An off-hand throw-away comment by a visitor to an earlier entry sparked a thought-thread in my head.  The comment was about one of these ultra-liberal schools that you hear about every once in a while, where the curriculum is something known as “Child-lead” learning.

     The assertion of my visitor/contributor that if kids were given the choice to do anything they wanted during class time, they would, as an aggregate, spend their time running around like monkeys on the playground rather than studying science or math:

“Reminds me of a news report I saw on some ultra-liberal school were they allowed the children themselves to decide how and what they should learn. The best quote from one of the teachers was, 'If the child thinks they would get more out of recess than learning math, that's what they can do.' You can guess how many kids were actually in the math and science classes.“

     While this is not an unreasonable assumption, especially given the stymied boredom that is the average modern classroom, I’m not sure that it’s accurate for the kinds of kids and parents that select these schools…

     But first, a word about my personal biases.  I was looking into every option that I could find for my children before they reached school age.  I looked at homeschooling, and decided that the options for co-ops in my area were limited to ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christians who wouldn’t teach science, and wouldn’t want me to teach it to their kids.  One parent told me “I don’t believe in science, I believe in God.”  She went on to explain that they would meet the basic science requirements of the State, but that they would present it as “what humanists believed”.  In other words, as a flawed and limited but pervasive world view that their children must be educated about by law, but that they would turn into lessons of how to not be fooled into Godless thought by humanists.  So I decided against that.  Now days, there are countless high-quality homeschooling co-ops, but my kids seem to be acclimating to public school so I think that ship has sailed.

     Besides, as a Jeffersonian Progressive, I HAVE to believe that public schools are the way to go.  J

     I also looked into the “child-lead learning” sorts of schools, and came away with the impression that they didn’t know what they were doing.  This is because they couldn’t tell me what they were doing, or how it worked.

     Their literature gave the impression of learning as a mystical phenomenon.  Like magic, it was supposed to “just happen”.  Now, it is possible that there was more to it than that, but I was unable, though telephone conversations, reading of books on the subject of child-lead learning, and through perusing the literature of at least three schools, to determine if there was any core philosophy or strategy to the application of learning, other than “it just happens magically”.

     So I was not a fan of child-lead learning in a school setting, and I’m still not so sure about it, but I’ve begun to have questions about my conclusions, and here’s why:

     First, we used to live in North St. Paul, and we had these neighbors whose kids came home from school to an empty house starting at about ages seven and nine.  They were and are sweet kids, but generally, they would come over to our house, and ask to watch T.V.  I obliged, because I felt bad for them being all alone after school.

     One day, the nine-year-old saw my husbands 3-D chessboard, and suddenly he wanted to know everything about it…and he wanted to play the game.  My husband told him, “First you have to learn to play 2-D chess.”

     The kid was happy to learn, so Rocky started teaching him, figuring he would try a couple of times, and then go back to vegetating in front of the Power Rangers and scarfing chips and soda.

     That isn’t what happened, though.  The kid would come over every day after school and play chess…either with me, or later in the day, with my husband.  He was eventually taught 3-D chess, and continued to show interest and enthusiasm.  We moved away eventually, so I don’t know if he ever achieved his ambition of being on the high school chess team, but I do know that he went from watching cartoons four hours a day to playing chess four hours a day without anyone telling him he had to.

     The second reason I have for questioning my judgment of child-lead learning is just as anecdotal, but I’m not offering proof here, just telling you why I’m questioning my assumptions.  It’s up to you to decide if it’s compelling enough to warrant further thought.

     It’s my friend, Alicia.  She is a stay-at-home mom in Southwestern Minnesota.  She has three children now, and she home-schools them all using a child-lead-learning model.  The oldest child is six years old now, and can read and write at a fourth grade level.  If you show her almost any kind of rock, she can identify it as igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic.  She can usually name the specific type it is (quartz, granite, sandstone, obsidian, etc.)   She can also tell you if there is any sillica, quartz, or mica in it. She knows all her math facts, and knows a lot about natural history and has an avid interest in paleontology (She has gotten very good at finding cretaceous sharks teeth on the beach of a nearby lake.)

     A third is how driven my oldest son was to learn his letters and letter sounds.  He would send hours holding up block letters and pieces from his letter puzzle and demanding to know what letter it was and what sound it made.  One of his favorite activities was pointing out letters and saying their sounds in all different types of script that you see out in the world.  He knew all of his letter names and letter sounds by the age of two.

     My reservations of child-lead learning persist, because as far as I can see, you would need a VERY small number of children per teacher, as each would require an individual and highly flexible lesson plan.  I don’t think that this is economical outside of a home-schooling co-op, or a very expensive private school.  Further, I’m not convinced that all children would benefit from this model.  My friend and her husband both have I.Q.s that only dogs can hear, and their children appear to be at least as bright. 

     Naturally talented, inquisitive, and highly intelligent people will thrive under almost any conditions of instruction.  Witness Fredrick Douglas, who taught himself to be one of our country’s foremost men of letters despite a childhood where attempting to learn got him repeatedly punished.  Which is why I think that Child-lead schools and home-schooling curriculum are probably very successful for some students; they are probably the preternaturally self-motivated children of preternaturally self-motivated parents.  Also, the schools claim to have a curriculum that makes the intrinsic rewards of learning more plain and clear to the students.  I wish I could have seen something that told me how they did this.  I would be more likely to buy it if I had.

     Add to the reservations column the fact that my youngest child showed none of the drive of the older one to read at all.  At seven, he just breezes through life oblivious to reading as anything but that stuff they make him do in school and at least twenty minutes per day at home.  He loves to have me read to him…maybe he figures I’ll always be there to do it for him…I don’t know.  The child-lead learning people assure me that he would learn “in his own time”…and he is certainly doing fine at it as far as I’m concerned…but I’m not convinced that he would take to it on his own and I’m not willing to risk it when we have a process that is definable and demonstrably works to teach most kids to read.

     In the end, I decided to do something that I have since learned is called multi-schooling.  Of course, many people with kids in public school do this.    It basically means home-schooling your kids alongside the public school curriculum. 

     An adequate school teaches your kids the things they need to learn to fit into society and hold down their jobs as a cog in the machine.  A good school will have supplementary music, arts, technology and Phys. Ed units.  A great school will promote civic-mindedness, critical thought, and a life-long pursuit of learning for pleasure and fulfillment.

     But we as parents always have stuff that we want our kids to learn.  In our family, it’s learning to play a musical instrument, a martial art’s education, basic computer programming, how to hunt, fish, track, and drive a boat, how to manage your money and live without going into debt, how to think through all the likely outcomes of a situation and it’s solutions…

     That sort of thing.  These things we pursue with a somewhat child-lead process, because they are behaviors that we can model for our kids, and they are things that our kids will naturally be interested in if they see us spending a lot of time/energy on it and obviously getting personal satisfaction from it.

     We tend to do child-lead learning at home, teaching the kids something when they show and interest and aptitude for it.  In child-lead learning, things have to happen for children in their own time.  My eleven-year old began violin lessons when he was four, because my mom and my sister both played, and he decided that he should learn too, after having spent a week visiting them.  He wanted to learn, and he nagged and nagged until I started teaching him.  In fifth grade, he switched to the Tuba.  For our younger son, interest in a musical instrument happened later, beginning the piano at age six and switching to cello at age seven.  Similarly, both of our children began their martial arts education by watching me and imitating me as I practiced. 

     I think that this is appropriate, because these things are not critical to our children’s functioning in modern society.  They don’t need to master any of these things at any given time to fit in and function, and because I think that child-lead learning is the most natural way of learning and teaching.

  In ancient times, a child with a talent or interest would ideally be apprenticed to someone who could teach him a trade.  He would learn by starting with grunt work, and stealing every opportunity to observe and imitate his master’s work.  A smart, disciplined, interested apprentice could get a tremendous education this way.

     Similarly, it was not that terribly long ago that lawyers were trained this way.  A young man would convince a lawyer to let him “read for the law”.  He would sit in the office and read law books, listen to lawyers talk, observe how they practiced, and generally learn the profession of law by pursuing it on their own through the example of their elders.

     In many pre-industrial cultures, all learning was done this way.  A child would learn particular skills by following and imitating and “playing” at the roles and tasks of adults.  They learned through imitation, individual practice, experimentation, games and stories.

     So, child-lead learning is not a revolutionary new concept, but is actually a very old one.

     But modern education isn’t just about learning to get food and plant crops or learn a trade anymore.  Modern education is about a systematic acclimation to modern life.  The schedule of our schools gets us used to the schedule of jobs.  The routine and the bureaucracy, and yes, even the boredom, tedium and repetition prepare us for what is generally expected to be our role in society.  To be an effective worker, producer and consumer, you need to learn to be on time, stick to a task until it’s completed regardless of how unsatisfying or boring it is, keep up with a schedule, work quietly without disrupting the work of others around you (especially in the current “cube land culture”), and learn how to negotiate your way through bureaucracies and at times manipulate them to get the outcomes you need to get things done right.

     And even if we rebel against it, escape from it, or try to turn it on its ear, we know what we are struggling against, because we have been taught how it works from age five or six on.  We understand it because we were inside it for most of our childhood.

     And I think we all need a little child-lead education to teach us not to just be a cog in the machine.  We need to have some spark of individuality, some diversions, some way to build something that is uniquely ours, even if it is just a set of skills or talents that ornament our lives and give us and those around us a richer experience. 

     These are not things that need to be learned on a timeline, but instead draw their urgency from how much we need them at any given time.  They are the things that we are lead to by our internal desire to accomplish, learn and grow.

     In the end, I have a really difficult time deciding which is the best way to educate children.  Lord knows, I have plenty of problems with the public education system as it stands, but yet I see it as the best possible option that exists for the mainstream of students.

     Public schools and many private schools tend to be the best for teaching kids that there are such things as expectations, schedules, and behaviors that are just simply imposed on us from without by society, and you have to at least give due deference to them enough to  not scare the normal people.  They also do a pretty good job with academics, when supported at home by parents and the community, and when not over-burdened by top-heavy administrative costs and unfunded mandates.

     I tend to think that each philosophy that I have looked at has its place, and that it is less effective to try to make one form of education do the work of another.  Life skills and life-enrichment skills are best taught at home when kids show appropriate interest and maturity for the task. 

     But then again, this is an evolving topic for me.  I might think differently next week, or tomorrow, or a year from now…who knows?