I was out tooling around in the blogosphere, looking at some of the homeschool blogs outside of my usual rambles. I found a post that Dana at Principled Discovery had made a couple of days ago about Christian Education and Unschooling. Both her post and the comments were very interesting.
As you know, I think that unschooling is perfectly compatible with Christian parenting. Christian education as a distinct entity is not something that I generally think about. Our churches have always had a Board of Christian Education that oversees the Sunday School, VBS, and day school where such existed. I know that isn't what they mean.
The sense I get is that many of them believe that there is a distinctly Christian way to educate. I don't.
I don't think of what we do as Christian education. In fact, I don't think of it in terms of education all that often. I think in terms of learning, certainly. But not education or teaching.
The one difficulty that I have with the underpinnings of the philosophy of unschooling is that it assumes innate goodness of children. I, of course, believe that my children were born sinful, as we all were, but I don't think that that has to keep us from enjoying the benefits of unschooling and the lifestyle that we enjoy.
Showing posts with label Learning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Learning. Show all posts
Monday, February 11, 2008
Friday, September 07, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Explaining learning
People understand school. They understand "education." They understand teaching. But what I've come to realize is that very few people understand learning.
They have a hard time grasping the absorption and growth of knowledge and understanding absent coercion or the assistance of an outside expert.
I was trying to explain to someone yesterday that, yes, my kids have learned to spell from reading. My daughter--who is an excellent writer--learned that craft by reading excellent writers.
We don't go "back to school" and that confuses people. I try to explain that they never stop learning, but that seems to confuse people, too.
When people find out that I was an education major, but changed my major after my practicum because I realized I would hate classroom teaching, they always suggest that it's ironic that I am a teacher now. But I'm not. I'm a parent. I actively teach my children very little. What I do do is provide them with opportunities and resources. I surround them with books and maps and music and art. I take them to parks and museums and antique stores and church and zoos and Target and beaches and coffee shops and soccer games and grandmas house. I let them weed the garden and wash the clothes and help me cook.
And we talk. All the time. We talk about the news, the book they're reading, and what the lyrics to our favorite Rush songs mean. We talk about why things are the way they are and what we can or can't do something about. We talk about moving to the country and the animals we'd have and what we'll name our dogs. We talk about what we could possibly do with all of our tomatoes and why Amish chickens taste so good and why lightening does what it does when it strikes different structures.
I don't think I could keep them from learning, except maybe by sending them to school.
They have a hard time grasping the absorption and growth of knowledge and understanding absent coercion or the assistance of an outside expert.
I was trying to explain to someone yesterday that, yes, my kids have learned to spell from reading. My daughter--who is an excellent writer--learned that craft by reading excellent writers.
We don't go "back to school" and that confuses people. I try to explain that they never stop learning, but that seems to confuse people, too.
When people find out that I was an education major, but changed my major after my practicum because I realized I would hate classroom teaching, they always suggest that it's ironic that I am a teacher now. But I'm not. I'm a parent. I actively teach my children very little. What I do do is provide them with opportunities and resources. I surround them with books and maps and music and art. I take them to parks and museums and antique stores and church and zoos and Target and beaches and coffee shops and soccer games and grandmas house. I let them weed the garden and wash the clothes and help me cook.
And we talk. All the time. We talk about the news, the book they're reading, and what the lyrics to our favorite Rush songs mean. We talk about why things are the way they are and what we can or can't do something about. We talk about moving to the country and the animals we'd have and what we'll name our dogs. We talk about what we could possibly do with all of our tomatoes and why Amish chickens taste so good and why lightening does what it does when it strikes different structures.
I don't think I could keep them from learning, except maybe by sending them to school.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
All the knowledge in the world
Last week as I spent a couple of hours just browsing the shelves in our new library, I was again overwhelmed by the vast amount that there is to know. I was caught between elation and discouragement, elated by the certain knowledge that I will never run out of books to read and yet discouraged that I will never run out, because this means that I will never know or understand all of the things that I could wish.
As homeschooling parents we often fear that our kids are not learning "everything." Of course they aren't. What we really fear is that there is some essential bit of knowledge that they haven't learned, and that this puts their futures are in jeopardy.
No one learns everything. Some people have an amazing, borderline-encyclopedic knowledge of a great many things. Many people don't care to have more information than they need to function in their daily lives.
There may be some essential bit that your child doesn't have. But that's okay. When he needs it, he can learn it. Think about the knowledge that you use in your daily activities. Did you learn it in school? I spend a lot of my day on the computer. I run email lists and blog. I have built more than one website. I upload, download, bank, shop, sell, balance financial accounts, create spreadsheets, brochures, and fliers, and can put together a mean Power Point presentation. All of this in spite of the fact that I never used a computer until I was a 28-year-old college graduate and mother of two and needed it for my job. I have learned the information that I have needed as I have needed it.
Yesterday my boys were talking and I was amazed at their knowledge of mythology. They made me feel really uninformed so I've added a some mythology to my reading pile. A relative was questioning the wisdom of them learning Greek. Why not choose something more practical? But knowledge doesn't all need to be practical. The value of knowledge can come from the discipline achieved in the learning or from the sheer joy of knowing something. It can come in the interesting late night conversations with friends or the essay exam for a history class that blows a professor away.
Best of all, for me, it can come from sitting at breakfast, with a child who is so excited by what he is reading that his pancakes are growing cold.
As homeschooling parents we often fear that our kids are not learning "everything." Of course they aren't. What we really fear is that there is some essential bit of knowledge that they haven't learned, and that this puts their futures are in jeopardy.
No one learns everything. Some people have an amazing, borderline-encyclopedic knowledge of a great many things. Many people don't care to have more information than they need to function in their daily lives.
There may be some essential bit that your child doesn't have. But that's okay. When he needs it, he can learn it. Think about the knowledge that you use in your daily activities. Did you learn it in school? I spend a lot of my day on the computer. I run email lists and blog. I have built more than one website. I upload, download, bank, shop, sell, balance financial accounts, create spreadsheets, brochures, and fliers, and can put together a mean Power Point presentation. All of this in spite of the fact that I never used a computer until I was a 28-year-old college graduate and mother of two and needed it for my job. I have learned the information that I have needed as I have needed it.
Yesterday my boys were talking and I was amazed at their knowledge of mythology. They made me feel really uninformed so I've added a some mythology to my reading pile. A relative was questioning the wisdom of them learning Greek. Why not choose something more practical? But knowledge doesn't all need to be practical. The value of knowledge can come from the discipline achieved in the learning or from the sheer joy of knowing something. It can come in the interesting late night conversations with friends or the essay exam for a history class that blows a professor away.
Best of all, for me, it can come from sitting at breakfast, with a child who is so excited by what he is reading that his pancakes are growing cold.
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