The Education of Little Impling: Chapter 1

This post is a long time coming. And as I write, it is becoming more and more obvious I'm going to have to break it up. There is just SO much to blather on about.

Sometime in the insomniac haze of last year, I stumbled across Fairly Odd Mother's blog and was delighted to find someone in the thick of home schooling. I admired her creativity in building a space and curriculum for her children designed to keep them interested and curious. I love what she has to say about educating her children. I found it inspiring, encouraging and enlightening. I said I would love exchange ideas at some point, then conveniently put my head in the sand, placed my fingers in my ears, and chanted “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” as loud as possible, to drown out any possibility of really thinking about the subject.

Because, at times, I see this future for myself, and I am terrified.

The Impling is only 2. Two and a half, to be exact. The age of preschool is approaching and what am I doing about it? My fellow mothers at the playground have enrolled their little ones in a variety of heavily researched (and paid) preschools and daycares to ensure that their children are on the road to being comfortable around other children, respecting authority, and listening well. Social conditioning is a necessary part of life. I know this. I want the Impling to be comfortable in herself, confident in her autonomy, and assertive enough to not let her fears get in the way of her fun. Preschool would perhaps offer this for her. So why, you may ask, have I not signed my little one up for preschool?

I could tell you it is because we have no money (which is true).

I might tell you that as we will be moving within the year, it makes no sense to start her schooling here now. (in reality, if she did start here, she would be red shirted, and probably have an advantage over her classmates, and have no trouble whatever transitioning, as by the time we move, her class would be over any ways).

I will tell you quite honestly that she will be in schooling probably for the next 18 years, and hopefully learning for the rest of her life. That this first four years is her time to play and learn on her own speed. Absorbing words and concepts and ideas as naturally as a sponge. And retaining that information. I am loathe to take her away from that.

Because as soon as we start school, suddenly, all those natural ways we had of sucking up information are suddenly completely disregarded and we are presented with rules, and tests, and textbooks, and lined paper and coloring books and told to stay within the lines.

I don't want to put this little mind in a cage.

Get over yourself, you might say. This is the world. This is how education works. It was good enough for us, it's good enough for them. If they don't learn how to adapt and take tests and do things they don't enjoy doing they will never survive in the real world. They will become bitter, disillusioned and depressed. Unlike the rest of us. You are ruining your child! Bad mother. Thoughtless mother. Should be locked up, she should.

I don't want to put my little girl in a cage. And really, I know that school isn't a cage for everyone. It just depends on your temperament. For me, it was a cage. This doesn't mean it will be for the Impling. But until public education learns to value those innate ways we have of absorbing knowledge and language and utilize them constructively, I will continue to keep my child out of public schools.

NOW some of you might be thinking, what an elitist bitchy fool, she's just building a different sort of cage for her poor child. After all, without an education, how will she ever get ahead, how will she succeed? What if she wants to go to college? Will she be able to do this without a “traditional” educational program? She will still have to take tests. She will still have to learn how to conform.

I have to tell you now, we can give children the talent and tools they need to do whatever they want without pigeonholing them into a vast and useless waste of time which is what much of our public schools offer. (I think we are awfully dim on what constitutes “getting ahead” and “succeeding” as well, but that will have to be another post) . Schools are only as good as the students and teachers in them. If you have an engaging group of curious, kind children and indefatigueable, creative, good hearted teachers, you will have a wonderful learning environment, and with the right tools to go along with it, you will have an exceptional learning environment.

Raise your hand if you have consistently had this education yourself. Parts of Junior High and High School keep getting in the way, don't they? Perhaps you had (like a certain blogger friend I know...*ahem*) brilliant English teachers, but poor to downright nasty ones for science and math. Most likely, you had, like most people, a spotty experience.

Get a load of me trying to write about education. And what's my background? I went to public school. I went to a University. My father taught 5^th and 6^th grade for over 30 years, then worked with troubled teenagers in detention. He taught kids music, and had the opportunity when Montessori love swept the school systems back in the seventies to teach the same class consecutively for 5^th and 6^th grades. At that time, he became enamored of an educator named John Holt. Ever hear of him? I hadn't.

John Holt wrote about his experiences teaching and observing children . “How Children Fail” and "How Children Learn”. Dad gave me his copy of “How Children Learn” and I opened it with the healthy skepticism I greet anything new with. Particularly if those introducing me to said new things are overtly enamored of it. I'm bitchy that way.

So I started to read the Foreword. I had that patient, sardonic smile on my face as I read the first lines, waiting for the first leap into the proverbial stratosphere of unreality (which, quite frankly, still may come...we shall see).

But then, I read this.

“...children have a style of learning that fits their condition, and which they use naturally and well until we train them out of it. We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favor of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves.

What are the results? Only a few children in school ever become good at learning in the way we try to make them learn. Most of them get humiliated, frightened, and discouraged. They use their minds, not to learn, but to get out of doing the things we tell them to do...to make them learn. In the short run, these strategies seem to work. They make it possible for many children to get through their schooling even though they learn very little. But in the long run these strategies are self limiting and self-defeating, and destroy both character and intelligence. The children who use such strategies are prevented by them from growing into more than limited versions of the human beings they might have become. This is the real failure that takes place in school; hardly any children escape.

When we better understand the ways, conditions and spirit in which children do their best learning, and are able to make school into a place where they can use and improve the style of thinking and learning natural to them, we may be able to prevent much of this failure. School may then become a place in which all children grow, not just in size, not even in knowledge, but in curiosity, courage, confidence, independence, resourcefulness, resilience, patience, competence, and understanding.”

I very nearly cried. Suddenly, I was reading, beneath a light coating of melodrama, basic common sense. YES. I thought. This was just the way it was for me. This thinking is right. It FEELS right.

And watching my Impling as she investigates the world...I KNOW, that at the moment, it is right.

John Holt wrote this in 1967. For many schools, not much has changed since then. Case in point...a valedictorian of the high school my father worked for who “won” that honor not for her hard work, but because she knew how to cheat and get away with it. You all can fill in the blanks here. How many experiences outside of my own would validate his words?

Next...A little John Holt bio (shocker of the week...the man was slightly eccentric), and a brief history of our system as we know it. And some actual statistics and other scintillating tidbits of information.