Have you ever questioned the traditional education system and its one-size-fits-all approach? If so, this episode is a must-listen as clinical psychologist and education advocate Dr. Naomi Fisher embarks on a deep discussion about alternative pathways to learning.
Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist who specialises in autism, trauma and alternative ways to learn. She is the author of two books, both about self-directed education, and she is the mother of two children.
For full show notes head to 👉https://www.raisingwildlings.com.au/blog/breaking-educational-boundaries-with-dr-naomi-fisher
Other ways we can help you:
Have you ever questioned the traditional education system and its one-size-fits-all approach? If so, this episode is a must-listen as clinical psychologist and education advocate Dr. Naomi Fisher embarks on a deep discussion about alternative pathways to learning.
Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist who specialises in autism, trauma and alternative ways to learn. She is the author of two books, both about self-directed education, and she is the mother of two children.
For full show notes head to 👉https://www.raisingwildlings.com.au/blog/breaking-educational-boundaries-with-dr-naomi-fisher
Other ways we can help you:
In today's episode, I'm in conversation with clinical psychologist and self-directed education advocate, dr Naomi Fisher, where we're talking all about the current state of our education systems and the tools that are used to manage children, as opposed to what children actually need to learn. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we're recording today the Kabi Kabi and Gabi Gabi people. I would like to recognize the continued connection to the land and waters of this beautiful place we call home. I also recognize Aboriginal people as the original custodians of this land and acknowledge that they have never seen its sovereignty. I'd like to pay my respects to all Gabi Gabi elders, ancestors and emerging elders and any First Nations people listening today. Welcome to Raising Wildlings, a podcast about parenting, alternative education and stepping into the wilderness, however that looks, with your family.
Nicki Farrell:Each week, we'll be interviewing experts that truly inspire us to answer your parenting and education questions. We'll also be sharing stories from some incredible families that took the leap and are taking the road less traveled.
Vicci Oliver:Wear your hosts, vicki and Nikki from Wildlings Forest School Pop in your headphones, settle in and join us on this next adventure. Hello and welcome to the Raising Wildlings podcast. You've got me on the potty today, vicki Oliver, and I'm really excited to have our special guest, dr Naomi Fisher, joining me on the podcast today. I've just finished rereading her first book, called Changing Our Minds, and it combines her in-depth knowledge in cognitive psychology, which I love, with her hands on experience in raising two children through the lens of self-directed education. Now, you might remember, recently, in 2023, I had Peter Gray on the podcast, and when I was chatting to him outside of our interview, I asked him who he thought would be a great guest on the podcast, and he actually recommended Naomi, so I knew that this episode was going to be a really important conversation.
Vicci Oliver:Now, dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist who specializes in autism, trauma and alternative ways to learn. She is the author of two books Changing Our Minds, which is the one that I've just reread, and also her second book is called A Different Way to Learn. They're both about self-directed education, and she is the mother of two children. She runs webinars and courses helping parents, and all of her Instagram and sub-stack are valuable resources that I highly recommend, so I hope you enjoy our interview. Naomi, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I'm really excited to hear all about your story and all of your thoughts. So let's start right at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about how you even fell into psychology, and then I'd love for you to tell me your journey to deciding to home educate your children.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Okay. So, oh, it's all my journey. There are so many different ways of telling my story, but I think one really important aspect to my story is that I moved around a lot as a child and I went to 11 different schools, so I got a perspective on schools which I think is quite unusual from the inside and a kind of I think, a skepticism, even as a teenager. I remember, as like 13 or 14, hearing the things that schools said you know, this is the way it must be, and knowing that they hadn't said that in my previous school and there was this kind of hang on a minute, you're saying this is the way it has to be.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I often talk about uniform, in particular because I lived overseas for a while. I was at schools with no uniform. Came back to the UK uniform all the way, very strict about uniform, to the point that you could be sent home from school if your uniform was wrong. You know, and I was like, hang on a minute, the last school I could wear whatever I wanted. No one ever made a fuss about it. Now you're literally measuring my skirt to make sure it's the right height and saying I've got to have, you know, black socks, not white socks.
Vicci Oliver:It's hard enough to just police that like. Lots of kids don't like that and have had no experience of what it could be like outside of their own school, let alone you seeing it from one extreme to the other.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I think it's like a process of training, isn't it? I think of the whole school process is when we put children in, when they're really small, you know, we four or five year olds we tell them this is the way it is, it has to be like this, and because they're so young, a lot of them just kind of incorporate that this is the way it is, it has to be like this. And I think because I was moving around so much, that kind of got broken every couple of years. You know, it was like oh, actually, this isn't the way it has to be, oh actually it doesn't have to be, and I think that was a really frustrating yeah, but I think you're really. I think, in a way, I think it saved me. Actually, I think if I'd been at, if we'd, if I'd been at one school all the way through, I I mean, I had lots of difficulties at school let's not pretend that I didn't but I don't think I would have made it through as intact as I did if I had been in one consistent environment. I think it was the fact that I was continuous novelty, that kind of kept me okay with it, most of it, not with all of it. But so talking about so it's talking about my story into psychology. It's kind of interesting too because although I had this very unconventional path through school, I did well at school.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I was a high achiever, I, and I, I think, like lots of people, I made my choices based on achievement rather than necessarily what I wanted to do, what I was interested in. So I was very capable in maths in particular. And if you're a girl and you're good at maths, I found that everybody's like hooray a girl in the maths classes and it was literally me. I had to do these advanced maths classes. They would literally be me and eight boys and that was.
Dr Naomi Fisher:You know, we would be a little elite extra maths group, but it would be just I was the only girl, yeah. So I got quite a lot of reinforcement about that. You know you should do these things because you are the kind of pioneer, you're the person doing it. So I did physics, maths and chemistry when I did my I don't know what you have in Australia, but at six form level I did an international baccalaureate and I did physics, chemistry and maths, even though I did really love maths and I still really enjoy maths, but physics and chemistry were definitely not my passion, you know it was like me it was a hard slog, yeah, and really looking back, I should have I did do English actually alongside it, but I should have chosen humanities or subjects that I really got, but I didn't.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I wasn't making choices because I thought, because I wasn't really thinking about me and my decisions. I was thinking what will get me on, what will I do well at, what will be okay, you know what will be a career choice this is the pathway that everyone tells me I need to take because I've got the ability exactly.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I've got the ability to do it and it is very. It was very much like that. The schools I was at. It was like you know, if there was a kind of attitude and I remember picking up on it like you know anybody, it sounds so awful. Now anybody can do things like English, history, psychology. In fact they're like soft subjects. You know, hard subjects which of course, are associated with being male in many cases I think that's not an accident either hard subjects like physics and maths and chemistry. You know that's what you should be doing if you can do it. So I did that.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And then I went to university to study medicine, because I was kind of on that path and I found medicine very, very hard work. I didn't it didn't come naturally to me at all. I found human biology really hard to get my head around, possibly because I hadn't studied biology at school. I just done the chemistry and the physics. And then I was really lucky to be at a university where we did all the medical stuff that we needed to do in the first two years.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Then we had one year where you could choose whatever you wanted to do before you went on to clinical school. So there's like a division between the university academic bit of medicine, one year of something else and then off you went to clinical school where you would be in a hospital learning how to actually be a doctor. Yep, that year was the first year, I think, in my entire education, bearing in mind this is the third year of university that I could choose something with no consequences. So it was the first time I could just choose what I might be interested. It didn't matter. I had a friend who did Chinese. You could really do right anything in that year. It was amazing. It was amazing. You could just go along and join the cohort and do it this is actually blowing my mind.
Vicci Oliver:I'm just actually thinking.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I don't think I've had a moment ever in any of that's been the case where that was an option yeah, it was amazing, it was really lucky and I think it's unusual, like most other places, most of the universities, if they give you a year like that, you have to do something kind of related to medicine. So you know you have to go and do extra physiology or extra biochemistry or something like that. But they were really like us. No, you've passed exams you need, partly because they worked so hard in those first two years. You've passed all the exams you need. You've got this year to do something that you're interested in.
Dr Naomi Fisher:So and I did psychology and it was just like a revelation. It was like my goodness, learning can be so much more interesting than what I've been doing all these years. And I remember it just being like a kind of almost like a fire being lit, like I couldn't stop thinking about it and making connections and I was reading all the stuff just for my own pleasure. You know, I was just. I just really couldn't get enough of it and I only had this one year and then off I go to be a doctor. So I decided that I wasn't going to go off and be a doctor, that I was going to drop out of medicine and take a different path, and I went and did a PhD in psychology, so that's an academic doctorate three years of learning how to do research. Then I went on and did another doctorate in clinical psychology, which is supplied psychology, so that's how to use psychology in mental health do you know?
Vicci Oliver:what I love about that is that you know when people find the path, even though they've been told to be on a specific path to achieve some sort of success, and then, like when I hear you talk about it so passionately, like when you find the, the thing that lights you up yeah, and it is exactly that you couldn't stop your learning. You couldn't, you just wanted to consume it. And I often think about that conversation and this. I wasn't going to take it to homeschooling yet. Um now conversation, but often about We'll do homeschoolers, we'll get into university, and having so many conversations with people who work at university and they say, no, we love homeschoolers, or we love it when people are in our course and they want to be there and they're the ones asking the curious questions and they're learning what they want to learn.
Vicci Oliver:And you know, when I think about every single person who did my course going through university, when I did my education graduate, diploma they were like they were so rare.
Dr Naomi Fisher:People weren't there. I know, I agree, that's what I think too there were people like that, and you know I was at a really elite university so you'd have to work really, really hard to get there. You couldn't get there by accident, but even so and I mean, I don't think anybody explicitly pressured me to go down the path I went down no, I think before it was just kind of in the atmosphere. But also, I think what happened to me now, thinking back as a psychologist, is that and I think this happens to children in the school system unfortunately is that from very, very early on we tell children in the school system what you really want to do and what you're interested in is less important than what we, as your teachers, think you should be doing and want you to do. And we're going to take a lot of your time you know really a lot of your time and energy and we're going to insist that you do the things we think are most important. And the stuff that you think is most important, that kind of gets pushed to the margins.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And I think we do that particularly in childhood, because the interests and passions of childhood are things that generally adults dismiss as trivial. You know young kids like so to sort of up to 12, they're really interested in Pokemon or they're really interested in Minecraft or they're really interested in, you know, dinosaurs or all sorts of things which adults are like. Oh you know, you'd be much better off doing phonics or in maths, something productive. So we set up that thing right from the start where we say to kids don't listen to your own kind of internal drive of what you really love.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And I even think with myself. I was a passionate reader from a really early stage, which gets you lots of approval in the school system. I was reading when I went to school and I was always with a book, always with a book. And even that one of my memories from primary school was them saying that I should be encouraged to read nonfiction because I was reading fiction and I should be encouraged to read more challenging books. So there was always a kind of what you're doing isn't good enough, it's not enough, you should be doing something else.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And actually, when I think back to what they pushed me to read, like when I would say 10 and 11, I was encouraged to read things like Jules Verne and Charles Dickens, like really weighty classics, and it completely turned me off them. I have never read them since, like, and I waited my way through these books and I was like you know. So I think by the time I got to 16 and 18, when I was making these decisions, I just really didn't know what. I firstly didn't really know what really interested me, but I also didn't value what interested me because I had been kind of trained to. Yeah, everybody had said, you know that you don't trust your own drive, don't trust your own. And certainly I would never have chosen psychology, say, at sixth form, because psychology I remember psychology being seen as a lesser, a lesser option, a soft subject. So I would have even ruled out that opportunity to discover then that it could be interesting by myself. I would have done that.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, and I was just on that note too, about how unimaginative we like I even think of myself when I was teaching how unimaginative we are when it comes to jobs and what potential there is out there, you know, like lawyer, doctor, you know yeah, kids don't know.
Vicci Oliver:And then I see the most amazing careers that people are making these days and I like it brings me so much joy to just be like look at what you can do. Like there is like blowing my mind that people are making money and making a life, and making a joyful life, and making a difference in people's lives in careers that I would never have guessed still get blown away. Someone gets paid to do that. That is so awesome and so it just makes me so happy when I, when people of our generation found something back then, like you know for you to have not have spent too much time before you found that thing that lit you up so sorry I interrupted you, but you were saying about yeah, you went into psychology and you found it. You loved it, yeah, yeah, you can keep going from there. I'm just loving this, yeah.
Dr Naomi Fisher:So, yes, I did my PhD, which was in developmental psychology, especially about autism. Then I did my clinical psychology doctorate, which is, you know, how to use psychology in an applied way with people, and I'm a clinical psychologist, so I really specialize in mental health and looking after people's mental health. Then I got out into the world, the world work of world, world of work, and and then and then I had my own children. So my children are now 15 and 12. Yeah, and as my children grew towards the age that they would have gone to school as my son, who's the elder one, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with the disconnect between what I had learned about child development at all in all my degrees and life psychology and what I read and what I saw happening in schools. And I particularly felt uncomfortable with the way I mean certainly the removal of agency and autonomy from children and how we think that's acceptable. We think that school is so important that it justifies taking that kind of control over their lives away from children, and also the way that it took learning out of context so that we you know, I had these small children.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I was a lot of time with my small children. I saw how they learned. I saw how everything they learned was in context. They learned things because it was useful to them right now. Like you know, they learned how to read words like yes and no because that was useful. Or they learned how to read the word free because that was useful. They didn't. They didn't learn stuff because it will be useful later. And from a child development perspective that made a lot of sense because actually neurologically that capacity to do things because it's going to be useful later is actually quite late to develop.
Dr Naomi Fisher:You know, I think they're finding now. The neuroscience studies are finding that there are massive changes in brains from like adolescents, basically from 1011 onwards, and one of the things that's coming in at that point is the ability to set goals, the ability to control yourself, the ability to actually say to yourself OK, I would like to. You know, I would like to play the piano. So I'm going to start practicing the piano and even though I can't play the piano now, I really want to be able to play the piano and so I'm going to spend time doing it. So it's that kind of thinking I'm not going to, I'm not just doing the thing that really gives me most joy right now. I've got this kind of delayed goal.
Dr Naomi Fisher:But we do that to children in school. We bring them into school and we say you need to be able to learn to read at a point when they are not yet interested, right, therefore, I don't know how old they are Australia, here they are at four or five. We've got kids who generally aren't that interested in reading yet, because they can live a perfectly good four or five year old life without being able to read, and we say to them reading is really important, you've got to learn it and we're going to pull it to part and we're going to make it into the little constituent part. So we're going to teach you all these little parts and it's all going to add together and then you're going to be able to read. And it's like that is so cognitively so far away from where these kids are and it's going to make learning more difficult. That's why I started to think. I thought the way that school is organized is going to make learning more difficult. It cannot not make learning more difficult.
Vicci Oliver:And that's what I found so fascinating in your book, because you started out straight away by saying that the school system is not based on learning theory at all. It hasn't been designed to maximize learning. So what principles have they designed the school system on?
Dr Naomi Fisher:I think originally they designed it on the system that we've got quite a lot of kids that we want to keep off the street and we don't want to be there. We're not allowed to. You know, they can't work anymore because they brought in child labour laws and we need to find somewhere for them to be and somewhere for them to be looked after in quite large groups. So I think a lot of it is convenient. So a lot of it is. We've got these kids. We can't have too many adults taking up. It's expensive to have adults looking after them, so one adult to 30, okay, we can do that.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And then it's like what it's kind of. We're doing what we've done for a long time and I think I think there's a process that goes on at school where you learn that this is the way learning has to be, and so you come out of school convinced, even if you did badly at school. In fact, I often find it's the people who did badly at school who are the most convinced that this is the way it has to be. And if I didn't do well in it, it's my fault, not the school's fault. You know it's because I didn't work hard enough, I was lazy, I didn't put the effort in.
Vicci Oliver:And that is still the conversation we're having that everyone is blaming everything but the system. It's like the child's fault.
Dr Naomi Fisher:It's the teacher's parents, lazy parents, not making them school ready, exactly.
Vicci Oliver:And we have all these like little infights and all of these conversations around those three things and it never stays, or even not even for long enough, on the actual system itself. And it is so incredibly frustrating because I just think not only is it the problem, it's causing more problems that are being amplified as we go on. I think as children and as adults, we're coming through that system and a lot of us are challenging it, which is why a lot of us did it out, and so we're all grappling with these ideas and still having like.
Vicci Oliver:I know I'm so in like because I homeschool my children as well. So 100% in my conviction, like I believe it, but I still have to push past the ideas of certain things. That was really interesting when you said before around the age of 10 or 11, do children start to think about that future, like you know, being able to set goals and it's just been making a reflection because my oldest is 11. And one of the things I really struggle with sometimes is the fact that she doesn't want to learn things now, like she likes the idea of it, but not enough to fit and want to actually achieve a goal, and that's really bothered me and I've always flow between she's not ready yet, blah, blah, blah. But it helps so much to understand developmentally where they're at and it also helps to talk to those people who are a few steps ahead of me, which has been one of the best things for me as well, to be like. My child was there too and now we're starting to see changes. Yeah absolutely.
Vicci Oliver:And also reminding myself that I've learned so much since starting our business. It's been one of the best learning experiences that I have loved every minute of in my 30s that learning doesn't stop. No because you've come out of childhood or teenage years doesn't stop. And then there isn't a timeline or a deadline where we're so time bound like it has to happen now.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I know, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I was there too. I also had that same like looking at my kids when they were prepubescent and looking at how, yeah, they were exactly like that. They wanted to be able to do things, but they didn't want to go through the process of learning how to do things, they just wanted to be able to do things. They gave up really quickly. They would try something and then they'd be like no, not me. And I would be like how are they ever going to do this differently? Because I think, like everybody who's at school believes, I certainly believe that that's something you learn at school. You have to be taught at school, and teachers will say that we have to make them do this so that they see the point and so that they learn, and I just think that's I now think that's completely misguided. I don't think that's how that shift happens and I've seen it so many kids now, because it is such a massive advantage to actually have teenagers who've seen the process happen. But I've seen that kind of shift and with both of my kids I first saw it with bicycle riding that when they were younger they both couldn't ride a bicycle and they just weren't. Well, they wanted to be able to ride the bike, but they didn't want to be able to learn. They didn't want to learn how to ride the bike because they didn't want to do all the falling off stage and the practicing stage, they just wanted to be able to ride the bike. And then, when they were both about nine, three years apart, it was like something just switched on and I remember my son be like I'm going to learn how to ride that bicycle and he just put on long sleeves, long trousers, went out every day onto that driveway we had a driveway outside our house fell off the bike fell off the bike, fell off the bike, fell off the bike for like two full days. And then he was like I can ride it now. And he could.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And my daughter had a totally different process three years later. She was like I'm not going to fall off, you are going to come behind me and hold me up the whole time. Okay, she said, you just hold there, you don't let go, we're going to do it. And we did do that and actually, similarly, in about two days she learned how to ride the bicycle and it was like once they got that idea and it was there. It wasn't you know, and I had worried about this. I was like, maybe what happens if they never learned to ride bicycle? But once I could see that they were doing that with the bicycle, I was like, okay, I can see it coming and it's going to happen for all sorts of other things.
Vicci Oliver:Do you want to know? One of the other stories that you talked about in the book which really struck with me was where you talked about immersive learning, and so you talk about your the fact that immersive learning is messy and it's not need a predictable, and you use the example of your daughter learning French, Like so you must have moved.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, we went to France for two years. So actually when I wrote that first book we were actually living in France. They went to a democratic school in France for two years, a Sudbury school.
Vicci Oliver:And so so you were saying that she, you know, like you didn't have proper French lessons, she's just immersed. Never. Totally. Yes, yeah, and it's like, it's like pulling in.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I think of it like pulling in information when you're immersed in something, it's like you're pulling in bits and you're making them fit together, but you're it's a completely different system to what it would be like to say, learning French at school, where you go along and they say you know, today we're doing Bonjour. And the funny thing is that she's now 12. And she's just started at another democratic school here, actually down in Devon, where we are, and the first day or so the other kids are learning French. And they went in and they and the first thing was was Bonjour. And she came back and said I cannot believe they don't know Bonjour, and it was like she hasn't had that experience of having to learn a language in that way at all. She said, in fact, no one ever says Bonjour, they just say salut.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, it was really interesting. I thought because the way you sort of said it like if you learn French in a very conventional way, you learn, you know greetings and certain things, but actually if you're immersed in it, she might have actually learned the word for Wi-Fi password before actually Absolutely Exactly.
Dr Naomi Fisher:You learn what's useful.
Vicci Oliver:Well, that's useful. And then you were saying, like to see whether someone knows French. They would have to, they would go through an examination process, and so your daughter may have failed a written test or a you know whatever way they were assessing it, but contextually she would be able to have a conversation with people in France, which is the whole purpose of learning the language in the first place. And yet that process is not giving you the outcome you think and telling you accurately whether something's being learned. And that was just like mind blowing as well, like you know. You know, when you put it in those examples, I was like that is exactly what we do. We make it sound like we know what needs to be learned and going to assess what needs, what we think is being learned, which is completely different.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yes To what you feel it is, and with French it's with a language. It's so obvious because you can learn a language for five years. You can get an exam. I tell the children about it all the time. I have a GCSE in German and I got an A in it when I was 16. I don't think I can even put together one sentence in German now. I just absolutely cannot. But we pretend that this is almost a superior way of learning. That you know. The people said to me things like oh, what about when they properly learn French? It's like they are properly learning French. Yeah, you know what will they do when they're learning it really at school?
Dr Naomi Fisher:It's like that's not how you really learn anything, and I think it's so obvious with a language, but it's the case with everything really Like. If I think about myself and psychology, I think the reason that I really got into psychology and I would still say I'm learning psychology all the time is because I immersed myself in psychology. I loved it so much that I immersed it myself in it. It wasn't because the teachers told me information that was really useful and I've retained that. I don't remember what I learned in my psychology lectures at university. It wasn't about that. It was about this kind of immersion in ideas and making connections. And yeah, that wouldn't necessarily be reflected well in an exam at all. And yeah, I don't know if the other thing about a French, I think so my son has now actually so he's the older one, he's actually just done a GCSE in French at 15. And that was a really interesting process for me because it was the first time he'd ever done any kind of formal examination and he was very like yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll go in there, talk French, you know, be fine.
Dr Naomi Fisher:But when we went in there to have like the mock exam at the school, they were really focused on how are you going to get your points? You know, you need to say this, you need to say this, you need to say this. And I was like, wow, this isn't about speaking French at all, it's about doing the things, that going to get you the points in this oral exam. And my son just started to look a bit kind of like what is this about? And I would say to you, you do need to say more.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Because he said you said well, you know what about? If she asked me the question, I answered the question and I would say well, because it's an exam, it would be good to then expand on your answer, you know, to show them that you can speak a bit more French than that. And he was like well, why would I want to do that? I've answered the question and it's just like he's thinking about this in a completely different way. He's just thinking about this as well. You know, I've actually speaking French as opposed to.
Vicci Oliver:I'm trying to get my best yeah exactly. Isn't it fascinating? And so I have a question that I'm curious to know your take on AI and how this is going to change the face of assessment. Because I met a guy the other like two weeks ago at a conference and he said he'd written his 8000 or maybe 16,000 word thesis through AI and AI was able to accurately write about his personal experience with just a few products and he did his whole thesis on it.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Wow, but he did his thesis on that, presumably, rather than simply generating his thesis and handing it in.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, so I think he used it obviously to prompt certain things, and he must have been put enough of his personal information, but it was meant to be a personalized, like his experience working in hospitality, or I remember him saying well, how do you do that, though? Like how do they not know? It's AI? He goes that it was so accurate in my experience, like it was able to generate my own experience so accurately Wow, it was just. I mean, we've been having this conversation amongst a lot of my home schooling friends who are also teachers.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah thinking about how, how, ai it emerged so quickly.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah.
Dr Naomi Fisher:How is it, yeah, in education really interesting is there, and I think we don't know. But I think one thing that Interests me about AI and about how it's getting talked about in schools Is a lot of it is about well, kids are going to use this to cheat, kids are going to use this to game the system. Basically, and for me as someone as a self-directed learning enthusiast, I Guess my question would be if you're doing the learning for yourself and because you're interested in it, why would you want to game the system like I'm writing my book right, maybe if I spent a bit of time thinking about it, I would be able to get my get AI to write this book for me. But why would I do that? Do you see what I mean? Because you only do that if you set up this system of, we are going to assess you on these quite rigid criteria and your job really is to, like in the French exam, to get as many points as you can.
Dr Naomi Fisher:It's not actually about the learning and I think I talk about this in that in my first book as well that the Shift from your learning for your own sake, because you really want to know and you're really interested At which point AI might be useful because you could ask it some questions, but but it's not going to replace that. And when, when you're at the point of I'm learning, because somebody else is going to judge me for it and they're going to give me a score for it, and that is really only reason why I'm doing it, in which case it makes perfect sense to use AI.
Vicci Oliver:If you could, yes, but it's, it's gaming, the system and the system has to change, right, if that yes, it does that they have to decide. Well, you know, I guess it's making us really consider Whether the assessments we have been asking children to do, whether they could cheat on AI or not- yeah. I have any point.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I think. If I can do it, why are we training kids to do it? Right, that's right. What's the point of training kids to do it?
Vicci Oliver:Yes, so it's going to make us be very, very clear about what outcomes and what learning actually looks like.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I think it could be good, yeah, no, I think it really does challenge us and it challenges us to think about why kids are doing things. And if we are setting up a system where cheating Is an obvious thing to do, then people are going to try and cheat. You know, if we're setting up a system I mean, we see this just across the board, don't we like? There's scandals all the time about people cheating to get into things, cheat people cheating to Sell stuff, people just if you set up a system which rewards, which which kind of puts outcome over process that's how I would put it.
Vicci Oliver:Yes, absolutely, and I think.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I think it's such a mistake in education to put outcome over process. I think you know I can see how in the workplace that that might well be something you need to do, but in education I just don't see a reason why we should make Everything so outcome focused, because when we do that we shift the focus for the kids, for the teachers, for the parents, for Everyone from what am I doing to I've got to show what I'm doing and be judged on it.
Vicci Oliver:That's right. So it's like Sorry, what the skills we need To do school well, as opposed to skills. I need to learn what I need to. Yeah.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And to discover my passions and what really interests me and processes messy. It's like immersive learning. You can't track it nicely, it doesn't look linear. You know you can't say all eight year olds should be doing this. You have to. But I think the weird thing is that I think that lots of people know this and I think the people who know this most Are actually early years educators.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yes, because we do have a place in our education system where Self-direction, autonomy, is valued. We do have a place where the adult job is to be available to curate the environment, to provide opportunities for young people. And the young people are the ones who choose how they do it and they can stop when they want to. And you know no one is generally going to say right, you've got to have two hours of water play today, two hours of sand about box tomorrow. You know you are allowed to come and go from things as you want.
Vicci Oliver:And actually those early years teachers that are having to tune more into that psychology, like they're actually there to help with the emotional process and the emotional learning as opposed to the academic learning, and there's that, you know, and they're battling, it's not valued. Yeah, they have to battle to remind the powers that be that that's actually their job, that the academic part of things is not their job as early educators. It's actually to help them with their emotional you know intelligence and learning how to be human.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, and it's there for learning how to be creative, how to solve problems. All of that stuff Happens much more in a self-directed learning environment, like a good nursery school, that it does when you sit children in rows and control them and tell them you've got to do these things. And I think I think it's tragedy that what's happening in our education system, at least in the uk, is the principles of Secondary of being extended down into primary and the principles of primary of being extended down into early years. So I would like it to be on the other way. You know, if early years was informing the whole of primary, yes, rather than it being actually in early years, you really should be getting on with letting them to learn that read, read and write their names and get you know. It's just like why? Why do we? We don't? There's no evidence that it's better to do it earlier.
Vicci Oliver:That's right, that is, and that's the thing. There isn't the evidence, and yet we're still battling with people who are coming up with all of the Rules for the game without any evidence to support it, and I think that that is a really frustrating place to be From people who are so desperate to see things change. And what happens is, I think, a lot of people end up you know all these good people who can see what the right thing to do is end up going. You know what? I'm just going to do my own thing with my own family. Yeah, so you're not listening.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Because it's so frustrating. Yeah, yeah, loads of teachers exactly loads of teachers.
Vicci Oliver:You see it from the inside, 100%. You're talking a lot about autonomy, which is something is so important, but one of the things and and this is a bit of a theme that's been coming up for me a lot lately is but helping children to say no, like this is something that we actively need to help children to do, and I think on is probably a separate topic, but also learning to hear no as well. For me, like yeah, that's like hearing no from other people and being gracious and hearing that no, but also being able to say no in themselves as well, to honor their feelings.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I think it's a really interesting thing. I write quite a lot about this, actually about how we tend not to value children's nose or value their yeses, and so we always value participation over non participation, for example, or Going somewhere over not going somewhere, or staying somewhere for a long time, as opposed to saying after an hour, actually, no, I've had enough, I don't want to do this anymore. Um, and I think we have to actively kind of make those nose Visible. I talk about it sometimes as it's like giving permission to children to say the no, so just saying things. So sometimes I talk about it like scales.
Dr Naomi Fisher:It's like when parents say things to their kids. Often there's a kind of implicit, hidden loading of I really want you to say yes, you know, like, would you like to come and write, read a story with me? Is that a real balanced question? Or is it Come and read a story with me if the child says something like no, I'd rather play Minecraft? That's definitely the disappointing answer there for the parent. So I think the parent has to yet literally try and balance those things up and say you know, we could read a story, but we don't have to. Other things could be good as well.
Dr Naomi Fisher:So that you're kind of Showing them you know, like all we could go out to the park, but also we could stay here and curl up on the sofa. That would be good too. So you're kind of showing them that you're not, that it's okay for them to own that, and I think you know I definitely see myself as someone who found it very difficult to say no, and I still find it difficult to stay. No, um, and one of the things that I see in my children, having not ever had the experience of being put in a setting where they couldn't leave and where they had to stay they're really good at leaving, yeah, really good at saying no. Wasted my time off, I go and I'm kind of like, oh you know you've stayed there for a bit longer.
Dr Naomi Fisher:No, they say yeah, I learned enough. Yeah, I think it's so hard as a parent. You hear that you go sort of go gulp Yep, is that really okay? We've gone all this way for this group and now you're saying that don't think it's for me and are they giving up too early, all of that kind of stuff.
Dr Naomi Fisher:But I also I think one thing that can help the parents is that, firstly, you kind of Value your kids nose as much as their yeses, but as well you don't take their noses completely closing a door, because I think there can also be a thing that a child might say no to something one time for so many reasons.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Right, one of it might be their own kind of internal autonomy, but another might be really high anxiety, Unfamiliarity with new places, all sorts of reasons might mean a child say no and I think it's important that that doesn't close down opportunities. Each time. So I do meet parents are like oh you know, we went to the soft play, they said no, so don't go anymore. Went to the playground, they said no, we don't do that anymore. And it's like your world is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and actually the job as a parent needs to be to making it bigger and bigger and bigger as they grow, and so I think that kind of needs to be a feeling. Well, you know, we say no today, but maybe we'll do it tomorrow.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And I think the other way to do that is to make your own feelings visible, your own internal feelings visible, so to talk about your internal process. You know like, well, I was thinking about doing this, but then I thought actually, no, I'm not going to do it today, but maybe I'll do it tomorrow, do you know? I mean so you kind of yeah, great that for them, so they can see it.
Vicci Oliver:Yes, I think I've also had to learn, um, to be honest about why, like you know, when I have tried to push in times where they've done that, where they've said no, when I'm like oh yeah and happy to be really honest and be like you know what, sometimes I feel the social pressure, like I feel like, yeah, this is my thing, this is what I'm carrying, yeah, why I may have said things that, um, yeah, made you feel like you had to make a different choice, or made you probably shamed you a little bit into.
Vicci Oliver:Yes, this is how, this is what it was feeling. That's what I was feeling like at the time.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yes, I think that's really helpful because otherwise you can't be neutral, because children pick up on it, that's right, they know and you could pretend that you don't feel the social pressure. But I think also, just always making these things visible is good. So if you can say you know I feel like everybody's looking at me about this one, but that's okay, I can sit with that, that's right.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah and and kind of own it. And kind of own it and say you can still make that decision, you can still say no, even though for me my Temptation is to try and push you into saying yes, absolutely.
Vicci Oliver:Um, I'd like to jump a little bit to homeschooling parents and people that are starting their homeschooling journey. What do you think are some of the main assumptions that we take from our own schooling experience and our own idea of what education looks like when we first try and do something different. Jump yeah, take the road less traveled. What are some of the main assumptions that parents might have that can make things?
Dr Naomi Fisher:So I think many parents have the assumption that they will do something quite school-like at home and that that's what successful home schooling or home education looks like that you need to have a certain number of hours a day. And I think most parents I think all parents maybe carry the assumption that if you don't make children do things, there are things they'll never learn. And therefore I meet parents who say things like well, you know, we just have to cover maths and English because that's really important and so we're going to make them do that. And I have a kind of opposite perspective because basically, if I think something's really important, then I absolutely don't want to force them to do that, because I feel like wherever I make them do it, I damage the learning. So I want to provide opportunities without the pressure, because the pressure kills the love of learning. But I think yeah, I think many parents and I think also parents often have a kind of time scale in their heads of when you should do things, because that's what happens in the school system. So I certainly had that when I began. Like you know, they learn to read in the UK at age five or six in the school system. So I'm like you know. Okay, what if they haven't learned to read when they're five or six and they didn't? My kids didn't learn to read when they were five or six and what you know help. Does that mean we're really behind? Does that mean I'm being really neglectful?
Dr Naomi Fisher:And I think that kind of tracking of the school system is quite hard to get away from. Certainly I had to really consciously step away from tracking what kids might have been doing in the school system, because they are in one system of education and they are being taught a curriculum and it's easy to see that and think, oh, my kids aren't doing anything like that. Look, they're still like playing on the trees all day and these kids are like writing essays. How does that happen? You know this sort of gap and I think that when I started out I did believe, I did think that we would have a kind of extended play base stage, like in some education systems, say, like Montessori or Steiner, have a longer play base stage where they might do play up to seven or eight. And then I thought, you know, at that point maybe my children would be more ready for more formal learning or become more like kids in the school system.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And what I didn't anticipate was that the longer we were out of it, the more different they got than the kids in the school system. So, like at seven and eight, it was like there's absolutely no way that we would be going into the school system now. It would just not work on any level and of course they hadn't gone through that training and I think that you have to be ready for that. I think child development looks really different. That's another thing I talk about in my book that when I learned about child development and I've read loads of studies on child development they never say this is child development in the context of school, because school is invisible, it's just accepted. Like when I did my PhD, I saw hundreds of children. I recruited them through schools, so of course I saw just school children. It didn't occur to me I was missing any kids, because we're kids they're at school right.
Dr Naomi Fisher:They're all at school. They're all at school. So, and when I saw how differently things could be when my kids didn't go to school, maybe think, wow, there's this huge invisible intervention that's going on into children's childhoods 30 hours a week, minimum every week, for like 12 or 13 years, which we don't see as an intervention, we just see it as natural, that's what children do. But actually, you know, when that doesn't happen, how do children develop and I think it's different.
Vicci Oliver:I find that that's actually one of the things I find so fascinating and that's why I've been drawn to Peter Gray's work and your work is that, you know, thinking outside of what has happened in the last 200 years in terms of the way that we've done things, and looking at, you know, people who have we've lived in the past, evolutionary wise, and how happy, and also just looking at how miserable the Western world seems to be.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, really miserable, and telling everybody else they should do it like that.
Vicci Oliver:Exactly, and it just gets so curious and I think I really resonate with Carol. Black uses that analogy about looking at orcas in Seaworld and saying that's that's what orcas behaviour is like.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I really totally resonate with that, absolutely yes.
Vicci Oliver:And then it's completely different to orcas in the wild, like yeah and cheese and not. It's almost like there are different species. When you compare, when you actually look at how they live, they're totally different. Yeah, resonated so strongly with me. Yes, thinking about children in schools?
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yes, absolutely. And I think if you homeschool, there are like little surprises all the way along. I have still have this, like things that I realise my children aren't learning from the school system and how different that is. And when they were really young, it was just things like the fact you go school Monday to Friday and not on Saturday and Sundays. That didn't. They didn't see that, they didn't learn that because you know it was, but also just things like we had this conversation when they were about when my son was about eight or nine about clever and what clever meant. We were with a group of school kids and they were saying you know, oh, yes, they're really clever, or they're really clever, but you know they're dyslexic, so they struggle with reading. And I was like, well, this way of kind of classifying people is so pervasive in the school system and so completely not there in my children's world.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yes because they're not compared with their peers all the time on how they perform on academic tasks. They have no idea how their friends might do in a maths test.
Vicci Oliver:I mean? I mean, kids do care about age, but they don't care about age at the same time, like they care about you know, I'm older, you're younger, but then that so falls away and they're not comparing. They're only comparing, like the actual number age, but not where they are and what they do, like a five year old will oftentimes, you know, see themselves as such an equal to a 10 year old or a 15 year old in so many ways True.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, nicky, my business partner did a post about we had our homeschool photos done at one of our co-ops and she said like it gave her goosebumps having a look at the photos of all of the children just wearing and being who you know, bright hair everywhere.
Vicci Oliver:Yes, Not brush hair bright hair, wearing whatever like clothing that I couldn't imagine, I didn't think being comfortable wearing. If I was at school and none of the children have any idea that us, as parents, are sitting there like having a moment over their school phone, they're just like, oh yeah, whatever, like I don't even understand photos and we're all just like, oh my gosh. I believe this freedom that you get to experience in your life, you have no idea of the stuff that you're like.
Vicci Oliver:you know, we often worry about what they won't, what they're missing out on, what they need to learn, and also like, as you say, what are they? What is the benefit of not learning some of the things that children at school will learn, that is absolutely.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I think about that a lot when you look at a group of home-ed kids, how different they all are and how much more different they are than if you look at a group of school kids, where they're all sitting in, they're all being made to look the same, they dress the same, sit the same, do the same thing, and you know you have your group of home-ed kids and even if there's class going on, you're always going to have someone who's under the table.
Dr Naomi Fisher:You're always going to have someone who's hanging upside down from a chair or on a tree. You're always going to have someone saying no, it's not for me. You know they. You've got like diversity right there in every group and I think it's just amazing and I think one of the things that got me thinking really early on actually as well, was seeing how lots of behaviors that my children and other children I knew had when they were young children and when they were young children they were accepted that they would have it like you know, just things like jumping up and down when they got excited you know, they got excited, jump up down hooray, hooray, hooray.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Move your hands around, whatever, show it with your whole body. Then I could see kids going into school and quite quickly they weren't doing that anymore and they were starting to sort of. And I remember we met up with one child, one other child who we'd known before school, and then she'd gone to school and my son was jumping up and down with excitement, waving his hands around and making noises and she said why is he doing that? And I was like he's excited. That's what he does when he's excited. And you know, a couple of years ago they would have both been doing that and they're excited, but she had now been put into this environment where that wasn't acceptable and she was learning that it wasn't acceptable. And the fact that these other kids, these home educated kids, weren't learning that, I think, was something quite special actually about them being able to express themselves and to continue to express themselves.
Vicci Oliver:So then, naomi, what do you think we could be doing right now? What can we, what can parents do right now, or teachers be doing right now to make changes? Do you have suggestions?
Dr Naomi Fisher:So there are some teachers trying to bring in more autonomy at some points, and I think you can do that.
Dr Naomi Fisher:If that's well, it depends on your school.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I think you really do need to be supported in some ways by the school, but there are inspiring stories of some teachers who have prioritised different things in their classroom rather than it being all about these results in the curriculum, and it can just be really basic things like giving children free choice about what they write about, or just adding little bits of autonomy, or taking out grading of some things, so saying you know, we're going to do this and there's research that shows that.
Dr Naomi Fisher:When you say to kids, you know we're going to do this and I'm going to grade you at the end of it, versus we're going to do this and we're just doing it because it's interesting, you can choose it because it's interesting, they do it differently, and the one that's just interesting they generally do to a higher quality, which is kind of the reverse of what we think right. We think, oh, they don't take it seriously unless they're graded. But I think we train children into that. We teach them that it's only serious if it's graded, and then we turn around and say, oh, they only take things seriously if they're graded. It's the kind of thing where you know children say is it going to be on the test?
Vicci Oliver:Yes, we train them into that. Yes.
Dr Naomi Fisher:We teach them that it's only really important if it's on the test, and then we blame them when they say I'm not going to do it unless it's on the test. Well, you set that up really. So I think as teachers there's a kind of can I bring in things where assessment is not the aim, and I think it's easier actually the younger they are, because the closer they are to being played or into a play. It's hard with 13 and 14 year olds. I do think it's really hard when they've got, when they've had 10 years in the system for parents.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I think you can do stuff after school where you step away from this model. You know, often kids will be spending all of their time doing structured activities which are outcome focused. So even if they do extra curricular stuff, it'll be music lessons where they'll be working towards an exam, or they'll be doing art lessons where it's about producing art for the exhibition, even things like drama classes. My daughter did some drama classes and I just thought it would be fun for her, but it was all about the end of term show actually.
Dr Naomi Fisher:And it was all about practicing for this end of term show. Everything becomes about outcome and I just think we really need to get our kids to be doing stuff where it's about process for as long as possible and giving them opportunities to do stuff where it's about process and where we're saying it doesn't matter. And not just saying that, because often parents will say it doesn't matter how you do your exam, let's just not do these exams, let's just you know, if you want to play an instrument, let's just play that instrument.
Vicci Oliver:Yeah, I guess in examining too. Like we say it doesn't matter. But how else are we saying that it matters? Like yeah. I'm a new fact that we may not have come out of our mouths. But is there other ways in which we have been reinforcing that idea? Of course there is.
Dr Naomi Fisher:Yeah, I mean just the exams, just the whole way they're done, says this matters, don't they Like you go to a special room, you have to sit in a special place, you have to perform in a special way, there's a special person who's the examiner, everything is set up to. This is important. This really matters. I think it gives children a really mixed message If you put them through that well, saying we don't mind what you get, well, why are you doing it? Then yeah, doesn't you know? Why not just say, oh, we don't have to do that, let's just play. And if they want to do it, then that's okay. But then I would, as a parent, not be very focused on how they do it, making the practice for it.
Dr Naomi Fisher:I sometimes meet parents say, well, they really want to do that exam. So you know, now I have to make them practice. You don't, you know, they can just do that exam. What's the worst that can happen? They fail an exam. Actually, failing an exam is quite a useful learning process to go through. And why not do it when you're younger? People sometimes say to me, when they're talking about autonomy and choices, I can't let my children make choices because they make such bad choices, and I often say well, you know what better time to practice making bad choices than when you're nine?
Dr Naomi Fisher:Because you've got nothing at stake. It's very unlikely you're going to lose your home home, for example, at nine, because of your choices, Whereas if you don't get to make any decisions until you're 23, which does happen to quite a lot of people then actually the consequences are much, much higher. And people. We sort of spitting people out of the system who just don't have much practice of making decisions, thinking things through for themselves. And the consequences for some of them are bad.
Vicci Oliver:It's been such a great conversation, Naomi. Thank you so much for giving so much of your time tonight. I am aware that we've been chatting for a while. Where can people find out more about your work or you have so many great takes on things. Where can people read and, you know, follow along with your ideas.
Dr Naomi Fisher:So my kind of one stop shop is my website Naomi Fisher dot co dot UK. It has links to my other social media stuff, but I so I have that. I have two books changing our minds is the one that we've been talking about mostly today, and then I have another one which is a different way to learn, which is specifically about neurodiversity and self threat education. And then I also have a sub stack, which is like a newsletter that gets delivered to your inbox every Monday. So that's good for people who don't like social media, because it's just an email and it's free and that's called think again Naomi C Fisher sub stack dot com and then Facebook. Dr Naomi Fisher is my place.
Vicci Oliver:I'll make sure we link all of those things in our show notes so for anyone that just have somewhere to click and find everything they'll be able to, because I think that we covered so many topics tonight and today was tonight actually this morning for me, this morning for you, tonight for me and I think that they're so valuable and I love having these conversations with more people and hopefully, you know, just inspiring people to think a bit differently about the way that we've always done things, so that we can have a bit more of a brighter future for the next gen.
Dr Naomi Fisher:It's. It's been really great to talk to you. Thank you for inviting me. You're so welcome Well there you have it.
Vicci Oliver:I hope you've enjoyed our conversation and I also just want to note before I go that, even if you're not on the same journey as both Naomi and I in terms of self directed educational homeschooling, I just hope that the points that we discussed today really resonated and sparked maybe some questions or some curiosity around the way that we do things within our education system. And it's important to actually see what's happening and to hear what's happening within the system, because we need to be catering for all children and start to really see and highlight some of the problems that it has created, because we need to have more child advocates making noise for change. Now it's always. I love doing this journey with you, so until next time, stay wild.