Pages

▼

Thursday, October 7, 2010

quote of the day and more on unschooling

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built upon the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily. Let him go and come freely, let him touch real things and combine his impressions for himself, instead of sitting indoors at a little round table, while a sweet-voiced teacher suggests that he build a stone wall with his wooden blocks, or make a rainbow out of strips of coloured paper, or plant straw trees in bead flower-pots. Such teaching fills the mind with artificial associations that must be got rid of, before the child can develop independent ideas out of actual experience." -- Anne Sullivan


Lately I keep thinking about the fact that Jude would be in kindergarten now if we had chosen public school. Jude helps me at the dairy farm every morning during the week. This is when we do most of our math. As chickens peck the ground around our feet, I ask him, "If grandma has twenty chickens, and half of them lay one egg a day, then how many eggs would grandma get a day?" "Ten" he quickly replies. With the buckets of feed filling the back of the truck, I ask him, "If we started with eight full buckets of feed, and we just put out three, then how many buckets do we have left?" We do this until all the buckets are empty. Now he starts his own math story problems. 


My mom said to me the other day, "I can't get over how much Jude wants to learn all the time, he never quits wanting to know the answer to things." I have never doubted that unschooling is the best thing for our children and our family and this was just one of those moments that confirmed it.        
at

1 comment:

  1. AnonymousOctober 10, 2010 at 12:47 AM

    I think that public education has little to do with learning. In fact, education in general is the antithesis of learning. Central to learning is the concept of exploration of the world in which we live; central to education is the instillment of the ideas of others who have come before you and have tainted the world with their perception of the of the world in which they lived. They are disparate and cannot be reconciled. Thus, the best and most valuable concept you can instill and support in anyone is the precept of critical thinking. If, you can as objectively as possible, analyze the statements of an individual, and draw a conclusion based in a logical deduction of their claims, then you are leaps and bounds beyond anything that a public education can hope to give you.

    ReplyDelete