The boys have been doing a crazy amount of learning lately. You may notice that when I talk about learning, it’s usually about the boys, because the girls are still very much in play mode, which the boys were almost exclusively for the first 7 or 8 years of their lives. Not, of course, that the girls aren’t learning, they are learning great amounts of things all the time, but the things that they are naturally working at are things that are not considered academic. Things like interpersonal relationships. Empathy. Social lessons of all kinds. Language fluency. Creativity. But what I’m talking about with the boys is their understanding of modern systems beyond self and family. That of science and politics, mainly.

But first I’m going to just make a quick note about reading learning, as that has been an ongoing subject on my blog. Jake has now completed four books: Ender’s Game, The Wednesday Witch, No Flying In the House, and The Phantom Tollbooth. The first three were on my suggestion. Actually, he’s had lots of books suggested to him, and started some of them, but these are the ones that took hold in his imagination and that he stuck with to the end. The last one surprised me because it’s a book that I abandoned after the first chapter or so because I found it dull and hard to follow. He says that his favorite so far has been Ender’s Game. No surprise there, it’s a fascinating premise and written extremely well. He’s also read probably a dozen graphic novels, and dozens more of my old comic books, although he’s moved on from the comic books now. For a while he’d sit and read them for hours, now they don’t seem to interest him at all. He’s eleven, by the way. Noah, who is nine, is on the same path, no books yet, but lots of graphic novels.

(A funny story about Noah — early this fall at market the woman in the stall next to us wanted to know why the kids weren’t in school, and she was very disapproving at hearing that they don’t go at all. She asked them if I am their teacher, and Noah said enthusiastically, “Nobody teaches us! We teach ourselves!” I swear, her face hardened into stone and I thought, oh no, here we go. I tried to laugh it off and explain that what he means is that I don’t behave like the stereotypical schoolteacher in that I don’t sit them down and make them do workbooks or lecture them, but that our mutual exchange of information is natural and organic in structure. In that sense “teaching” could be said to be occurring but it’s not an artificially constructed and mandated thing. She was looking at me so hard it was like she was trying to bore a hole through my head solely with mental effort. Then she whipped back around to Noah with that same intense glare and said, “How do you learn to read? Are you reading yet? What are you reading?” Noah, bless his heart, was not at all perturbed by her manner (he tends to be in his own little world, oblivious a lot of the time,) and took his time formulating an answer, looking thoughtful. Finally he said, perfectly cheerfully, “Well, I read a lot on video games.” I just about died. Luckily though the woman considered that outrageous enough that she couldn’t bear to have anything more to do with us, and she sourly avoided looking our way the rest of the day. I was a little nervous that she might try to report us to some authority, but it’s been some time so I think we’re safe.)

Anyway, yes, Noah is reading quite fluently, which still just tickles me every time I think about it, because he’s had no reading instruction whatsoever. Of course if he’d asked we would have helped him, and he might have asked if we’d make an issue over his readiness, but as it was he had no need. And it didn’t occur to him, in absence of any need or worry on our part, to ask for help. Perfectly logical. And Noah is a really average, typical person, I think, in terms of intelligence. He’s got his strengths and specialties, for sure, but he’s not a prodigy. So it really makes me wonder how many other people would be just fine if trusted to know intuitively what they need in order to learn — better than fine, actually, if we were to take into account how many “failures” would cease to exist if everyone was allowed to learn according to the actual needs of their minds and hearts. The key, I think, would have to be a paradigmatic shift in understanding about how reading learning happens. “Oh yes, they just pick that up, just as they do talking. Of course they do. What else would they do?”

Now, imagine what it would be like if people believed that children would be better off if they were taught to speak earlier and faster than they would naturally pick it up. We assume it’s inherently different, but is it really? Consider that some people do believe in that. Do a search for “teaching babies to talk” or even “early childhood pedogogy” and thousands of results come up. There is a parallel - just as there are people who don’t read well, there are people who don’t speak well, and the number of people who don’t speak well are growing in our minds — I’ve lost count of how many parents I know who have been seriously worried that their toddlers were speaking “late” or not enunciating properly — it’s like an epidemic. I don’t think it’s far-fetched that our collective perception could eventually become that speaking is something that is ideally taught, and that many children will suffer from poor speaking skills unless we nip it in the bud early by ensuring that all children have the opportunity to have early management of speaking skills, and that it is dangerous to assume too much of a spectrum of normality. Is it possible that our anxiety over reading learning and need to universally manage it is the same sort of nonsense? Yeah, I think it very much is.

Well, I went off on a tangent there, didn’t I? Let’s see, way back up at the top I wasn’t talking about strange conditioned beliefs about how people learn, I was talking about the huge amount of unschooled learning that’s been happening around here lately. It’s just exploded, really. Oh, don’t worry, the boys are still playing plenty of video games. But we’ve also been having these amazing conversations and question sessions and looking things up online. One recent popular topic of conversation is the material world. We’ve looked at genetics, animal species, how various kinds of reproduction takes place, sperm and eggs and DNA, chemical elements and atoms, the similarities between the extreme macro-world and the extreme micro-world, other dimensions (a favorite of Noah’s,) and many related and tangential things. Another topic has been politics, which I suppose could just about be expected given that an important election is coming up. We have been talking about the reasons people go to war, hatred and fear, genocide, religious fanaticism, racism, poverty, greed, corporate welfare, illegal immigration, heath care, our voting system, the political parties, branches of our government, and other such things. And this has all been initiated and propelled by the boys — I’m just the facilitator.

I was talking with a couple of friends recently, not together, about schooled life versus unschooled life. One friend sees school as THE place where intellectual pursuit happens, and her concern is that the kids will miss out on other information and perspectives than I would provide. But what I remember about school is incredibly inferior to what the kids have been experiencing as a spontaneous thing in just living their lives. I remember spending an awful lot of mental energy in school trying to figure out what the “right” or “smart” thing was to say, or just being scared of being called on, which meant that I ended up saying not much at all. It wasn’t an atmosphere that encouraged or even allowed active questioning and searching, nor self-confidence, self-direction, self-knowledge. Nor were most of my teachers interested in that. We were simply being fed (a mediocre and unengaging curriculum for that matter,) and most of the time we weren’t interested in simply being fed so we tuned out. What a ridiculous waste of time. And it was painfully boring. I remember, exactly like Calvin, feeling time slow down to a virtual standstill, but it wasn’t funny. It hurt. An entirely pointless kind of hurt.

For many of us who are unschooling, the discussion inevitably comes down to time, and so it was with my other friend. We were trying to figure out, in between getting up early, driving to school, all the sitting around while the teacher gets things organized, the busywork, the lecturing, the testing, eating lunch, more organizing and managing and sitting doing nothing and busywork and lecturing and watching the clock, driving home, doing some mind-numbing activity to relax from the exhaustion of the previous hours of tedium, eating dinner, doing homework, getting ready for bed early so that you can get up early: were is the time to really think and connect? We both observed that in our own lives there is quite enough of interests and personally beneficial and meaningful work to fill the day, so that the oh so important authentic connections and private quiet time for searching thought are dependent on there being enough of a quantity of time in which they can arise spontaneously often. The directing and managing of so much of our time by others significantly impinges on the amount of time in which that can happen, and so could be said to be responsible in a very real way for the modern disintegration of family, critical thought, creativity, and autonomy.

To read: John Taylor Gatto, Why Schools Don’t Educate: “Right now we are taking all the time from our children that they need to develop self-knowledge. That has to stop.”

And: John Taylor Gatto, The 7-Lesson Schoolteacher: “All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alienated from common human reality that I am convinced it is wrong and that most people would agree with me if they had a choice. We might be able to see that if we regained a hold on a philosophy that locates meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found — in families, in friends, the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends and real communities are built.”