Passions help us grow.
I have become passionate, about so many things. My life has had some strange twists
and turns that have awoken the child in me and this is helping me on the
road to being the person nature meant me to be. Unschooling my children
has changed so many of my long-held beliefs and in learning to trust my
children I have developed a trust in myself.
I spent too many years believing all society's truths, which over time have become lies to me. I was a "true believer" who wanted her kids to get good grades, do well in school so they could get a good job. It seemed to me that childhood was merely a road to adulthood, that the most vital issue when looking at the child, child rearing and education was the end product. Now I believe that childhood is probably the most important part of the journey, and that it shouldn't be spent marching to the beat of someone else's drum. I can no longer dare to assume that I have the answer as to what my children "need to know". Of all the facts known, and maybe more importantly those still unknown to man how can I presume to know what my children need to fill their minds with wonder and their hearts with passion.
My kids may not know the difference between a verb and a noun, but they are
able to use words correctly in their speech so why should it matter? Why
do schools think children need to know such useless facts? Why fill their
heads with such useless things: "verb", "pronoun", "noun", "adjective",
"adverb" etc, give them instead such words as "explore", "invent",
"search", "live" but not in sentences and stories about other people, give
them these words so they can do these things themselves.
Some of you may
say "you live on a farm, it's easy for you" and in some ways you would be
right, but everything we do here can be translated to a smaller scale to an
average home. A few ideas to help get your family closer to Nature while at home: Make a small pond and wildlife will come, it attracts all sorts of insects and birds and if you are lucky a frog may spawn there. Your children can help make the pond, it's really easy just dig a hole and line it with plastic, add water and some aquatic plants and stock it with some small fish whose mouths are too small to eat tadpoles then sit back and see who comes to visit, or make your pond their home. It may take a little time, but children free of school's timetables have plenty of that. If you don't have any trees plant some, watch them grow and wait for the day a bird first makes a home in one, this is an exciting event. I'll always remember when Aaron [my second son] and I watched out the kitchen window as a dove built her nest, he was late to school that day but he probably learned more in that morning than he did for the rest of the week in school. Get in touch with the soil, that's where we are all from, make a compost pile, grow a small vegetable garden, get a few female chicks and let your children raise them, they are really good for eating food scraps and in return they give you eggs and some fertilizer for your garden.
The main function of schooling, be it in the classroom or at home is to train
the child to answer questions, and what good is it to be able to answer questions that everyone already has the answers to anyway? Any of the
information children are taught to parrot can be found in books, so if they
can read they can find the information they need, if they can't read they
can ask someone else. Kids should be free of the pressure to know set
facts, there is too much human knowledge for any one person to know anywhere
near all of it, so how can we say what is important and what can be
ignored. We need to let kids explore for themselves and find out what they
need to know, I trust my kids to do that. Instead of stuffing the child's
head full of facts and then asking them to tell it back society should be
asking them questions without answers and seeing what they can come up
with. Robert J. Oppenheimer said "There are children playing in the
street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they
have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago."
It is a known fact that the more we are programmed by society the more our brains can loose touch with reality. I was watching a program on the brain, and using two different sounds from the Chinese language to gauge babies' responses it was universal that babies at age 4 and 8 months can detect the subtle difference in what to me sounded the same. By 11 months, the babies were so programmed by hearing only their Mother-tongue that they could no longer hear any difference between these two sounds. Yet any Chinese person will tell you are distinctly different. To me this shows that very young infants are the only humans who hear and see reality. If we loose the ability to hear things by age 11 months, what else do we loose throughout childhood. The child's brain is a living miracle, too wondrous to be routinely molded to a set pattern to conform with society's standard, yet that is exactly what day-care, kindergarten and the early years of school is doing to humanity. We are all born with so much ability, our brains have a "use it or loose it" method of forming and keeping connections going. If we force children to learn mainly by listening to other people's truths and concepts their brains change, and become less adept at new thoughts. Because of that we risk loosing so many future possibilities for the human race.
Children want to run, explore and learn, to use all their senses together in a way that Nature designed them to, but most children have this joy of life and exploration drained out of them by being forced to conform. Sit at that desk for endless hours when their whole being is crying out for activity. Mold that brain into a reading/listening machine, when it should be a thinking machine... so many areas of the brain must come together in order for reading to take place that it alters the way the brain functions, in some children this is a natural progression at age three, for others this may not come naturally until age 12. Respect the difference and let the child develop at his own pace. Force little hands to hold a pencil and form meaningless squiggles when those little hands and the brains that operate them would benefit so much more by working/playing with sand, soil and water, cooking ingredients, building blocks, puzzles, coloring pencils, mouse, keyboard etc. There are so may fun things that will develop a child's fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination which will prepare them for the day they feel the need to write and figure out numbers. Children who have not been bored to death by being forced to learn certain things at certain times retain that beautiful natural curiosity so much longer. Why does society not value this wonderful quality?
I did very well in school, mostly I got 10 out of 10 for tests, and I could
parrot back most of the useless facts that had been forced down my throat... but why?
Wouldn't I have been better off outdoors where my heart was anyway, I spent
so much of my time looking out the window and day-dreaming. Right across the road from my school there was a beach; on that beach were
such creatures as the blue ringed octopus and cone shells, yet we were
never told anything about these deadly beauties so close to our classroom.
I'll always remember watching that clock waiting for the moment when I
could escape so I could explore the rock pools of Margate beach,
fortunately I never did encounter one of those deadly creatures up close
enough to catch.
I'll never forget the first time I dared to tell a teacher he had made a mistake, shy as I was
I couldn't bear to see this person telling my classmates something that was
wrong. Even at age 10 it concerned me to see how some kids would struggle
to grasp concepts that I found so easy, and I was worried that they would
be even more confused by trying to work out this problem. So I raised my
hand and said "Excuse me sir, that problem is wrong", he saw red "COME ON
THEN SUSAN EVANS, YOU TEACH THE CLASS" he roared at me. I wanted to shrink
into a corner and disappear. The teacher knew I couldn't talk in front of the
class. In spite of my fear I stood and walked toward the blackboard and corrected the math
problem, and all my teacher said was "I did that on purpose to see if
anyone was paying attention"... what a load of bull, this was new work and
even if the class was paying attention most kids would not have seen the
error, but I guess he saved face [not with me]. It really bothered me that so many teachers thought they were so God-like that they couldn't admit to being wrong. If they could just say "I made a mistake, it just shows I'm human like the rest of you." would have given a much better lesson than the ranting and raving that came from most of them when an error was pointed out. No matter how politely it is done teachers generally react in the same way, first anger at a child daring to correct them, then lies to cover their error.
School/schooling does more damage than any possible good and in time these institutions may no longer be seen as the best place for a child's mind to grow and flourish. There will always be kids who's parents both need to work to support them or kids from a single parent who has to rely on others to care for the child for several hours a day. Institutionalized schooling is not the answer to this problem, neither is it the answer to the unfortunate children who are better off in the care and guidance of someone other than their own parents, these kids are a sad fact of life, they are unwanted and unloved and no amount of schooling can help them either. Unfortunately some will always need people other than their own parents to guide them on the road to discovering what they need to know to survive and hopefully thrive as adults. However more should be done to try to help these families care for their own children instead of rushing them off early to institutionalized learning.
In time as the unschooling movement grows and more people have the desire to be their children's primary guides beyond the first few weeks or years I foresee a better world with more thinking adults, not dictated to by the lessons learned in schools who's very design was to make willing workers for industry. There will be less people content to spend their weekends being spectators in life and more people getting out in the world and living. For the some their passions may even spill over into what they do to earn the money and these lucky people won't care if it's Friday or Monday, every day will be one where they eagerly get out of bed in the morning and go their work with real enthusiasm.
To thy own self be true, and give your children a chance to find their own selves before they start out on their own in the world.
Sue Gallien
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