Education Outside the Fishbowl: Observation, Evaluation, and How Children (Really) Learn

If a child learns in the forest, and there are no adults there to see it, did they really learn at all?

The summer my sister turned 13 was spent in a patch of woods--one of the few semi-wild spaces near us to be spared from development--with a group of neighborhood kids. They dragged in used furniture found on big-pickup trash days, set up complex political systems, and built and played from when they staggered out of bed in the early afternoon until everyone got too hungry and made it back to their respective houses for supper. There was arguing and conflict resolution, wild creativity and hands on problem solving. Sometimes I’d tour the small world they’d created, hidden away behind suburban backyards (though being an entire 2 ½ years older than my sister, I was definitely too cool to participate myself).

This was long enough ago that a group of 11 to 14 year olds disappearing all day, unsupervised, was considered pretty normal by everyone’s parents (something it seems is increasingly unusual now), but I think my mother was probably the only one of the lot who saw what was happening as learning. All the other adults seemed more likely to see it as kids just messing around, albeit in a harmless way, which was fine and definitely better than, I don’t know, drugs or partying or any of those other things parents start panicking about as their children ease into teenagehood. So they got to spend their summer days in peace, playing and learning under the trees.

__

I have to believe that most adults realize, at least on some level, that learning happens outside of the classroom (after all, that’s the way most of them have been learning since they left school). Yet they often behave as if they don’t. “Every week without learning is causing a lifetime’s worth of harm!” cry the politicians and pundits, eager to “reopen” an economy in the midst of a deadly pandemic, and parents nod along in concern. How can you just let kids not-learn for so long, after all? Isn’t that irresponsible?

Learning happens all the time, as any unschooler will tell you. Yet to many, it’s invisible. Their eyes slide over it. They can’t hear its rhythm in joyous laughter or in focused silence. “Learning” is supposed to occupy a specific place, to conform to a certain shape, and to follow all the correct rules (in the proper order). Learning, to them, means schooling. Anything else is a distraction.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to guess that the reason many parents don’t see learning when it happens for their children is because they don’t see it for themselves. They may learn informally, but without an official stamp of approval, I wonder if that learning remains invisible, too. One of my favourite John Holt quotes reads: “To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves...and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.”

This (mis)understanding of what learning is and how it happens has lead to the strange phenomena of seeing learning (with all its incumbent change and growth) not as something arising primarily through a learner’s experience, play, socialization, fascination and dedication, but as something done to children by properly certified adults. If, as Paulo Freire said, students are seen as “vessels to be filled” then when left unattended, they’ll simply sit empty. 

Learning, though, is not only something which must be done to, it must also be seen by. If learning isn’t witnessed by an appropriate expert, or if it can’t be evaluated by those same experts in an easy to measure way after the fact, does it really count?

If a child learns in the forest, and there are no teachers there to see it, did they really learn at all?

__

School isn’t a place where students get much privacy. In fact, every effort is made to make sure they get as little time away from prying eyes as possible. Some of this is genuine concern about what harm might be done to students by each other when no adults are watching. But I think it goes beyond that, as well. To know that learning is happening, children must be observed. If they’re not being observed, they’re probably not really learning (children, remember, cannot be trusted).

To be contained in a school building is to be almost constantly watched, assessed, and judged. Carol Black refers to the “evaluative gaze” of school, noting:

“There is something profoundly deadening to a curious, engaged child about the feeling of being watched and measured, or even, some studies suggest, the anticipation of being measured. Sure, some kids seem to dig it. They preen and pose for it, they compete with their friends for it, they want to be better than everybody else. But everybody can’t be better than everybody else, and this business of being constantly scrutinized and compared to others does something insidious to the life of a child. I've seen kids drop what they're doing in an instant when they realize they're being observed in an appraising way. A wall goes up. The lights go out.”

It’s always been clear to me, in my own life, that I need a lot of privacy to learn something new. I need to be able to struggle and make mistakes--to forget important facts and miss important steps--without the weight of eyes on me, correcting and judging and getting in the way. Even as an adult, to know you’re being evaluated can make you shrink, become stilted and overly cautious, the focus no longer on discovery or improvement but on not making any mistakes. The goal shifts to that of performing competence in a way that makes you look smart and accomplished. Actual learning, in all its messiness, gets shoved behind stage, where the audience can’t see any missteps.

__

Learning can be both shared and social, deeply private and personal. Sometimes it starts as one and morphs into the other, or switches back and forth based on an individual’s comfort (and other people’s openness and ability to withhold critique unless asked for). The role of teacher and mentor can be important (as can that of friend, parent, neighbor, librarian, peer), and there is definitely a time and place for evaluation of one sort or another. But when and where and how much and what sort and by who? Those are all important questions, and the answers should often be when a learner asks someone for their opinion or assistance, and in situations a learner has chosen to be in, and much less, and varied and flexible, and by people the learner respects and trusts. But the default, the normal, the everyday of childhood should not be one of scrutiny and evaluation.

We as a culture have come to believe that learning is something which only happens in captivity, in carefully controlled environments and under the keen observation of experts.

But that’s not the way learning really works. It’s not the way children grow best, not the way any of us feel the most confident and brave and excited and free, not how we live our best lives.

When we go to the forest--wandering through dappled shade, identifying frog calls drifting in from nearby wetlands, standing very still so as not to spook a nearby woodpecker, and plucking sumac berries to chew on--the learning is real and true, no matter who’s there to see it.

Children deserve to learn in peace, wherever it happens.

20 Ways to Make Kids Hate Learning

This post originally appeared on my Patreon in March '17. Occasionally I'll share an older Patreon post on the main blog, but most of them remain accessible only to patrons. Join me there to see all of them!

I talk a lot about ways that self-directed learning works, and how to embrace and encourage it... But now I’d like to take a moment to talk about the opposite, the anti-unschooling, what could more readily be referred to as--dare I say it--schooling (whether it actually happens in a school building or not). If you were to sit down, as I did, and say, how could I best discourage self-directed, delight driven learning? this is the type of list you’d come up with (or at least, it’s the list I came up with). What do you do? This is what you do:

1. Tell them learning--or at least important learning--only happens in a specific place.
2. Only allow them to learn about certain topics, in a certain order, and from a select few people.
3. Make sure that they have very little--or even no--free time in which to pursue their own interests (unless, of course, they’re happy to forgo eating and sleeping).
4. Discourage collaboration by deeming kids interacting with each other to be goofing off, being disrespectful, or even cheating.
5. Ban or severely limit the use of modern technology (aka “screens”), thus cutting children off from their social groups, and effectively eliminating the easiest way in which to look up information.
6. Tell them (or imply with your attitude) that their interests are silly, unimportant, immature, and worthless.
7. Call them lazy and unmotivated when they appear to be doing “nothing,” or doing something deemed, as aforementioned, to be worthless.
8. Constantly test their learning, compare them to their peers, and create hierarchies of best to worst students based on those tests and comparisons.
9. Attach strong emotional reactions/acceptance/love to grades.
10. Strip all real world authenticity out of learning in favour of teaching to the test.
11. Convince them that learning has to have an obvious purpose.
12. Focus only on major accomplishments in lieu of recognizing simple progress, no matter how big.
13. Create an environment that feels critical, unsafe, stressful, or otherwise unpleasant, and mandate that children spend a majority of their time in that environment.
14. Separate everyone into either “student” or “teacher”--those who have useful knowledge, and those who don’t.
15. Focus on (potential) future problems instead of current reality.
16. Turn every pleasurable moment into a “learning activity,” or somehow attach work to everything that could potentially be fun (i. e. book reports). 
17. Force them to take on responsibility that they express clearly they are not ready for. Alternatively, refuse to allow them to take on more responsibility even when they clearly express that they’re ready to do so.
18. Hammer in the point that learning has no personal relation to what they actually want and plan to do.
19. Tell them you always know more about their needs/goals then they do.
20. Make sure they feel incompetent and incapable of making their own decisions. Bonus: act surprised and disappointed when they reach early adulthood and struggle with feeling competent and making their own decisions.

Why Not Leave Education to the Experts?

My mother used to get asked, sometimes, if she was a teacher. Considering my sister and I weren’t going to school, the assumption ran that surely she must be a teacher. Surely she wouldn’t consider something so drastic as to take her children away from the hands of educational experts, and into those of a mere layperson. That remains one of the biggest fears expressed about school-free education: the belief that experts will know best and do best, and so to take away those experts seems to be doing a great disservice to children. Of course, I could talk about the fact that teachers often find a big gap between the more idealized educational practices they learn in university compared with the reality of what they’re actually allowed or able to do in the classroom; the impossibility of fostering any type of truly individualized learning in a class filled with dozens of individuals; the fact that teachers are as prone to biases and prejudice as anyone else, meaning that marginalized students are often served especially poorly… But I don’t really want to get into that. What I want to explore instead is all the ways that unschooling functions without school teachers, but not without teachers; without institutionalization, but not necessarily without structure.

“One person can’t possibly teach everything.”

I agree! But the idea with unschooling is not that the parent becomes a teacher, but instead that they act as a mentor and partner in their children’s learning. They’re not expected to know everything their child might want or need to know, they’re expected to help their children find the answers to their questions. They’re not there in order to “teach” different subjects, and instead work to find their children the resources needed in order to fully explore the things they find interesting and important. Parents or other trusted adults are not expected to be super-people, knowing and doing more than is humanly possible in order to single-handedly provide an education. They’re facilitators, co-learners in a quest for greater knowledge. 

“You’re just isolating them from learned people.”

Unschoolers usually find it very important to make connections in their community with various different people who have a variety of different skills. Learners volunteer, find mentors or teachers to guide them in their chosen pursuits, even take classes. They take advantage of book clubs at the local library and free lectures at a university; they use the wealth of information to be found online, including video tutorials and complete courses, long-form journalism and blogs covering an interesting topic. Experts and skilled amateurs alike make their knowledge and skills available to others in all sorts of different ways, meaning that self-directed learners can always find some way to learn about whatever it is they want to learn. Unschooling doesn’t mean eschewing all “experts,” it just means seeking them out only if and when they want to… And it also means that many unschoolers have access to more experts with more in-depth knowledge in their field than children in school do.

“But surely an actual teacher is best equipped to guide a child through their education.”

If you take it as fact that all children should and will learn the exact same things, at the same time, in the same way, and with a similar aptitude and amount of interest, then maybe. But as we all know, that isn’t the case, and as much as many teachers might want to allow for more individuality in learning, the reality of high stakes testing and large classrooms makes such a thing completely impossible. It’s also important to note that while the term “self-directed” has been co-opted in certain circles to mean learning the same things from the same sources but going at your own pace, that’s not what actual self-directed education is. If your goal is not for everyone to reach the same point (just at different speeds) and instead you seek truly personalized education, consisting of what is most wanted and needed by the learner and their community, then you quickly realize that maybe a teacher doesn’t make the best director. Maybe the learner themselves, the owner of their own unique mind and body, is best equipped to shape their own learning.

When you take out classroom management, and teaching to a test, and whatever the bureaucrats or textbook producers in your particular region have decided is the one body of knowledge all children should have, you make way for much greater diversity between individuals in the shape and content of their education. It’s a reality shift, one that ultimately looks to create not conformity, but a diverse society where varied skill sets, different strengths and weaknesses, unique quirks and passions, can exist without shame from the earliest of ages. If we want a world where everyone is valued for their own unique selves, why do we try and educate every child in the exact same way? Wouldn’t it make more sense to celebrate those differences instead?

Leaving education to the experts doesn’t seem to be working out too well, so maybe it’s well past time we stop relying on them, and look to the learners themselves show us the way forward.

To see more content become a Patreon supporter. $1 or more a month gives 

you access to exclusive blog posts, collections of favorite links, in-depth newsletters,

 and more. Most importantly? You help me continue doing what I do!

The Hidden Curriculum and the Truth About Schooling

"We don't need no education. We Don't need no thought control. Hey! Teacher! Leave those kids alone." Pink Floyd, in their iconic song Another Brick in the Wall 

(Source)

Sometimes, I wonder if it would have made what I have to say about school more credible if I was a dropout (rise-out, opt-out...) myself, instead of a lifelong unschooler.

Because as such, it's assumed quite often that I must have no clue what I'm talking about.  School doesn't really teach obedience to authority, conformity, and all that jazz.  I just think it does, because I've never been to school to see how nice it is, and instead have been turned against this fine institution by my prejudiced parents.  Or so the idea goes, at least.

It's true that I can't ever know from personal experience what elementary or high school is like (besides kindergarten, of course), but I feel very confident making the statements I do about school.  Why?  Because all the research I've done shows not only that school really does teach obedience and conformity, but that the educators in the schooling system are well aware of that fact.

Open any mainstream/used in university classes sociology or education text, and I can almost guarantee that it mentions something called "the hidden curriculum."

I found this description of the hidden curriculum in a book called Sociology of Education: An Introductory View From Canada that we picked up a while ago secondhand (I posted briefly about it when I first discovered the passage): 

"The fundamental patterns in any society are held together by tacit ideological assumptions.  In schools, some rules are not overt, but they serve to organize and legitimate the activities of teachers and students.  Much of what the school teaches and the students learn does not appear in the formal curriculum.  Successful school performance requires that the student learn what are considered important and useful skills and knowledge.  But students must also have the skills to uncover the hidden rules and expectations that affect their dispositions, identities, and personalities.  For example, schools emphasize conformity, deferred gratification, achievement, competitiveness, and obedience to authority [emphasis is mine].  Students must understand the social and other dimensions of this hidden curriculum.  The hidden curriculum refers to the tacit teaching of norms, values, and dispositions that occurs through student's social experiences in routine school activities."

In another book, Society: The Basics (Canadian edition), it's noted that:

"...the school's so-called hidden curriculum, subtle presentations of political or cultural ideas, imparts important cultural values.  School activities such as spelling bees and sports encourage competition and showcase success.  Children also receive countless messages that their society's culture is both practically and morally good."

Taught to think our culture is both "practically and morally good," is it any wonder that things continue to be so bad?  If our culture is good, then there's obviously no need to change things in any real or radical way.  The same book also goes on to say that "schools further socialize young people into culturally approved gender roles," something that, as a person who often chooses to identify as a feminist, and has a good handful of queer friends, disturbs me on multiple levels.

I find it funny that so many people consider writers like John Taylor Gatto (who wrote, among many other things, this essay, which I think is great) to be so shocking, considering he's really just framing what the education profession knows to be true in a different light.

This is all just to say that not only do I consider myself justified in my dislike of the schooling institution, but also that the people who claim these things are untrue don't seem to have done much research themselves.  It seems they react in automatic defensiveness, and out of a desire for it simply not to be true, not because they've actually thought about or researched the possibility that, well, it is true!  Now if only more people could start seeing that truth, things would start changing faster...