Road School

Learning through exploration and experience

Sue Cowley

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781785831140
• eBook ISBN: 9781785831928
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Frustrated by a regime of statutory testing, and keen for a midlife adventure, Sue Cowley and her partner decided to step out of the system, and set off on the educational adventure of a lifetime with their children. Road School is the story of their family's adventures around Europe and across China, and what they learned along the way. Part comedy travelogue, part parenting guide, part educational philosophy, Road School asks you to consider what 'an education' really means and offers tips for anyone planning their own learning adventure. As a parent in the UK, you must make sure that your child has a full time education, once they are of compulsory school age. However, this education does not have to take place in a school. A growing number of parents are finding that home educating, or 'unschooling', either permanently or on a short term basis, is a viable and attractive option. The national curriculum, benchmark tests and exams serve to reinforce the idea that there is a specific set of knowledge which equates to 'an education'. However, when you are home educating, it is entirely up to you what and how you wish to teach your children. Or, rather, what and how you wish your children to learn. You might choose to include part or everything that is in the national curriculum, or you might not. Sue's family found that one of the best things about Road School was the freedom to follow their interests. Sue offers plenty of advice based on the lessons her family learned on their Road School adventure, such as: take into account how learning can happen simply by visiting a place and exploring it. Don't feel that you always have to formalise your visit by turning it into a 'lesson'. The experience of going somewhere can be memorable and educational in its own right. Much of what your children will learn on the road is social and emotional rather than intellectual. They learn how to cope, how to adapt, how to be resilient and how to be brave. The challenges and difficulties that you face on the road will teach them all these things without any direct 'teaching' needed at all. Involve your children in making decisions about the content of their curriculum, particularly when it comes to choosing topics or themes. What would they most like to study during your learning journey together? You can teach subjects such as English or history through cross-curricular 'themes' rather than as discrete lessons. Ask your children to decide which topics interest them the most and capitalise on those. One of the great things about educating your child yourself is that you get to learn alongside them. Not only do you provide a model of lifelong learning, but it's also very liberating to learn new things as an adult. Remember that teaching is not the same thing as learning. You don't have to teach your children directly for a set number of hours each day in order to educate them. Learning can take place all the time, and anywhere, rather than just during 'school' hours. It doesn't matter what time of the day or day of the week it is - if there is learning happening, then your child is being educated. Contents include: England, English Lessons, Stepping Out of the System, The Netherlands, Dutch Lessons, The Practicalities, Germany, German Lessons, Cultural Literacy, Italy, Italian Lessons, An Education, Portugal, Portuguese Lessons, Travelling with Children, France, French Lessons, Pussycat Parenting, China, Chinese Lessons, A Road School Curriculum.

China

Chinese Lessons

1. When you visit the East, having been brought up in the West, the experience is palpably different. The food, the buildings, the language, the landscape, the people – pretty much everything feels like the polar opposite of what you are used to at home. (Unless the hotel you are staying in happens to have a Belgian bar.)
2. There is no point in visiting another country and getting cross because the people don’t behave in the same way that people do back home. The Chinese attitude to spitting, queuing and shopping irritated us at times, but that was our problem, not theirs.
3. Road School was not just about a philosophy of education; it was also about a philosophy of parenting. Ironically, one of the aims of spending more time with our children was to encourage them to gain in confidence and to become more independent from us.
4. There is a balance between keeping your children safe and letting them develop their independence. Travel is a great way to explore this balance, because it gets children used to coping with change, difference and difficulty.
5. To get a proper feel for geography, and for what our big wide wonderful world is like, you should definitely travel.
6. Trying new and different foods is exciting, but there are times when only the cuisine of your home nation will do. (Even if your home nation is Britain.)
7. The Chinese have a knack for creating great visitor attractions. Sometimes they were kitsch; sometimes they were terrifying; sometimes they were breathtaking. But one thing is for sure – they were never boring.
8. Souvenirs are a great reminder of a trip to a foreign country. They are like breadcrumbs that you pick up on your journey, so that you can retrace your steps when it is over.
9. You can save a lot of money by organising your own travel. The only thing we actually had to do via a tour company while we were in China was book train tickets.
10. If you don’t take a few risks in life, you will never know what could have happened.

A Road School Curriculum

In 1988, a national curriculum was introduced in state schools in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The national curriculum laid out what children should learn at different stages in their schooling. Although it has evolved over the years, and is no longer statutory for certain types of school such as academies, the national curriculum has filtered its way into the nation’s consciousness. It has come to represent a set of knowledge that every child should learn. In the United States, the introduction of the Common Core State Standards Initiative in 2009 was a similar attempt to specify the curriculum that everyone should receive.

The national tests, GCSEs and A levels that students sit serve to reinforce the idea that there is a specific set of knowledge which equates to ‘an education’. However, when you are home educating, it is entirely up to you what and how you wish to teach your children. Or, rather, what and how you wish your children to learn. You might choose to include part or everything that is in the national curriculum, or you might not.

When you ‘plan’ your curriculum:

Remember that teaching is not the same thing as learning. You don’t have to teach your children directly for a set number of hours each day in order to educate them.

Bear in mind that you are not the only available source of knowledge and expertise. If your child can read, they might learn as much from reading a book about a topic as they do from you giving them a lesson on it.

Take into account how learning can happen simply by visiting a place and exploring it. Don’t feel that you always have to formalise your visit by turning it into a ‘lesson’. The experience of going somewhere can be memorable and educational in its own right.

Tourist sites often have a strongly educational element built into them, with signs, information boards, interactive exhibits, etc. Further opportunities for learning may be available on the website associated with the site and through leaflets and other printed materials available during your visit.

Involve your children in making decisions about the content of their curriculum, particularly when it comes to choosing topics or themes. What would they most like to study during your learning journey together? You can teach subjects such as English or history through cross-curricular ‘themes’ rather than as discrete lessons. Ask your children to decide which topics interest them the most and capitalise on those.

Remember that learning can take place all the time, and anywhere, rather than just during ‘school’ hours. It doesn’t matter what time of the day or day of the week it is – if there is learning happening, then your child is being educated.

Much of what your children will learn on the road is social and emotional rather than intellectual. They learn how to cope, how to adapt, how to be resilient and how to be brave. The challenges and difficulties that you face on the road will teach them all these things without any direct ‘teaching’ needed at all.

One of the great things about educating your child yourself is that you get to learn alongside them. Not only do you provide a model of lifelong learning, but it’s also very liberating to learn new things as an adult.

English

Our children had learned how to read and write at school, and they were both already keen readers, so planning for English was about giving them opportunities to read, write and talk. When you are planning for learning in English:

Consider how you will transport reading materials. We took paperback books with us, rather than electronic ones, because we prefer to be hands on with our reading.

We allocated one of the suitcases as a ‘portable library’ completely filled with books, supplementing it as we travelled.

Take a mix of fiction and non-fiction books. We left the storybooks behind us when we had finished with them for someone else to find and read.

Think ahead about the topics that your children might like to read about after you have visited specific places and take materials on these with you. There are many fantastic reference books available – the Dorling Kindersley range is particularly good.

Souvenir shops at big tourist attractions often offer an excellent selection of books on related topics and in a range of languages. There was a particularly good bookshop at the Colosseum. We inadvertently ran out of books in China, but luckily we found a great English language bookshop in Shanghai.

Getting our children to write in their diaries worked really well – it gave a structure to the day, ensured that they wrote regularly and encouraged them to reflect on what they had learned.

Remember that English can be about all kinds of communication. We encouraged the children to be inventive in how they completed their diaries – for instance, adding drawings, tickets, notes, doodles and numbers as well as words.

Encourage the children to write postcards and letters to friends and family at home, telling them all about their adventures on the road.

Speak at an adult level with your children, using words that they might not have previously encountered, such as ‘philistine’, ‘connoisseur’ and ‘claustrophobic’. Make your conversations a source of learning for vocabulary.

Maths

Maths was everywhere on our road trip. It was in the money we used, the distances we travelled, the time we got to each place and how long it took us to get there. It was in every cry of ‘Are we there yet, daddy?’ In school, maths follows an increasingly abstract pathway, like most subjects. The more complex the theory gets, the further the subjects move away from concrete, real world scenarios.

To find maths in everyday situations with your children:

Buy them wallets and give them spending money of their own. Encourage them to make dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for Road School
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• England
• The Netherlands
• Germany
• Italy
• Portugal
• France
• China
• Epilogue
• Copyright