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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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.

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There's No Such Thing As "Self-Taught"

The term “self-taught” is bandied about a lot in self-directed education circles. People learning outside the strictures of formal institutions, classes, or tutors are deemed have taught themselves, taken on the internal role of both student and teacher.

And yet “self-taught” is not really a term I like or use myself.

To me, self-taught implies that learning happens in a vacuum. Alone, without external influences, without help, without the plethora of human resources available in this world. Unschooling is too often viewed, in my opinion, as something both insular and perhaps even lonely (that age-old “socialization” myth), along with being almost arrogant in nature: you think you know enough to teach yourselves? You certainly have a high opinion of your skills…

While there are really great aspects of independence that life learning obviously provides--after all, the whole point is self-directed learning, making your own decisions about what you choose to do with your time--I think there’s an important distinction to be made between independence and isolation. Between learning which is self-directed, and knowledge which is supposedly self-taught. The reality of unschooling is that it functions best within community, with the support of myriads of different people--sometimes even teachers! Besides, being “self-taught” may not even be possible. After all, even if you learn something from books, YouTube videos, or observation, someone wrote those books, filmed those videos, and is practicing their skills in a place you can observe them.

I’ve said it before, but as far as I’m concerned it bears frequent repetition: unschooling is about opening up more of the world to children than they’d generally encounter in school, not less. Spending time around a wider variety of people (ages, backgrounds, skills), not fewer. Life learning is truly a community venture, rooted in the unique places we inhabit, not a solo-expedition in self-teaching.

What do I personally like to emphasize, instead?

Delight-driven: Learning that starts with a spark, building curiosity, a burst of inspiration, excitement, delight.

Inquiry-based: Finding the answers to a question (or a hundred questions), the solution to a real problem, exploring the world with interest and thoughtfulness and wonder.

Self-directed: Choosing which pursuits are worth pursuing, who you turn to for support and direction, what you spend your time in doing.

Life learning doesn’t seek to turn everything into teaching, whether by yourself or others, and it certainly isn’t about going it alone and lonely (at least if you can possibly help it). Instead it’s about taking advantage of any opportunities available to you, if they seem important or interesting, and shaping a collaborative, self-directed education.

Doesn’t that sound a lot better than self-taught?

No Classes, No Teachers, No Books? The Reality of Structure in Unschooling

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen article headlines proclaiming “Unschooling: No Classes, No Books!” I always shake my head in frustration.

I suppose when people hear that unschooling is not school, they jump to the conclusion that any and all even vaguely school-like trappings of classes and teachers--or even books, apparently--must be thrown out the window. Not school must mean nothing that looks like traditional learning, and nothing that looks like structure.

The reality, though, is quite a different story.

Unschooling might be against such school trappings as forced memorization and compulsory classes, but it’s not against individuals choosing to learn in whatever ways they feel work best for them. In fact, that’s kind of what unschooling is all about! It’s the ultimate in individualized and personalized learning, which means while the lives of some individuals will look very carefree and unconventional, the lives of others might look very traditionally “educational.”

Unschooling is characterized not by its lack of structure, but by its flexibility.

There are classes. As children me and my sister went to co-op classes and French classes and science classes. In recent times I’ve been to dance classes. My sister has been taking Ninjutsu for years, which at this point in time means two classes a week with an extra practice day thrown in. Unschooling is self-directed learning, which means you choose what classes you take (or don’t take). What it isn’t is learning only by yourself with no help. I’d hope that everyone can recognize that learning in group settings can be helpful and fun for some people some of the time. Would I like to only ever learn in class settings? Definitely not. But sometimes, it’s really great, and no one should ever believe that unschooling means shunning a specific type of learning just because it looks traditionally educational. It’s all about choosing what works best for you.

There are teachers. Not only present in classes of various sorts, but also in one-on-one situations. Sometimes the best way to learn something is by seeking help from someone skilled, which means a teacher or mentor of some sort. It may end up looking like a familiar school teacher-student relationship, or as is more often the case, it might hopefully be a more mutually respectful and reciprocal relationship. I have learned so much from other people: learning in isolation would be a sad and, well, isolating thing indeed. But by freeing ourselves from the need to be taught, I (perhaps ironically) feel that we can become much more open to all that is to be learned from those around us and those we seek out, both professional teachers, “experts,” and community members.

There are books. In some cases, lots of books. In my house, the house I grew up in, there are two over packed bookcases in the living room; a bookcase stuffed with cookbooks in the kitchen; two bookcases in my bedroom; one in my parents room; two bookcases plus towering, precarious stacks shoved everywhere they can possibly fit in my sister’s room; and I don’t even know how many more bookcases are scattered around the basement. Point being? Between us, my family owns a whole lot of books. The internet provides lots of useful information and access to a ton of terrific essays and stories, but there’s still a lot to be said for both novels and nonfiction books. It seems absurd that I should even have to say this, but generally unschoolers like books a lot. While some people are never going to really enjoy reading books for pleasure (or will be unable to due to learning disabilities), the vast majority will at the very least use books when appropriate to get the information they need.

We’ve established that some unschoolers will appear more “school like” in their pursuit of knowledge, or in the ways they choose to structure their learning. But while that may be one sort of “structure,” even for the most freeform unschoolers out there, the patterns of life will create a structure of sorts. Daily habits and rituals, visits and activities, will build a scaffolding for the unschooling life, a structure that evolves and changes over weeks and months to support the needs of each individual and the family as a whole.

Unschooling doesn’t mean doing away with any structure whatsoever: it means creating a structure based on the needs of actual people, instead of following a structure designed for the needs of an institution.

This means that sometimes unschoolers will go to classes, seek out teachers, and read books. And sometimes, they’ll learn quietly by themselves, they’ll teach themselves a new skill, and they’ll play a video game.

However much or little structure their lives end up including, life learners are trying to open themselves up to as much of the world as possible. To pick and choose what works for them, and discard what doesn’t, all with the knowledge that they can always make different choices in the future.

And those choices will quite likely include classes, teachers, and books!

Why You Should Start Unschooling

I'm seeing a tag going around, proclaiming today to be National Start Homeschooling Day. In honour of that, I figured I'd share my top reasons to start unschooling. I understand that, for any number of reasons, unschooling just might not to be doable in your life. If that's the case, I hope you can still glean inspiration for doing your best to devalue standardized assessments and instead place value on passion lead, self directed learning, no matter where it takes place. If, however, you are considering leaving school or taking your kids out of school, I hope these reasons will prove so inspiring that you actually do it!

Building a self-directed education

Forget teachers and standardized curriculum dictating what and how and when you should learn. Instead, learn about whatever really interests you, what you feel is truly important and relevant. Your learning then becomes truly personalized, unique to you and based on what you want and need. You get to spend as much time as you want doing whatever it is that you wished you could be doing instead of sitting in a classroom, bored by the current lecture.

Learning and growing without externally imposed timelines

When you control your own learning, timelines of when certain things "should" be learned become irrelevant. Your child isn't a "late" reader, and you're not "behind" in math when you're no longer comparing yourself or your kids to others, based on what the school system thinks you should be learning. Instead, you can learn and grow at your own pace, and in your own way. We all learn differently, and unschooling allows us to truly embrace that.

Recognizing that we all have knowledge and skills to both learn and share

In school, there are teachers there to impart knowledge, and students attending in order to have knowledge imparted to them. Outside of school, you start to recognize that everyone can fill both of those roles at different times, and that the relationship between those who are teaching and those who are learning can be a cooperative, collaborative, and respectful one.

Improving relationships between parents and children

Parent-child relationships, especially parent-teen relationships, can often be contentious. Fights often revolve around issues of homework, bed time (early school days seem to require one), and other school-related things. When you remove school from the equation, and when parents start striving to trust, respect, and truly listen to their children, relationships can change dramatically, and "teenage rebellion" can become a thing of the past.

Socializing on your own terms

The forced socialization of schools, complete with bullies (both other children and sometimes even teachers), a lack of freedom of choice and movement, and an inability to choose more or less socializing based on each individual's needs, does not exactly promote the development of a healthy social life. As an unschooler, socializing can be based on the emotional needs of each child, and you can build a social life that truly feels good to you.

Learning in the real world

Instead of learning in a single, age segregated building, unschoolers learn in the real world. You can learn at home, in nature, at the library, at museums and community centers and yes, in classes. The world opens up, and you start to see all the myriad opportunities that are all around you for learning that feels relevant and important in your life.

Growing in an environment that feels supportive and safe

For many students--including LGBTQ people, disabled students, and students with mental illnesses--schools can feel anything but safe or supportive. People learn best and are most creative in their learning when they're not stressed and afraid, so if family life is nurturing and loving, home can make a much better base for learning.

Having time to daydream

Instead of being pushed to focus constantly, school-free learning leaves plenty of time for relaxing, processing, daydreaming, playing, and quiet introspection. As an unschooler you can reject ideas of "laziness" and choose to value the whole learning process, including boredom, not only the parts that look most active and productive.

Doing real work

When you're not simply studying for a test or producing a project or paper that will never be seen outside of a single classroom, you can instead focus on work and creation that actually feels real. You can volunteer doing important work in your community, get a job or apprentice in a field that fascinates you, write blog posts and articles for an actual audience, create visual art for a community exhibition, and otherwise share yourself with the world. You have the time to do things that feel genuinely meaningful, and that make a real impact on the lives of others.

All of these are compelling reasons why many of us have chosen unschooling for ourselves or our families. I hope that they encourage you to choose a freer, more personalized, more exciting way of approaching learning in your own lives, as well.

Breaking Down Hierarchies in Learning: Re-Imagining the Student-Teacher Relationship Through Unschooling

One of the most fundamental, and I believe revolutionary aspects of unschooling, is how it challenges one of the most deeply rooted beliefs about education and how it works in our society. The belief is that teachers are the holders of knowledge, wisdom, and other educational things, and students are the receivers, empty vessels to be filled. As Ivan Illich said:

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits.

I had a short conversation recently with someone on Twitter, where they said that they'd talked recently with someone about unschooling, and that person said he just couldn't see how someone could get interested in something without an inspiring teacher. As an unschooler, this attitude seems mind-blowing to me. I can't quite get my head around how it could possibly make sense to someone to think that way. Yet, when I consider that of all the concerns people have about unschooling, a huge portion of them boil down to "but how can you learn without a teacher?," it doesn't necessarily make any more sense, but it does seem to show a pattern. There are a whole lot of people who literally don't understand how children could learn without a teacher. There are a lot of people who think that teachers are depositors and students are depositories.

This is a sad state of affairs for everyone involved.

I started writing this article months ago. But after just a scribbled paragraph, it got put aside in favour of something else. I have a long list of post and article ideas, not to mention the ebook I'm working on, so it's easy to jump around between thoughts and ideas and writing projects. But when I re-discovered that little snippet, I liked it. And it's really what I'd consider the heart of this post, what I'm really trying to get at, so I wanted to share it here:

By challenging the idea of one person as the learner and another as the teacher, you start breaking down a lot of ingrained ideas about hierarchies of knowledge, and who belongs where on that hierarchy. Realizing that everyone, no matter their age, has things to both learn and share, strengthens individual and community bonds, as well as opening up access to a whole lot of knowledge and skills you wouldn't really have access to if you were only looking at professional teachers. Thus unschooling parents aren't seeking to become teachers, but to learn alongside their children, to both share knowledge and gain it themselves.

By living an unschooling life, we have the opportunity to challenge a lot of hierarchies that many people take for granted. We get to re-imagine what it can be to live together as a family, with respect for children and teens, good communication, and working partnerships, instead of a top-down, authoritarian, parents give directives and children don't question them set-up. It also gives us the chance to re-imagine what learning can look like without the teacher-student hierarchies of the schooling system.

What if children don't have to be forced to learn? What if children don't have to be taught? What if "education" can look like meaningful partnerships where learning is recognized as a collaborative process?

Both older and younger people can share and gain knowledge from each other. This means that mixed age friendships, mixed age groups and classes, friendships with age peers, and groups of age peers can all benefit from relationships of shared learning, and have relationships based on mutual respect and liking, no matter their age. One person doesn't have to take on a Teacher role and the other that of a Student. They can just share and learn and discuss...

Yes, age makes a difference. It often changes the way people relate to each other, older people have had more life experience, and more time to develop mastery in their chosen fields or areas of passion. Thus a mentor and mentored relationship might develop when there's a large age gap between two people, which is perfectly natural. But within that framework, both parties can still recognize that they both have valuable things to contribute: one is not the filler of the pail and the other, well, a bucket.

Free choice can radically change the relationship between a teacher and a student. In a school type setting, teachers are there because it's a job, and while hopefully many care about what they're doing, their livelihood likely depends on keeping their student's test scores up, and not being overly controversial in the material they teach. Students are there because they have to be. Neither part has all that many options.

Outside of a school, even formal teacher-student relationships can change dramatically. As unschoolers, children and teens are choosing to enter into such a relationship, which means they're doing it because they want to, because they're learning about something that matters to them, because they care. And the teachers, instead of having to focus on tests, have the job of best sharing their knowledge in a way that's interesting, enjoyable, and challenging. They're trying to create a good experience for their student(s), and if they don't succeed at that, an unschooled student can choose to simply end that relationship. It becomes about a good rapport between teacher and students, and about actually learning something meaningful, not about standardized results.

It's not all clear cut. The lines between teacher and mentor, teacher and student, friend and teacher quickly start to blur when you take school out of the equation and add in a big dose of free choice. Sometimes monetary exchanges will be involved, and sometimes they won't. Sometimes there will be a class, sometimes a one-on-one lesson, and sometimes a casual meeting. Sometimes a teacher will turn into a friend, or a friend become a mentor as well.

What remains a constant with unschooling is that learning and teaching--how it works, who does it, and when it happens--is being re-imagined, and approached with an attitude of openness. This challenging of existing knowledge hierarchies--who is thought to have "authority" and who not--is to me one of the most radical and important elements of life learning. We're not just re-imagining learning, we're changing how people relate to each other.

This more egalitarian way of looking at learning and at relationships between learners (because really, everyone is a learner) is also empowering for children. If we value what children and teenagers have to share, their ideas, their experiences, and their knowledge, we're showing them that they're valuable, and worthy of respect. They're not depositories, they're people capable of learning from others and making contributions themselves.

What do I hope people will take away from this article? Mainly just that, outside of schools and schooling, there can be a wonderfully diverse amount of learning relationships, and that the role of "teachers" and "students" is much more flexible, has much more fluidity, and is a lot less authoritarian. It even starts to look a lot less like Teachers and Students, and a lot more like just a bunch of people learning from and with each other: a collection of mutually agreeable learning relationships and learning communities.

There is so much richness to be gained when you stop looking at some people as depositors and others as depositories, and instead see that we're all learners, and we're all in it together.

A big thanks to Sarah and Lauren for looking over this post and helping me to fix a few problems. My regular editor (also known as my sister) is away this week, so the help was much appreciated!

5 Ways to Help Someone HATE Reading

I've often heard complaints and worries, from a wide variety of people, about how many people, especially youth, don't like to read.  Blame is placed on a variety of things, from texting on cell phones to uninvolved parents to class sizes in school.  But rarely is the actual way reading is taught and approached and looked at brought into question the way I think it needs to be.

I positively love reading, and have since I learned to read at 8 or 9 (and before that I loved being read to), so perhaps I'm not the best person to be writing this.  Maybe someone who actually hates reading should be writing this, instead.  But then again, people who hate reading often hate writing as well, so would probably have no interest at all in writing about why they hate reading!  Besides, I know all the things that I think  were done right to foster my own love of reading, so I figure I can just think of all the opposite things that could have been done, instead.

1. Regulated reading.  When it comes to things to read, there's an overwhelming variety.  Comic books and magazines and poetry, novels and non-fiction books and instruction manuals and textbooks.  Yet usually the only types considered Important are actual books, not magazines or video game manuals, and within the category of books there are ones considered far more respectable and important than others (for instance, fantasy novels and non-fiction books on fashion are not generally considered important to include in A Comprehensive Curriculum).  There's so much out there to read that it's virtually guaranteed everyone can find something they enjoy reading.  Yet if someone is required to read only a certain type of book, only the type of reading deemed most "educational" and "worthwhile" the one doing the requiring is infringing on whatever relationship the learner could find themselves with the written word.  Coercion breeds resentment, and deciding what someone else should be reading will likely just create resentment against both the enforcer of that should and against reading itself.

2. Required reading.  Similarly to the above, requiring people to read certain amounts or at certain times of the day or for certain reasons is a great way to make reading feel more like work.  If something can feel fun instead, that's always what people should be aiming for!  As with any forced teaching or forced "educational activities," making reading mandatory doesn't make it something fun, it makes it something to resent.

3. Book reports.  So often growing up I heard homeschoolers discussing the book reports they required their children to write upon completing any book they read.  A forced book report (something often a very unappealing thing to write even for people who usually enjoy writing) looming at the end of every completed book, is not a very good incentive to do more reading.  If you want people to like reading, it has to be something positive and enjoyable, and anything that's done to make it feel more like work is really not conducive to people learning to enjoy reading for it's own sake.  When people are most likely to not mind doing things that feel like work is when that work is freely chosen, and when it feels meaningful and important.  Book reports?  Don't necessarily feel very meaningful!  Critically discussing books can be (almost) as interesting and enjoyable as reading itself, but that discussion can happen verbally or in many different written forms (discussion groups and chat-boards, blog posts, Amazon reviews, essays, or yes, book reports) and is of course only enjoyable when the reader has freely chosen to do so.  It's also important to remember that it doesn't signify a lack of comprehension if someone is happy reading without doing any type of break-down or discussion afterwards.  Different people learn and process things in different ways, and deciding everyone is best served by writing book reports is just going to, once again, breed resentment and negativity towards reading.

4. Shaming reading choices.  Maybe a parent doesn't actually regulate as such what their children read, but exclaims upon seeing that horror novel or Superman comic in their children's hands "you're reading that??," with a healthy helping of disdain.  This can be a very passive-aggressive tactic, or it can just be a knee-jerk comment made without thought, but either way, it's not pleasant.  People want approval and support from those they share their lives with, from the smallest choices and quirks to the biggest life decisions and goals, and even those smallest comments can be hurtful.  If reading is something they have to anxiously wonder what their parents will think and say about it, it's not going to be nearly as much fun (not to mention how harmful that type of interaction is to the relationship between parent and child!).

5. Focusing on reading skill.  I say this as opposed to focusing on reading enjoyment.  Reading skills are certainly important, and certainly influence reading enjoyment (if the act of reading itself is a struggle due to learning dissability or some other reason, it's obviously not going to be very enjoyable and needs to become less of a struggle first). But when you're purely talking about reading enjoyment, as I am in this post, I'm going to say that as long as someone is able to basically read without extreme difficulty, I think it's really important not to focus on individual reading skills, and instead on enjoyment. If someone is being tested regularly, prompted to read faster, asked regularly to read aloud (as a test of ability, not for fun, since reading aloud together can be really fun, no matter what age people are!), or otherwise has a parent focus strongly on reading skills, they're turning reading into something to feel anxious and possibly inadequate about. If someone enjoys reading, that's what's important.  And if someone enjoys reading and wants to do more of it, improved skill in the activity will naturally follow!

Of course, some people will face some or all of the things on this list, and still come out as passionate and voracious readers.  This list is simply some things I think are a lot more likely to harm than help!

How is your relationship with reading?  Do you think I missed anything that should be on this list?  Chime in in the comments section and share your thoughts and experiences!

Some more thoughts on teaching and learning

Wow, there's been a whole conversation going on over several blogs about the subject of what exactly the words *teaching* and *learning* mean; is teaching a good, bad, or neutral word (or can a word be good or bad?); how language is used, etc. etc.  It started (and I'm doing this in chronological order) with Cassi's The Role of Parental Instruction, I responded with some thoughts in my post Teaching vs. Learning, Cassi wrote a post entitled Teaching and Learning, and finally today there's a post over at Lenz on Learning called The Unschooling Thought Police.  Be sure to read the comments if you want to get a picture of the whole discussion, because those are at least as important as the original post!  I wanted to post excerpts from some comments I made on a couple of the posts, to kind of expand on why I don't generally use the word teach.

“Don’t let words master you” is one way of looking at things. Another way is realizing that words have incredible power. They do. And what word you choose to use can make a huge difference in how what you’re saying is interpreted by those around you. Jumping on other people because of their word choices? Maybe not such a great idea. However, I make a point of paying attention to the language I use, since as both an unschooler and an anarchist, I have very strong opinions about things, and I want the language I use to reflect my values, not just perpetuate all of the stale ideas of this culture. So that means that sometimes I decide to use certain words carefully in context, so they mean only what *I* want them to. And it means that sometimes I decide to stop using a word entirely, or almost entirely, if I feel that its commonly held meaning, that I strongly disagree with, is too entrenched in most peoples minds… 
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What you describe as *teaching* sounds a lot like what I'd just call fascinating conversations with interesting and intelligent people! 

I didn't respond before to a mini discussion on whether someone can only learn if they *want* to learn, but I'm going to throw out a few thoughts on that now.

I think this depends a lot on what exactly your definition of learning is.  Schools generally consider learning to be synonymous with memorization, and I'd say you can definitely be *taught* a list of facts...  But even then, memorization only occurs if the student decides they're going to memorize stuff!  Students who really don't give a crap don't, and fail tests, because they just don't care.  So I'd say that it really is all up to the individual and whether or not they want to learn this specific thing, and if they don't want to *learn*, they're not going to!  As for true, deep, learning, well it seems obvious to me that that type of learning can only ever happen when the student truly wants to learn about whatever it is they're learning... 

That felt a bit scattered, so my apologies!  Not enough sleep lately...

Peace,
Idzie