Computers and Self-Directed Learning
In the July 9 online edition of The New York Times, Silicon Valley-based business professor Randall Stross published an article entitled Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality. He described some studies in which economists have been measuring a home computer’s impact on the school performance of children in low-income households. (Actually, he and the researchers he quotes refer to “educational impact” but there is, of course, little correlation between getting high scores on school tests and being educated.) Anyway, the researchers have concluded that there is “little or no educational benefit” to providing students with their own computers because they apparently resulted in declining test scores. Worse, they found that low-income kids’ test scores often decline more than their richer counterparts after the computers arrive.
The author begins by declaring his ignorance of how people learn, his sharing of our culture’s lack of respect for kids, and the education industry’s arrogant belief that there is little value to anything except what schools teach. He writes, “Middle school students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance. Put the two together at home, without hovering supervision, and logic suggests that you won’t witness a miraculous educational transformation.” And he ends on the same note: “How disappointing to read in the Texas study that ‘there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.’ When devising ways to beat school policing software, students showed an exemplary capacity for self-directed learning. Too bad that capacity didn’t expand in academic directions, too.”
Too bad Professor Stross doesn’t realize the irony in those two sentences. If the schools had put less effort into controlling learners and what they were supposed to learn, the students would have wasted less of their self-directed energy. I wonder what he and the researchers would say about the education unschooled kids give themselves at home with computers and without “hovering supervision” (not to mention their satisfaction levels). No matter what sort of manipulation, supervision or technology is directed at the educational process, people learn what they want and need to learn. And that’s an education – whether business professors, schools, and educational researchers like it or not.
The Fast Food Model of Education
A curriculum is a diet of other people’s ideas that is fed to children in schools. It is designed by a group of people assumed to be much better qualified than mere parents – let alone children – to decide exactly the type of information that should be fed, and when, and how its digestion should be measured. However, that very process results, more often than not, in what I call “fast food education.” It is no wonder that many students have to be forced to eat this diet…and in many cases fail to digest it. Its standardized content is often bland, bulked up with fillers, and short on flavor. Its delivery is regimented and, many times, uninspired. School children are seldom consulted as to their tastes, or even level of hunger, let alone trusted to understand their own nutritional requirements or dietary quirks! The force-feeding process is so relentless that many students gag on it, in some cases becoming permanently soured on learning.
In spite of catch phrases like “child-directed learning” and many good intentions, fast food education is the norm because a curriculum diet is an easy, efficient way to feed facts simultaneously to large groups of people. For purely management reasons, school systems feel they must chop up knowledge, parcel it out, and feed it to children in small portions. Whether or not the parcels make sense to a particular learner, or the portions are of the correct size, are secondary to the need to get everyone fed at least something. And to make things worse, each meal-sized portion of each subject area is desiccated, premixed and fed by teachers who have minimal knowledge of, or connection to, what other teachers are feeding, and who are not able to provide context tor the disconnected facts they’re shoveling into their students’ mouths. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, students never receive a complete experience at school, except on the installment plan! The information provided often has no relation to the lives of the learners, especially those who aren’t part of the dominant culture. And few tools are provided for decoding the information, or for thinking critically about it.
Unfortunately, home educators aren’t immune to feeding educational fast food. Their motivation is usually to comfort themselves (and those “authorities” who are mandated to oversee their children’s learning) by attempting to control what is a very mysterious process. Learning is open-ended and often invisible. It is difficult to observe and manage. Papers and plans can be something to hold onto when a child’s intellectual growth process seems chaotic or obscure (or doesn’t measure up to Jimmy’s next door). Yes, there is a great deal of comfort involved for everyone in the use of curriculum…except, of course, for learners, who often end up frustrated, confused, bloated, and yet still hungry.
Languid acceptance, half-hearted digestion, and mindless regurgitation are not a good recipe for developing minds that will be able to think us out of the social, economic, and environmental messes we have put ourselves in!
The meals created by hungry individuals weaving together their own education using their own timetables and the resources found in their communities are so much more delicious, nourishing and useful! Call it “slow learning!”
(This essay is adapted from the book Challenging Assumptions in Education.)
The Roots of Unschooling Denial
I once had a remarkable conversation with someone at a social event. A lawyer and I were happily chatting about many things, including what we each do for a living, when I, in response to a question, casually mentioned my advocacy for life learning (but certainly didn’t try to “sell” it.). All of a sudden, this man became highly defensive about his own children’s schooling arrangements and his own love of school. In fact, he went on and on, unable to enthuse enough about his schooling. He apparently loved school, did very well academically, played sports, had a great social life and made many lifelong friends, etc., etc. So, he stated emphatically, school was great for him and is great for his kids.
I just smiled, said I was glad he enjoyed school, that I did too, and then we moved on. However, I couldn’t help but chuckle as, throughout the evening, I picked up snippets of other comments from this very pleasant and gregarious man, which provided many hints about his real school experiences…and the fallout. He confessed in various other conversations to being science-phobic, to having no patience for – and actually “hating” – poetry and plays, to being overly competitive (and his wife not enough), and to wishing he’d had more time as a kid to daydream, to be in Nature. He laughingly (and seemingly self-approvingly) recounted a story about how his “in-group” of teenagers had bullied other kids (although that’s not how he presented it) and baited the teacher.
But school was great and he has no idea why I think it should be abolished in favor of a more respectful, learner-centered alternative. While I respect this man’s right to his memories and opinions, I feel sad that he hasn’t connected his regrets about himself with his childhood experiences. And I feel angry that he is unwilling to apply them to his own children’s lives. But I understand the implications of doing that; an examination of such issues would demand change, and going with the status quo is much simpler for most people. If adults admit to the damage done to themselves by their schooling, they would have to question sending their own children to school. And that could be inconvenient. So denial rules.
Kids Are Capable of Much More Than We Give Them Credit For
The recent sailing misadventure of sixteen-year-old Abby Sunderland and the successful climbing of Mount Everest by thirteen-year old Jordan Romero have me thinking about skill and ability as related to age. Whenever a kid accomplishes something major, it hits the media because children aren’t expected to achieve much in our society. But the coverage usually involves adult disapproval more than admiration and encouragement. In Romero’s case, we read cute stories about him calling his mom from the summit, along with some age-related criticism, even after he reached the top. Sunderland and her parents have been the topic of a great deal of media negativity, especially since she had to be rescued.
Although the term hasn’t been used, to my knowledge, in coverage of these two situations, the word “prodigy” comes to mind. The dictionary definition of prodigy is an extraordinary, marvelous, or unusual accomplishment, deed, or event – which, I think, fits both adventures. A child prodigy is defined as someone who, at an early age, masters a skill at an adult level…with the assumption that the achievement is extraordinary, marvelous and unusual. Although both Sunderland and Romero are at the upper end of qualifying as children, they have, by all accounts, mastered skills that most adults have not.
But what exactly is an “adult-level skill”? Who decides? Why do we connect a person’s age with their talent and ability anyway? And why do we have such a problem with kids pursuing – and perhaps achieving – excellence? Our ageist culture is in awe of prodigious talent, but only when it’s seen in adults; in kids, it’s usually either dangerous or weird, and given a label that smacks of condescension. Do a web search for “child prodigy” and you’ll find lots of sites listing such people as some kind of freak of Nature, the gosh wow factor often accompanied by sad tales of lives wrecked by the burden of unusual talent. There’s even one site called oddee.com, which concerns itself with the “odd, bizarre and strange things of our world”…and highlights ten kids who have accomplished things. Of course, it’s not the talent that’s odd, but our reaction to it.
It’s likely that all kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for. Joyce Reed, in her new book What Really Matters, co-authored with David Albert, points out that anthropologists have found evidence of human communities in which the oldest bone artifacts are of eighteen-year-olds. She writes, “It means that in order for that society to continue and to develop, it had to more than reproduce itself within eighteen years. Children (by our standards) were having children as soon as they were biologically capable (ten to twelve?), but they were then dying before they raised those children past the ages of six or eight. Thus, between ages five and eighteen, these ‘children’ lived in groups, sharing and caring and learning to take care of themselves and each other. Isn’t that an astounding thought? It certainly could mean that humans are programmed to do our best problem-solving in those years – if we are given the freedom to do so…Yes, we are concerned that our twelve- and thirteen-year-olds could be as precocious as Romeo and Juliet, but we rarely realize that they could also develop and demonstrate the leadership and decision-making abilities of Alexander the Great, who was leading a significant portion of his era’s population into a new and different concept of nationhood at age eighteen.”
Instead of allowing children to follow their passions and play meaningful roles in society, most parents cocoon them, even living their lives for them, with the conflicting goals of keeping them safe from the world while helping them compete in it. Schools don’t challenge kids either: Six-year-olds belong in first grade, whether or not they are capable of (and are often already doing) third grade level work. Society stereotypes age groups, generalizing that all adolescents are equally immature, violent, or rebellious. And the few kids who do manage – often with the support of parents who see things differently – to excel at something are labeled as prodigies…odd and unusual, and best pushed back to where they belong lest they get hurt.
Perhaps the recent generations of life learners will break through this ceiling and help normalize the idea that children are capable human beings with the right to develop their abilities and passions as they choose…and with the help of adults, rather than with their criticism and faux protection.
What Really Matters is Now Available
Our latest book is hot off the press! What Really Matters by David Albert and Joyce Reed is subtitled “Two veteran homeschooling advocates discuss what learning is really all about.”
The official publication date is September 1, but copies are now available for sale (with no shipping!) to friends and subscribers.
We are thrilled with all the wonderful things people are saying about the book. You can read some of them (by people you may recognize in the home-based learning world) here.
Just a few minutes ago, we created a Facebook page for the book. We’ll be keeping it up-to-date with reviews and other information, so we invite you to drop by.
This is a powerful conversation about parenting and home-based learning from parents who, between them, have helped seven children (now grown) learn without school. It will be reassuring and informative for those just embarking on the path, and provide a great deal of food for thought for the rest of us.
Unschooling: Doughnuts and Peanut Sauce
The ABC News show Nightline has recently featured “unschooling.” I guess budgets are low and the network is repurposing content – or at least ideas. Last month, one of the Nightline segment “reporters” did a similar piece, with a different family, on the ABC show Good Morning America. It was equally as ignorant, unbalanced, and sensationalist. But I guess they were proud of their first foray into the muck, since, in an oddly sort of déjà vu manner, the shows are quite similar, right down to the website text accompanying the two videos. Aside from having moved from calling this supposedly odd phenomenon “radical homeschooling” to “unschooling,” even the headline is the same. Oh, and the scandalous food that these reportedly irresponsible parents supposedly “let” their kids eat has changed from doughnuts to pasta with peanut butter sauce.
Sadly, it looks like the “reporter” didn’t learn from (did she even read?) any of the feedback to the first piece before doing the second one. For instance, many of us pointed out that “unschooling” isn’t particularly new (some families – mine included – were living this way with our families 35 years ago, and John Holt coined the term back then too), but there they are gushing on about this “radical new approach to education and parenting.”
This is becoming wearisome. Even film critic Roger Ebert has weighed in on the subject, for heaven’s sake! However, I’ll put my ennui aside one more time to challenge the ridiculous notions in this show, simply because it reaches so many people. One of the things that apparently bothers these “reporters” is that unschooling parents allow kids to decide what to learn and when. The reality is that (contrary to what most people prefer to believe) even school kids decide what they want to learn and when. They can’t help it; it’s a prerequisite of learning. Oh, they might memorize some stuff in order to pass a test or otherwise regurgitate on demand, but that’s not learning. The idea that adults can decide what kids will learn and when is delusional, futile, and counterproductive.
Real learning is not something adults do to kids, no matter how much parents and schools want it to be. This Nightline show picks algebra and Shakespeare as examples of topics that kids miss out on by not being in school. I suspect that most people use simple algebra in their everyday lives, whether or not they know/care what it’s called, that it is taught in school, and that it’s supposed to be difficult. And to say, as these self-appointed TVland experts do, that people need to be exposed to Shakespeare is just silly. Almost as silly as saying that life learners won’t be. Or that there’s something wrong with pasta with peanut sauce. Pad Thai anyone? We’ll eat it while we’re reading some of the books we’re apparently not supposed to have in our homes (according to the piece’s title).
We need to remember that these shows are entertainment for the masses, not news. And that the people who use them to justify their own fear of a better future for their kids will be the last ones to embrace or create change. If this show and its clones enlighten a handful of families looking for another way to help their kids learn, then the brave life learners involved have spent their time well.
Having Fun…For the Fun of It
One of the unfortunate mainstays of the homeschooling industry is inspirational books and magazine articles describing fun things to do with your kids that are also educational. This notion that we have to make learning fun by dressing it up as games or other enjoyable activities is nonsense…and, more often than not, our kids know that. And that knowledge lessens both the fun and the learning.
Learning is not difficult, boring, or unpleasant. What happens in school is often difficult, boring, and unpleasant, but that’s forced memorization/regurgitation, not real learning. Real learning is either not even noticed because it’s a side effect of being deeply engaged in an activity or it’s jumping up and down, joyful discovery.
So let’s relax and let fun family activities be fun without staging them for a purpose or dissecting the learning that may have happened as a result. Fun is a valid outcome on its own, and there is no need to feel guilty about having fun with no hidden agenda. In fact, telling kids that something will be fun when we really want to sneak in some “serious” education is every bit as manipulative as what goes on in school.
When my kids were little, we loved playing board games, we traveled a lot, and we often went on hikes and visits to the science museum, the zoo, and art galleries. Heidi and Melanie undoubtedly learned some science, math, spelling, and other academic “subjects” while engaging in those activities (as did their father and I). But that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was to enjoy life – to have fun…laughing, exploring, and enjoying each other’s company. While we were living life and having fun, we also got an education – in that order.
Resource for Canadian Life Learners
We’ve just added a new website to the Life Media family. Called LifeLearning.ca, it is an up-to-date and comprehensive resource for Canadian home-based educators. There are lists of home-based learning books by Canadian authors, links to information about legalities in all the provinces and territories, a list of – and, in some cases, links to – research about home education in Canada, a FAQ about homeschooling in Canada, and a growing number of articles – both housed and the site and elsewhere. It is quickly becoming a repository for all the information we have collected in the 35 years since I kick-started the Canadian home education movement by founding the Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers. I am currently working on a short history of the homeschooling movement in Canada, which will be added to the site when it’s finished.
Please feel free to contribute additions to the history and to this site , and to link to it from your own blog or website.
We Know How to Learn…Until Schools Gets in the Way
I’m often bemused to read how important it is that children “learn how to learn.” It seems to be the phrase du jour among self-described progressive educators, book authors, school critics, and those who promote ever-earlier attendance at pre-school institutions. Some young children might be able to be trained – in dog-like fashion – to sit still, listen, memorize and regurgitate. Aside from the criminality of taking their childhood away from them, that training has nothing to do with teaching them how to learn. It would be more honest if we admitted that it’s a rationale for congregating kids in a supposedly safe place so their parents can do other things.
Children don’t need to be taught how to learn; they are born learners. As I wrote in my book Challenging Assumptions in Education, we come out of the womb interacting with and exploring our surroundings. Babies are active learners, their burning curiosity motivating them to learn how the world works. And if they are given a safe, supportive environment, they will continue to learn hungrily and naturally – in the manner and at the speed that suits them best. In fact, you cannot stop young children learning from everything they experience. They are always experimenting with cause and effect. And they are always soaking up information from their environment – learning to walk, talk and do many other amazing things.
Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnik, who is co-author of a research study called “The Scientist in the Crib,” says babies’ brains are smarter, faster, more flexible and busier than adults’. Her research has confirmed that, contrary to traditional beliefs about children, toddlers think in a logical manner, arriving at abstract principles early and quickly. “They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments,” she writes.
The late Robert White, Harvard developmental psychologist, called this instinct to learn an “urge toward competence.” What he meant was that we are born with the need to have an impact on our surroundings, to control the world in which we live. We do not just sit and wait for the world to come to us (unless we’ve been told to sit down, be quiet and wait). We actively try to interpret the world, to make sense of it. Of course, this drive to discover means we are constantly learning…and experiencing the pride that comes with having learned. And it doesn’t stop with walking and talking; it continues naturally as children learn to read, write, do what we call math, science, geography, history and more.
If someone is enrolled in a school or a course and therefore required to study a specific topic with the end result of remembering the contents of the course, they will benefit from a variety of study strategies skills – tips for organizing and memorizing data, reading efficiency and research techniques, organizational habits, ways to bribe themselves to keep at it, and so on. At the end of the school year or the course, these tricks may help the person remember the material and score well on an exam. They may or may not remember the material past that time frame, be able to integrate it into their understanding of the world, and apply it to future situations. That is, they may or may not have learned something, although we use that terminology to describe the outcome. Ironically, these are the very skills children innately use from birth and that school steals from them at an ever younger age!
Learning has been described as an art form. And yes, it might well be that. But we’re born with the necessary talent. To think that a child needs to be taught how to learn is an example of ubiquitous adult arrogance. Children need time, space, love, trust and respect so they can develop their art. And then, perhaps, the adults in their world might do well to sit back and watch them at work…and unearth the talent that their own childhoods buried.
Victory for Home Education in England
The British government’s plans for a series of oppressive regulations on home education are all washed up today. And home educators there are rejoicing, albeit with caution. The nasty requirements for unsupervised and unannounced interviews with home educated children, and security checks and registration for home educating parents have been removed from an educational reform bill before it was passed. According to various media reports and this one from a home education group, the legislation is a casualty of what’s called “wash-up,” when the government strikes deals with the opposition in order to get some of its legislation passed prior to the dissolution of Parliament in preparation for an election. The Labour Party introduced the legislation after a period of 18 months of anger, fear, frustration and opposition by the home education community. The opposition Conservative Party has called the proposed legislation “draconian” and said it would not go ahead with the legislation if it were to win the election, which takes place in a month. However, it promises to be a close-fought election, hence home educators’ caution…and the vow of many to place their vote where they think it will put the proposals to rest forever.