I have a very small child next to me right now. He's humming, eating a cracker, and tossing his head from shoulder to shoulder. His average day is spent toddling around the house, learning everything he can about everything. He looks at us like he's thinking, "What? I'm doing science!"
That's the way a small child views the world. Everything is an opportunity for something new to learn and explore. There's no such thing as sitting around and playing too much or not doing something educational enough. Everything is a chance to learn and grow.
Thinking about it, adults do the same thing. If I want to know about something, I ask questions, read a book about it, or hop online and do some research. I can make my own choices on what I want to learn and what's important to me. I'd like to think most adults are the same way.
In school, however, kids don't get that freedom. Everything they learn comes prepackaged in this box and they aren't allowed to deviate, aside from on their free time. Even their free time is taken up by school with homework. It's not even close to the model of learning your standard adult or preschooler uses. It's so incredibly foreign and different that it almost doesn't even make sense.
Unfortunately, there are articles like this one by ABC talking about unschooling families and any family that doesn't use a "school at home" approach to learning. True, this family may not be the perfect example of unschooling, especially as their children don't have any interest in going to college, but they're trying to make a point. Unschooling is unhealthy and damages a child, giving them too much ego and not allowing them the structure a child needs. They even go so far as to say one of the children doesn't like sports, not that he'd know because he's not exposed to sports through a PE class.
That last statement gets under my skin. Not everyone finds out they like sports through PE class. Actually, in my experience PE class usually gets met with kids who mock the gym teacher and do everything they can to avoid going. They hate the games that they play and most kids lose their love of sports, at least that's my experience. PE class doesn't teach kids to like sports. That's not even what it's there for. PE class is to make sure kids get a healthy amount of exercise each day.
Further, homeschooled and unschooled kids love sports! Well, maybe not all of them do, but they do take the opportunities to try them out if they're so inclined. For example, I'm planning on starting both my older kids on soccer in the winter. Unfortunately, youth soccer is about the only sport that's available and well known about in this area. Even so, they've both expressed an interest in soccer as well as martial arts. How can that be bad for them? It's definitely an opportunity to learn, grow, exercise, make new friends, and have fun. Isn't that what being a kid is about?
All too often I've seen it portrayed that unschooling families, whether radical or not, are giving their children too much power and in return their kids don't learn anything. Given the opportunity their kids will do nothing but eat junk food and play video games all day. Well, that's something to consider, yes, but as a parent, I can do something about that. If the kids are hungry and want a snack, I can make sure healthy snacks are available and keep the junk food at a distance. If they want to watch television all day, I can suggest something really interesting to watch, like a documentary on my child's favorite subject, or give them some other option that's so fun and irresistible that they're not likely to want to watch television at all. If they don't want to do it, well, what harm is there in watching a little television? More often than not, when the suggestion of something more fun and interesting comes up, the television goes off without a problem.
Somehow it strikes me as odd, and a little bit fishy, that big media corporations paint such a dark light on those who choose to raise their children in an alternative way. Even shows like Mom Swap, or whatever it's called, are prone to showing alternative families in a very bad light when they pair them up with some very normal seeming family. It's striking that somehow these corporations seem to think that non-standard families are somehow a threat to society. After all, if they were showing them in the positive, healthy light that they're seen by the families that choose it, perhaps more people would choose to do it too.
When it comes down to it, I'm noticing more and more each day that we prefer to unschool around here rather than teach formal lessons. We tend to learn things on the fly and focus on what the kids are interested in. It's almost freeing not to have to worry about what I'm going to teach the next day and how I'm going to get my kids involved in lessons they have no interest in. Instead of all that, I'm finding myself more and more capable of introducing my own interests to my kids. It's a more natural way of learning.
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