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Lazy Learning “Education
is hanging around until you’ve caught on.” ~ Robert Frost
Few things seem to trouble parents more than the
possibility our kids might be lazy. I guess it’s the legacy of that old
Puritan Work Ethic – and you don’t have subscribe to any particular
religion to suffer from it! Like our current style of public education, which
is based on it, the belief that hard work makes you a better human being dates
back to the Industrial Revolution. It might have been a useful tool for
factory owners trying to make their employees productive, but it can actually
be counterproductive today, when working smarter and more creatively are keys
to success and happiness. Funny, then, that our education system still embodies
the Puritan Work Ethic. In school, learning is work. Children’s time is
regimented into study periods and programmed in pursuit of “learning
outcomes,” and even their out-of-school time is scheduled for homework,
tutoring and more lessons or organized activities. Parents and educators
mistrust anything that looks like inactivity and bustle around trying to
motivate our kids to “find something useful to do.” Unfortunately for
these children, work for its own sake – or because somebody else tells you
it’s good for you – just doesn’t make sense. The long hours school
students are forced to spend memorizing, cramming for exams and doing homework
seldom produce much real learning. Some kids are luckier – and arguably
better educated – because they are part of a growing movement dedicated to
the realization that learning doesn’t have to be work and that children
don’t have to be forced to learn. As “unschoolers” or, as I prefer to call it,
life learners, their curiosity is
trusted to do the job. My family was part of the birth of the modern
"unschooling" movement, over three decades ago. When Heidi and Melanie were children, they didn’t attend school. Nor did they see
learning as work. They didn’t use a curriculum or workbooks, nor were they
graded or tested. They learned math, reading, writing, science and geography
in the same way they learned to walk and talk. Their learning was experiential
and inquiry-based, led by their interests and curiosity. They explored,
investigated, asked questions, experimented, took risks, got ideas and tested
them out, made connections, made mistakes and tried again. It was a rich and
joyful way of life, with knowledge and skills picked up both purposefully and
incidentally, guided by their innate need to participate in, explore and make
sense of the world around them. A lot of what they did day by day looked like playing
or daydreaming. In our society, play is the opposite of work. As products of
that Industrial Age-induced work ethic, we think of work as unpleasant,
something one does during the week in order to afford to play during the week
and summer vacation. We have made education into an industrial process, where
facts are stuffed into people like so many sausage casings. And that, of
course, is work. We have turned a potentially joyful experience hateful with
our schedules and rules and structure. And we have confused our children, who
are smart enough to know the difference between the challenge of doing
productive work and the numbness that results from busywork that doesn’t
accomplish anything. The basis of life learning or "unschooling," on the other hand, is that
children are born to be curious, independent, active, self-directed learners
and will remain that way if school doesn’t dampen their natural curiosity
about the world by turning learning into something unpleasant..into work.
Children don’t naturally think in terms of math or reading being “hard;”
we create those feelings if we force them to learn these skills before they
are developmentally or emotionally ready, or before they are interested. When
people memorize something without truly understanding it, they haven’t
really learned it. When a skill is mastered in the context of an interest and
need experienced in the real world, it is truly learned. Melanie is now a largely self-taught conservation
horticulturalist who runs a native plant botanical garden that is part of a
university-based environmental sciences center. Heidi is a talented,
self-taught graphic designer and writer of literary fiction whose latest novel
was short-listed for a book award. They pursue their adult lives with the
passion, joy, curiosity and self-reliance that were hallmarks of their
unschooled years. Their “work” is fun, and they continue to learn about
the world as effortlessly as they did as young children. I think that’s
evidence of a successful education and a successful life…and all a parent
could wish for. A version of this
essay first appeared in
Life Learning Magazine. |