Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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I think it's outrageous that the government is going to spend £77 million on schemes like giving fruit to children in schools. Where's the fruit for kids who don't go to school? Argghh.
“It doesn’t matter what information is presented to children; the important thing is that they should be taught learning skills”.
PART 3: Learning styles, syllabuses and windows of opportunity
These are three other things that came up in conversation with my good teacher friend. They didn’t really fit in the previous posts, but I am fishing for responses.
1. Learning styles.
A characteristic of today’s teenagers is their readiness to identify their own learning styles. “I’m a kinesthetic learner” they announce with pride (and they can probably spell it with confidence too). “I’m a visual learner” chips in another. “Oh, I’m almost entirely verbal” says a third.
Given a certain type of problem, different people certainly like receiving information in certain ways. To find Croydon leisure centre (to pick an example entirely at random), some people prefer to print a map from the internet. Others prefer to get verbal directions from the lady at reception. Still others will follow the Dirk Gently school of navigation (drive behind someone who looks as if they know where they are going and see where you end up). I do not dispute this, although in fact, when finding Croydon leisure centre, one might do best by combining elements of all three techniques.
But I do dispute the wisdom of identifying oneself as a certain type of learner.
It just isn’t true. In response to a certain type of problem, one might tend to adopt a visual rather than a verbal approach (or, to borrow more educational jargon, a deep versus surface approach, or maybe a holistic versus a serial approach). But the identification of a preferred learning style might have exactly the opposite effect from that desired by the educationalists. Instead of helping us to build on the mental techniques that we find most efficacious, does it not tend to funnel us into certain types of approaches, whatever the problem, rather than tackling the problem itself with whatever mental resources we have at our disposal? (See PART 2: learning ‘learning skills’)
As we are left free to learn what we want to learn how we want to learn it, we become very good at identifying the mental and physical circumstances conducive to our own creativity in tackling certain classes of problem. And given a problem we want to solve, we will use everything in our mental and physical armoury to help us to solve it. Maybe we will start off visually, but having identified ourselves (or, worse, having been identified by others) as visual learners will only hinder us when it becomes apparent that a different approach is more likely to bear fruit.
2. Following a syllabus
A fixed syllabus is inimical to learning. If you want to know why clouds stay up, and it isn’t in the syllabus, an enormous opportunity to learn lots about physics goes up in smoke. A syllabus that promoted learning would be a co-evolving one, negotiated progressively between mentor and mentee. Schools aren’t very good at managing this, obviously; yet another reason to stay out of classrooms in the interests of maximizing learning opportunities.
3. Windows of opportunity
Apart, perhaps from learning a first language (but Chomsky might be wrong…) there is no magic chronological window within which certain things have to be learned. Children who only learn to ride a bicycle at 10 are not cyclistically challenged for the rest of their lives. Ditto reading, writing, you-name-it. Just saying. People learn what they want to know when it strikes them as a good idea to learn it, assuming they know about it as something it might be possible to learn (NB no advocacy of abandonment parenting or teaching here).
You can’t teach anyone something they don’t want to know. If something is important to someone, they’ll learn it.
“It doesn’t matter what information is presented to children; the important thing is that they should be taught learning skills”.
PART 2: Learning ‘learning skills’
1. A variety of tricks for finding answers to certain types of problem. This might involve “being able to plan an essay”, “being able to argue convincingly” “thinking logically” and “critical reasoning” as well as “knowing how to factorise quadratics”.
It is certainly true that by tackling lots of a certain type of problem, one gets better at solving that kind of problem.
You are most likely to develop time-saving or otherwise valuable tricks and techniques successfully if you want to find a solution to the problem, rather than someone else imposing an artificial problem on you. Teachers do not have no role. If a child has been introduced to adding and finds it really interesting, they may become frustrated at how slowly they can work things out. “If you solve lots of adding problems, you’ll get quicker and quicker” suggests the teacher. “I’d like that” says the child. Quick as a flash, the teacher pulls out a pile of questions se made up earlier, and everyone is happily engrossed in 25+37 before you can say Jack Robinson. Note who decided they wanted to develop speed and skill at this kind of problem, and who acquiesced.
2. Learning to read, speak, use a computer.
Such skills (and I would include walking in the list) open up new channels of communication. Most people want to learn all of the skills in the list, and others I didn’t think of, because they can easily see how rewarding people around them find the skills. Even in the kinds of households that most teachers would consider illiterate, being able to understand the instructions of a computer game, or read in the local paper what’s on at the local cinema and so on are likely to be viewed as useful skills by all concerned.
The question of how children are best introduced to such fundamental skills in the face of abjectly bad parenting won’t be addressed here, except to say that mass state education might be considered overkill (alternatives include charity, more closely focused state intervention…).
Conclusion:
Human minds are conjecture and refutation machines. We acquire the skills we need to solve the problems we want to solve by solving problems we want to solve (along the way, maybe smaller ones, or incremental ones, or easier ones, or just plenty more of the same general type). Guidance in solving our problems is often helpful, but solving interesting problems is the goal, not learning how to solve any old problem for the sake of some abstract mental process. Along the route of solving the problems that interest us, we will acquire all sorts of explicit and inexplicit knowledge about how to tackle whole classes of problem.
It is important to remember the desire to please the teacher at all costs that so horrified John Holt when he recognized it in his classrooms (he said some crazy things too, but this bit really struck me). When giving children tasks, the information content of which is not really important as far as the teacher is concerned, how sure can the teacher be that the child is extracting the general principle, understanding the algorithm as anything more than an arbitrary answer-generating machine, learning the learning skill the teacher hopes for rather than learning the vitally useful but autonomy-destroying skill of how to give the teacher the answer that will please?
You can’t teach anyone something they don’t want to know. If something is important to someone, they’ll learn it.
PART 3: (if trilogies work for Tolkien, they’ll work for me) follows shortly.
“It doesn’t matter what information is presented to children; the important thing is that they should be taught learning skills”.
This is the answer I wish I had had the gumption to make when a school-teacher friend of mine made this remark recently:
PART 1: The information presented
Saying that the information isn’t really important is a way of downplaying the content of education. This is necessary, since parents of school children were taught quite different things, whichever two generations are in consideration, and are likely to be suspicious of things both newfangled and omitted.
It’s also a necessary justification in the face of reality: most of us have forgotten almost everything we were told at school. Either the teachers are failing in their duty to fill us up with knowledge (NB I think the bucket theory of knowledge is wrong – no-one can fill anyone else up with knowledge) or… here we go… the actual information presented isn’t actually that important. Phew. Status quo safely retained.
However, what you learn IS important. Factually wrong or mutually inconsistent things aren’t going to help people in later life. Religious or political indoctrination would also go down on my list as positively harmful.
Nobody is going to learn anything in which they are not interested. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told how much RAM my computer has. I still don’t remember because I’m still not interested.
What people learn is what they’re interested in. I do not mean to downplay the role of other human beings in introducing children to things they might be interested in but don’t know about yet. But with that in the background, children should be pursuing their own interests, solving the problems they themselves want to solve. In a classroom of 20+ children with one adult, this is going to be impossible. Some teachers might see this as a call to arms to improve the multi-task possibilities of their classrooms. I see it as a good reason not to spend much time, or for my children to plan to spend much time, in classrooms at all.
The information that children encounter is important. You can’t teach anyone something they don’t want to know. If something is important to someone, they’ll learn it.
Parents are probably the biggest influence on their children's lives. They are the first source of information, the first source of help and the first reference-frame for seeking out ideas and inspiration.
But we all have blind-spots and hangups, and want to be careful to avoid control-freak parenting where neuroses are passed on from lack of enablement in trusting, working with and relating to other adults than one's parents. This argument is often used to support schooling and attack home-education, and we have all read or heard about the kind of obssessive home educators who lock their kids in the garage all day to train them with rote-learning and/or threats. However, those kinds of parents probably aren't the ones reading this blog for new ideas- and if we respect and further our children's wishes with regard to their own growth and learning, it seems unlikely that we would end up being the only important source of ideas in their lives.
But I wanted to write something about how different families are right to build on their individual strengths, and how this approach to growth is more productive and beneficial than attempting to be perfect by focussing only on flaws and failings and trying to "shore up" against weakspots in a way that prevents much progress in any one area.
All families have the advantages of certain kinds of knowledge in which their parents have specialised. And all families can seek out new ways of learning, which can be as easily done as finding a friendly mathematician to spend the odd afternoon with. Parents can and should share their knowledge and the unique opportunities their own lives offer with their children. They can talk about their passions and what interests them, and of course their children will often be inspired to folllow-up similar learning routes. And this is good.
So, I just wanted to make the point that however rubbish we think we are at helping our kids become water-skiing champions, film stars or totally happy in every conceivable way, there are always things we are uniquely good at and those things are valuable and worth building on. I think the most important thing for children is that they are helped to learn whatever they want to learn as effectively as possible- when you know how to learn, you can work out how to apply it to anything you want in life. And that's the best possible gift anyone can offer their child.
If you have not yet acquired a copy of the game "Settlers of Catan", do so immediately. I just spent a week in the company of relatives and close friends in which meals interrupted our games only at very irregular intervals. Oh, and we watched LOTR 2 and 3 also.
Some things that are great about this game:
1. It's all to do with constructing a civilisation. Once you've built a city or got a library, noone can take it away. This makes it a non-frustrating game - you might be miles behind the other players, but you're still building.
2. Noone can win without trading. This means that everyone has to have a good grasp of strategy, knowing what they are aiming at, and knowing when to outbid their rivals and when to retire gracefully.
3. Everyone is involved all the time - it's not like Civilisation, where you can go and write a novel between turns.
4. It requires everyone to compete. No sweet-self-wounding pelican antics from Mother are possible (beyond the first game, after which she works out that helping one child directly correlates to damaging the others, and threatens permanent break down of diplomatic relations with Father)
5. It is fun for all ages. Well, our sample only went from 27 to 61, but we are sure that younger and older people will like it too...
6. It's pretty obvious who's winning (this is theoretically a game of perfect information, assuming well-developed memory skills). This means that they can be attacked when the opportunity arises and everyone (including them) knows it's fair.
7. The board is different every time, so the problem situation is always different.
8. This game involves huge amounts of learning (it must do; otherwise people would have started saying "no thanks" when someone suggested a game) without being the least bit "educational".
