On 10/16/13 5:26 AM October 16, 2013, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
Can the educators, homeschoolers, and various other interested parties
here comment?
Udhay
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/all/
How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses
It's not new at all. Victorian educational theorists talked about the
superiority of interest-initiated and delight-driven learning. The free
schools have been using this model for over 50 years, and my mother (a
psychologist) has remarked that she wishes there had been a local free
school when my siblings and I were growing up.
The unschooling theorist John Holt popularized this idea in the
homeschooling community in the 70s. Most of the homeschoolers I know use
unschooling when it works.
For most children in most areas, interest-initiated or delight-driven
learning works extremely well. You give the children resources and
support, and they learn. Young human beings are curious about the world,
and learning is what they do best. Get out of their way, and they teach
themselves. This is the time-honored way for young primates to learn
about the world. It is only in the last couple hundred years that we
have tried the experiment of separating young children from their
families, segregating them with age peers, confining them in desks, and
pouring the industrial product called education into their heads.
Leave a young child in their family and community, give them access to
information and tools, and they engage themselves seriously in the
business of learning what they need to know to be successful members of
society.
Three of my four children learned to read by osmosis. They had access to
books and to older people who read to them and were available to answer
questions.
"Rig-huh-tuh, what's that word, Mama?"
"Right. The g and the h are silent and make the i long."
One son started reading simple words before he was 2. By the time he was
6, he was reading science books intended for teenagers. He also taught
himself to read music during the same time frame, and would read a
musical score with as much pleasure and comprehension as another person
might read a novel.
At the same time, his just-older sister was not reading at all. She is
severely dyslexic. As a child, she preferred doing anything rather than
apply herself to cracking the code of written language. When I realized
this was an area of serious struggle for her, I tried a variety of
approaches, including a number of manipulatives.
One day, we were working with a manipulative where the child matches
letters to sounds and objects. The manipulative used pegs on the back of
the letters to match the answer to the problem. My daughter soon deduced
that it was far easier to disassemble the puzzle, turn over the letter
tiles, and match the peg patterns. This was genius in its way, but did
not help with the task of learning to read.
She did learn to read (the learning specialists say that her level of
remediation and confidence is amazing for a person with her level of
disability) and currently has a 3.94 college GPA. Learning to read and
write was not delightful or interesting for her. It took many years of
daily effort before she finally cracked the code at 11. She enjoys
reading now, but it takes her a long time to read anything.
In the 99% of areas where interest-initiated works for children, it does
work extraordinarily well. I don't think that it will turn ordinary
children into geniuses, but it does allow them to learn in their own
time and in the way that works best for them.
There is an idea in the unschooling community that children will
eventually learn to read if left to their own devices. For a lot of
children, that is correct, and there's no point in rushing them to read
before their brains are ready for it. A substantial minority of kids,
though, can't learn to read by osmosis. Their brains don't work that
way. If you just leave them alone and wait for them to learn to read,
they will grow up into illiterate adults.
Interest-initiated learning can also lead kids to focus on odd areas
that adults don't consider useful. In most cases, I think these
seemingly useless areas are valuable learning experiences for children.
In some cases, though, kids can get into unhealthy ruts. Parents and
teachers need to be aware of what's going on with the children and
redirect their energy if it gets into unhealthy patterns.
In sum, delight-driven learning is a great way for kids to learn, and
tremendous fun for the entire family. It's not the end-all and be-all of
education, though. There is a place for formal learning and adults still
need to monitor and guide children. We are primates, not reptiles. We do
not simply lay eggs and slither off into the sunset. We teach our
children to become adult human beings by spending lots of time with them
helping them learn everything they need to do to become successful adults.
--
Heather Madrone ([email protected])
http://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com
Live sweetly in bitter times.
