Children learn the same way everyone does when they are completely free of others’ expectations and other interfering impediments to learning. They learn by wondering about something, thinking about it, finding out about it, perhaps reading about it or discussing it or looking it up on the internet, all driven by their own curiosity.
When a child WANTS to learn mathematics, the learning is effortless and remarkably swift.
Parents can help their child stay the rebel that society needs to stay healthy, by allowing unfettered conversations going wherever the child’s curiosity takes them.
A child who is completely free to learn and whose learning is not being monitored and assessed is empowered. Their learning is for themselves, not because an authority figure asked them to memorise and regurgitate a set of facts or ideas.
It is not true that screen time implies an isolated child cut off from family life. Screens and non-screens can be intertwined worlds filled with connection, joy, fun, and learning.
Most home educators in Britain favour autonomous curiosity-driven learning, vs formal homeschooling.
If your young children are curious explorers who like taking things apart, find more things for them to take apart. Embrace their interest.
Every Education Act since 1870 has clearly intended to place upon parents a substantive duty to educate their children. Therefore, if it were ever found that some legal loophole made that duty vacuous or unenforceable, Parliament would rush to plug the loophole.
The homeschooling mentality turns education into performance—the semblance of education. This interferes with learning.
Learning is different from looking at one’s learning. Objectifying education as a thing to look at and judge interferes with learning.
Learning science could include conversations, reading, thinking. It might or might not include experiments. Experiments are tests of theories—so first you need a theory to test. Theoretical physicists do no experiments at all. They think. The same could be true of a child.
What non-coercive, curiosity-driven mathematics education looks like in real life.
It is a mistake to seek evidence of children’s learning, because that can have a significant destructive effect upon the learning that is going on. They are then highly likely to switch from addressing the problem they were addressing, to the new problem the teacher has introduced, of how to perform and provide evidence for the teacher.
Children have to do what they themselves think is right, with no pressure whatsoever—that’s what non-coercion amounts to—but they also have a right to be told morality as best we see it.
Understanding that knowledge grows through creative conjecture and inner criticism facilitates non-coercive interactions.
Popper’s work provides an epistemological critique of the teacher-directed learning model, although it appears that Popper himself never made this connection.
Having pessimistic educational theories like ‘not everything that is useful is (in itself) interesting’ suggests there are things children need to learn that they will not willingly choose to learn, therefore educational coercion is necessary. That is a mistake. Educational coercion impedes and impairs learning. It does not help.
My re-wordings of what people say about a child, usually to make it about an adult, but in this case making it about learning to breathe instead of whatever the poster was saying children need to learn, aims to show the reality of what is being proposed.”
Instruction is usually not a very good way of learning things, because it does not address the immediate moment-by-moment concerns and questions of the learner.
It is educational coercion that sabotages learning, not teaching per se. WANTED teaching is different from unwanted teaching.
Television is a wonderfully educational medium. How can anyone possibly compare the richness of television with workbooks, let alone compare it unfavourably?
You may think you are helping your child learn when you answer your child’s burning question pedagogically, with a question, such as ‘What do you think?’ or ‘How might we find the answer to that?’, but it is more likely to annoy them so much they avoid asking you questions in future.
Many unschoolers have a very narrow definition of ‘education’ and hold an incoherent theory in which the putative ill-effects of coercion only apply to areas deemed ‘education’. They range from ‘never offer, never refuse’ (not interventionist enough imo) to having a pedagogical agenda, or in some cases they get their children to do projects.
Professor David Deutsch on why he himself values and plays video games, and why the arguments against them are mistaken.
This 1989 workshop advocated taking children seriously, not just ‘autonomous learning’.