From an official at the US Department of Education: Eventually, I think homeschoolers will force a paradigm shift in the way we look at education for everybody. This regime of 30-pupil classrooms, 180 days a year, 6 hours a day, makes sense only from a bureaucratic point of view. It makes things easier to organize. But with new technologies and with parents willing to lend supervision & coordination to a child's education, truly individualized education becomes possible. Perhaps it will also free up professional educators to work more intensively with children who have parents that do not have the will or resources to lend a hand.

Replies by David Graham to that and others in the thread: Not to be TOO dyspeptic: Pharaoh also faced this problem of intrinsic motivation when he decided to increase productivity while flattening both the personnel and the raw materials curves. Sort of the ultimate business ideal: mass value-added product from zero materials, labor and fabrication costs.

Of course, one can get cynical about this, and neither you nor I want to do that. It is also true that not all business people, neither now nor in former times, want something for nothing. The great houses are infused with common sense, the houses that sustain themselves over time. And common sense is almost a synonym for what today might be called 'humanity' or 'balance.' Reality is not structured to support Pharonic goals. Not even Pharonic reality.

-- mentioned non-graded environment in context of increasing intrinsic motivation. This is an interesting and significant concept that will probably always be employed here and there with varying degrees of happiness. As I mentioned, I spent some time years ago thinking about this one and have been again now, in answer to --'s note. What I have to say is neither complete nor systematic. It is a collection or mixture of thoughts and observations. To wit:

First, the strongest opposition to this usage comes from the upper-grade-point students and from teachers. Administrators and prospective employers do not have inherent problems with this usage, except in the occasional case of personal bias. Graduate school admittance boards can have problems with it. This means, graduate faculties, who are usually the boards. So, basically, the opposition is from upper-grade-point students and faculty members.

Why?

The students are against it because (1) they are ambitious and they don't want anybody getting into the scarcity economies (graduate schools) in a way other than the one they know how to manipulate -- and they DO manipulate it, on high -- and (2) they don't want anything OTHER than grade performance (e.g., personal habits, psychological fitness, moral condition, ACTUAL intellectual capacity) to be taken into consideration or weighted more heavily than what they can accomplish in the way of getting grades written on their transcripts.

The teachers are against it because (1) it requires work/thought and (2) it isn't 'clean' in the sense of allowing them to impersonally deal with students. If a portfolio is accepted in lieu of or partial lieu of grades, a teacher has to face the fact that this student HAS done something that is worthwhile and they then have to open up their criteria of WHAT is worthwhile to include this thing that the student has done. It is easier and less time and energy consuming to simply say that this and this is what a student has to do, they do it or they don't, and if they don't they are out, period. By then delimiting the expectations of student achievement to what a teacher can scan and grade rapidly, there is more time for sailing, lunching, or whatever.

Quick, clean and tidy is a teacher's aim, as we now have teachers. They do not want to explore what students are doing outside a narrow frame of reference. This is especially the case with unionized teachers.

Of course, not all are like this. But I bring this up to mention that in my experience the ones most against non-graded academic achievement are these two groups: top-grade-point students and faculties. You will have no difficulty in perceiving that I have difficulty generating any sympathy for the attitudes of these two groups on this matter. You can also see that, being who they are, their combined voice is usually going to be sufficient to keep non-graded academic achievement corralled on the margins of the educational enterprise. Or, the margins as these two groups would like us to think of them ....

Still, even 'marginalized,' the non-graded environment picks up some children and helps them in ways they would not be otherwise served. For even one such it is worthwhile.

After the entry-level jobs, an applicant is, after all, presenting portfolios exclusively. They are long past graded work. College degrees are cheap as water. MBEs are a bore. PhDs are useless. What have you done? Who do you know? How can you go? These are the questions on an employer's mind. And they are all 'portfolio' questions. Ultimately, grades are an indication of some things, not all, in a young workforce entrant. By the fourth or fifth year in the workforce, they are getting irrelevant. Portfolio (performance) is now the key.

And if an individual is a member of a classified population, not even a portfolio is important. Only evidence of their inclusion in the desired classification: gender, skin color, age, sexual preference (the things that in other contexts are actionable as bias).

As I was thinking about this -- and thank you -- for making me do it -- it occurred to me that the main stimulant to intrinsic motivation in a student is the love and attention of their parents, first, and their teachers, second. A child who is loved is a happy child, a calm child, a hard-working child. I think that's axiomatic. So this brings us back to the original question of our confabulations, which is, parent involvement in the education process and schools in particular, mainly public schools.

And on this one I am coming more and more to the feeling that the key here is some grasp on curriculum. Not a total grasp, but a shared grasp. And with that some grasp on what is called socialization (a quaint term, for, it's origin is Marx/Engels/Lenin). Again, not total, but shared.

If parents are going to be involved in the public schools -- and the crisis in this respect is truly pandemic, there being a very low level of confidence in the schools and certainly not enough to support even present levels of activity -- they are going to have to have and FEEL that they have some shared responsibility for curriculum and company.

Even just 30 years ago, such a thing was assumed. There was a general unspoken consensus society-wide as to what constitutes the proper academic curriculum and what constitutes acceptable modes of behavior and acceptable company to be in. Now, none of these former 'givens' is a given. The curriculum is a vapid pastiche of this notion and that, presenting the world as a disjunct helter-skelter of impulse and competition. The modes of behaviour and the company one keeps are not taken for things about which one can chose, or should. Instead, the children are let to run the school, terrify the teachers and impose on everyone and everything in sight, as if it is their inner necessity to do this.

So, these two areas, curriculum and company are the keys to parent involvement. More and more parents are deciding to regain some control in these areas. As well they should. And the districts are going to be happy to see this wave move forward, as well they should. But if the districts delude themselves into thinking that the new and proper wave of parent reach for curriculum and company control is for the purpose of supporting the business as usual as it is today, then they are going to be disappointed. Business as usual is precisely what is not going to satisfy the parents who want more involvement.

I think this would be an exciting avenue of inquiry: what sorts of curriculum and company enhancements, in terms of shared parent control, would induce parent involvement?

Much of this thinking is triggered by an observation that came out of the Maywood discussions. The question was asked, why has Maywood, with a population ranging from well-raised parents and children to extremely marginalized, last-chance drop-outs from Highline Schools, NOT had a single security call this year? The answer turned out to be: there are so many adults constantly around the place, doing this and that, just being there. Many are parents, of course. And the parents are there because they have genuine control of curriculum and company ON-SITE.

Seemed simple and accurate.

How to get the affluent -- I agree on their importance, and so does John Dewey, who is not one of my favorite characters, but he's right about this -- interested in systemic change, as well as the high-achieving students? Rather a pertinent question. My inclination is to look into the area of curriculum and especially the customizing of same in a shared responsibility of students/parents/teachers/administrators. Each of these constituencies has necessary and therefore legitimate interest in curriculum. Now, only one of them has significant control of the area, namely, administrators. And these are driven by publishers, who are driven by the vagaries of taste at the major teaching colleges, such as Columbia Teacher's, and to some extent the Ivy League women's schools, Smith, Barnard, Wellesley, etc., since that is where the PC is concentrated at this time.

The adoption of curriculum looks majoritarian since legislatures and local school boards efficiently adopt it, but the stuff they adopt is what they are offered for adoption by publishers, and from the local scene little more than administrative input gets into the curriculum adoption process. Students and parents and mostly teachers are absolutely shut out. The adoption process has the patina of majoritarian rule, but de facto it is everything but that. And our society is founded on the recognition of the need to protect minority opinion from majoritarian squash in any case. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were agreed on this point. As Marshall said, over and over, it is the government's mission to protect individuals from the majority. I.E., the government is the bulwark against the tyranny of PC, which ALL the fathers recognized as a very palpable and dangerous tyranny, at all times present or potentially so.

So, my thoughts keep coming round to this thing of customizing curriculum from input on the scene by and for those whom it is meant to serve, namely, students, parents, teachers and administrators. Shared education. We have to get beyond the idea of motivation and involvement meaning just backing up what administrators and teachers are doing already. What they're doing already is precisely what has us asking all these questions. It isn't working.

Now, -- is raising also a matter which many homeschoolers have tried to sweep under the rug and which I have been insistently bringing out from under the rug for many years now, and that is the fact that the society, in the form of the district-legislature-county-state-local-federal governments, has some necessary and legitimate claim on every individual who takes birth in the territory, notwithstanding any other consideration. The claim is not absolute and it is not unqualified, but it is inexorable and it cannot be dodged. The basic claim is that these governmental agencies, in order to accomplish their necessary and legitimate mission, have the right and the responsibility and the authority to ensure that every citizen comes up to a level of literacy in the broadest sense, a level which to some extent can be specified and therefore measured and therefore held as a standard.

Many homeschoolers bridle and shake at this notion. They go into deep denial. And I have been ridiculed, sparing nothing, for maintaining with some persistency that this claim is primal and legitimate and therefore to be gladly accepted and worked with.

It raises the question, 'What is the standard of literacy, broadly thought of, which it is the legitimate and necessary task of government to ensure across the population in order to secure the general welfare?' The question could hardly be more apropos today, or any day. It is especially salient when one is discussing motivation and involvement. The committee on student learning goals (I can't seem yet to remember its formal name) which the legislature set in motion last year is facing this question, at least obliquely.

My own answer to this question is, 'A literate person is one who has developed the habit of study.' This is the most primal definition I have been able to see, trying to get something that wouldn't raise hackles. But you know, just trying to ask the question, much less answer it, is very non-PC in most of the homeschooling community.

I have warned against the danger inherent in not facing this one, that someone can come along -- and will -- and say, you're not teaching anything worthwhile and so we have to rescind homeschooling. Because without having a consensus on what sort of literacy is being sought, and having that consensus be unassailable by reason and common sense -- anything is always assailable by politics, but that's not germane since homeschoolers can handle themselves in a politic fight -- homeschoolers are sitting ducks for anyone who wants to define their implied standard(s) of literacy, or lack of same, as less than what government has a necessary and legitimate right, responsibility and authority to guarantee for all citizens.

This is like Godel's 'Proof' in the mathematics profession and Schweitzer's 'Quest for the Historical Jesus' in the theological/religious: it is a monster: since folks feel unable to face and answer it, they just try to deny that it's there. Mathematicians have gotten along denying Godel for years now and the schools and churches Schweitzer, so maybe homeschoolers can get by denying the legitimate responsibilities of government respecting common education ....

I don't know the future.

But I do think that motivation and involvement are related to curriculum control and I do think that curriculum control begs pertinent and near preternatural questions regarding literacy itself and the right of society, through government, to guarantee the same among the population.

I am inclined to trust that intrinsic motivation, driven by the savour of customized curriculum, done over a significant set of the population, will produce the variety and the intensity of skills and capacities and knowledges which are required by a large, dynamic, progressive society such as our own. I think that if we do what is right, we will be supported by what is right.

In this I am in some disagreement with our founding fathers and with many today who believe that human nature is deeply flawed and cannot be trusted on that account. This is the concept of original sin, a concept that it still deeply affective even though we do not recognize it as such. It was certainly in the minds of virtually all of our founding fathers, as a tenant of faith.

I am not a communist, however, thinking, with Shaw and Dewey and Huxley and the rest of the Fabians, that human nature is inclined to bad things only because of the presence of ersatz knowledge, such as religion and the church. Otherwise, outside these noxious influences, human nature is eminently trustable. So goes their preaching.

Human nature is not omnipotent and it is not omniscient. But it is workable and brilliant and able to accomplish great and good and wonderful things, when intrinsically motivated and cultured to honor and value the presence of points of view which, while not its own, yet conduce to the common prosperity and welfare, peace and happiness. I am willing to trust that this can and will happen when we encourage it to through trust and support and love. Not blind, not heedless of actualities, but yet persevering through the ups and downs of life.

In other words, if we do what we seem to be feeling here needs to be done, society will have all the workers it needs and ready to work, as well. I believe this.

March 1994
David R. Graham
Maywood Homeschool Leadership Team