homeschooling

Part 1: Schooling Has Nothing to Do With Real Education, Part 2:Learning What Matters Most

The tricky part outlining a “how-to” for a real education (provided you don’t want your children to have a fake one–that’s kind of tongue in cheek,just so you know), is that it takes your life, your experiences, your children and your opportunities to make it happen.

So I’m going to offer you what I’ve been using to give me inspiration, guidelines, ideas and direction about how to implement a real, living education. You may simply scour these ideas to supplement a more structured routine. Either way, this is where your comments could be SO helpful. Because the idea of a “real” education is so foreign to us, the more tangible the ideas, the better. I would personally love to hear specific ways some of you carry out these ideas.

General Thoughts:

“In centuries past, the time of a child or adolescent would be occupied in real work, real charity, real adventure, and the real search for mentors who might teach what he or she really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary to becoming a whole man or woman.” -Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher

“Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology—all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so they learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cellphone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.” -Gatto, Should School Be Boring?

Gatto listed 15 Themes for Private Education I found helpful:

My random notes:

• Much of Gatto’s insight has helped me to relax and allow my children to spend significant time doing what they love. Solving problems happens while playing, building, creating and dreaming. Let them.

• We have designated Friday’s as “Good Deeds Friday”, and a large part of that is writing letters to express gratitude or encouragement to those who may need it. Having a piece of writing that someone else will see encourages them to work on syntax and grammar.

• Letting them, as young as possible, do things like make purchases, pump gas, grocery shop with a small list, use a debit card, etc. builds confidence. Often they rise to whatever challenge you treat as expected.

• Service, whether in the form of organized volunteer work or more organic meeting of needs in your community and church cannot be underestimated for its importance both in teaching and developing important character qualities.

Real life. Equipping men and women to think, process, analyze and DO things; to work out conflict in relationships, to live lives that are a continual blessing to others; to foster a deep gratitude–a life-changing kind that transforms the way they live; to make choices grounded in wisdom; to grasp the power of contentment; to love, laugh and inherit the peace that comes with trusting in God’s will in their lives. This is the education we want for our children.

“This book changed our lives. I had no idea how I was squelching my children’s love of learning by trying to reproduce something that we already knew doesn’t work very well. Now they thrive and we’re all much happier!” -Sandra L.

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Reading Matt Walsh almost makes me feel like not writing anymore, simply because he has said it all and he has said it so brilliantly.

I had to share one of my most recent favorites because I know you’ll love it. You will. Trust me.

Kids, Go to College or You’ll Die Alone in Misery

“I’ve written this Message About Education. Call your kids into the room, this is addressed to them:

Hi kids! Hey, let’s discuss college! Actually, this is not a discussion. You WILL go. You MUST go. Only lazy, dirty losers don’t go to college. You aren’t a lazy, dirty loser, are you? ARE YOU?….” Read the rest

Follow up with his answer to a letter he received:

“My child is gifted. He’s also 29, unemployed, and living in my basement”

Don’t forget to come back and tell me what you think…

“…one thing we do not have to worry about is how to educate children. We do not have to worry about curricula, lesson plans, motivating children to learn, testing them, and all the rest that comes under the rubric of pedagogy….The more we try to control it, the more we interfere.” Peter Gray, PhD, Children Educate Themselves

Think about it…

Ignore, just for a minute, everything you think about school, learning and education.

You just had a baby. Probably the most important thing your child must learn is how to communicate. You’re a smart parent so how do you prepare for this most important educational feat? Well first you must find an expert to teach her. No? You’re going to attempt it yourself?! Then certainly you have researched and found the most rigorous, well-known language curriculum money can buy, right? Long hours of study? Co-op classes?

NONE OF THAT?! What will become of her? What kind of lazy parent doesn’t teach her child the most important subject she’ll ever learn, the most crucial life skill without which she will be a failure?

See? Until our children are about five years old, we don’t worry about how they will learn, even though they’ll learn more in that span of time than in all their years combined. No one is testing them to make sure they’re on target,  no one is questioning our academic capabilities requiring us to keep progress reports, or threatening us with an over-the-shoulder “I’ve got my eye on you.”

Yet our children learn what they need to learn, remarkably well, without any of that. Through a natural process of interacting with the world and people around them, they have the miraculous aptitude to combine knowledge with experience, resulting in real education.

Just what if that kind of learning continued past the age of five? What if we didn’t worry and fret so much about how many facts they memorized or how much information we could pack into their minds? What if we let them learn what they needed to, what they wanted to, when they needed it?

Can we not think of a thousand things we’ve learned that way?

But we have to do things we don’t always like…

I used to think that since part of living in the real world includes doing things one doesn’t want to do, that was sufficient reason to force-teach children. But reason prevails: there are many opportunities in life to learn that lesson. Why should we sacrifice a child’s natural propensity to learn and enjoy learning, for the sake of a lesson we can teach in another way?

I still have reservations.

I believe in the logic of people learning on their own, I recognize that schools are failing monumentally despite their best efforts, and I know that generally, kids hate school, something that should be a red flag to all of us. Admittedly though, even as I’ve been thinking outside the box for a while, I still have reservations, difficulty breaking out of my own indoctrination of “how school should be done.” Scary, isn’t it, how we can be so convinced of one thing, that even when faced with the reality that it might be wrong, we continue to cling to it. We are afraid of having our familiar methods yanked out from under us. But fear enslaves. Thus, I write and think and continue to push the questions.

I haven’t thrown the text books out, by the way. I may one day, who knows. My intent here, with such a one-sided look at education, is to get us to look at all, past our preconceived ideas that conventional schooling has all the answers. We’re so bent to the left, sometimes we have to bend severely to the right, then maybe we can come up with a more balanced view of things.

Perhaps unschooling (as this method is best-known) is merely one color of a rainbow of ideas about the best way to educate. But at best, it cannot be ignored as a powerful theory, and conventional, test-driven methods, failing so often as they are, need to be highly scrutinized.

Great thoughts by some others.

A few other thinkers like Gatto, Gray and  Schank have dared to propose this simple observation, but it’s doubtful that the mainstream American will ever be able to shake his ingrained philosophy of education, so radical from the idea of natural learning. Still for the few who dare to question the status quo, there is a world of opportunity and freedom awaiting.

What about higher education?

And for those who think this style of learning can’t prepare children who desire to go to college, think again. An increasing number of unschooled adults are sharing their testimonies which include college degrees and successful businesses.

“Children learn wonderfully without anyone systematically or deliberately teaching them, but yet, we adults do have, or should have, the responsibility of providing the conditions that allow children to take charge of their own learning. Real educational reform, in my view, is reform that provides those conditions.

The most important condition is freedom. To learn on their own, children need unlimited time to play, explore, become bored, overcome boredom, discover their own interests, and pursue those interests.” -Peter Gray, PhD, Is Real Educational Reform Possible?