Editor of Life Learning magazine Editor of  Natural Life magazine Author of educational books Small/ Home Business writer Poet Speaker

Welcome to these regular musings, meanderings, wonderings and wanderings by Wendy Priesnitz.  Archives - April, 2004 Instinct to Learn – April 29, 2004 I believe that people have an instinct to learn, that children are born with the desire to discover what they need to know about the world around them. The late Robert White, a developmental psychologist and Harvard professor, called this instinct to learn, to manipulate, to master an “urge toward competence.” What he meant is that we are born with not just a desire, but the need to have an impact on our surroundings, to control and understand the world in which we live. Children who are lucky enough to have families who trust that need are what I call life learners. They don’t need to follow somebody else’s second-hand curriculum, to be artificially motivated to learn, or to be tested about to be sure they are learning. They don’t need school. Unlike people who have been told to sit down, line up, be quiet and wait, life learners don’t just sit and wait for the world to come to them. They actively try to interpret the world, to make sense of it. They are constantly learning...and also experiencing the pride that comes with having understood new things and having mastered new skills. As the adults living with these constantly learning young people, we are most helpful when we can honor their right to set their own learning agenda, trust them to learn what they need to know, help them develop in their own ways, and provide opportunities that will help them to understand the world and their culture, as well as to interact with it. Posted: 4/29/2004 4:59 PM Overstimulating TV – April 25, 2004 Very young children who watch television face an increased risk of attention deficit problems by the time they go to school, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers at the Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, Washington, suggest that TV might overstimulate and permanently rewire the developing brain. They studied the viewing habits and behavior of 1,345 children, and found that for every hour of television watched daily, two groups of children – ages one and three – faced a 10 percent increased risk of having attention problems at age seven. Behaviors cited included difficulty concentrating, acting restless and impulsive and being easily confused. The researchers didn’t know what shows the children watched, but lead author Dr. Dimitri Christakis says that content likely isn’t at fault. Instead, he says, unrealistically fast-paced visual images typical of most TV programming may alter normal brain development. Research has already shown that since the brain develops very rapidly during the first two to three years of life and that television watching can shorten attention spans. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics already recommends that children younger than two not watch television. In my opinion, that is good advice for people older that two as well! As Groucho Marx once said, “I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.” Posted: 4/25/2004 4:55 PM Lack of Power – April 21, 2004 Murray Milner Jr., a sociologist at the University of Virginia, says that the baffling social behavior of so many of today's teenagers is a reaction to the isolated and powerless role that adults have assigned to them. Milner is the author of a new book Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption (Routledge, 2004). Through extensive fieldwork by a team of researchers, he found that the elaborate social scenes constructed by teenagers are a logical response to the constraints of their lives. He says that living in a world ruled and regulated by adults, teenagers have few opportunities to shape the key features of their lives. And so they exert control over their school social scene – with a vengeance. “Why this near obsession with status? It is because they have so little real economic or political power. They must attend school for most of the day and they have only very limited influence on what happens there.... They do, however, have one crucial kind of power: the power to create an informal social world in which they evaluate one another.”  Milner’s findings also suggest that our consumer society plays an influential role in the lives of status-conscious teenagers: “Perhaps the thing that American secondary education teaches most effectively is a desire to consume,” he writes. Posted: 4/21/2004 10:24 AM Laziness – April 20, 2004 Few things seem to trouble parents more than the possibility their kids might be lazy. I guess it’s the legacy of that old Puritan Work Ethic (and you don’t have to be part of any particular religion to suffer from it!). Like our current style of schooling, 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. Those who can work smarter and more creatively often get further ahead in today’s workplace. And they certainly live happier, more balanced lives. The Puritan Work Ethic is especially damaging in terms of education, where work for its own sake just doesn’t make sense. Students are often asked to put in long hours in the classroom and doing homework, experiences that seldom produce much real learning. What we call “play”, on the other hand, often results in a great deal of learning. The problem for many adults is their lack of trust in children’s innate ability – yes, their drive – to learn. As a result, they mistrust what seems like inactivity, forgetting that our brains can be very active while our bodies are at rest. Oh, and that fear of growing up lazy? Kids who are able to pursue the results of their own interests and passions work harder than those who are made to do meaningless work. That just makes people aimless and unproductive. Posted: 4/20/2004 1:56 PM Learning and Forgetting – April 19, 2004 I’ve been reading a wonderful little book by Frank Smith, entitled The Book of Learning and Forgetting (Teachers College Press, 1998), which, by the way, is reviewed in the upcoming May/June issue of Life Learning. Smith, who was a reporter, editor and novelist before beginning his formal research into language, thinking and learning as a Harvard Ph.D. and subsequent education professor in Canada and South Africa, has a knack for cogent description of what helps and hinders learning. He believes that learning is a social process that can occur for people of all ages naturally and continually through collaborative activities (no news to most of the people reading this blog!). In this book, which is one of many he has written, Smith writes at length about short- and long-term memory. He explains that the effort to memorize interferes with memorization because it destroys understanding. Rote memorization, he says, puts things in the wrong place (i.e. in short-term memory, where you can only hold onto something for as long as you rehearse it). When something goes into long-term memory, on the other hand, information is organized and retrieved on the basis of the sense they make to us. The way to hold something in long-term memory is – as anyone knows who has tried to remember a new acquaintance’s name at a cocktail party – to relate it to something you already know. But, writes Smith, when you are trying to learn something there is no need to worry about finding something you can relate the new knowledge to, “because that will take place automatically if you understand what you are doing.” So, he recommends, don’t even think about it. “Get on with enjoying what you are reading – or look around for something else that is [more]  interesting and does makes sense to you.” In short, the more absorbed we are in an activity, the more we learn about it. Posted: 4/19/2004 10:41 AM The Apprentice – April 18, 2004 Were you one of the 40 million people who watched Donald Trump’s recent television series The Apprentice? I wasn’t, but it has been hard to avoid the hype surrounding it. Aside from its crassness, lack of substance and phoniness (some critics have labeled it a sham) , the show has catapulted the concept of on-the-job learning from a mentor onto center stage. In fact, it has spawned a whole industry (this is Donald Trump, after all!) of books, videos, quizzes, websites, T-shirts, music and more. Whatever you may think of unbridled capitalism, Hollywood hype or reality TV – and I dislike them all, in case you might be wondering! – the word “Apprentice” is now much-googled and discussed. I’m hoping that this is an opportunity to publicize the concept behind the word as well.  Apprenticeships go back at least as far as the guilds of the early Middles Ages, and some developed into formal, industrial training schemes, which are still in place around the world. But I am talking about (and so is the TV show, for that matter) a more personal learning relationship, with a learner working alongside an “expert”, often somebody running a small business who could not normally afford to take on an assistant. One definitely non-Trump organization that promotes this sort of learning opportunity is the ApprenticeMaster Alliance, a charitable organization founded in the mid-90s and based in London, England. Like the now defunct Mentor-Apprentice Exchange that my self-educated daughter Heidi launched back in the early 90s, it seeks to match up people who want to learn with those who can teach. Heidi wrote an article for Life Learning’s sister magazine Natural Life back in 1997 that provides some good insight into this concept. Posted: 4/18/2004 11:45 AM Unschooling or Just Living Life? – April 15, 2004 I haven’t been posting to this blog as often as I’d like. That’s because I'm too busy – trying to do too much, as usual. These days, both life and business are getting in the way of much thinking, not to mention putting those thoughts down on paper. So there has gone the intention to try and define the term “unschooling” that I mentioned a week or two ago.  A large portion of my time and emotional energy has been taken up with trying to find a satisfactory living arrangement for my 95-year-old mother. But that process has provided me with a great deal of learning...about how the bureaucratic system works, about how I want to prepare myself emotionally and financially for old age, about the health issues of the elderly, and many other things. I have even added a few new words to my vocabulary as a result!  It occurred to me yesterday that my current path is no different from the one my children walked as they grew up. By that I mean they learned by living their daily lives, through experience...both that which found them and that which they sought out. They reacted to a need, a duty or an interest by exploring, researching, asking questions, listening to others, testing their ideas and putting them into motion, getting feedback, making the odd mistake and correcting it, and so on. Along the way, they learned how to read and write, how to research and communicate effectively, how to do math and think strategically, how to dance and play guitar, and about science, history, geography, art and computers. Nobody taught them what they learned, although many people contributed to their store of skills and knowledge. Nobody tested their knowledge or measured it against someone else’s idea of what was appropriate for them to learn, although it was tested daily by the success of their various projects. It hardly seems appropriate to confine such a rich way of living through the use of such a narrow (not to mention semi-negative) term as “unschooling”! Posted: 4/15/2004 7:45 AM Teenage Lib Handbook Author Featured – April 12, 2004 Grace Llewellyn, author of the Teenage Liberation Handbook and founder of the Not Back to School Camp, is featured in an in-depth profile in the current issue of Teacher Magazine. It is an interesting read. As Grace told writer Tracy Aitken in a shorter interview in the current issue of Life Learning, the underground unschooling classic was not originally intended for homeschoolers, but to “open up the world if independent, self-directed learning for school kids”. And she now seems to be moving on from supporting unschoolers. Her next book is aimed at supporting teens “who would not or could not leave school”. She is collecting info for that project and can find a survey to that end on her website. Posted: 4/12/2004 3:28 PM Distraction from Interaction – April 9, 2004 A new study by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Children’s Digital Media Centers has uncovered some astounding news about young children’s use of electronic media. The study is called Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers and it surprised even its authors. In surveying over 1,000 families, the researchers found that American children six and under spend an average of two hours a day using screen media. This is about the same amount of time they spend playing outside and well over the amount they spend reading or being read to and otherwise interacting with caring adults! Posted: 4/9/2004 10:18 AM 4/9/2004 10:18 AM 4/9/2004 10:18 AM Real-Life Learning – April 6, 2004 Today I received a press release from the Ontario Science Centre, about its new Agents of Change initiative. The facility’s Director of Visitor Experience Jennifer Martin said that “we hope [to] energize a new generation of creative thinkers, problem-solvers and innovators.” She continued, “To us, innovation is a state of mind and a channeling of the creative impulse. It is something that must be nurtured in youth and sustained throughout life.” Further, she explained,  “What sets the initiative apart is its core concept. Instead of giving people facts – albeit in an engaging manner – we will give them tools, opportunities and a dynamic environment in which to explore and hone their innovation skills by presenting them with real-world problems to tackle, research questions to contribute to and unexpected and engaging challenges to spark them.” She goes on to talk about blurring the boundaries of various academic disciplines and innovating by using the senses to manipulate new and common materials. I guess the Science Centre thinks their new initiative is innovative, but it will sound pretty familiar to Life Learning readers. Which brings me to my rumination of the day...definitions. I've recently been asked to come up with a definition of the term “unschooling”, and to comment on how it fits into the realm of “homeschooling” and the ramifications of that. Now, I dislike defining things in general, and this is a term that is perhaps undefinable. But I promised to give the matter some thought. I do know that unschooling is not a method of education; it is a way of looking at the world – for people of all ages, not just kids. And that is why, in the Contributors’ Guidelines for Life Learning magazine, we ask people to avoid the term, along with “homeschooling”, “deschooling” and a bunch of other similar words. Meanwhile, here are some earlier things I have written about our use of terminology and why that is important. Posted: 4/6/2004 4:44 PM Off to the Printer – April 5, 2004 Last night was deadline night. Electronic versions of Life Learning (and its sister – mother? – magazine Natural Life) were sent off to the printer. Life Learning finally found its way to their FTP site around 10pm. And now, a new cycle of information gathering, article writing and editing, photograph finding and layout begins. Posted: 4/5/2004 4:48 PM Radical Holt Book Back in Print – April 4, 2004 Kudos to Sentient Publications for reviving – intact – what I think is John Holt’s best book, Instead of Education – Ways to Help People do Things Better. Holt, of course, believed in learning by doing and coined the term “unschooling”. But in addition to being an educational reformer, he was also a social reformer. And this book, while not as well known as How Children Learn, How Children Fail, and Teach Your Own, may be his most radical. Originally published in 1976, Instead of Education lays the framework for unschooling as the path to self-directed learning and a creative life. It is both an indictment of state-run schools (what he calls “S-chools”) and a description of a variety of learning opportunities outside of conventional schools, including personal learning schedules, independent study programs, community learning exchanges and co-ops, and resources like museums and libraries. But more radically, it includes strategies for helping kids escape compulsory schooling, both legally and in defiance of truancy laws – including the creation of an “underground railroad” for school leavers. While the homeschooling movement has matured in 30 years, unfortunately, Holt’s indictment of S-chools rings as true as ever.  Posted: 4/4/2004  5:26 PM Education as a Meandering Brook – April 2, 2004 I just came across a neat quote by Henry David Thoreau: “What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch out of a free, meandering brook.” The “meandering brook” style of learning is what Life Learning is all about...children learning because they are trusted with the freedom to muddle...opportunities to explore, to interact with the real world, to investigate their questions and ideas, to figure things out, to make connections, to get ideas and test them, to take risks, to make mistakes and try again. School and school-type styles of education (yes, even home-based ones!) could be called the “straight-cut ditch” style of learning. Also, I think, in that category goes the careless and too-early use of electronic media. Yes, the straight-cut ditch might seem to end up in the same place as the free, meandering brook. But how much richer, in so many ways, is the path of the brook!         Posted: 4/2/2004  9:05 PM Return to current weblog Comments? Suggestions? Email Us copyright © Wendy Priesnitz 2004-2007

Topics & Passions: natural learning simplicity environment parenting creativity / writing books ~ What I'm reading: The Rapture of Maturity - A Legacy of Lifelong Learning by Charles D. Hayes (2004, Autodidactic Press) Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver (2002, HarperCollins) Off Our Rockers and into Trouble - The Raging Grannies by Alison Acker and Betty Brightwell (2004, Touch Wood Editions)