Reference resources reap rewards for parents and children alike
by Peter Spinks

``Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.'' - Chinese proverb

IN MAY 2004, a cross-country runner stumbled upon an unemployed man, 53, and his 12-year-old daughter, Ruth, who had lived for four years in a tarpaulin-covered shelter dug into a steep hillside in Forest Park, Oregon, in the United States. Authorities were concerned about the girl's education after she had lived for so long in the wild, removed from so-called civilisation. Yet welfare workers were struck by Ruth's happiness and wellbeing, and her vast general knowledge. "Upon testing her - they couldn't help themselves - officials found her academic levels were on a par with our VCE or university entrance levels," says Home Education Network Victoria co-ordinator Lyn Loxton. Among the couple's few possessions were several well-thumbed volumes of the World Book Encyclopedia. "The girl had gained her entire education from these books as well as from the incredible knowledge of life given to her by her father," Loxton says. Can we benefit from Ruth's experience? For a start, she acquired her knowledge informally. Second, she and her father relied on a limited but comprehensive reference resource.

EDUCATIONAL psychologists know that acquiring knowledge is a lifelong pursuit, and the stimulation, joy and satisfaction of exploring and discovering new things about the world, and how it works, does not stop on leaving school. Much of the learning process is subconscious. In basic behaviourist terms, it involves weaving intricate webs of connections between multitudinous stimuli and responses. When we sit in a classroom or lecture hall, the business of education, training or schooling, as the act of learning is then known, takes on a more formal, conscious dimension - self-conscious even - as we realise the need to store those connections so that they can be recalled later. Memorising facts, and retrieving them at will, after all, is part of passing examinations. Informal learning, in general, is a more pleasurable process. It's also inclined to be more enduring and meaningful, and a lot less burdensome.
How do we learn informally? Essentially, when we seek answers to questions. (Even the receipt of no answer to a particular question is more likely to be remembered as a question unanswered - perhaps to be answered later on.) This kind of casual education, or "living-room learning", occurs much of the time. It's how we get to know what's happening through printed and broadcast news, and about activities we enjoy, such as cooking, reading, watching films or listening to music. Children come wired for informal learning in every conceivable situation. As child psychologists know, playing is about learning - and one of the most valuable forms of instruction known. Museum curators prey on play by using interactive games as exhibits that endeavour to tempt and tantalise young visitors into learning while playing.
Home educators, those relying on distance or correspondence education and more and more schoolteachers, too, realise the power of play and the need to use the everyday world of plants, animals, minerals, sounds and smells to facilitate what is known as "natural learning". It involves nothing special - just trying to answer questions as they arise. In this regard, natural learning is the antithesis of what much formal education attempts to force-feed - namely, answers to questions that never arose in the first place. But how can home educators, parents or even qualified teachers provide answers to every question an inquisitive child throws at them? Many children's questions, after all, embarrass us by exposing our ignorance. Short of becoming veritable know-alls, few parents can answer everything their children ask them.
So how should parents tap the benefits of natural learning? One strategy might be to encourage offspring to "Ask Jeeves" or use other internet devices to search electronically for answers to their myriad questions. (A problem with this is that it is hard to verify the authenticity of much internet material, some of which may be inaccurate or misleading.) Another approach might be to palm inquisitive children off to a knowledgeable neighbour or the local library - assuming one is close by, and still open (in Victoria, for example, several mobile library services have been halted, while local budget cuts in the US have forced some Californian libraries to close). A third way, perhaps to be tried in conjunction with the first two, would be to invest in a slightly souped-up version of what Ruth had access to - an initially modest but comprehensive home reference library. This might comprise a judicious selection of audotapes, videos and DVDs but, above all, a collection of up-to-date, printed editions of children's encyclopedias, dictionaries and other reference works. Their purpose would not be to outdo or replace the local library's reference collection, but to provide in-house resources that encourage and educate children and adults alike.

RECOGNISING the rising demand for such resources, numerous mainstream publishers produce a range of colourful, concise, all-encompassing and compellingly accessible works that explain topics accurately and simply in language that children understand. (This is in addition to the resources available from home educators' learning centres and suppliers across Australia.) Some books are complete reference works in their own right, others form series and many are now linked to the internet. A few, such as the Macquarie School Dictionary second edition (John Wiley, 2003), include computer software with interactive activities for learning and practising language.
One beauty of these publications - which are designed for children aged from four, or thereabouts, through to the late teens, and beyond - is that they avoid the technical details, excessive information and tedious prose plaguing many traditional reference works. As a result, adults find themselves comprehending topics they thought they already knew and understood. This is both the joy and shock of parents choosing to educate at home or perhaps wanting to supplement school-set homework with some independent home inquiry.
Suppose, for instance, a child is learning about the solar system. Doring Kindersley's e.encyclopaedia science says this about the second planet from the Sun: ``The atmosphere of Venus is much thicker than that of Earth and is made up mostly of carbon dioxide. Its pressure is nearly 100 times Earth's atmospheric pressure. The dense clouds in the atmosphere are made up of sulphuric acid droplets. The atmosphere traps heat like a greenhouse, sending the temperature soaring to more than 475 degrees.'' The entry displays a keyword that electronically links readers to extra information online at www.science.dke-encyc.com, created by DK and Google. E-links include animations, videos, sound buttons, virtual tours, interactive quizzes, databases, timelines and real-time reports.
The e.encyclopaedia is e-linked to about 1000 topics arranged in categories: matter and materials, forces and energy, electricity and magnetism, space, earth, plants, animals and the human body. Those wanting more particulars may consult DK's specific titles, such as e.explore Dinosaur, e.explore Earth, e.explore Space Travel, e.explore Human Body, e.explore Insect (the latter two just published this month [May]) and a simplified Night-Sky Atlas with star-studded photographs, maps and transparent pages.
A kit for building a Martian mini-rover provides a hands-on chance to learn more about the red planet. The Ultimate Flight Kit, meanwhile, enables children to assemble a paraglider, glider, airship, helicopter, propeller plane and other craft, from pre-cut components.
Relating newly acquired information to real-life situations helps reinforce the material. In the case of a child learning about the solar system, a peek at the night sky through binoculars or a rudimentary telescope might be followed by visits to a planetarium, museum, library or IMAX movie on the planets. When the child starts on chapters dealing with the evolution of plants and animals, for example, tours of the park, botanical gardens and zoo might help.

FOR home schoolers and parents with children engaged in correspondence or distance education, these techniques are not new. The range and quality of reference works, however, are new, as are the electronic links to dedicated, interactive webpages. "Better and more reference resources and educational workbooks are now available in bookshops and even newsagents, making it easier for parents to teach at home," says Lyn Loxton.
Inquiries she receives about home schooling have trebled over the past 18 months, as more parents become disillusioned with conventional education and problems such as bullying. Despite concerns that home-schooled children lack the socialisation skills of conventionally schooled children, home educators argue that their children have ample opportunity for socialising with peers and, some insist, are better "socialised" than many institutionally educated children.
This claim seems to be supported by a North American survey, Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream, published in 2001 by The Fraser Institute in Vancouver, which found that, on average, home-schooled children were more academically and socially advanced than public and private school students.
Home education is legal throughout Australia, though regulations vary between states. Some, such as Queensland, require home tutors to hold teaching qualifications, although this is under review. Western Australian and South Australian home schoolers need only register with their education department or board of studies; in other states, registration is optional. Most parents prefer not to register and so exact figures on home schooling are unavailable. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, in fact, collects no data on home education.
Estimates by home education associations, based on curriculum suppliers' mailing lists, homeschooling networks and newsletter subscription records, suggest that 10,000 children are home-schooled in Victoria. The unofficial Victorian figure exceeds an official nationwide estimate of only 7000, which parents' organisations reckon is grossly underestimated; they put the national tally at almost four times this number.
It's believed that about one-third of homeschoolers in Australia belong to religious groups who prefer to do their own thing. "Years ago, before home education became as mainstream as it is today, and before bullying became paramount for many parents, I would say that it was much higher than one-third but I think more pressing issues these days have outweighed the religious ones," says Loxton.
Whatever the true total, home schooling seems to be catching on. The NSW Board of Studies, for example, reports that 250 students were educated at home in the 1990-91 financial year and 1478 in 2001-02, a rise of almost 500 per cent. In Queensland, 907 children were home schooled in 1996 and 1384 in 2002.
In the US, home education was illegal in 30 states in 1980 but was legalised nationwide in 1993. Some states even provide vouchers for educational resources. In New Zealand, such assets are a tax-deductible expense. Australia, unfortunately, offers no such concessions yet, despite luring property investors with generous incentives, such as negative gearing, which costs the country more than $2 billion a year in lost revenue. Offering subsidies or tax allowances to parents investing in children's reference works - in much the way that solar hot water systems attract subsidies - would give a shot in the arm to primary and secondary education in Australia. In addition to assisting home schoolers, such a move would raise parents' awareness of the potential benefits of acquiring home reference resources. This would assist parents to become more directly and jointly involved in their children's education and may result in youngsters learning more actively from everyday experiences. An old Native American saying goes: "Tell me and I'll forget. Show me and I may not remember. Involve me and I'll understand."
Home schooling means total involvement. Parents unable or unwilling to take this path might consider supplementing their children's conventional schooling - be it public or private - with some wholesome home habits. Most teachers, after all, admit that the best performers at school are children whose parents are involved in their education. In 2002, an Australian Council for Educational Research study found that the socio-economic background of parents may influence educational performance at least as much as the kind of school that children attend. This implies that parents, and what they possess and do at home, may ultimately influence their children's education as much as the schools themselves. Thus, well-stocked and updated home libraries, accompanied by regular reading habits, may offer a cheaper and possibly wiser alternative to private schooling. A handy home library, after all, costs hundreds of dollars, against thousands a year for private school fees.

DESPITE this, parents increasingly opt for private rather than public schools and many of them may not even keep reference resources at home. A recent national poll of high school students' parents by the Australian Council for Educational Research revealed that in the decade to 2003, enrolments rose nationally by 22.3 per cent for private schools but by only 1.2 per cent for their public counterparts. Overall, the public school share of students has fallen nationally from 77.4 per cent in 1970 to 68.4 per cent this year, leaving every capital city, bar Darwin and Hobart, with 40 per cent or more of students in private secondary schools.
Reasons for parents choosing private schools range from their particular culture and discipline to their traditional values and learning environment. Some parents, squeezed for time, seem keener to pay more for a school that can "entirely take care of" their children's education than plump for a relatively poorly resourced school that they feel requires some degree of parental tuition at home. Most of these parents argue that they have neither the time nor the domestic resources to fill gaps left by teachers.
This argument needs tackling, particularly in light of American philosopher George Santayana's comment: "A child educated only at school is an uneducated child." Parents paying less for schooling, by going public rather than private, would not need to earn so much money in the first place. They could work shorter hours - in theory, at least - and use the time not spent at work on teaching their children, and simultaneously learning themselves, about things they wanted to know.
Let's say parents wished to nurture a child's natural fascination with animals. John Farndon's Wildlife Atlas (ABC Books, 2004) provides a colourful, habitat-by-habitat account of 1000 or so predators, grazing mammals, birds, insects and reptiles. In Richard Morecroft, Alison Mackay and Karen Lloyd-Diviny's brightly illustrated Zoo Album (ABC Books, 2004), zookeepers tell anecdotes about the personalities and habits of gorillas, frogs, tigers, penguins and other animals in captivity.
Satisfying children's penchant for stickers, Ruth Brocklehurst's Animal Sticker Atlas (Usborne, 2003) teaches where animals live by getting younger readers to stick images of more than 200 species on their global habitats. In similar vein, although not restricted to animals alone, Brocklehurst's Children's Picture Atlas (Usborne, 2003) locates, by picture and word, the world's crops, people and animals. For slightly older readers, the Jacaranda Junior Atlas (John Wiley, 2003) takes a novel approach by asking three questions relating first to the globe and then to each region: Where do we live? How do we interact with the world? What is changing? It's a worldly wise way to explain maps, settlement, landforms, agriculture, political divisions, territorial claims, climate, vegetation, population distribution, transport networks, mineral and energy resources and even trading patterns. Options for atlases don't end there. Featuring new satellite-based landform maps for each continent, and linked to interactive webpages, Jacaranda's compendious Atlas of Discovery (John Wiley, 2003) allows children to uncover the what and where of the world as well as the why and how of specific societies and environments.
The 100 maps, 1000 illustrations and pictures and countless fact files of the Macmillan Children's Atlas (Pan Macmillan Australia, 2004) aim at a seemingly ageless audience. Pages are crammed with information they never taught at school (at least not me). This is the kind of reference that readily complements conventional class work. For instance, say a child gets a lesson at school on the Low Countries. A parent wanting to build on what's been learnt in class might encourage the child at home to read just two pages from the atlas. Beginning with a potted history of the region, this would cover natural features, major cities and places of interest, great painters, traditions, culture and profiles of such luminaries as Abel Tasman, Vincent van Gogh, Mata Hari and Anne Frank.
Children eager to discover more about one part of the world might consult a regional reference, such as Coral Tulloch's Antarctica (ABC Books, 2003), which won the Wilderness Society's environment award for children's literature.
Books like these inform in a digestible, entertaining way that makes material instantly understandable and hence easier to recall. In fact, much of it is hard to forget.

THE secret is to integrate learning, living and playing in a way that breaks down classroom walls and renders schooling seamless. Virtually everything then becomes an enjoyable opportunity to learn together - not just for children, but whole families too.
A visit to the shops thus becomes a lesson in geography, physics or economics. A walk in the park takes on a botanical, zoological or even physiological twist. And the inconvenience of being caught on the hop in a hailstorm offers the chance to dash home to the Oxford University Press A-Z Geography to discover: "Hail is ice which falls from the sky. Ice is formed in thick, dark clouds and it grows into hailstones as it is blown about in the air. The hailstones, which are usually about the size of a pea, fall in hail showers. The biggest hailstone ever found was almost 20 centimetres across.''
Other A-Z subjects include science, mathematics, space, technology, the human body, art, music and world religions. Every title lists more than 300 words alphabetically, and defines each one using OUP's tried-and-trusted formula of providing highly accessible but authoritative information that has been carefully checked by expert consultants, many from the famous university itself.
"One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long," a former Harvard University president, Charles Eliot Norton, once opined. Selecting the appropriate books is obviously crucial and a set or two of encyclopedic and lavishly illustrated children's reference works would make an excellent start.
Once the books are on the shelf and consulted regularly, children will acquire the heuristic habit of loving to learn things for themselves, when they are ready to do so. In no time at all, the lifelong art of learning will have assumed a leisurely life of its own.

MORE TO PORE OVER:

For Dummies . . .
Wiley Publishing, New York
Although not designed expressly for children, this light-hearted, often humorous series, written by people who can write, helps adults to extract and explain the essence of complicated or technical topics. ``For Dummies'' uses wit, cartoons and down-to-earth explanations, sometimes in depth, without dumbing down material. Having begun with computers and business, the 300-plus-page books now span a vast and ever-expanding raft of subjects, including English grammar, biology, astronomy, world history and religion (with more specific titles on branches such as Buddhism).

Nelson Primary: Flying Colours
Thomson Learning Australia, Melbourne
This home-grown, complete literacy program for the first three years of primary school comprises 200 fiction and non-fiction books, such as The concert, At the playground and My little fish. Also available are 10 animated stories for online work, 20 benchmark assessment books and teachers' resources. Another series, ``Nelson Focus'', features 120 titles - such as Plants, Maps, Early inventions and Weather watching - spanning science, technology, the environment and society. Nelson Maths for Victoria, including electronic teachers' resources, supports the state's early years numeracy program and encourages children to perform elementary mathematical tasks at their own pace.

The Usborne internet-linked Children's Encyclopedia
Usborne Publishing, London
This one-volume wonder provides a general, albeit fleeting, introduction to topics younger children may ask about. It's a sensible place to start, and could be supplemented by more books on topics that take children's fancy. Budding boffins, for example, would relish Usborne's internet-linked Science Encyclopedia with links to 1000 recommended webpages. Covering physics, chemistry, biology, information technology, earth sciences and astronomy - including newer areas such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, telecommunications and environmental protection - the book clearly explains more than 2500 scientific terms using at least 1500 illustrations and diagrams and about 140 experiments and activities. It also has a dictionary defining more than 1500 terms and self-test revision aids. Chapters are presented in a lucidly logical, stepped sequence, enabling readers to build knowledge slowly but surely.

Children's Encyclopaedia
Oxford University Press, Oxford
For children of eight and above - not to mention a fair few parents wanting to learn more about the world they thought they already grasped - OUP's nine-part, 1712-page hardback set is hard to beat. The first seven volumes cover major and many minor subjects from Aborigines to zoos. The eighth is a 560-profile biography. The last volume includes a 15,000-entry index, a gazetteer of countries and a timeline of world history. The June 2004 edition has revised topical areas of science, such as cloning, genetically modified foods and the human genome project, as well as politics, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this regard, Cambridge University Press is behind its main rival, OUP, which tries to capture who it trusts will become regular readers almost as soon as they step from the cradle.