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Editor-in-Chief
of Author of unschooling books Interview on Radio Free School
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Musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings about unschooling, natural parenting, sustainable living and more by Wendy Priesnitz. Comments? Suggestions? Email Me How Do They Know That? – August 2, 2008 But why does it matter how children learn? Or adults, for that matter? So much of educational research is aimed at finding better ways to teach things (and, of course, better ways to artificially motivate children to be receptive to that teaching)…things that would be learned anyway without the teaching and better, in some cases, without what amounts to interference masquerading as helping. I think that mostly comes from academic elitism, an adult arrogance that says we can help them do it faster or more efficiently than if they left to their own devices. We also need to understand (and control) the process of learning because we think it is difficult, a belief seemingly reinforced by most school experiences. However, children who have the opportunity to learn informally instead of attending school demonstrate that much learning happens effortlessly without adult interference when the time is right – meaning the motivation is present – and usually without the learner being aware it is happening. And when the motivation is present, even inherently difficult information can be mastered with joy in the absence of planned pedagogy or professional organization. Or maybe we misunderstand what learning really is. Much of what is supposedly learned in school is mostly material that has been memorized, whether history dates, mathematical formulae or the difference between a verb and a noun. Absent any interest in learning the material and any context for it, as well as sufficient time to experiment with, adapt and apply the information, this process cannot be called learning. Rather, it is memorizing, regurgitating and forgetting. (Why else would teachers and some parents bemoan the “ground lost” during summer vacation?!) When supporters of informal and home-based education try to understand how learning happens, their motivation is somewhat different. For instance, British academics Alan Thomas and Harriet Pattison researched and wrote How Children Learn at Home (Continuum, 2008) in order to challenge many of the assumptions underpinning educational theory and to demonstrate the efficacy of parent-modeled life learning. And their book does that well, largely by quoting parents who admit often to not having a clue how their children learned something! And I think that’s just fine, especially if it helps us learn to trust the children and the process. Thomas and Pattison write: “If we begin with a child’s
eye view of the learning situation, asking what attracts children’s attention,
why, and how they then go about exploring these things, we begin to be able to
see learning as a form of growth in which children add, flexibly and
organically, to their understanding of the world around them. Such a view
further enables us to see how learning is structured by the child’s day-to-day
environment and is accomplished as an ongoing facet of the things that children
do.” Just like adults learn. Learning (in) Fear –
August 1, 2008 Carrying a gun is not the way to build trust and respect – that’s the code of the street lived by those who have been terrorizing the schools! And one of the reasons they are behaving that way is that they have experienced a huge dose of lack of trust and respect, coercion and fear in their lives. That’s why I am horrified to realize there are many people – perhaps the majority – who welcome the use of armed police, drug sniffing dogs, security cameras, hall monitors and worse in schools. Perhaps they don’t realize that kids’ lives are already highly controlled, that they are routinely mistrusted and assumed to be guilty, that their freedom of movement is already severely limited, that they are coerced to be places where they don’t want to be and that are irrelevant to their lives, and where they regularly experience failure and frustration. Much of that happens in the prisons called school, all in the name of attempting to force them to learn certain academic information…as if that were possible, even without the atmosphere of fear. As Tim Gill writes in his book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007), children want adults to help them stay safe and we must accept that responsibility. But, he writes, “rather than having a nanny state, where risk aversion dominates the landscape, we should be aspiring to a child-friendly society, where communities look out for each other and for children.” Then we might have a chance of creating a truly democratic
society, which sees all people (of all ages) as valuable and responsible, which values cooperation
and collaboration, which abhors misuse of power and which tries to solve conflict
non-violently. It’s not a simple goal and it won’t be reached by something
as simple or relatively inexpensive as putting armed police in school corridors.
But we must pursue it. What is Adult Behavior? – July 29, 2008 Then I read about his theories about maturity and his conclusion that teens are far more competent than we assume and that most of their problems stem from restrictions that artificially extend childhood…mostly by our outdated thinking about the delivery of education and their place in the workforce. That, of course, is something I’ve been talking and writing about for decades, although I extend my concerns about our lack of trust in competency to children younger than teens. Epstein told Psychology Today last year: “Our current education system was created in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and was modeled after the new factories of the industrial revolution. Public schools, set up to supply the factories with a skilled labor force, crammed education into a relatively small number of years. We have tried to pack more and more in while extending schooling up to age 24 or 25, for some segments of the population. In general, such an approach still reflects factory thinking – get your education now and get it efficiently, in classrooms in lockstep fashion. Unfortunately, most people learn in those classrooms to hate education for the rest of their lives.” So I picked up the book and, in the name of journalistic research, I took an online test he and colleague Diane Dumas created called The Epstein-Dumas Test of Adultness, which supposedly measures the variety of competencies that define adult functioning. The test was the foundation of the research that led to the book. My Total “Adultness” Competency Score was 93
percent. Aside from the fact that the test should be renamed The
Epstein-Dumas Test of American Adultness (we Canadians can act like adults
too!), the area where I was marked down the most was education. Oh,
I have enough, apparently. It’s just that I answered some questions
incorrectly regarding compulsory education and the value of schooling. Here’s
what the result said: “Education: 78%: Adults are supposed to have obtained at
least a basic education, and they’re supposed to appreciate the value of
education. They’re also supposed to know basic education laws – for example,
that young people are required to attend school until at least age sixteen or so
(depending on one’s state of residency).” I’m pretty secure in my
“adultness competency” but I guess I’ll contact Dr. Epstein about this
lack of rigor in the quiz. There is clearly an error regarding either his
knowledge of the laws about school attendance or in semantics. But, worse, the
quiz seems to contradict Epstein’s comments to Psychology Today and, according
to the cover blurb, his book on the subject. And that’s not very adult. copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2008 |
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