Unschooling is a term coined by John Holt who advocates that children are natural learners and learn best when they learn what they want, when they want with minimal adult intervention. Laura from Speargrass is a strong advocate of this and seeing how successful the system has worked for their family, I decided to do a little more research on the subject. First and foremost, Education and Learning are different things; doing well (or not) in school has little to do with learning. The earlier is about being able to answer questions in exams, the latter is about understanding and applying knowledge. According to John Holt and other research done on literacy, it takes 30hrs for a person to learn how to read; both adults and children. That is less than 2 weeks of school! The problem nowadays, is that we introduce reading to children at too early an age with "dumbed-down" material that may not be of interest to them. On top of that, we add on the complication of learning phonics and rules, and make everything so complicated that it puts them off. If we waited for the right time, the children would naturally seek to read as it is a means to an end; to be able to read things that interest them. After the basic 30hrs of instruction, they will learn to read & understand words contextually and this is later enforced through frequent exposure to the same words. I largely agree with the above. Stephan is dyslexic and we had struggled to teach him how to read since the age of 3. That was probably way too young! The therapists used phonics based methods; sounds-write program, orton-gillingham approach…. And to be honest, I don't understand any of the rules. Basically, there are too many rules and too many exceptions! By the time he had worked all that out in his head, he'd lost interest in what he was reading. About 1 year ago, we started using audio books with book support. Stephan would listen to the stories and follow the words on a hard copy book. He was able to read interesting books that would normally not be accessible to him at his reading level. This coupled with reading glasses (an optician specializing in learning difficulties found that his eyes had difficulty focusing) and Stephan is now an avid reader! Natural School of learningIn the month we spent at Speargrass, I saw how our own children have become more independent and how the older children learn and have been very impressed.
Personally, I remember little of what I learnt in school. History of the Industrial revolution? Calculas? Accounting standards? Tax Laws? I did relatively well in school but the reality is that none of what I learnt is relevant to my life now. Would I have turned out "better" if I had been given the freedom to learn on my own? I am not sure.
Even though I do not utilize the knowledge I learnt, I believe that the process of going to school and taking exams teaches us discipline, focus and the tenacity to get through whatever it takes. Life is after all not only about doing the things we want to do, and often, persevering at something that doesn't, at first glance, seem appealing often gives us an even greater sense of accomplishment when we succeed. I also fear that if our kids were unschooled, they would become too much like us. Children are products of their environment and if our kids do not go to school or have other avenues of garnering information, all the materials and information given to them will be governed by our interests and beliefs. Wouldn't this be limiting for them? There is a Democratic school movement that sounds very interesting. Children are in a school environment, but the children decide what, when, how they want to learn with the guidance from teachers. Sudbury School, Summerhill School are 2 well known schools that I am going to look further into. …
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
March 2017
|