Freedom to Learn

Peter, It's all so logical. Why would we take our young, impressionable, enthusiastic 5 and 6 years olds, put them in a prison-like warehouse that is designed to make them first and foremost obedient, leave them there with no voice and no control for 12 years, and then expect them to come out as healthy, well-adjusted members of our society ready to solve difficult problems and take our country successfully into the next century? We're brainwashing them. And our country is brainwashing us.

Today's traditional school students are destined to become 1 of 3 things - robotic drones who do nothing until told by an authority figure; rebellious misfits who hate society and everything it stands for; or adults who, although they are not miserable, know nothing about themselves, or what they want out of life and become materialistic and money hungry in an effort to become what corporate America has told them they should be. I realize that there are many dedicated educators and administrators in our traditional school systems who genuinely care about their students and would do anything to help them become successful. But they're going about it all wrong. It will never work for more than a handful of kids.

I attended traditional schools, was a straight A student, and 'liked' school (as much as one can like prison). I cheated as often as I could, and did as little work as possible to get by. Because I was a girl, white, introverted and carried books alot my teachers often gave me the benefit of the doubt and I earned grades I did not deserve. Every test I took, I 'crammed' for, and I don't remember 75% of what was 'taught' to me. I consider myself to be intelligent, but now in my mid-forties I still feel directionless and unmotivated, and I still often catch myself doing as little as possible to get by in life.

My 10 year old son is a student at a Sudbury school and I can't imagine him being "educated" any other way. I want him to grow up to be a passionate, motivated, inquisitive, happy person. And I know the Sudbury education model is the surest way to achieve that goal. So why is the idea sooooo hard to sell to the average American parent?

My child LOVES school. She is in a Montessori school. I find Montessori very similar in concept to Sudbury Valley -- self-directed learning based on interests, personal responsibility, teachers are resources and guides rather than a lecturer, individual discovery and mistakes are encouraged, etc. I read your blog often and wonder what your thoughts about Montessori are.

Peter, this builds on an experience we had just yesterday. My daughter, age 11, who has been homeschooled her whole life (about 50/50 unschooled/parent-guided) went to an art class. When I picked her up, she was in tears. "Mom, the teacher talks, the kids listen, and then they just do the work. No one talks, or smiles, or has any say about what they are doing. It is UTTERLY CHEERLESS!" I said, that's school, sweetie.:) At the age of 11, she already understands that learning is about collaboration, and that the relational part is just as important as the content. How do so many adults miss that?

My daughter and son, ages 8 and 7 respectively, recently attended their first day of an outdoor "freeschool" that meets once a week at various outdoor locations. This is my blog excerpt describing their first day:

I'm really new to homeschooling and just learning the ropes. This particular program was the wild card among the classes the kids are taking this fall. It is the least structured activity in their schedule, and the longest. The kids show up with their gear at 10AM. They’re greeted by their “nature guides/counselors” and off they go. I pick them up 6 hours later. Done. For me a much needed break. For them...?

I don’t think anyone would argue against the concept that learning is a life-long endeavor. If I could gift one trait to my kids it would be love of learning. Homeschooling allows me to tailor their classes and my primary goal is developing this love. Attention span is an issue with both of my kids. At home we do very few “academic” exercises that last more than 20 minutes. Do I think the ability to attend for long periods of time is important? Of course! And I also know that both of my kids will develop this ability…in time. For me it is more important for them to enjoy what they are doing, without the constant pressure to “keep at it for just a few more minutes.” When they are engaged they ARE focused.

There are very few places where my kids can stay focused for hours on end. As it turns out music is not the only thing that soothes the savage beast…being out in nature helps too! One might ask, “With all that outdoor, unstructured time, are they really learning anything?” Today that same seed of doubt plagued me with a palpable twinge of anxiety as I dropped the kids off at the farm (I had 6 hours to mull this over!)

Thankfully my fears were swiftly and deftly washed down river at the end of the day. At exactly 4PM my kids ran toward me with dirty bodies, mud-caked shoes, unidentified natural objects tangled in their hair, and the look of unmistakable joy on their faces. During the car ride home the air was filled with backseat chatter: “Rhubarb tastes so bitter…the Ohlone Indians painted their faces using rocks and water…I learned how to pick up a chicken today and…it is so important to thank the trees when we take their precious leaves.”

If my kids can thank the trees, then I can thank Mother Nature for embracing my children and providing the world’s best classroom.

After trying to make public schools work for our four kids, we chose homeschooling. Learning and growing around all sorts of interesting people is how humanity has always flourished. I'm a big fan of free play and time in nature, but I think it's also important to recognize that young people want very much to develop their own capabilities, which often happens as they take part in meaningful work. Here's what happened to one little boy who pestered neighbors to "do stuff." http://lauragraceweldon.com/2011/11/09/mentor-fancy-name-for-grown-ups-k...

Thanks for your continued thoughtful postings about child-centered learning and unschooling!

-Kerry @ City Kids Homeschooling
http://cityhomeschooling.blogspot.com/

I hated school. I enjoyed a few classes but I attribute that to the teachers themselves. I made good grades if I put forth a little effort. Through high school I slept most of the time and got by. I attended private Christian schools, magnet, and public schools.

With my children, I decided to try homeschooling them early on. My two boys attended 2nd & 3rd grade in a public school, and we removed them after the first month of the second year. It was horrible. They hated it.

When you put your children into public school they become property of the state! Teachers and staff were aware of problems and no one ever felt the need to consult me, the parent! Bullying, abuse, and so forth. My youngest was 7 and cried every day for the first semester. I finally found out when he blurted it to me when he was angry and frustrated, he accused me of not taking him to the doctor to fix his problem. I confronted the teacher and he finally told me that my son would cry and say I don't belong here, every day. He would get sent to the nurse to calm down and she scolded him that I needed to take him to the doctor for his asthma! He didn't have asthma, he hyperventaled from crying so much!

In Florida they spent much of the year studying for FCAT. FCAT did not relate to any actual instruction from their daily work. Teachers would print out worksheets off basic web sites just to send home busy work. I later found out that home work didn't even count, because it wouldn't be fare to the kids whose parents didn't help them or make sure they did it! The work sheets didn't even match what they worked on that day, half the time the boys didn't even know what the stuff was and here I was spending hours trying to teach them at night. I thought they just weren't paying attention!! I never saw a single text book, they didn't have any!! They got one block a week for PE which was instructed outdoor time, no play ground or slides or fun..That's it...

We have used a self directed approach, the kids engage in things that interest them, I provide as much guidance, resources, and tools as I can, along with any outside activities that relate to their areas of interest. They do volunteer work and are great with the public and engaging meaningful conversation with any age group! We are using online courses to begin more traditional courses, just for the basics. They are in 7th and 9th grade now, as far as traditional grade levels/ages go.

I decided along time ago to delay math instruction in the early years. After much researching it seemed to make the most sense to me. They can now see how math relates to real life important things like finances and traveling and other areas of their interests. They can relate to it, learn what they need to know, and actually put it to real life use!

One site I frequent is www.schoolandstate.org
That's our history in a nutshell. Just wanted to share.

I think we send kids to school too early. Let them roam and play and learn the world until they're, oh, 10 years old. They will learn everything we teach them today in those early elementary years very quickly, because they're developmentally ready for it. They will already have learned to read, write and do arithmetic, most likely, as those skills are needed in everyday life. If not, they'll pick it up much more easily than they do at 5 or 6, and won't have to deal with the repeated failures that do so much harm to late developers.

Of course this means we won't need several years of teachers, and we will need a parent or other caretaker to stay with the kids, but if it's the good of the children we're after, it's worth it.

A friend and I were talking about this very thing this week--how we and our husbands came to the decision to homeschool. As we considered what to do about our children's education, we looked back on our own school lives, and realized how unhappy they had been. This realization became a huge part of our decisions for our own kids. Two of mine have now graduated university, and not a day goes by that they don't thank me, in some way, for never having sent them to school when they were young. They didn't realize, they say, until they got to university and spent time with their schooled peers, just how miserable an experience school usually is.

It's good to see the problem of evolutionary mismatch addressed so directly. Although you generally emphasize the drives to learn through play, you also seem to attribute the playfulness of the hunter-gatherer culture to the culture itself, saying that the playful approach is deliberately extended (cultivated) beyond childhood so as to maintain egalitarianism, am I right? I think the peacefulness and bent towards partnership rather than domination of these societies could be seen as expressions of evolutionary match, between on one hand the genetically accumulated expectations to cultural interaction and on the other what is actually experienced, much as Jean Liedloff observed it among the Yecuanas. I believe it's very important to appreciate our initial state of dignity and competence when we enter this world, to properly judge how degrading is the education we receive. So when you state (elsewhere) that "the egalitarian, non-autocratic, highly cooperative way of living did not occur just naturally" and that "it cannot be attributed simply to a benign human nature, corrupted in us by modern social institutions" I feel compelled to object. It seems problematic to me the way we automatically think of cultural evolution as something separate from natural evolution. I think, much in the vein of Daniel Quinn (if I got him right), that culture can be subject to natural selection, and in that I might agree with you, that it emerges as a means to improve the chances of survival, but I think it can only do so on a basis of "fulfilled expectations" within a continuum of experience, in the terms of JL. I sincerely believe that the state of distress we're currently in, is due to our "benign" nature not being recognized, and the institution responsible for this could very well be the very modern one of agriculture. BTW it seems to be a problem that we only have the agricultural metaphor to deal with the phenomena of culture ('soil that has been tilled'), much as you have pointed out is the case with education. I hope I've made sense, and I hope you consider this a valuable contributions, as I much esteem the work you are doing.

Ela

All very well and good for parents who are well to do and educated, but what about those who are not? If parents speak no English, how will the children learn? If the vocabularies and grammar of the parents are poor, how will the children learn to speak well? If there are no books in the house, what will they read? If the education of the parents ceased at 3rd or 6th grade, and much of what they learned has been forgotten, how will the kids learn to multiply and divide or borrow and carry in arithmetic?

The challenge for America is not how to educate the children of the wealthy and educated, but how to educate the children of the bottom 80%. They'll be paying my social security, and it's in my best interest (and yours) to make sure they have skills, too.

Great article. Have been autonomously educating my children for 7 years and wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm currently a senior in a public high school. One of the most common questions that we ask is, "Where will we use this in real life?" To which the most common answer is that we'll need it for a class that we have to take in the next year of school.

Throughout high school, the core classes of math and English have been taught "for the test". Our whole schooling system revolves around standardized testing. Many of the students who get great grades and do well on these tests, have no common sense or creativity when it comes to problem solving.

Our teachers call us lazy, disrespectful, and warn us that in college, "no one will spoon-feed you like we do." One teacher I have who told us that his class will prepare us for college doesn't really teach. He gives us notes to memorize and tells us when our test is. High school doesn't teach us how it will be in the real world, but it teaches us what we'll need to know for more schooling (and what we need to know for the school to get funding from the government).

I've been lucky to have a parent that let my brother and me "run wild". After the age of seven, my father never punished me. He let me figure things out for myself, never telling me what to do, and never helping me unless I asked for it. My brother and I never had chores and we only had family dinners on Tuesday, leaving us to make our own meals and manage our own time. We both knew, though, that my father would always be there to help us whenever we got in over our heads. My father saw school as a necessary evil. He was happy and praised us if we showed him or told him about anything good we did at school, but he never asked to see our grades. If we got in trouble in school, he didn't get angry, but told us that we had to behave, because school was something that everyone has to go through, no matter how stupid we think it is. It was a bit extreme, and not all children would thrive in this situation, but it taught my brother and I more than we've ever learned in school.

From my years in school, the most important lessons that I have learned are that there will always be people that you don't like, that you have to learn to get along with; and that there will always be rules that you have to follow, even if you don't agree with them.

The only reason that I feel confident in going out into the real world on my own in June, has everything to do with parenting, and nothing to do with school.