The Open Road as a Way to Learning

As freelance writers who home-school our children, we have more control than most over our work and learning environments. That gave rise to an idea: Could we use modern information technologies to take our lives on the road? What would a portable home office look like? Could these technologies enhance, in any way, the experience of home-schooling?

As we explored the issues of mobility and feasibility, other questions came up. We live in San Francisco and write frequently about technology, but, based on an inquiry from 9-year-old Aliseo--”Who uses teeny tiny cellular phones when most of the people in the world don’t even have a regular phone?”--we began thinking about the utility of these technologies outside of metropolitan centers.

In theory, technology makes geography less important, and thus it should create new opportunities for people in rural areas. But is this really happening? The insistent promise of the Internet is its potential to build community, to create a democratic forum where all contributors come to the electronic table as equals. But does it remain mainly a phenomenon of people of a certain educational level who live in certain urban areas?

We decided to seek answers to some of our questions in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, because of its proximity to our home base of San Francisco, its abundance of remote communities, and its continuing status--even at the end of the 20th century--as a frontier. Our portable home-school home office would be a Fleetwood recreational vehicle.

We aim to answer four large questions in four stories over the course of four weeks: How can technology enhance home-schooling? How has technology changed life in remote areas? In what ways can digital community enhance the real-world kind? And do portable technologies live up to their promise?

For a more detailed, day-to-day accounting of this project, take a look at our travel diary at https://www.latimes.com/cutting.edge

We welcome your questions, comments and suggestions on the bulletin board located at the same address.

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From President Clinton on down, there seems to be a growing consensus among politicians, businessmen, educators and parents that computer education--even for the very young--is not only desirable but necessary for a child’s future success.

Home-schoolers, though outside the mainstream in many respects, are part of the program on this issue. Many home-schooling families rely heavily on technology, with the children doing all their research and writing, for example, on the family computer.

This is not true of our family. We don’t have a television set, for the same reasons we don’t allow the children to park for hours in front of the computer: We don’t believe that spending long periods in front of a cathode ray tube is a healthy activity for young people, and we consider a lot of what’s available on TV, on the Internet and on CD-ROMs to be of questionable educational value.

That said, we do think the family computer offers some great opportunities. We do something somewhat unusual in the world of home education in trying to apply the pedagogical ideas of Rudolf Steiner--founder of the Waldorf schools--in our home-schooling, and finding support for this approach hasn’t been easy.

We had heard about a packaged curriculum, Oak Meadow, that drew on Steiner’s ideas, but we were disappointed with the product. However, by buying the curriculum, we learned about the company’s Web site (https://www.oakmeadow.com), which includes a bulletin board. There we were able to ask specific questions about resources and techniques and get answers from people who are trying to do what we’re trying to do.

Mary now exchanges e-mail with three other Waldorf home-schooling mothers to share information, inspiration and ideas. One of the cyberfriends, it turns out, lives just a 40-minute drive away; we now see each other regularly so the children can play or do organized activities together and so the mothers can swap experiences.

Thanks to the same bulletin board, we’ve found out about other helpful Web sites, especially Waldorf Without Walls (https://www.waldorfwithoutwalls.com), a site and newsletter dedicated specifically to Waldorf home-schooling. This is the Internet at its best, putting people with obscure interests together and disseminating information that’s otherwise difficult or nearly impossible to find.

The Internet offers opportunities for research and learning too. We believe it’s important for these excursions to be chaperoned, not so much because there’s material that’s inappropriate for children on the Internet--though that certainly is a real issue--but because it can be so frustrating to have to wade through 300 barely related Web sites to find a glimmer of what you’re looking for.

When a 7-year-old asks, “How is a mountain made?” any parent or teacher worth her salt will want to capitalize on that curiosity and explore the question fully. One sure-fire way to numb the child and make him think twice before asking such a question again is to get into the World Wide Web and do a subject search for “mountain.”

So a parent’s or child’s fluency on the Internet is central to whether the Web will become a helpful tool or a tedious distraction. While some subjects are sufficiently narrow to use for a general search, others, clearly, are not. For these cases, we turn to a resource that has already done a lot of the preliminary search work for its users--”Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages” by Jean Armour Polly (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, $19.99). The book covers many areas children will be interested in, such as earth science, dinosaurs, birds, sports and sites on world religions.

One thing it doesn’t cover is outlaws. As we set out on our trip, we decided to visit some of the areas where Black Bart--the outlaw who terrorized Wells Fargo stagecoaches in the late 1800s in Northern California--did his dirty work. The topic of the Wild West--outlaws and lawmen in particular--is endlessly fascinating to our 7- and 9-year-old sons.

We went to the Plumas County Museum in Quincy, where there are not only photos of Black Bart himself, but the actual money box from a Wells Fargo stagecoach that the bandit stole in 1878. Evelyn Whisman, assistant curator of the museum, regaled our sons with stories of how Black Bart would leave poems behind for the lawmen to find. She explained that Bart had a reputation for being polite, and that his gun was never loaded.

The boys came away with a series of questions: “If he didn’t hurt anybody, was he a bad guy or a good guy?” “Did his mother name him Black Bart?” “Did he have any kids?” We wanted to encourage their interest in California history, so to try to find answers to these questions we went first to Polly’s yellow pages. We looked under Black Bart, Outlaws, Wild West, but found no listings.

So, that evening, Paolo and the boys searched the Web under Black Bart (the best site is https://www.tlc.discovery.com/area/locallore970120/lore1.html) and Outlaws (try https://www.contact.net/judo/outlinks.html) and found answers to their questions. (Everyone agreed he was in fact a bad guy; his given name was Charles E. Boles; he had two daughters.)

Other information they wouldn’t otherwise have come across--notably biographical information about his nemesis, Wells Fargo detective James Hume--spurred an interesting discussion when 7-year-old Eli asked: “If James Hume is the good guy, how come we’ve never heard about him but we all know about Black Bart? Shouldn’t the good guy be famous?”

This was a clear case where an Internet search proved interesting and fruitful, largely because of the specificity of the subject being investigated.

We had a somewhat different experience with the Internet later in the week after visiting Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California.

None of us had ever been to Lassen before, so we were all struck by the spectacular evidence of volcanism visible all over the park--bubbling cauldrons of mud, hissing fumaroles that vent gases from the earth’s interior, hardened lava flows, and mountains built up by centuries of volcanic activity.

Everyone’s favorite place was Bumpass Hell, acres and acres of spluttering mud, gurgling clay tinted in pastels by mineral deposits, and boiling sulfurous pools. It’s named after the unfortunate Kendall Vanhook Bumpass, a local guide who, in the 1860s, lost a leg when he plunged it through the thin crust covering a seething thermal pool.

Nowadays, visitors reach the site (which is crisscrossed with boardwalks for safety) by hiking in one and a half miles on a fairly level trail. Seven-year-old Eli commented that the bowl-like Bumpass Hell, with its roaring steam and rotten-egg sulfur smell, seemed like another planet. Everyone agreed.

After we hiked out, the boys didn’t have a lot of geothermal questions--probably because the experience was so all-sensory and thorough it was complete unto itself. Still, when we got back to the laptop, Paolo decided to check out some Web sites to see if they could add anything.

The Internet Kids and Family Yellow Pages suggested three Web addresses dedicated specifically to volcanoes. One (https://geology.usgs.gov) had information from several different volcano labs around the country, as well as good satellite maps of volcanoes; another (https://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vw.html) offered lots of facts about volcanoes, and even lessons and activities on the topic for teachers and students; the third (https://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/msh/msh.html) provides maps, photos and stories about the Mount St. Helens eruption.

All were good sites, well-designed and graphically and textually appropriate for young people wanting to learn about volcanoes. But our sons showed little interest in them. It’s not fair to compare a Web site to Bumpass Hell, but it’s certainly true that a two-dimensional representation of something as exciting and dynamic as hydrothermal activity can’t hold a candle to the real thing.

This also made us reflect on how it can be counterproductive and confusing to bury young people under an avalanche of facts and information, something parents and teachers need to watch out for when exploring the Internet with young people. Childhood is an important time to encounter cultural riches and natural phenomena, and file those experiences away for later factual amplification or critical analysis.

When 5-year-old Silvano went to bed after the day at Lassen, he said to us, “Wasn’t it magic the way that big bubble kept coming up and up and up at Bumpass Hell?” (He had spent a good 15 minutes watching the big bubbles in one particular mud pot.) For a 5-year-old, magic seems a reasonable explanation for a geothermal phenomenon. Since childhood is the only time that we can really enjoy that kind of relationship with the world, it seems important for adults to honor it.

Equipment and services for this project were loaned courtesy of Fleetwood Enterprises Inc., Recreational Vehicles Group, Hewlett-Packard Co., Compaq Computer Corp., 3Com Corp., Nextel Communications, AT&T; Corp., Thousand Trails Inc.