My concern about after-school homework centres (also being picked up
as an idea here in NZ) is around the question of the social
construction of what counts as useful knowledge.
For me schooling is only a subset of education. One of the great
deadening forces involved in institutionalised public education is
the tacit redefinition of what happens in the home as being not
'education', especially if that home is inhabited by people who are
perceived as having cognitive deficits.
Parents have increasingly come to believe that if they are unable to
contribute to 'schooling', for whatever reason, they are therefore unable
to contribute to 'education'. It is scarcely surprising that those
who are concerned about their children but believe themselves to have
a functional deficit as educators of them begin to make
demands for the deficit to be corrected by further institutional
interventions such as after school homework centres.
But in my view the after school homework centre response merely
treats the symptoms and compounds the problem. We reduce the
time, and therefore the opportunity, for parent-child zopeds to form
and be nurtured. Not only that, we also further entrench the
redefinition of what constitutes education as being whatever the
education authorities say it is. Consider the syntax of Sara Hills
sentence in her posting which was 'They [parents] want their children
prepared nevertheless." Sara's syntax is perfectly descriptive. But
it made me weep (literally - tears sprang to my eyes when I saw that
sentence - becasue, for me, it elegantly encapsulates a perception of child raising
in western societies which is bleak, impoverished and destructive)
For the past year we have been working with a group of schools whose
intakes come from a NZ community whose formal description dubs it
to be one where home deficits in the capacity to contribute to
'education' are amongst the highest in the country. Yet these schools
have rejected the foregoing assumptions.
Instead they are affirming that what constitutes useful knowledge is something to be
co-constructed between schools and homes (rather than between schools and the
administrators who 'serve' the elected representatives of parents),
and that once that co-construction has taken place one of the
responsibilities of the schools is to assist parents to learn
strategies appropriate to their personal circumstances by which they
can better form zopeds within their own homes which complement and
collaborate with the contribution of the schools (rather than to be
better able to make their children 'school ready' or 'better
prepared').
One very clear early point is that many parents give up on seeing
themselves as being active participants in the education of their
children because, having ceded the rights of description and
definition to the school system, they are then asked to 'support' the
school in ways which they cannot, given their skills and/or
circumstances. Of course, if they are then asked what they need from
the system by way of support, they respond with demands for after
school centres and the like.
If, instead, useful knowledge is clearly defined as
something that is found everywhere (in the fridge, in the VCR
controls, in the family rottweiler) and education is redefined as almost
anything that you experience and reflect on while awake, and that
these things are defined as phenomena that are part of an integrated
experience of which the school is part, then huge new potential
educational resources are discovered, and institutionally
infantalised parents can catch a glimpse of themselves as functional
adults.
I acknowledge that the foregoing is an idealistic statement of
perfection. There is no proof yet that this will work. No chance to
prove it yet - the project has so far been one of scoping, planning
and bidding for funding. Only now is it about to become operational.
The barriers are huge. The project confronts deep seated century old
cultural assumptions about education, knowledge and the functions of
schools as institutions, with some teachers providing as many attitudinal
challenges as the most alienated and hostile parents. But in
exploring and mapping the territory, and discussing the idea widely
in the community, there have already been just enough magical little
vignettes to instill a sense of excitement and hope into this project which is
greater than almost anything else I have experienced.
Phillip Capper
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business (WEB Research)
PO Box 2855
9th Floor 142 Featherston Street
Wellington
New Zealand
Phone: (64) 04 499 8140
Mobile: 021 251 9741
Fx: (64) 04 499 8395
phillip.capper@webresearch.co.nz
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