HOME EDUCATION and the QUIRKY CHILD - Part Eleven

Now, I promised that I would tell you about the word “Apparently”.

When our older boys started to be interested in dinosaurs (actually, just off on another random thing here – there are lots of subjects that children are drawn to for some reason, it's fun to make a list of them – start with dinosaurs, pirates, sharks, space travel, robots, knights and castles, horses, dogs, cats, dancing, music … the world is full of very exciting things to learn – and natural education methods don't squash or spoil a child's desire to learn and keep learning into adulthood. Oh oh – another rabbit trail sorry, I will eventually get back to the “apparently” thing, but I just wanted to share something that happened to me in relation to LEARNING NEW THINGS.

A few years after leaving school, I was working for a lawyer by that time, I had a sudden and intense desire to learn things. People asked why I wasn't studying for my legal executive qualifications, but I’d known for many years that I wanted to be a secretary, and enjoy that, until my real job of being a mum came along. I thought that being a legal executive was a rather dull job compared with being a secretary then a Mum. I loved being a secretary even though the interaction with the public made me mentally very tired (I didn’t understand that now, but if I had I am sure I could have worked something out to make my life a little more enjoyable during that time). But anyway, yes, I guess I was about 19 and I wanted to learn things – I wanted INPUT!

I wondered if you were allowed to go into the library and get random books out on random subjects just to learn things. I wondered if someone would question me “are you doing a course on this? Why do you want to know this?” I thought that learning things only happened within a certain constraint – that of a course, or a class. It took me many years before I could break free of this thinking – probably when we started unschooling. But the freedom to learn things JUST BECAUSE THEY'RE INTERESTING is wonderful and dizzying!

And now, yes, back to the word APPARENTLY

Remember I started by saying that when our older boys were interested in dinosaurs I would get books out of the library and read “dinosaurs roamed the earth in the days before man” Nobody had told me about evolution, I didn't even know there was a name for it – it was just what everyone thought (or so I was lead to believe). The lie of that statement is of course that not EVERYONE thinks evolution is truth – even if that is what you find in 99.9% of the library books. In fact, over the years following we discovered great big holes and lies paraded as truth in the theory of evolution, and then our eyes were opened to the fact that God created everything in the world.

And so I realised that I should have been reading those books, back when I didn't know much about that subject and saying “Apparently, dinosaurs roamed the earth in the days before man”.

Adding the word “apparently” means “I have no personal proof that this statement is correct, but I have no reason to disbelieve it at this point.”

Think of the map of the world – apparently that is what the world looks like.

Apparently, all or most health professionals in the field of women's health were lead to believe there was something called a lactiferous sinus – to do with milk production and breastfeeding. But, apparently in 2005 new research suggested that the lactiferous sinus did not exist. The cross-section diagram of the breast had to be redrawn and corrected.

It's a bit clunky to have to say APPARENTLY all the time, but use it enough and your child will get the idea that we need to learn to use discretion and logical thinking in life. Wisdom is not the same thing as knowledge, and the sooner someone works that out the happier they will be in their lives.

I was just reminded then of a little hint I have for not killing a subject – if a child expresses interest in a something it’s good to look through a book, inviting them to join in, and dependent on the age and stage of the child to read the captions under the pictures – only just that. If they ASK for more information read a little more. My husband remembers so clearly the feeling of tedium as the teacher would drone “get out your textbook and read page 6.” What if the child flicked through the book and was extremely interested in the picture and information on page 14? Should he read that? Is he allowed to? I guess it depends on how he feels about learning. About what the system has taught him.

If you use a textbook make sure it’s a good one. Not dry. Not so concise that it misses all the best parts of the subject in an effort to cover too much. Read through the whole book, looking at the pictures, reading the captions, commenting on things, skip bits that nobody is interested in, ask questions of your own – not testing the child, but things you genuinely wonder about. “I wonder why …” and “I wonder if …” are BRILLIANT questions to ask your children. If they don’t want to think about it right then they’ll either ignore you, or quickly pull an answer from the PRIMARY THINKING part of their brain. These Primary Thinking answers are often something like “Dunno” or “Hm” . If something has grabbed their attention and they dig back into the SECONARY THINKING part of their brain they might come up with something really good.

I think it might be frustrating for a very bright child when they're having a book read to them to be continually asked “how many of those can you count?”, or “what colour is the big one?” or “and that's a ….” The bored child will mostly likely glance at the dolphin and say “cow”

“no” you will gently correct “it's a dolphin.”

Gauge your child’s interest and their desire to answer questions. Some children delight in it – for others you will be squashing any interest they may have.

John Taylor Gatto – New York Teacher of the Year three years running, now homeschooling advocate, tells of a time when he told his class to tear the question pages out of the end of each chapter of the “study” version of Moby Dick. He said that a classic book should be read and enjoyed and chewed over on a personal level, then perhaps shared with others if you want to. When the book is read again there will be more questions in a reader's mind, something that wasn't noticed last time. If we can keep this in mind with all topics that we present to a child, or they bring to us it will keep our relationship with them healthier and their desire to learn will be stronger and more exciting.

I think of this when I read of families having a topic that they keep for an entire month or term – whether it is a country (where they would learn some of the language, the food, exports, imports, traditional dress etc), or a certain period in history, or castles or horses – any subject really. Whilst I think it sounds fun I know that our family would feel like they were labouring over the topic and I would be under stress to keep everyone on task … in the end it wouldn't be worth it for us. Too much stress, too much work and the result and the retained learning wouldn't justify that.