Young Children as Research Scientists

In John Holt’s Learning All the Time (see Books on this site for more information about it) there is a chapter called Young Children as Research Scientists. Holt writes:

The process by which children turn experience into knowledge is exactly the same, point for point, as the process by which those whom we call scientists make scientific knowledge. Children observe, they wonder, they speculate, and they ask themselves questions. They think up possible answers, they make theories, they hypothesize, and then they test theories by asking questions or by further observations or experiments or reading. Then they modify the theories as needed, or reject them, and the process continues. This is what in “grown-up” life is called the—capital S, capital M, Scientific Method. It is precisely what these little guys start doing as soon as they are born.

If we attempt to control, manipulate, or divert this process, we disturb it. If we continue this long enough, the process stops. The independent scientist in the child disappears.

Holt’s observations led to his practice as a teacher of letting children be active learners, of providing access and time to let children’s learning unfold, rather than managing and instructing them on a fixed schedule based on adult’s needs and desires about children and learning. The metaphor of a child as a vessel to be filled with knowledge by a teacher is powerful and supported by even more powerful institutions and politicians, despite our personal experiences to the contrary. This is not a knock against teachers—we need all sorts of teachers at various times in our lives—it is to say we just don’t need compulsory, womb-to-tomb teaching.

We are led to believe that whatever we can learn on our own is never as good as what we must learn in school from teachers: form trumps content, the process is more important than the product. Of course, Holt, myself, and many others have cited much research that exists to counter this perception, but since this evidence leads to the conclusion that people can be trusted to learn on their own it disrupts too many elements of modern society that rely on compulsory attendance to maintain the status quo.

Nonetheless, here is some current research that clearly supports John Holt’s ideas about how children learn. It is maddening to see these concepts presented as “new theoretical ideas and empirical research”; perhaps it is true about the research, but these ideas have been presented and acted upon by homeschoolers, unschoolers, and some alternative schools for decades.

Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications, Science 28, September 2012: Vol. 337 no. 6102 pp. 1623-1627

By Alison Gopnik

ABSTRACT: New theoretical ideas and empirical research show that very young children’s learning and thinking are strikingly similar to much learning and thinking in science. Preschoolers test hypotheses against data and make causal inferences; they learn from statistics and informal experimentation, and from watching and listening to others. The mathematical framework of probabilistic models and Bayesian inference can describe this learning in precise ways. These discoveries have implications for early childhood education and policy. In particular, they suggest both that early childhood experience is extremely important and that the trend toward more structured and academic early childhood programs is misguided.

Maturity Is Not Created by College

Here’s an interesting and well-written essay on what is like to be a young adult who became an unschooler in high school and who then decided not to go to college by Emma Zale that was published in the Daily Kos.

I was struck by this passage in particular, about the relationship between attending college and people’s perceptions of your maturity:

As I began to interact more and more with these mid-to-late-twenties/early-thirty somethings, I noticed something startling -- the majority of them were in the very same situation that I was. We were all working blue-collar (or more menial white-collar) jobs, trying to launch some kind of artistic or otherwise higher paying career. In the case of my co-workers, who were virtually all college graduates, I (the youngest among them) was their boss.

They felt like my peers, and whenever I admitted my age to them, they tended to be astonished. When I would reveal that I had not only never gone to college, I had dropped out of high school... their jaws would literally drop. “But you're so smart,” they would say. “You're so mature.”

To the latter I would often answer: “Well, I've been out of school for nearly 5 years,” and that seemed to resonate with them. But what does that say about what constitutes a person's maturity in the “real world”? Because I had been in it for as long as some of them had, I read as 25-30, when I was really just shy of my early 20s. It seemed that not only was college not always indicative of success, it wasn’t necessarily a barometer for maturity, either.

Never Judge Someone Based on Their Schooling

Grant Colfax, the homeschooler who made headlines in the eighties by getting accepted into Harvard and going into medical research, has now made headlines today as an adult. The San Francisco Gate reports:

President Obama on Wednesday appointed Dr. Grant Colfax, San Francisco's top HIV public health administrator, to head the Office of National AIDS Policy.

Grant spent much of his youth on a dairy goat farm in Northern California, helping his parents make the farm work and following his interests, such as searching for Indian arrowheads. Micki and David gave the keynote speech, How Children Learn from Everyday Life and Work, at the Growing Without Schooling 20th anniversary conference and I wrote about it on the HoltGWS site; here is an excerpt:

"Micki analyzes how education became separated from work—indeed how education demeans most work—and cites many historic examples to support her points. She then takes issue with descriptions of her family's unschooling as a sort of "physical work program" that was imposed on her family. She notes, "Work is not construed as a means to, but an end in and of itself, as we and our children are shaped by the work we do." She discusses Illich's Deschooling Society and Holt's work and how "we do not need to make special arrangements for learning."

Then Micki talks about how play is the work of children and how it isn't necessary to seek work for children in order to fill up their days. She further explores the nature of work as an ordeal and the types of work her children did as youngsters and teenagers. Micki wraps up her talk by describing how none of the activities, work, and play that her children did could easily predict what they would be or do as adults. For instance, she and David long felt Grant would be an archaeologist, but he became a doctor and medical researcher."

In today's conventional media I detect a backlash against self-directed learning, against learning outside of school, and against parents and teachers who support change that does more than alter curricula in schools. This zero-tolerance policy towards change agents who are not in agreement with school dogma can be stifling, if not depressing at times, so it is most refreshing to see one of the tenets of unschooling/homeschooling—that you can't predict what the future holds for anyone based on their performance or nonparticipation in school—publicly verified again.

There are many ways to learn and grow, many paths to successful careers, and we need to keep expanding, and creating, these paths instead of letting educationists block access to them. Grant's continued success is his own, not homeschooling's, but his example and contribution to society is another piece of evidence that homeschooling and unschooling do not necessarily make children anti-social, parent-dependent dolts ("My momma said I don't have to do no book learnin'" is the punch line I heard one comedian knock homeschooling with recently), nor does homeschooling make them nonparticipants in the civic arena.

Steve Jobs and Growing Without Schooling

I fell in love with the Macintosh from the start. I own one of the first 128K Macs created; it has the Mac team’s signatures etched inside its case. I remember trying to convince John Holt in 1984 to bring the Mac into the office for creating Growing Without Schooling magazine and our other publications; John was skeptical. I used to lug my 128K Mac from my apartment to the Holt office to show how it could be used, and it wasn’t easy. Though touted as a portable computer, the original Mac needed to be carried in a large, square, padded container and it weighed a lot. I garnered lots of funny looks as I squeezed onto rush-hour trains with this huge bag slung over my shoulders. But I felt the effort was worth it. I worked with rubber cement, typewriters, and razors to create our publications in those days and I immediately grasped the elegance and ease of using a Mac to do the same. Of course, the software for laying it out took time to develop (anyone besides me remember MacPublisher, the first layout program for the Mac?), so it wasn’t a quick solution, but I could at least create advertisements (MacPaint and MacDraw) and articles (MacWrite) for HoltGWS on my Mac, and I did. We eventually became an all-Mac office (see photo) and remained Apple users even during their direst corporate moments in the nineties.

However, in recent years I came to respect Steve Jobs more as a person than as a corporate and technology visionary. That’s because of his openness about his background, revealed most in his commencement speech to the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford University.

I quote parts of this speech in some of my talks, and I want to share them with you today in case you haven’t read them. I use Jobs’ words to allay people’s fears that they might be constraining their children’s options and growth in the future by unschooling them now. Like the Mac, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, these words are worth considering because they can reduce stress and make your life a little easier and a little more fun. Steve Jobs:

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Stop trying to connect the dots for your children’s future and stay focused on your present time with them. Trust children, and yourselves. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

Research Proves Kids Can Learn Complex Things On Their Own

I learned about this research from a press release, since the research paper itself is in German. However, I find it striking in several respects, not just because it supports self-directed learning for children.

1) The release opens with this sentence: "Self-directed learning has long been heralded as the key to successful education. Yet until now, there has been little research into this theory." Something that is "long-heralded" must have some basis in reality for people to recognize its efficacy, and there is more than a little research into this theory. A brief perusal of my Research page, the work of Holt, Neill, and alternative schools everywhere, research such as that done by Alfie Kohn, Frank Smith, and Thomas Armstrong, as well as studying history prior to the invention of compulsory schooling about 150 years ago, shows that self-directed learning is not just how every baby learns a most complex thing—how to speak—but also how most children and adults learned until we corralled everyone into classrooms.

2) Professor Kristina Reiss, one of the researchers is quoted:

"We now know that students – also those who are weaker in math – have the skills to master even very complex subject matters at their own pace,” continues Reiss. “Although extended phases of self-directed learning are often advocated, they are still not part of the everyday school curriculum. But they are an important option for teachers as varied lesson formats ensure a lively and interesting learning experience.”

It really bothers me that this research admits that providing time and space for self-directed learning should be advocated for use in schools, but when unschoolers claim they are doing this (GWS has printed their stories since 1977) they are often taken to task by educators for not providing a rigorous, or even adequate, education to their children.

3) Germany, Sweden, and other countries outlaw homeschooling because they claim their public and private schools provide a professional education that no parent can provide. This makes little sense if self-directed learning is in play since the teacher, if there is one, is "the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage" in that situation. It is interesting resources, access to people and places, doing things alone and with people, supportive parents, friends, and mentors that encourage self-directed learning, not necessarily a professional teacher's "varied lesson formats."

I can sense the thrust of where this research will be used in classroom practice from the quote above: it will be used as another technique to get kids to do what teachers want them to do in order to complete the teacher's lessons, rather than as a genuine attempt to build on a child's self-directed learning, as unschoolers have successfully been doing for decades.

ON A SIMILAR NOTE:

The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning, another academic resource that supports self-directed learning, has a call for papers for their next issue. As an advisor to the Journal, I've been asked to solicit articles for the next issue. If you're interested in doing so, here's the information you need:

I am pleased to invite submissions for the eleventh issue of the online peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning (JUAL), to be published as papers become accepted. Authors of original research interested in submitting manuscripts to be considered for publication in JUAL should review the JUAL home page, and the Submissions for detailed information on submission requirements.
 
JUAL seeks to bring together an international community of scholars exploring the topic of unschooling and alternative learning, which espouses learner centered democratic approaches to learning. JUAL is also a space to reveal the limitations of mainstream schooling.

JUAL understands learner centered democratic education as individuals deciding their own curriculum, and participating in the governance of their school—if they are in one. Some examples of learner centered democratic possibilities are unschooling, Sudbury Valley, Fairhaven, and the Albany Free School. In terms of unschooling, we view it as a self-directed learning approach to learning outside of the mainstream education rather than homeschooling, which reproduces the learning structures of school in the home.
It will offer readers relevant theoretical discussions and act as a catalyst for expanding existing knowledge in specific areas of practice and/or research on learning relevant to the journals mandate. The journal will be available at http://www.nipissingu.ca/jual/index.asp as a free publication containing material written in French or English. JUAL will initially be published as articles become accepted for publication. When enough articles to make an issue are available, we will publish them as an issue.
 
I invite you to circulate this announcement to colleagues, graduate students, researchers and/or organizations who may be interested in submitting a manuscript to JUAL for consideration.
 
Questions can be addressed to the editors of JUAL by contacting Carlo Ricci at carlor@nipissingu.ca.