better for the world that we live in than school does.

Ellen:

Isn’t that interesting, how often people say one of their big problems with homeschooling is, what about when they get in the real world? And I think, actually homeschoolers are living in the real world. It’s not the real world, thank goodness, in school. Because half of what goes on in school, if it happened in the real world, would be illegal. The bullying, and we wouldn’t say to someone in their job, well, you’ve just got to stay in that situation where you feel unsafe, because that’s good for you, you’ll develop grit. We never would say that.

Rebecca:

Very strange. Very strange, the things that we put up with in schools. I don’t understand.

Ellen:

And you mentioned that whole timing on learning. I have found that certainly for neurodivergent children, to be told, 40 minutes or 20 minutes is up, and now you’ve got to put that away and go on to the next thing, that can be really distressing, because they’ve really engaged in something that they’re doing.

One of the things we try to do at Euka is we say, if you would like a week plan with the different things that you can do in a day, here you are. If you would like a subject plan, here you are. So that then gives the ability for a parent to say, you know what, my child doesn’t want to do anything else but science for three weeks. Go. And then if they’ve finished that and they want to move on, they can do that. So giving that agency, as you have shared, is a wonderful thing.

Rebecca:

And the opposite is true too. Imagine being trapped doing 40 minutes of something that you absolutely hate. You’re counting the minutes count down and they feel like they’re going backwards. I hate it when I start riding the exercise bike for 30 minutes and it’s only been two. It’s really a frustrating experience.

Ellen:

It’s the same with kids that are fast learners. We have a lot of gifted kids that work with Euka, and one of the things they share is, they’ve been at school and they’ve learnt something, and then the teacher will hand out a worksheet with a hundred of those calculations to do. But they’ve done five, they know how to do it. It’s that mind-numbing time that can be really difficult.

Rebecca:

Mine used to be, when I was teaching, I used to teach petty cash, and the students would say to me, what’s a cheque, miss? And you’d be like, well, a cheque is… And they’d be like, why am I learning this? And you’d be like, well, honestly, it’s because it’s in the syllabus and I have to teach it to you. So let’s just clench our jaws and crack on and get through this.

And then you have to do a booklet of like a hundred petty cash activities, and you’d be sitting there tearing your hair out, because they’re sitting there tearing their hair out. Like, why did we do it? But anyway, we had to.

One piece of advice, and what the research shows [29:56]

Ellen:

If you could give one piece of advice to a family who’s just made the decision to homeschool, and they’re lying awake at night saying, what if I mess this up? What would you tell them?

Rebecca:

I would tell them that the research very much shows that young people socially and academically are advantaged by homeschooling.

Now, the effect size in that advantage ranges from, it’s fairly benign, it doesn’t make any difference, school, homeschool, whatever, to quite large, where homeschoolers are obviously advantaged in relation to their mainstream schooled peers.

There’s been lots of what we call meta-analyses done. A meta-analysis is an analysis of all the papers about a topic. And what they tend to show is that across all of the KLAs, the key learning areas, or the learning areas as they call them in the United States, these young people do as well or better than their mainstream schooled peers. Sometimes in maths they might be not doing as well as they might be in English, or what they call language arts, or social sciences. But in the main, these young people are outperforming their mainstream schooled peers.

University pathways [31:09]

Rebecca:

The other question that a lot of parents have is, can my child go to university? And the answer to that one is very simply, yes they can. There are so many ways into university. For example, at my institution we will take students into teaching who have a Certificate IV in anything. It doesn’t have to be childcare, it doesn’t have to be anything. As long as you’ve got a Certificate IV, they will take you.

So that says that all the stress around ATAR, and all the stress around the preceding 13 years from prep, or reception, or whatever they call foundation, to grade 12, are actually quite pointless. Because in nine to twelve months you do a Cert IV and you have enough to get into university.

So I think really, and there’s some research that argues the same thing, what homeschooling asks us is, it asks us to think really deeply about what it means to be educated in Australia, or the United States, or the United Kingdom, or any other country in the 21st century. Because if school is not the only pathway into careers, jobs, successful lives, and we’re forcing it to be more standardised and much more about assessment, and it’s got to be driven by this churn of data, then why are we doing it? And I actually don’t have an answer for that.

I understand that it does act as a childcare for a lot of parents. Fine. But it’s got to be more than that. It has to be about a sense of lifelong learning. You read the front of the syllabus and it’s full of these two-dollar words about teaching them to be engaged and active thinkers who are passionate about the world. But the behaviour is the opposite of that. So it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me why we persevere with this, and we haven’t looked at ourselves and said, what are we really achieving by this, and how can we make education better? That’s the question that I have.

What a good education means [32:09]

Ellen:

Let’s finish off with something that is going to be an answer to that in some ways. What would you say would be your own definition of a good education for a child? What does that mean, to give your child a good education?

Rebecca:

I think a good education for a young person is to meet them in the moment, and understand that those are just moments, and that those moments will change. It’s about showing that young person how to love learning, and how to make sure that whatever it is they have to learn, they’re able to learn. I don’t think that any child can’t learn something.

If I could go back to my own teaching experience, I was writing my master’s thesis while I was teaching this Certificate II class of kids who were, like, swinging from the rafters. But I had a child who was the red dot on the roll. So he’s the one that you don’t want to teach.

This child said to me, what are you writing, miss? And I said, I’m writing about Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, field, practice. And he said, what does it mean? And I said, well, basically Bourdieu argues that your life experiences lead you toward not being able to be effective in certain places, because you’re just not matched to those places. So some young people don’t come to school with what they need to be successful at school, and some young people do, and that makes a difference. So what schools churn out is what comes in. They don’t change anything, they just sort and sift.

And he said to me, miss, that makes such a huge difference to me and it explains my life. And then went into a really beautiful Bourdieusian discussion of his own trajectory through schooling.

And I thought, this is the kid who’s the red dot on the roll. He can barely write his own name. And yet here he is engaging with philosophical thought. There is no young person who can’t learn. We just need to communicate with them in the right way. And that’s what education is. It’s communication.

Close [34:13]

Ellen:

I love that. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. I know our listeners out there and families will really get a lot out of that conversation and that encouragement.

Rebecca:

Oh, thank you. That’s so lovely of you to say that.