Why School Sucks
Admit it - it really does suck
From Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller's teacher
| I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience. |
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Unschooling Our Children
In our home, we have hundreds of books on all sorts of subjects, from flowers and volcanoes to crafts and the Renaissance, to history and mythology. (We make trips to thrift stores and yard sales regularly and find the best books!) These books are at all reading levels, from picture books to encyclopedias.
We make materials available to the kids. Easels and paints, origami paper, glue and string. We take them to museums and let them create things at home, like magnets and speakers and crocheting and sewing, and whatever interests them, really.
When I began homeschooling, I bought curriculums and found school textbooks. (Textbooks are particularly worthless, but that is another topic altogether.) I always wanted to teach - both my parents taught public school - and I had lesson plans and was very organized about the whole thing.
I learned quickly that my kids didn't like that approach. They had fun "playing school" for a few days, but quickly grew bored with the regimented learning. They didn't want to sit and do worksheets. They wanted to plant peach seeds, or write stories, or make boats out of bits of stuff they found around the house. Most of my kids do like math worksheets, and my oldest taught himself algebra from a book. They love it when I read history to them and show them places on the globe and talk about cultures and wars and religions and we learn about these things together. But unless it's a biography or diary, they have no interest in reading a dry textbook on history on their own.
Their favorite tv station is the Science channel, and my 10 year old will no longer read little stories or let me read them to him - he likes Harry Potter, but besides that, any books he reads must be "learning" books - he loves science. So that's what he spends his time on. At bedtime, instead of a story he'll ask me to read him a book about trees or minerals. There isn't even a question on this. He insists on the science books.
They take classes at our church, on individual checksheets in an adult courseroom (we will have a separate children's courseroom next year, but for now they sit alongside the adults) - the courses they take include communication, how to use a dictionary, overcoming study barriers, getting along with others, basic morals and ethics, etc. (The older kids are taking adult courses now, of course.)
My feeling is that public schools try to force everyone into a mold - with a basic "everyone must know such-and-such" while not encouraging students to excel, really, in the areas of their passions and real abilities. It kind of forces everyone into a sort of mediocrity. Now, obviously not all children experience this - but most students do, and it's particularly hard on those who struggle to keep up, those who learn differently, and those who learn more quickly.
As L. Ron Hubbard stated:
"It is appalling how education tries to reduce all children to the same level mentally. There are just as many degrees and kinds of intelligence as there are children."
In the "real" world, people find their area of interest and pursue that. So that's natural to me, and that's how my kids learn. The same way adults would.
Think of how you approach it when you want to learn how to do something new - such as replacing a washer on your kitchen sink. You might get a book. You might just experiement with the faucet. You might ask your neighbor, a plumber, to show you.
You probably wouldn't want to sit down at a desk while a teacher gave all the theory of plumbing and physics and take notes to see if maybe you could apply it later.
People learn things because they are interested in learning how to DO things. Well, kids are highly motivated to learn how to do things, at least until that gets stomped out of them.
With unschooling, the adults in the child's life simply encourage the desire to learn, feed the interest, stay calm about the whole thing, and approach it rationally. No need to lecture or force the child to memorize facts for a test. That's not how anybody learns.