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.

Education Without School Conference in Bogota, Colombia

It is exciting for me to publicize the third conference in Colombia devoted to exploring and supporting alternatives to conventional schooling. When I attended the first conference in 2009 I was impressed by the interest and support given to the event by the school's faculty, and especially to the number of parents who traveled great distances in order to meet other like-minded parents. If you are interested in how unschooling and ideas about other alternatives to school are catching on around the world, this is an event worth exploring.

Invitation to the Third International Congress on Education without school, Education, Family, Self-Learning Collaborative, flexible models of schools.
Bogotá. November 2, 3, 4, 2011

 Please visit
 http://educacionsinescuelacolombia.wordpress.com/

 Sincerely,

 Organizing Committee.
 Education Research Institute IEDU
 Faculty of Humanities
 Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá

Child-driven Education

In 2008, in an earlier version of this blog, I wrote about the research of Sugata Mitra whose "Hole in the Wall" experiments have shown, “in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other, if they're motivated by curiosity.” Dr. Mitra has a new TED video (see below) where he explores this concept in more detail by conducting further experiments using children, computers, and the Internet.

Mitra interviewed Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction author, who says to Mitra in the video, “When you have interest, you have education.” This pretty much sums up Mitra's position about learning.

Naturally all of this sounds incredibly familiar to unschoolers and others who support self-directed learning, but Dr. Mitra and the audience he reaches seem genuinely surprised and delighted by these findings. Indeed, I felt as if I were watching a parallel universe emerge as Mitra discussed his concept of creating SOLEs, self-organized learning environments and enlisting British grandmothers to read and speak English with school children in other countries by using an Internet connection. Echoes from the work of Paul Goodman, John Holt, and Ivan Illich abound in Mitra's findings, but the connections are not drawn in either of these videos.

Mitra's work is focused on technology and children, but as unschoolers and alternative educators such as A.S. Neil have shown for generations, children can teach themselves and others far more than we believe they can, if provided with access, time, and kind, not overbearing, adult support. I really like Mitra's attitude about how the adults need to get out of the way and let the kids have ample time and equipment to self-organize their learning.

As can be seen in these videos, the technology Mitra uses is not the sort of expensive computer learning labs our schools would insist on building before implementing any such program. The consumer off-the-shelf products Mitra provides the students with in these videos contain as much involvement and content as any custom-designed, age-appropriate, aligned-to-standardized-testing computer program. In fact, since the tools the kids are using are the same that adults use—Google, common Internet browsers—they probably have even more appeal to children than programs designed just for use in the classroom.

At the very least, Mitra's work can be cited by unschoolers as further support for the self-directed learning their children do. I hope at some point Dr. Mitra will expand his inquiries to consider other places and ways that children self-organize their learning besides using technology to do so. For instance, in addition to those authors mentioned earlier, examination of the work of Bill Ellis, who was inspired by E.F. Shumacher; Ron Miller's work about alternative schools, particularly The Self-Organizing Revolution: Common Principles of the Educational Alternatives Movement (Psychology Press, 2008); Roland Meighan's The Next Learning System: and why home-schoolers are trailblazers (Education Heretics Press, 1997), and the growing literature from unschoolers about how their children learn from and about the world without formal instruction all support Mitra's ideas about teaching and learning. There are other books and studies that can be cited, such as Letter to a Teacher from the Schoolboys of Barbiana, wherein Italian children who were flunked out of school in sixth grade banded together and taught themselves what they needed and wanted to learn, but I'll stop here.

Mitra ends his talk with a slide that displays these words:

Speculation: Education is a self organizing system (sic), where learning is an emergent phenomenon… It will take five years and under a million dollars to prove this experimentally.

Mitra seeks to prove, experimentally, something that some parents, teachers, and children have long known and leveraged: that children have much greater abilities to learn and grow than our current conception of schooling can even dream of or allow. I wish him well in his experiment, but there is no reason for anyone to wait for him to "prove" this before it can be used by people.

As homeschoolers and unschoolers we know that no matter how much research is shown to support our position, the conventional wisdom of the day usually trumps it. So even if Mitra can prove his speculation we are not going to see school officials stop harrassing parents and teachers who aren't using conventional school techniques. But that's no reason for us to stop helping our children learn in their own ways; indeed, Mitra's work, even without such proof, is an inspiration for us to continue doing what we've been doing and saying for years.