In a comment from my most recent cry for help, JJ quotes from one of her own past posts (a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote, I think!):
Some students as children were taught to color inside the lines, watch Barney the purple dinosaur, and always ask permission. We need students who found out what Crayons tasted like, loved reading “The Cat in the Hat” and paid little attention to rules — students whose parents encouraged their children’s curiosity.
Have I mentioned in the past that Gamma has gone to school here? It’s called maternelle, and most children start at the age of 2 1/2. We sent Gamma briefly at the age of 2 1/2, believing it was the only way he would meet local kids and make friends. (that’s a topic for another post, but let me just briefly say, there are no kids running about around here, even in the heart of the summer. all the parents seem to work, and all kids seem to be in special all-day programs, even during vacation.) He cried every single time I took him, so eventually we brought him home. We tried again just last September, at 4 1/2. At this point we’d been back and forth on the homeschool question half a dozen times. What tipped the scales into “real” school’s favor? Simply put: French. I can teach him French, but fluency will be a stretch. It seemed extremely important at the time.
Still some tears, but he was older and adjusted better. His teacher was firm but kind. Most of the other kids were fine. He brought home some behaviors we didn’t care for, but we took that as par for the course. Regardless, it was during that year that we decided his need for close family ties and an individualized education outweighed his need for French. He didn’t go back after spring vacation.
His last day of school, his teacher gave me a packet with his papers and schoolwork from the year. She said she had loved having Gamma for a student, and we could stop by anytime. I left feeling a wee bit nostalgic.
In the car, I glanced through the paperwork. On several pages, I saw a sad face with tears dripping from the eyes. Why? Because he had scribbled instead of colored in neatly. He had followed the key correctly, coloring all the N spots black (noire), all the R spots red (rouge), all the J spots yellow (jaune). But the coloring in had been done half-heartedly, because it’s not something he enjoys doing yet.
The message those sad faces sent (to me, at least) was that understanding the concept behind your task wasn’t important. What was important was delivering a pretty package. I was stunned. Does a kid at 4 1/2 really need to be made to feel like they failed? At coloring? At that point, whatever doubts I’d been feeling about the should we/shouldn’t we issue disappeared.
Thanks, JJ. I’m glad to have been reminded of that moment.
3 comments ↓
And he might never like coloring, PL certainly never did. Yet coloring likely would have been a frequent part of school for several years. How many sad, teary faces can a child be expected to stand, right?
Yes, I agree! And I very much doubt Gamma will ever learn to like coloring. He’s getting so he enjoys drawing — robots and Bionicles and and such. But I’ve been doing a lot of “unschooling” reading lately and am trying to be more cautious of how the words I use to describe him and his actions may serve to limit him.
Wrapping one’s mind around unschooling is easier with experiences like this kept front and center, as Beta just discovered.
But it’s really, really hard to do. Dale McGowan at Meming of Life has written about “confirmation bias” in trying to enlighten ourselves about religious doctrine, where even a tough, serious and motivated mind may have embedded scripts below the level of consciousness that sabotage objective inquiry in decision-making of all kinds.
It feels so risky to stop believing the party line of either church or school, that our own minds and emotions are on the other side working against us! — to talk us out of it or if that fails, TRICK us out of it, for our own good of course, because conformity feels safer to the lizard brain.
The primitive fear is the same in either case, that if you reject either school or church teachings, you will be cast out into the darkness and damned, your life will lose all meaning and you’ll eat out your own liver for eternity. Talk about high stakes tests!
JJ’s Hypothesis: Adults determined to study and test their own embedded beliefs about either church or school, are likely to have similar personal experiences with both.
Some people get to unschooling more with their feelings, often after being so monstrously mistreated by schooling that the mind finally will accept almost anything as being safer than a return to that. Same with church. Maybe think about “church” conventions as a parallel to “school” conventions — how the culture indoctrinates us that both are some sort of universal human truth and resistance is futile. As children we receive church AND school dogma as “written on our hearts” to the point that as adults, daring to break with belief inside our own hearts and minds, can feel like falling into an abyss.
Others of us get there with our thinking more than our feelings, I guess. Like me.
But even as we think we’re being so analytical and rational, and we try consciously to challenge the cultural scripts about church (and school) all around us, they keep playing on a loop INSIDE us all during our inquiry, under the level of rationality, and it’s very hard to resist; I imagine it must be something like how addiction feels? When the mind has doubts about embedded scripts of school and church, even a well-educated and scientific mind tends to rationalize away the doubt to resolve the dissonance, and usually that means the embedded idea is not only not removed, it’s actually reinforced and harder than ever to think away the next time. This is not logical but very human.
I read and researched for years, tried several belief systems and thought I had a couple of transformative spiritual experiences even, before I could finally set aside my lizard brain scripts of church — and then I had to start all over again with school. Studied it all, tried it all, thought I believed and embraced it all, until I had my own children. ( That should be the picture in the dictionary next to the word “epiphany!”) So then I addressed my growing doubts with years of gorging on cognitive and education psychology, and that eventually became my own mind’s way of accepting that any risk in unschooling was better than the known system failures of schooling.
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