Naomi Fisher’s Changing our Minds

Should you teach your child multiplication tables?

I’m taking a break from the daily posts this week but normal service will resume next Monday. In the meantime here are my thoughts on a home ed book that has been on my list for a while. If there’s a book you haven’t got round to reading yet, let me know and perhaps I can cover it in a future post.

Also coming up in June, another special guest edition of How We Homeschooled Today. If you missed the previous one with Rachael Ringenberg, here it is.

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Naomi Fisher talks a lot of sense. If you’re interested in how children learn, I recommend her Substack. So I was slightly surprised to find myself disagreeing with some of the things she writes in Changing Our Minds: How children can take control of their own learning.

Dr Fisher’s aim in the book is to show parents that education doesn’t have to mean school. That ‘self-directed learning is a real and viable option.’ This matters because:

…we tell ourselves that school is the only way. This comforting belief helps us to avoid the reality that this is a choice we make for our children. Yet understanding that this is a choice is vital. For if it is a choice, then we have to weigh up the downsides as well as the benefits; we have to decide that the downsides are worth bearing, because the benefits are enough to compensate.

As a homeschooler myself, Fisher doesn’t need to change my mind. But I think it is possible to be pro-home ed without being anti-school. It’s not possible or right for every family to home educate. Homeschooling works for us, and there are lots of things I don’t love about school, but that doesn’t mean everything ‘school’ is bad. I also think that home education can take many forms and still be successful and valuable, which is partly what I want to show with How We Homeschool. I’m not convinced that Dr Fisher agrees.

Changing Our Minds is not a quick read. That’s not a criticism—this is a meaty book, wide-ranging and with a lot of detail. There are sections on trauma and ADHD which will be more relevant to some than others. For a parent considering withdrawing their child from school, it is a very thorough introduction to the subject. It’s convincing, but I didn’t find it inspiring. There is a section at the end where self-directed learners or their parents describe their experiences which I loved, and I would have liked those kinds of stories to have been woven throughout the book. Some of the book is very theoretical—Dr Fisher is an expert and she’s got a lot of information to share. I really liked the chapters on testing and exams, parenting, and deschooling (especially the bit about parental anxiety and feeling you simply must make the child sit down and read a book or do some maths. I think most home educators get these feelings occasionally). I think because the book is more theory than practice, it was hard for me to see what Dr Fisher’s vision looks like in reality. There’s a bit of talk of Fortnite and My Little Pony and how we mustn’t impose our academic beliefs on our children which may be slightly alienating to parents who are already worried about how their child will learn maths if they’re not in school.

Passing and Failing

Dr Fisher doesn’t like schools that fail children.

…in the UK around 40% of teenagers don’t get five good grades in their GCSE exams—regarded as the minimum needed to carry on in education and to demonstrate basic literacy and numeracy. Those aren’t great statistics in a school system where the most important outcome is passing those exams. There are a lot of young people finishing education with nothing to show for all those years.

I can’t disagree with that.

But then she also doesn’t seem to like schools that don’t fail children. She talks about Michaela Community School. For the uninitiated, this is a London school with very high expectations of its pupils and very strict discipline. Michaela is about as far as you can get from unschooling. (This is a good summary of the school and its achievements). Nearly 25% of Michaela students are on free school meals, and yet almost 75% of its A Level results are A or A*. Three-quarters of pupils are offered places at Russell Group universities (the top tier of UK universities). As home educators, we may not care about exams or university. But it is difficult to say that schools don’t work because 40% of pupils don’t get five good grades at GCSE, and then also criticise the school and the means whereby pupils excel by the same measure.

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Schooled children learn how to remember things

Dr Fisher doesn’t like the idea of filling children’s heads with stuff that makes no sense to them.

In fact, cross-cultural studies have found that one of the things which schooled children do better than those who do not attend school is remembering lists of unrelated information. Schooled children learn how to remember things, even when they don’t make sense.

There’s not much point committing things to memory that don’t actually mean anything. But this doesn’t mean it’s bad to learn a lot of stuff. Dr Fisher again, in a different section:

…learning gets easier the more we know. As our mental models get more sophisticated, we can add new information into our existing framework, rather than having to start from the beginning each time.

Learning a lot means having more pegs to hang new information from. I think this means it is sometimes ok to learn things by rote that perhaps don’t mean very much initially, because eventually these things can become part of the structure of your whole temple of knowledge. In general, I think the more you know the better (so long as it ultimately makes sense). But I don’t know if Dr Fisher agrees.

Back at Michaela Community School, Dr Fisher explains that music pupils aged 11-14 aren’t allowed to compose yet, because their teacher feels they don’t have the knowledge to do so meaningfully.

It’s lucky The Beatles didn’t go to Michaela. None of them ever learnt to read or write music. Paul McCartney, composer of some of the world’s most famous songs, says, ‘I don’t see music as dots on a page. It’s something in my head that goes on.’ He uses software to convert his music into notation. He knows no formal music theory at all.

This is an interesting article on how The Beatles never learnt to read music. It turns out that among guitarists it’s very common; they learn to hear a tune and then recreate it on the guitar. But it also turns out that the ‘fifth Beatle’, George Martin, played a crucial role. And guess what? He studied music composition and orchestration at the Guildhall School of Music.

To my mind, there’s nothing wrong with teaching music pupils the nuts and bolts of how music works. I suspect that any budding Paul McCartneys in that class are composing in their bedrooms anyway, whatever their teacher allows in class. And if McCartney uses software to turn his music into notation, who wrote the software? I bet they had a thorough grounding in the mechanics of music.

This detour into The Beatles illustrates what I found slightly frustrating in Dr Fisher’s book. She is very keen that we understand that school is not the only way to get an education. But occasionally, she comes across not just as anti-school, but anti-education. I don’t think she really means this—after all, the woman has a PhD. It may be because the book is largely theoretical not practical. I enjoyed the practical bits the most, and would have welcomed more.

Should children learn multiplication tables?

Here is Dr Fisher on multiplication tables:

If [the children] decide they need to memorise their times tables, then they can do that, but they may decide, as I have for myself, that it’s not worth the effort.

Regular readers will know of my family’s dedication to Multiplication by Heart. And Dr Fisher herself, more than once, talks about how maths is all around us. If it’s all around us, surely we owe it to ourselves to have a working knowledge of it. For me, taking responsibility for my children’s education means making sure they know their times tables. They don’t ask me every day to do their multiplication cards (but some days they do). If they don’t ask, I remind them that we haven’t done them today. I often get the cards out when we sit down for a snack. I encourage them by saying there are only 4 cards to get through today. Occasionally they really don’t want to do it, and I don’t force them. But most of the time they are happy to, and get really engaged once we get going. To me, this example is not incompatible with a child-led or self-directed education. But at times I wondered if Dr Fisher would even take issue with my phrase ‘taking responsibility for my children’s education’.

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An analogy is with healthy eating. If my children were allowed to eat in an entirely self-directed manner, they would eat fruit and vegetables and nutritionally-balanced hot meals, sometimes. But they’d also eat crate-loads of junk. My job is to teach them about a balanced diet, to tell them they can have a biscuit for snack so long as they have some form of plant alongside it, to offer a plate of raw veggies before a meal when I know they’re hungry and likely to eat whatever is in front of them. Obviously we don’t force-feed the children, but we often encourage them to ‘try a tiny taste’ of foods they’re not keen on. Similarly, I don’t insist the children sit at the table and work. But I find ways to make maths a game, and I encourage them to try to write one perfect letter if they don’t want to do a whole page. If they find a particular subject boring, it might mean they’re not ready for it just yet, or it might mean I haven’t found a very engaging way of introducing it to them. Dr Fisher says home educating parents need to ‘step back’, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. But at some points in the book I wonder just how far back she wants me to be.

Screens

Dr Fisher also seems to believe that nothing is of more educational value than anything else. Fortnite can be as valuable as a more traditional academic subject. In a Q&A section, an imagined parent complains that their daughter spends all their time watching My Little Pony and asks how to get them to do something more worthwhile. Dr Fisher asks, who gets to decide what’s trivial? She describes My Little Pony as a ‘psychological drama’ and says ‘if your children are engaged and interested in what they are doing, then they will be learning from it.’ In principle, I agree with this. My caveat is that no child is truly ‘engaged’ in watching TV, and also that much TV is pretty poor fodder for our children’s minds. There’s a reason we exhausted parents switch on the TV in the evenings, and it’s not usually to expand our minds. And if I had to choose between a childhood that never encountered the Greek myths, or a childhood that never encountered Mighty Express (a mindless train cartoon my children love), I know which I’d opt for.

Providing the right conditions

But sometimes I think Dr Fisher and I may have more in common than it seems. She is very clear that the environment dictates what children can and will learn. She quotes Peter Gray:

In self-directed learning, children are going to learn what’s in their environment. So, if people aren’t reading, if they aren’t talking about intellectual ideas, if people aren’t speaking standard English, they’re not going to learn those skills.

This is why I write at the beginning of all our ‘How We Homeschooled Today’ posts that we label ourselves unschoolers, but that I consider it part of my job to put interesting things in the children’s way. I don’t say ‘today we’re learning about volcanoes’, but I will suggest a great-looking volcano book on a trip to the library. The children are free to reject my suggestions, but they don’t reject them all. I think Fisher agrees:

Children need an environment of opportunities: they cannot learn if they don’t have those chances.

And:

This doesn’t mean that adults can’t provide things in the environment […]. It does mean that the adult needs to prepare the ground, make it accessible, and then step back. The strategies needed to enable this are respectful and available (but not intrusive) adults, coupled with an environment full of opportunity and challenge.

An environment full of opportunity and challenge? Perhaps Dr Fisher and I are not so far apart after all.

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