New Book

So I got a new book today. What's new? LOL
I'm always reading something but I find that I don't really read fictional books anymore. I love books that give me information (I, myself, have found a new passion for learning!) and my weakness is anything having to do with homeschooling, the way people learn and now, my new favorite - books on unschooling. I love the entire philosophy of unschooling. Don't like the word much (sounds very negative to me - guess it's the un- part...) but the whole concept in amazing and makes so much sense. I tend to like the phrase "natural-learning" a little better, which is what a lot of people call it.

Here is a part of the book that I'm reading. I happened to find this speech on the Internet so I didn't have to type it all out, thank goodness. I would have though because I think it is THAT good. While I was reading it today I just became over-whelmed with emotion at how he explains things. I was thinking, "Yes! Yes! That's what I have been thinking but didn't know how to put it into words!" I'm terrible at feeling things and not knowing how to express myself. I think that's why I have been quoting a lot of things on my blog lately and not writing my own stuff. I just can't seem to word it as good as some of these people do and get my point across.

(Part of a speech given at a conference) Can read the entire speech here.
Schooling: The Hidden Agenda
By Daniel Quinn

What sells most people on the idea of school is the fact that the unschooled child learns what it wants to learn when it wants to learn it. This is intolerable to them, because they're convinced that children don't want to learn anything at all--and they point to school children to prove it. What they fail to recognize is that the learning curve of preschool children swoops upward like a mountain--but quickly levels off when they enter school. By the third or fourth grade it's completely flat for most kids. Learning, such as it is, has become a boring, painful experience they'd love to be able to avoid if they could. But there's another reason why people abhor the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it. They won't all learn the same things! Some of them will never learn to analyze a poem! Some of them will never learn to parse a sentence or write a theme! Some of them will never read Julius Caesar! Some will never learn geometry! Some will never dissect a frog! Some will never learn how a bill passes Congress! Well, of course, this is too horrible to imagine. It doesn't matter that 90% of these students will never read another poem or another play by Shakespeare in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% of them will never have occasion to parse another sentence or write another theme in their lives. It doesn't matter that 90% retain no functional knowledge of the geometry or algebra they studied. It doesn't matter that 90% never have any use for whatever knowledge they were supposed to gain from dissecting a frog. It doesn't matter that 90% graduate without having the vaguest idea how a bill passes Congress. All that matters is that they've gone through it!
The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them--the things they need to know--and forget the rest. I am a living witness to this fact. I went to one of the best prep schools in the country and graduated fourth in my class, and I doubt very much if I could now get a passing grade in more than two or three of the dozens of courses I took. I studied classical Greek for two solid years, and now would be unable to read aloud a single sentence.

One final argument people advance to support the idea that children need all the schooling we give them is that there is vastly more material to be learned today than there was in prehistoric times or even a century ago. Well, there is of course vastly more material that can be learned, but we all know perfectly well that it isn't being taught in grades K to twelve. Whole vast new fields of knowledge exist today--things no one even heard of a century ago: astrophysics, biochemistry, paleobiology, aeronautics, particle physics, ethology, cytopathology, neurophysiology--I could list them for hours. But are these the things that we have jammed into the K-12 curriculum because everyone needs to know them? Certainly not. The idea is absurd. The idea that children need to be schooled for a long time because there is so much that can be learned is absurd. If the citizen's education were to be extended to include everything that can be learned, it wouldn't run to grade twelve, it would run to grade twelve thousand, and no one would be able to graduate in a single lifetime.

I know of course that there is no one in this audience who needs to be sold on the virtues of home schooling or unschooling. I hope, however, that I may have been able to add some philosophical, historical, anthropological, and biological foundation for your conviction that school ain't all it's cracked up to be.


I think the entire idea that kids will learn no matter what is so true - as long as you don't force them and push them and that you allow their natural desire to flourish. I see it everyday with Brenna. Just last week she came up to me with paper and pen in hand and asked me how to do division. I was floored! We sat for about 15 minutes and I showed her how to work some simple problems and she picked it up very quickly. That was pretty cool. :)
Anyways, I'm going to get back to my book now. I'm hooked on it and I have two more coming in the mail this week. Yea! LOL


*Another addition from my book. Came across this paragraph right now and thought I would add to my post....

From the Chapter - How Do We Know Their Learning?

Any parent of a toddler could almost certainly tell us how many numbers her child can count to, and how many colors he knows --- not through testing, but simply through many hours of listening to his questions and statements. In unschooling, this type of observation simply continues on into higher ages and more complex learning.
If the government were to establish compulsory evaluation of babies to determine whether they were walking on schedule, everyone would think that was absurd. We all know that healthy babies walk eventually, and that it would be futile and frustrating to attempt to speed up that process -- as foolish as trying to speed up the blooming of a rose. Gardeners do not worry about late - blooming roses, or measure their daily progress -- they trust in nature's good intentions, meet the needs of the plants under their care, and know that any further intervention would interfere with the natural flow of their growth. Such trust is as essential in the education of a child as it is gardening. All healthy rose bushes bloom when ready, all healthy babies walk when ready, and all healthy children in a family of readers read when ready. There is no need to speed up or measure this process. When a child is free to learn at his own pace, he will continue to love learning throughout his life.


I absolutely love that last sentence. And I am starting to realize how exactly TRUE that is. When I push my daughter to learn or try and master something, she resists and it becomes a struggle. When I let her be and let her do it at her own pace, she gets so much more out of it and learns so much easier and so much faster. Why would I want to force any kind of learning when it comes so naturally without it? Children are taught to hate learning when they no longer have control over it.

Think about it.

Think of what you KNOW right now, and what you care about as an adult. Is it stuff you were made to sit at a desk at school and learn? Or is it things that really interest you and things you feel passionate about and want to know?