Education Uncensored: A Guide for the Aspiring,
the Foolhardy, and the Disillusioned, by Laurie Block Spigel

BOOK REVIEW by Jennifer Dees

I want to tell you about a new book, Education Uncensored, which is chock full of creative ideas for teaching and learning. But first I have to tell you about my friend Laurie Spigel, who wrote the book. You see, there is no way I can write an objective review, because Laurie has been too important to me and to my daughter, who loved her as a teacher. So I might as well tell you why Laurie is so wonderful, and then you’ll know why she has such important things to say in a book.

We first met Laurie Spigel when we moved to the New York City area for two years. My daughter enrolled in one of Laurie’s popular group classes for homeschoolers, and was enchanted. During the next two years, when she was 8 and then 9 years old, my daughter took four classes with Laurie: Art History of the Ancient World, Create Your Own Board Game, Literature and Poetry Club, and Playwriting. That range of classes, and the intriguing course titles, provides a glimpse of Laurie’s creative integration of learning experiences.

To watch Laurie in action was a pleasure. I thought of her as Renaissance Woman, bringing together multiple “subjects” in each of her classes. In her “Art History of the Ancient World” class, there might be ethnic music from an old world land playing on CD; there might be pots or jewelry or other artifacts she had brought in for the kids to look at; there would be multiple over-sized books of art opened to color plates; and Laurie and ten kids would be eagerly leaning in over a large, laminated map of the world that covered someone’s large dining room table, getting a fix on the geography and other aspects of the development of an artistic tradition.

Many people who are very creative themselves do not know how to inspire creativity in others. Laurie’s warmth and generosity of spirit make her other-oriented, so that even while she overflows with creative ideas herself, her most creative acts are in the way she elicits and develops creativity in her students. My daughter, like her other students, adored Laurie and worked hard for her. In her new book, Education Uncensored, Laurie shows others how to nurture creative learning, too, partly by getting her readers as excited about the joy of learning as she is.

Her book takes us through the evolution of her learning how to teach, first by assisting her education professor mother (who taught at prestigious Hunter College in Manhattan), starting at the age of 7. Laurie learned her mother’s innovative educational philosophies and techniques in the 1960s and beyond, and helped her mother implement many of her projects, making puppet kits and other teaching materials at home. But she also learned from her mother’s parenting mistakes, seeing a divide between her mother’s liberal professional views and her lack of loving, unconditional support of her daughter at home.

Small wonder, then, that Laurie later focused not only on being a loving mother to her own two sons, but on integrating her support of their individual needs with championing their education. At first, she worked to improve their experience in schools, both public and private. Laurie volunteered in their classrooms and saw many examples of what worked, and what did not. But ultimately, both of her sons homeschooled for most of their K-12 years.

They couldn’t have had a better teacher than their mother. Laurie describes how she was able to facilitate each of her sons’ unique educational paths, learning with them and teaching them “how to learn anything.” Along the way, they took an integrated approach. She writes, “Focusing on interests, instead of on subjects,  allows us to learn in a holistic manner. In fact, it is impossible to separate history from science (from evolution to the influence of discoveries), or math from art (symmetry, perspective, geometry, fractals). […] Subjects are not isolated.” And then, “Learning how to learn and how to acquire knowledge is far more important than acquiring the knowledge itself.”

Community was critically important to Laurie’s homeschooling of her sons. She is an active member of New York City Home Educators Alliance (NYCHEA) and many of her sons’ activities included others from the group. “On March 14th," she writes, “we would celebrate Pi Day. We invited other homeschoolers to bring any kind of pie they liked: apple pie, pumpkin pie, chicken potpie, pizza pie (the favorite), any kind of pie! Then, at 1:59, after we each derived the area of our pies, we all ate! March 14th is 3/14; at 1:59 p.m. those numbers make pi (pi is 3.14159…). Kids would bring in charts showing pi to the hundredth place or more, and various other pi decorations. It became an annual Pi Party.”

As her children grew, Laurie began to offer group classes to the New York City homeschool community, and her classes were immediately popular. Overflowing with ideas for learning, she nevertheless listened to her students and allowed them to help shape the way they would learn in her classes. And she discovered her talent for bringing out the best in each student by honoring the individuality of each.

One of her stories illustrates her unique sensitivity. “I had a shy, quiet student who loved mice. I drew him out in writing classes by encouraging him to write about mice. Eventually he wrote (among other things) an 11-verse poem about superhero mice. But his mother avoided discussing mice with him. Except for this one point, they were an unusually close family. She was, understandably, afraid that he would bring one home, and mice unnerved her. I explained to her that they simply needed to respect each other. Her son must understand that he could never bring home a mouse; but she must support his love of the mouse. I advised her, ‘Embrace the mouse!’ Suddenly her son’s reading expanded, as they discovered a whole world of fiction with mouse characters. His science came alive with the evolution and anatomy of the mouse and its place in the biodiversity of planet earth. In one of my classes he made a board game about mice. In the end, his love of learning grew. But the biggest bonus was the change in the relationship between mother and son. Their main source of disagreement had vanished, and occasional moody standoffs were now replaced with a mutual understanding and respect that nurtured their working relationship.”

There is so much more to Laurie’s book than her entertaining stories. She explains the four levels of teaching, with the ultimate being learning in which children conceive and create their own educational experiences. This was Laurie’s goal for her own children and for all the children she teaches. She describes “The Creative Classroom” and then goes on to explain learning “Beyond Four Walls,” out in the world. And she then offers creative ideas and specific techniques for teaching all the “subjects.” But even more fun are her customized curricula – “Zoo Curriculum,” “Restaurant Curriculum,” “Fairytale Literature,” and more. Spending some time with her inspiring book is the next-best thing to having your child enrolled in one of her stimulating classes.

Laurie’s book is available via her Web site, Homeschool NYC, and with her permission, I’ve excerpted one of its chapters below.

© 2009 Jennifer Dees

"A Balancing Act of Feeding the Brain"

Excerpted from Education Uncensored: A Guide for the Aspiring,
the Foolhardy, and the Disillusioned, by Laurie Spigel

As funding becomes scarce, schools today are minimizing the fine arts and the performing arts, sometimes to the point of eliminating them. Physical education, too, is often pared down to the bone. In its place are hours of boring test prep. Playfulness is often absent from the atmosphere, replaced by conformity, pressure, apprehension, and fear of the test. When a school’s funding is based solely on test results, changes like this are sadly inevitable. Yet the desired result, improved academic performance and higher test scores, is an uphill fight when accompanied by a lack of arts and physical programs and an absence of experiential learning.

Brain scientists have proven that cross pattern movement, such as crawling, running, swimming, and brachiating (swinging from an overhead ladder), improves not just physical coordination but brain coordination. The more we develop our physical muscles, the better our brains work. Scientists have also proven that play is a necessary survival skill, important at every age. Play, it turns out, is an activity that activates the brain like nothing else. Employing a playful approach in learning naturally increases the learning. In this instance, schools have their approach backwards. More physical activity rather than less, more creativity rather than less, more playfulness rather than less, would dramatically improve academic skills and test scores.

Replacing creative experiences with repetitive practice only serves to dull young minds. Think for a moment that you are a child struggling to understand and master a skill. As you struggle more, your frustration increases. Is the answer to your problem to heap on extra hours of study? Should playtime now be eliminated, so that your hours of frustration are increased? Of course not! Rather, you should do the reverse. Shorten the hours and shorten the struggle. By creating shorter periods of work, the child is likelier to stay focused. When you set shorter, smaller goals that can be attained with a sense of playfulness a child is far likelier to feel a sense of success. Frustration can kill a child’s motivation, but a series of small successes can fuel it.

Music makes us better at math, art makes us smarter in history, physical activity and play make us better at everything. It is the total package that makes a child’s mind and body healthy, and keeps his or her spirit alive. The ratio of arts and phys. ed. To academics in schools should be radically reversed. The ideal balance might be two-thirds, or even three-quarters, of a child’s day spent in the creative arts and physical pursuits, with the remaining portion devoted to academics.

As we developed our homeschooling routine, we found that we could begin all paper and pencil tasks at breakfast time and be done by lunch, leaving long afternoons for the fun stuff: museums, dance and music classes, science experiments, costume or puppet-making, trips to the park or the skating rink or the hiking trail. Three hours a day for academics turned out to be plenty. (In most schools true learning occupies less than three hours in a day, since much of the day is spent on chaos control and conformity, including rote work and test prep.)

Schools not only have their ratio of time spent on subjects reversed, they have their ratio of students to teachers just as skewed. They use testing in a backwards fashion too, as an assessment tool rather than a diagnostic tool. They misjudge the amount of time that a child should struggle with a subject, increasing it instead of decreasing it. Yet the largest mistaken perception is the idea that every child deserves the same education. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The No Child Left Behind Act attempted to standardize education further. The idea was that all children would eventually score high on the same test. But children are not standardized, and neither are teachers. No one is at a grade level in everything, and most of us will always be ahead in some areas and behind in others. A good education, it turns out, is a different education for everyone, a unique education. Just as each parent knows how different their children are, they also know that a successful outcome for each child is a different outcome for each child.

The sameness of our educational system is the death of education. Teachers are no longer encouraged to get inspiration from their students, or from their environment, or from their own ideas. Standardization has dulled everyone.

It is entirely possible for teachers to allow each of their students to have a different goal, to capitalize on their strengths, and to minimize their weaknesses. I do this in my classes by encouraging students to research what interests them, to write about what moves them, to read what they want to read, to find their own voice and their own style.

I know the luxurious position of a teacher of homeschoolers. I am not faced with an overcrowded room. I have ten or twelve students, a group that I can get to know intimately, and take the time to encourage each individually. I am not dictated to by an administration that tells me what curriculum to use. I am not observed and evaluated by a principal and told that I did not cover the mandatory amount of material in the allotted time. I do not have to grade my students and they are never threatened with failure. I have the luxury of allowing my students to get excited about their learning, and the freedom to take my lead from them. I have often abandoned a lesson plan or changed my curriculum because I was inspired by my students to do so. I have the deep satisfaction of students who grow up with me, returning year after year to study with me, instead of experiencing the awful sadness of watching my students go on to deal with bad teachers, seeing my hard work, the student’s confidence and empowerment, undone by a bad system.

The ultimate luxury of being a teacher of homeschoolers is that every child has asked to be there. Most teachers cannot even imagine what it would be like to have a class full of children who really want to be there. If I feel that a child is not motivated to be in my class, I advise the parents to choose something else. An ardent reader of nonfiction, for example, might hate taking my fairy tale writing course. In the homeschooling community there is so much to choose from that children can find the learning environment that best suits them. Using child-led learning principles, parents can feel confident encouraging their children to focus on their interests.

How different the energy is in an overcrowded classroom! Overcrowding prevents us from being able to move around freely, limits our play, and restrains our freedom. Lack of personal space makes us feel threatened. Lack of time and attention make us feel ignored and misunderstood. Add to this the unwillingness to be there, since for many children school is like a prison. It’s a recipe for restlessness, resentment, and mean-spiritedness amongst the children. When too many people must stay in a room, they feel caged.

It is important to recognize that subjects are not self-contained. For example, science cannot be learned without also learning history, math, art, reading, and writing. It is a mistake to think that any school subject can be separated from other fields and types of learning. The arts can and should be integrated into every field of learning, while the physical self is kept moving and alert, not stuck at a desk for hours. This is an integrated, thematic approach, drawing on the interests of teachers and students, and incorporating as many learning and teaching styles and subjects as possible. Using the arts and performance-based learning immediately takes teaching out of that first, most base level, and raises it to the second or third level, with many opportunities for fourth level teaching.

I have titled the following chapters with traditional subjects because this is the view that most people share, but each chapter mentions other subjects, which connect to that focus. As a homeschooling parent, I separated subjects mostly for reporting purposes, and far less often for educational purposes. In the chapter Great Curriculum Ideas, you will find examples of many subjects combined together.

Teachers and parents must also include “non-subjects” that are often crucial to successful learning. There are no classes or curriculum requirements on how to self-prioritize (it is always the parent’s or school’s priorities), how to relax, how to get to know someone new, the importance of being true to oneself, and so much more, especially universal spiritual truths such as practicing kindness and compassion. When I was a mere child I often wondered why sign language wasn’t a part of every first grade curriculum, because it would eliminate deafness as a disability. Why aren’t yoga and tai chi taught when both are keys to fitness and longevity? Why aren’t simple eye exercises done daily in grade school (a practice that has nearly eliminated the need for eyeglasses for children in China)? Could these “non-subjects” that defy category be just as important, if not more important, than our traditional curriculum?

Students each need to have a personal creative voice. They each need to work at their own level and pace. They deserve to live and work in a world of mutual respect, and to learn in an active and playful manner. Ideally, they should have constant opportunities to shape the content and style of their own education.

The children in my classes have a great deal of ownership in what goes on. If a student suggests that we do something new, I will probably ask the class to consider it. Their input is very important to me. This is not just because it promotes the kind of respect and teamwork that I crave. It is also because it creates a deeper educational experience for everyone in the room, a potential for that fourth level. Everyone learns from each other. I look at each child as a resource. I see the parents this way too. Everyone is a resource, not just me! I learn so much from them, and this delights all of us. I am never bored when everyone provides input, and my responsibility as a teacher becomes not an overwhelming burden or a tiresome chore, but a shared joy that leaves me elated at the end of the day.