No. 257 - How Children Fail

I read an interesting article today titled, The Deschooling and Unschooling Movement Is Growing.

It began by defining what "unschooling" is:

Unschooling takes children out of schools, but, unlike a lot of home-school approaches, it doesn't import the classroom into the home. It does away altogether with educational clutter such as curricula and grades.

Unschoolers maintain that a child's learning should be curiosity-driven rather than dictated by teachers and textbooks, and that forcing kids to adhere to curricula quashes their natural inclination to explore and ask questions.

I wrote back in Post No. 159 that "I'm going to have to get my kids to tell me what story to write before they get too old...and lose their creativity." What I meant by that is that humans are naturally creative. We see that creativity in kids, before it is taught out of them, mainly in school.

From this article, I learned about a book called How Children Fail by John Holt, which was published in 1964. Holt suggested that smart children struggle “because they are afraid, bored, and confused. They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud."

Holt hits my theory right on the head. Kids are afraid of getting questions wrong in class, of being laughed at by their peers, of failing. So instead they conform. They tend to ask less questions. They forget to ask why. They become less interested, and less creative.

Is unschooling the answer? I don't know. The time commitment of one or both parents would need to be substantial. And conventional schooling provides much needed socialization skills. In the meantime we should encourage our kids to learn outside the classroom, to provide an environment which fosters creative thinking, and most importantly, to never stop asking why.