Informal and Alternative Education Paths

"Boats and Forests" anthropological analysis:

Boats and Forests is a two part film about home education in Southeast England that connects three stories within: the one of Pierina, a home tutor who lives on a boat with her partner Jay, together with whom they would consider homeschooling their own kids once they have some in the future; the second one of Anna, now a young woman who at the age of 11 came out of school, and together with her sister were literally "unschooled" – their parents let them to decide on how they are going to manage own self interests and structuring devices. Her story is followed by the visual footage I gathered while following Kent Home Education community, daily life of which I was lucky to observe and record after getting in touch with Steph.

Her family of four kids became my point of departure into experiencing Anna‘s narrative and Pierina‘s future aspirations in a current setting performed „in action“, so to speak.

While Anna has been a dear friend of mine I knew since my first year in Kent, other interviews and testimonials I accessed through a thorough web research. Facebook home education, unschooling and homeschooling communities of Kent and London played a major role in me getting in touch with Pierina and Steph, as both women replied to my public posts where I outlined my research idea and that I am looking for people willing to participate in this project.

Once they got back in touch with me, all that was left to do was to plan when and where we meet and just go from there.

Initially, my research and the film I wanted to make, was aimed to look at childhood in England as a reflection of the adult society that surrounds them. A lot of anthropological focus on the concept has been weaved in relation to primitive societies, or Aboriginal childhoods (Eickelkamp 2010). Due to that studying children, and particularly in the West has somehow achieved an unintentional stamp of lacking "seriosity" and depth to the issue (Hirschfeld 2002).

Personally, I find the positioning of anthropological lense to the context of growing up rather fascinating, yet challenging. Using children as informants requires to convert thick conceptual questions into a language children can understand. Interpretation of their unique answers back into epistemological data that meets research requirements poses an extra layer of challenge to that (James 2007). There is a risk that children just won‘t take you and your research seriously, and why would they? But the manner and perspective they represent themselves is authentic and should be left independent from positioning it in comparison to that of the adults.

The shift to home education for my research more explicitly happened during the course of looking for the participants of the study. Once I was faced with realisation that studying children is going to involve a huge management to get access to them and parental consent, I also knew that less formal and sort of alternative communities might be more trusting and open to this endeavour. When I met with Pierina, and later with Steph, I was also keen to find out what universal forces influenced their decision to get back in touch with me, since my posts on Facebok groups were rather open and personally indirect. Apart from the fact they thought it might be an interesting experience for themselves, Pierina pointed out that a film I am making is a means for her story to reach out, inspire and encourage other people. It might answer some questions she herself once raised before taking such decisions as moving on the boat or tutoring for home educated children in London. Therefore, the representation of my research is a utility for her testimonial to be accessed by non-anthropologists (Pink, 4).

Steph shared her awareness of how we are all so naturalized to take school education for granted, and that the practice of home education is easy to generalize and wave aside as to children 'just having fun' and not being up to anything apart entertainment all day long. Tendency to write off alternative practices is not hard to explain, as the origins of "formal education in the style of schooling developed in the industrialized West“" (Strauss, 1983).

Since what we see and interpret is historically and culturally specific (Banks, 2001), its no wonder that seeing children being responsible for their own decisions about the education they want to have actuates our inner protection mechanism from possible deficiencies home education might impose to them. A slightest derival from the norm to make its way through to defamiliarise itself in our consciousness still has a rocky road to overcome.

Reflection of a similar instinct can be seen in smaller aspects as well. As Anna has pointed out during our interview, adults are sometimes over obsessed to protect children from anything that can or cannot happen, that even boredom the young ones usually face becomes a threat to be protected from. Her story points out an aspect of unschooling her parents practiced on her and her sister, leaving them kids to solve their own boredom, or come up to terms with watching too much television themselves rather than forcing them to do something else, better, more fulfilling, as we tend to assume basing on our own confidence.

There are certain parallels between the treatment of the kids in a manner to how some societies treat other, assumedly less civilised or developed groups of people. Imposing our rational reasoning and experience of how daily life should be structured, forcing choices of a book rather than a tv, an early getting up because waking up late equals laziness; or vice versa, it depends.

Kids are like sponges who soak up anything that comes their way, and maybe instead of soaking the idea of one activity being better for them rather than the other for our preferred reasoning, they might also soak up the actual framing of the issue rather than its content: through seeing things either black or white, rendering and judging others for their natural choices rather than allowing the difference to explore itself.

Kids do reflect the adult life they see, but it doesn‘t necessarily go for the truths exposed to them, rather the very act of making something truer than the other.

References:

Banks, M. (2001). Visual Methods in Social Research. 1st ed. Sage Publications.

Eickelkamp, U. (2010). Children and Youth in Aboriginal Australia: An Overview of the Literature. Anthropological Forum, 20(2), pp.147-166.

Hirschfeld, L. (2002). Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?. American Anthropologist, 104(2), pp.611-627.

James, A. (2007). Giving Voice to Children's Voices: Practices and Problems, Pitfalls and Potentials. American Anthropologist, 109(2), pp.261-272.

Pink, S. (2007). Applied Visual Anthropology Social Intervention, Visual Methodologies and Anthropology Theory. In: S. Pink, ed., Visual Interventions: Applied Visual Anthropology, 1st ed. Berghahn Books, pp.4-16.

Strauss, C. (1983). Beyond "Formal" versus "Informal" Education: Uses of Psychological Theory in Anthropological Research. Ethos, 12(3), pp.195-222.