Unschoolers Will Not Learn To Do Things They Don't Want To Do

I think the unschooling segment I appeared on with the Yablonski/Biegler family on The Good Morning America TV show probably caused more heat than light today. There were so many important points to make—schooling is not the same as education, lack of curriculum is not lack of instruction, how and why different scopes and sequences for learning work—but, in the total 4 minute segment, it was all I could do to mention that children are natural learners from birth. As you can see, today’s interview didn’t have the negative edge of yesterday’s presentation, so at least that’s an improvement.

But yesterday's damage is done; unschooling is just a version of hookey that produces uneducated kids to those viewers, not a genuine way to help children learn and, as the host kept implying, it should be more regulated. If only we could have spoken about how kids can do serious work without being coerced into doing so, how learning can be rich and non-linear when it occurs outside school, how unschooled kids fare in college and the world of work. There are plenty of books and videos and studies we could have discussed, but instead it all got bogged down in the refrain, "Isn't it the job of the parent to teach the child to do things that they don't want to do?" What a negative way to think about learning and work: "I have to do things I don't want to do only because someone with power over me tells me I should." So much for self-starters, questioners, think-out-of-the-box employees; no, according to this concept we want to primarily educate our children to become adults who Obey. The world is full of opportunities that teach us how we must sometimes do things we don't want to do in order to accomplish something we do, so I don't think that's a lesson parents, or schools, need to endlessly drill into kids. I think the job of parents is to show how joy for life and love of learning can be sources of discipline and hard work, not fear, bribery and misery. Children do help out with chores around the house, cooking, and more without bullying them into it. In fact, I read about a study that shows altruism is inherent in children as young as 18 months; kids really want to join in and help and we can work with that ability instead of quashing it so they'll only help when we command them to do so. There's much more to say on this topic, but I'll get off my soap-box now.

On another note:

I recently listened to a podcast entitled John Holt: Libertarian Outsider, by Jeff Riggenbach. It is an interesting portrayal of Holt’s work, with some excellent quotes from John’s books, particularly Freedom and Beyond. Sponsored by the Mises Institute, the 20-minute presentation often makes John seem like Captain Ahab, pursuing the education whale with monomaniacal intensity. As a result, Riggenbach neglects to mention Holt’s other causes and interests, such as music, fiction and ecology, but this is a minor matter. If you want to learn more about John’s work and speculate about why Holt didn’t become a “capital L Libertarian,” as John used to say or, as Riggenbach notes, a “Movement Libertarian,” this is a good place to start.



Do you ask real questions or do you just quiz kids?

First, I want to share some homeschooling humor that was shared with me earlier today. This is from the Onion:

"WASHINGTON—According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home."

Next, I want to thank everyone who helped put on the OHEN conference in Tigard, OR on March 20. What a great time I had at the Oregon Home Education Network conference. It was a packed day for me – a keynote plus three workshops – but the camaraderie and energy that were present on-site made it an exciting day. Plus, the event ended with a professional magic show for all ages that left us amazed and upbeat, making it a unique experience for me because I especially enjoy magic performances. I had to get back to Boston to be at work on Monday, but I hope to visit Portland in a more leisurely manner some day. The “underground” tour of the city sounds pretty interesting.

My first two talks ran over their allotted time due to me departing from my written comments and technical difficulties. Arden, a tech-savvy teenager, and Pat Nystrom, a homeschooling dad, helped me keep the audio-visual aspects working throughout the day, but neither they, nor I, could figure out why all but one video played correctly in my presentations. Of course, that one video made the whole program crash and quit each time! I summarized the videos in my own words at the conference, but I’ve uploaded the Holt video here so you can hear John Holt himself talk about the differences between a question and a quiz.



“I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

Over the past few weeks I’ve been preparing for four talks I’ll be giving in Portland, OR on March 20 (click the sidebar if you want more information about this engagement). I wanted to include some new videos and perspectives for these talks and I started rummaging through my files from my days with John Holt and found a bunch of video and cassette tapes of talks by John. I’ve started watching one, a four-hour VHS tape of John speaking to homeschoolers in Spokane, WA. I’m not sure of the date, I think it is 1983 or 1984, given references John makes to some of the kids who came into the office then. I hope someone who views this, or some of the other segments that will be posted, will remember at least the year. Let me know if you have any guesses or ideas that would help date this video.

I am about two hours into this video and I’ll certainly post more of it as I watch it and become more adept at extracting video from tape and then uploading it to the web. However, there are so many classic John Holt lines, and some surprising comments John makes, that I couldn’t wait any more to start sharing it with people. I think for much of the public there is a perception of John Holt as a wide-eyed radical who romanticized childhood. I hope this, and future clips, will show John as the quiet, plainspoken but deeply thoughtful man he was. This short segment also shows Holt’s deep empathy with children, a quality that is sorely lacking in all our discussions of education today. John’s analysis of how children struggle with pronouns is radical when you consider how few current day teachers would recommend, as John does, to leave the children alone and let them figure it out for themselves. Indeed, in my mind I hear a chorus of educators clamoring as to why they must intervene instead of following Holt’s advice:

“They will develop learning delays!”

“They’ll fall behind their class!”

“You are guilty of educational neglect because you should be making your children learn how to correctly use pronouns!”

Of course—and I see this in this particular clip—John could be quite passionate about certain things, in particular about how children learn and what parents and other concerned adults can do to help them learn. As you will hear John say, “I beseech you: leave your child’s learning alone.”

This particular lecture is in a setting John enjoyed being at: speaking with a group of parents and children in a comfortable setting. In much of the tape I’ve seen so far you can hear lots of babies babbling and children playing in the background and, often, John will stop speaking and comment on what he sees or hears from the children in the audience.  I also found cassettes of radio interviews John did with NPR and the BBC, as well as tapes John made of himself playing the cello or speaking in foreign countries. The cassette tapes are usually very good quality recordings, either professionally done or recorded by John himself, who was quite an audiophile. However, the video tapes aren't the greatest quality. Nonetheless, I decided to work with them to get them online because there just isn't much video of John and I hope people can look beyond the grainy images and scratchy sound to experience, or re-experience, John Holt and his observations about children. I look forward to sharing these with you as I move more of these recordings into digital formats.



New Research Supports John Holt's Views About Learning

One of the core ideas of John Holt’s approach to education is that children are good at learning. John asserted in the early sixties, often and clearly, that children are natural learners and that adult interference in their attempts to learn, often through uninvited teaching, inhibits children’s learning. This idea continues to be met with skepticism as most adults believe not much is going on with babies and young children; they are considered to be silly giggle machines incapable of clear, deep thought. Indeed, I must admit my dismay as I read more and more from both homeschoolers and schoolteachers that they worry how children aren’t ready for kindergarten or that they must formally teach children how to talk and walk. Why is it that the more educated we become as a society, the less we trust our innate abilities to learn? Further, with so much emphasis being placed on getting children “ready for school” at ever-younger ages—preschool playgroup consultants could become a new market—I applaud every parent who decides to let their children play instead being plugged into an early enrichment program.

An article in The NY Times (Aug. 16, 2009) about current research done on how babies learn confirms what John wrote nearly fifty years ago and should give heart to parents and teachers who want to help children learn in their own ways.

Alison Gopnick, a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of The Philosophical Baby, writes, “The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.

New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.”

Gopnick cites her own and others’ research that demonstrate that babies and children up to five years old have “capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic [that] allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them. Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet.”

The important thing Gopnick points out, as Holt did, is that babies and young children learn best from the people, places, and things that surround them, not from formal lessons. She writes, “The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cell phones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)

But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

A very important aspect of this research is that preschool-age children have developing, flexible brains that can’t focus on just one thing to the exclusion of all else around them—the opposite of what school expects from kids—and that this openness and curiosity are what feed their brains. Gopnick writes, “Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But… children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative. …Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.”

It is refreshing to know that even more research backs up the idea of giving children free-range in thought and action, though it seems this information never gets a fair hearing in schools or politics since we keep making policies in those areas that lock and track children into specific learning at younger and younger ages. Research and theories that confirm the “babies are smart” idea existed before John wrote of course, but, like Holt’s ideas, they never get serious attention from educators. One of John’s favorites was a wonderful book by Millicent Shinn, The Biography of a Baby, written in 1900.

If you’re interested in reading Holt’s perspective on this issue, I suggest reading the chapter “Learning Without Teaching” in Teach Your Own, and John’s books How Children Learn and Learning All the Time. In fact, John wrote Learning All the Time, his last book, to be, in his own words, “a demonstration that children, without being coerced or manipulated, or being put in exotic, specially prepared environments, or having their thinking planned and ordered for them, can, will, and do pick up from the world around them important information about what we call the Basics.”