Let the children Play. Joseph Chilton Pearce.

A child will pick up a spool of thread, and that will become an automobile, or a match box will become a bed, or a chest of drawers: where one object can stand for another. That’s the basis of metaphoric thinking for the rest of our lives. Joseph Chilton Pearce. Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education

Here is an excerpt from Pearce's chapter called "A conversation about the magical child," in the Natural Born Learners Reader.

A great neuro-scientist, Paul Maclean, who was head of brain development research here at the National Institute of Health, came up with three needs. He calls them a trio or trinity of needs. From the moment of birth on, they are: audio-visual communication, nurturing, and play. They are all equally important, and they are all interdependent.

It’s interesting that play is included as the most important thing that a child could have, not only for the development of their body, but their whole neural system. Play begins almost immediately at birth. The child catches on quickly when the adult is willing to play.

Play can take place only in what Michael Mendizza and I (2003) call “the safe place” (p. 69). A child must feel secure to play. That’s what audio-visual communication and nurturing is, a safe space. Given that safe space, the spontaneous reaction is to play, and to turn every activity into play.
Children, I don’t think, have much connection with work. They will turn work into play, or they will play at their work; which is exactly what they should do.

In Montessori schools, they use the term “work,” but if you look closely, you’ll see that there is the same spontaneous freedom of movement, speech, and play. A critical part of all learning is the ability to approach it playfully. Literally, this has to do with the structure of the brain itself.

When people are in a totally safe space, feel completely secure, safe, and nurtured, the center of neurologic action shifts to the forebrain, which is the latest evolutionary development in brain structure, the structure for creating imagination, the one that will lead us to metaphoric, symbolic thinking, which underlies all of our great subjects like science, mathematics, religion, and philosophy. All those depend on metaphoric, symbolic capacities, which are developed in play, and play is the only way that this metaphoric, symbolic capacity can develop.

Play can only take place in a safe space. If the child feels at all insecure, a good part of their energy of their brain and body centers around the defensive areas, which are the sensory-motor, what we call the hind brain. Activity moves back into the more ancient animal structure, the reptilian brain, the oldest part of the brain systems. You can clearly see, with the new scanning devices, when the child is shifting from the forebrain, the highly-civilized mind, into the more ancient animal brain structures, when they are concerned about their safety.

Play, in the first seven years, develops this creative forebrain, which sets us beyond all the animals. The most important form of play arises from storytelling, after about the first year of life. Up until then, it’s any repeated interaction between the infant and the parent. For example, hiding, peek-a-boo, little surprise movements, repeated over and over. The child immediately interprets this as play and goes into a state of hilarious delight. They do this from very early on. After about a year, when they have their language pretty much under control, storytelling is a primary impetus to play, because, having been told a story, they create internal imagery in keeping with the story, that activity brings about neural development. They want to play that inner image out in the world. That’s when you get metaphoric and symbolic play.   Want more?  Buy the reader here. Thanks!

Grace Llewellyn: Guerrilla Learning

Grace Llewellyn

I would love to see us as a society not thinking so much in terms of “education,” but rather thinking more broadly in terms of “life.”

We tend to see things in boxes and categories, which doesn’t always serve us. When people say “education,” sometimes I like to say, “If you substitute the term ‘life’ for ‘education’—every time you say ‘education’ or ‘learning,’ try saying ‘life’ instead—that might invite you to look at things in a different way.” (I probably stole that idea too, most likely from John Holt I suppose, it all starts to bleed together in my mind at this point: what’s his, what’s mine, what’s some other guy’s).

In broader realms, too, I would love to see us think less in categories: over here we have health; over there we have learning; and over here we have work. What about a life or a neighbourhood that mixes all three together so the edges are rubbed out? I would love to see a less institutional society and a more integrated society.

I have also edited a book about the African-American dimension of homeschooling. Freedom Challenge (1993) hasn’t sold many copies, which I’m sad about. I wish that more homeschoolers in general—not just African-Americans—would read it, because it’s important for us all to be aware of ways that we can be more welcoming, and understand more of what is true for sub-groups of the homeschooling community. I’d love to see more African-Americans reading it too.

In the African-American community, traditionally, there is a high value placed on education and, perhaps by default and through not being aware of other choices, that translates largely to a high value placed on schooling. So, I’d just love to see more African-Americans considering the possibilities, and then including the option of homeschooling in their dialogue about education, even if most ultimately chose to stay within the system. For whatever reason, people are way less interested in that book than in my other work. Nonetheless, I think it’s important, and I very much enjoyed working with the writers; it was a fun project for me.

Excerpt from  Chapter 16  Guerrilla Learning with  Grace Llewellyn in Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education.

What does it mean to be educated? John Taylor Gatto chapter excerpt from the Natural Born Learners reader.

This is an excerpt. To read the entire chapter, buy the reader here.

How you choose to spend your time, I think, says a tremendous amount about yourself.
The admissions officer at Princeton, (a long time ago) told me the first thing he looks for is hobbies.
I said, “Why do you look at hobbies?”
He said, “It’s really the only way a young person has an opportunity to commit to something without being pushed into it. The choices they make, when they have choices, tell me all I need to know.”
I asked, “What would it tell you? What would you like to see?”
He said, “We would like to see someone with an intellectual hobby, a social hobby, and a physical hobby.”
“Wow,” I said, “like what?”
He said, “It could be chess playing, it could be ballroom dancing, and it could be swimming.”
“So what about sports?”
“It’s got to be there, but people do not understand that individual sports like bike riding and sky diving, and long distance walking and stuff like that,” he said, “are much more important than team sports.”
“Why so?”
He told me, “Team sports enable an individual to hide behind other people. You can slack off and let your teammates carry you. Whereas, when you are out there alone, if you make a fool of yourself, or if you are inadequate, there’s no place to hide. And people willing to do that,” he said, “are superior people, the ones we want at Princeton.”

So why aren’t these ancient, well-understood truths the stuff of schooling?

In a corporate economy, you have one boss, twenty sub-bosses, and fifty sub-sub-bosses. That arrangement is only possible if people don’t know how to escape their placements. You can lie, saying with Darwin that most of us are inferior and they couldn’t escape their placements, but my experience teaching for 30 years is that is not true. Harlem kids are capable of exactly the same quality of intellectual production as upper-middle-class white kids.

I don’t say that as a romantic, or as a humanitarian. I say that as somebody locked up with children, who decided to do a first-class curriculum with poor ghetto kids out of personal boredom. I got in a lot of trouble, at first, doing that, but the minute the kids caught on that you actually meant what you said when you told them you’d treat them with respect, after the adjustment period, the quality of the work was exactly as high as it was with so called gifted and talented kids. And these were street kids from the ghetto!

I can’t be the only one who’s discovered that. But what would you do if 70 million kids graduated every twelve years in the United States, and every one of them had, as Napoleon advised, a field marshal’s baton in his backpack? What if everyone was looking for an independent livelihood? What if everyone wasn’t just willing to pick up a pay cheque, but brought principles and moral standards and aesthetic preferences to the job and said, “No, I won’t do that!”

Let’s suppose that tens of millions of kids tomorrow grow into a modern America in which employment will be part-time for many, and not well paid. That’s cause for resourceful thinking, where you say, “How can I improve this situation?”
Don’t you think kids have a right to know these things? To spend a respectable amount of their school time reflecting and researching and debating and coming up with personal answers that will help them in their lives? To leave them completely in the dark about this, until they are laid off and remain out of work for four years, such is the fate of many of our people. Why would you do this if you had any real concern for them? Truth is, the mass population in America is no longer relevant, except to man armies to suppress the rest of the world.

Kids, from first grade on, are set against one another. It’s no surprise, then, when they become adults after twelve years of back-biting, competing, being placed in class/status relationships to one another, that they can’t build a community. It’s no surprise at all.

Community isn’t built, intellectually, by saying, now wouldn’t it be a good idea if we all worked together? Kids have had twelve years of never working together. These are truths so fundamental it almost embarrasses me to say them, except for the fact that people have been trained not to think of these things. They strike the virgin ear as some radical statement.
What can you do for the entire society? I think the answer is nothing, except doing your best for the principles you believe in. Struggle, argue, and don’t expect any substantial change but what you can change for yourself, and your friends, and your neighbour. It’s not easy, it remains a struggle but it’s just so much more correct a way to live.
I mean you don’t live that other, selfish way. You say, “I prefer not to act these other ways.” And sometimes, you submit; because not submitting would exact a price way out of balance with what you would win from acting on principle. I think you develop the mind of a saboteur.

You look and move like everybody else, you don’t draw attention to yourself, but from time to time you find where the gears are meshing and you put a nice handful of sand in them. The biggest handful of sand, though, will be your children. If they come to the age of majority with independent critical minds, with a good attitude towards things, without expecting change to come easily, enjoy the struggle of testing themselves, this gives them good lives.

In having good lives, they’ll be helping me and you and everyone else. It will happen after I’m dead, I think, but at some point a critical mass of people will emerge who just won’t accept bullshit any longer. Then things will change, as they did in 1776. Now, what I just described is very, very hard for a nation to do, but it’s not that hard for a family, a neighbourhood, or a community.

______________

John Taylor Gatto (born December 15, 1935) is an American retired school teacher of 29 years and 8 months experience in the classroom and author of several books on education including Dumbing us Down: The hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (2005), and Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through The Dark World of Compulsory Schooling (2009). He is an activist critical of compulsory schooling and of what he characterizes as the hegemonic nature of discourse on education and the education professions.

More Time is More Freedom

Here is an excerpt from Brenna McBroom's chapter in Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education.

Brenna McBroom is a long-time unschooler from Asheville, North Carolina. She currently works as a potter making functional and decorative crystalline glazed ceramics.

I love the world I live in. Were I to change it, I think I would alter attitudes and beliefs rather than attempting to change governments or institutions, because, in the end, it is the things we believe and the values we hold highest that shape our world. I would change the belief that qualification and ability are inextricably linked.

For example, in the eyes of many, the twenty-four-year old Master of Fine Arts graduate possesses more ability to instruct ceramics students than the self-taught ceramicist who has been operating a functional studio for thirty years, merely because of qualifications. I’m not saying that qualification and ability never come hand-in-hand—merely that they don’t have to.

For those who are not sure if school, or higher education, is the right place at this time, I would say: trust yourself! If you have a nagging feeling that institutionalized schooling isn’t right for you at this point in your life, listen to it. College can be a great tool to get you where you want to go, but it’s just that: a tool. It’s important to keep it in its proper perspective, as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

If you’re struggling with the college question, a good litmus test is to ask yourself the following questions: I’m planning to go to college to what end? What am I trying to achieve? If your answer is something like, “Because I want to be a veterinarian,” or “Because it’s an efficient way for me to learn everything that I want to know about classical philosophy,” then you’re probably on the right track. If, on the other hand, your answers are something like, “Because otherwise I’ll end up working in a fast food joint,” or “Because I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” then I would suggest you do a bit more soul searching.

I learned, through personal experience, that there are much better places to find yourself than college: write a book, save the rainforest, teach English as a second language, revitalize your community, build a house, or live somewhere you don’t speak the language.

Furthermore, never believe those who tell you that not going to college resigns you to a lifetime of flipping burgers. Those who perpetuate this myth are usually none other than the school faculty and administrators, who are completely dependent upon your continued support of higher education for their continued employment. The vast majority of people I know who have chosen to forgo college are doing amazing things like writing grants, traveling the world, working on farms, or doing web design.

Finally, keep in mind that not going to college now is not the same as not going to college. I believe many people would benefit a great deal from taking a few years to experience, and experiment with, various occupations and lifestyles before they make the decision to attend (or not attend) a university.
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Kate Fridkis: Growing Up Weird

Kate Fridkis works as a lay clergy member at a synagogue and writes a blog called Eat the Damn Cake, which is syndicated on The Huffington Post and Psychology Today. She also writes a column for Home Education Magazine. Her work has appeared in Cosmopolitan, Slate, Salon, and others. Kate has published her first book, Growing Eden (2013)––a memoir about being pregnant in New York City and making the kind of choices that sometimes result in growing up, or at least growing.

 In Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education, Kate talks about her experience growing up unschooled. Here is an excerpt from her chapter:

I have a problem with the idea of a balanced curriculum. I’ve never liked the notion that well-rounded education is the ideal education, because I think that when people pursue that model of educational success they end up with a lot of people who maybe know a little about a lot of subjects, but who aren’t experts at anything, and who also haven’t learned how to pursue their interests.

The idea of balance, maybe in its ideal form is awesome, but when it’s applied broadly it prevents people from learning what they love to do. When you learn to love learning, and do things that interest you, whatever it is that interests you ends up connecting you to a whole huge network of other stuff, other subjects, in really surprising ways. Maybe you end up being more balanced than people expect, in exciting ways, but it’s never through pursuing well-roundedness.

The truth is that you learn something new in absolutely every environment. It’s not like there is an environment that you can go to where you get access to all the important information. You learn everywhere! The idea that I love, and always find true about unschooling, is that you are always learning, because you are living. Of course, when I went to college, I learned from interesting people who I wouldn’t have otherwise met, but to be perfectly honest I would have learned somewhere else, too.

As an unschooler, I felt like an adult. By being around adults, and being in the community rather than in school, I had a lot of contact with grownups who didn’t expect to end up being my friend because here I am, a kid. It is kind of expected that kids are going to be with other kids, and adults with other adults. Everyone is going to be slotted into their particular age bracket, and that is where they are going to stay—which is kind of a strange idea really, because it is so useful for children to learn from people who are older.

My experience as an unschooler consisted of being around adults who told me, “You seem so grown up!” It wasn’t that I was grown up, it was just that I was interacting with them as I would with a friend. Through these relationships, I was able to talk about things that were relevant to adults. I was able to have a lot of educational and relational experiences that other children didn’t have access to. There is a lack of fear of adults, in unschooled kids; they are not afraid of speaking with adults, and are not wary of adults. The schooled peers I met in college, who were still afraid of interacting with adults when they were twenty, surprised me.

Another thing about unschoolers being grown up is that they just have a lot of responsibility, which is something people don’t expect from kids in school. I have to qualify that, and add that kids in school have tons of responsibility. Not the same kind of responsibility, not the kind where you get to decide what you do with your time, and what you learn, and what you pursue. For them, it’s the kind that I shrink from, like having to do hours of homework, or getting straight-A’s in every subject. That sounds so stressful to me, I can’t imagine how anybody does it.

Buy the book and read more from grown unschoolers!

Pat Farenga: You don't have to go to grow: Growing without schooling

Here's an excerpt of Pat Farenga's chapter in Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education. The chapter is called You Don't Have to Go to Grow: Growing without Schooling.

One of the things that has been really interesting, and gratifying to me, has been understanding the work of Ivan Illich and understanding why John Holt was such a big fan of Ivan’s work. Illich wrote a book called Deschooling Society (1970/1983), which many people misinterpret, mainly because they don’t read it—they just read the title and assume he’s saying “let’s eradicate all the schools.”

Illich is not saying that. His whole thesis is that we need to eliminate compulsory schooling. Schools make sense for having central locations where communal resources can be distributed, but school is not a true communal resource. It’s become a private enterprise that is administered by professionals, almost as if it were medicine, and very expensive medicine at that. What Ivan pointed out is that learning is not a scarce commodity to be doled out like medicine. Human learning is abundant; institutional education is scarce.

Our economic system supports giving out rewards primarily to those who consume the most education credentials, but is that really learning? When Holt read and studied with Illich, he started exploring all sorts of ideas of how else can we help children and adults to learn?

In Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do Things Better (1976/2004), John outlines the reasons he thinks compulsory education is “the most destructive force on earth;” largely because it wastes so much of everyone’s time in busywork. This is borne out all the time when employers say, “college graduates don’t know how to do anything except pass courses, and high school graduates don’t know how to write their names.”

Ivan pointed out, in 1971, that all institutions seem to hit a point where they become counter-productive. Our institutions for transportation create traffic jams, our medical institutions create iatrogenic illnesses like the antibiotic failure we see now. We suddenly turn a corner when these things get too big and, in education as Holt and Illich claim, we have reached the point where schools create stupidity in students.
Read more when you buy the book.

The Everyday Lives of Black Canadians Homeschoolers: Monica Wells Kisura. In loving Memory.

Dr. Monica Wells Kisura (Trinity Washington University) recently passed away after battling cancer. She was a brilliant, vibrant beautiful woman and she will be deeply missed. I am so grateful that we have Monica's contribution in the Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education reader. Monica, your words live on! Here is an excerpt from her chapter:

Q: What are the conditions necessary to get more black families to even consider homeschooling to begin with, let alone move to an unschooling approach?

In the United States, you have a very different social context, the Civil Rights Movement, and the fact that many people fought so hard to integrate schools, and to have a place at the public school table. The older generation feels a sense of betrayal, which is a strong word, but there is a sense that to homeschool means one does not appreciate the struggles that people who came before them went through to give African Americans an opportunity to have a conventional, especially public school education. We must take into account these looming psychological barriers, which have cultural roots and may be preventing many from even considering home education.

The second piece when you talk specifically about unschooling as an approach, which is self-directed learning that allows the child’s interests to move the curriculum, you have the issue of black parents feeling like this approach would be disregarded. Grace Llewellyn’s (1996) book, Freedom Challenge, is written by black homeschoolers themselves. Llewellyn made the observation that black families are already battling the social issues of supposed racial and intellectual inferiority, so there is more of a tendency to lean toward a structured approach. Tracy Romm (1993) made a similar observation in his 1993 dissertation, Home Schooling and the Transmission of Civic Culture in which he examined the lives of four white and four black homeschooling families.

One of the challenges these families are facing is getting their children to a place where they feel society will accept and acknowledge that these children have a certain level of intellectual ability and capability. Thus far, it seems to be true that most black parents are leaning towards a structured approach. Ironically, they are less inclined to use standardized tests. In fact, most of the parents that I have spoken with, whether they were structured or eclectic, did not, nor do they plan to use standardized tests or exams to measure their child’s progress.

I think it is going to take another generation, frankly, for more people to become comfortable with the idea of homeschooling, first of all, and then possibly another generation beyond that before more families to move toward unschooling.

What I have discovered is that, when I ask the question, “If you could change anything about your experience as a home educator, what would that be?” Almost all of them say, “I would be more relaxed.” So I do believe that there will be, and that there are signs that families are moving toward, a more relaxed approach to learning. Given that mainstream homeschoolers came to light during the sixties, seventies, and eighties, but most black homeschooling families, even those so called “old-timers” really did not get on board until the nineties, there is a ten- to twenty-year lag, so this is why I am calculating that it may be another ten to twenty years before black families really feel comfortable with home education as an alternative, and then unschooling as a viable practice.

I want to conclude with something that may be a bit radical, a thought that occurred to me fairly early in my research. After interviewing a number of homeschooling families, and again thinking about this in the much broader context of political-economy, I began asking what political changes, what economic changes have occurred to open this opportunity for people to homeschool? It dawned on me that, since the decolonization movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and since the Civil Rights movements in the United States during the sixties, homeschooling is probably the most radical statement that black people have made regarding self-determination and resistance. I think that home education, particularly for this segment of the population, has the potential to be very radical, and move the community as a whole to a different level of consciousness.

Schooling: A Highly Questionable Practice.

On March 9, 2003, the admissions officer at Harvard, Marilyn McGrath, on the front page of the New York Times, told readers Harvard only accepts students who show evidence of distinction. Many people skipped that article because they assumed they already knew that high grades get you in. But McGrath said test scores and grades are not evidence of distinction—you can’t get into Harvard that way!
I thought that was a stunning revelation. Not that I didn’t know it, but to actually admit it on the front page of the New York Times. Wow!
I wrote her immediately and asked, “What would an evidence of distinction be?” although I already knew the answer. The Harvard lady quickly covered up: her reply was an exercise in dissimulation, backing off her New York Times statement.
By the time someone reaches eighteen, there are tens of thousands of such people—but not millions—tens of thousands who have records of distinction. They have sailed around the world alone; they have walked from the South Pole to the North Pole; they’ve started a charity; they’ve earned a million dollars—not because they are such superior geniuses, but because a number of families preserve traditions of effectiveness and ways to reach real goals. The methods aren’t difficult and they aren’t expensive.
If you read Ben Franklin’s autobiography, you’ll see they were used among many ordinary people in the 18th Century United States. Franklin was thrown out of two schools before he was 11-years-old. He started a business selling beer to printers, through which he amassed capital to buy into a printing company later on. He was 12-years-old.
Once I was on that trail I looked into intimate details of colonial life here in the Americas. The minute you do that, detailed evidence appears about the different ways young people were reared back then.
Take the American Revolution, for instance. Virtually everybody who made the American Revolution was a teenager! Washington was the Grand Old Man. I think he was 42. But Jefferson and Hamilton and really the whole pack of them were 17, 18, 19, 20, 21. The myth that keeps us small and in our place blows away with that discovery. The US young people, with free minds, were able to overthrow the most powerful military nation on earth, Great Britain.

Schooling: A Highly Questionable Practice. John Taylor Gatto.

This is an excerpt from Natural Born Learners: Unschooling and Autonomy in Education.

Unschooled violinist, Madeleine Kay plays Chelsea Hotel

Madeleine Kay (17) was unschooled up until grade 6. Listen to her rendition of Leonard Cohen's Chelsea Hotel, arranged and played by her.

Unschooler and author Kate Cayley: How you were born

Years ago,  our Radio Free School program had the honour of not only interviewing author Kate Cayley for our show, but we also created a youtube video based on the interview where Kate describes growing up unschooled. Now she's got the Trillium Prize for her recent book How you were Born.
Read about it in Now Magazine. Check out Kate's video here:

You want change? Change your questions.

If you have ever tried putting a duvet into its cover, you know how hard it can be if you don’t first set the thing up correctly. What you do is you turn the cover inside out, stick your hands through while holding onto two corners, and grab the duvet corners and pull it through so that the cover now sits the right side up, with the duvet neat inside, then you have to put its opposite corners into the corners of the cover, and finally give it a shake to even it all out (Phew! That was hard to explain).

The point is, it’s the same thing when it comes to approaching problems: if we don’t frame the problem correctly, if we don’t set it up right, we end up frustrated, much like we feel with the duvet all bunched up in one corner of the cover.

I was helping my kid with a research project. The assignment was to explore if teens that view violent media and play dehumanizing video games are more prone to violent behaviour and likely to become desensitized to violence in real life.
My daughter had to formulate five guiding questions. As she researched questions, it became obvious to us that there were no right answers to the questions she was asking.  The true lesson that she learned from this exercise is that maybe her questions weren’t good ones: she needed to ask better questions.

She needed to look at how the conversation is being framed, who is asking the questions, how the problem has been tackled historically, whose voice is missing from the discussion, who has the most stake in the answer, who benefits etc.

For questions to be of any use they have to challenge assumptions.

Of course there was very little time to delve into new questions—which is the problem with the way we do things. We don’t give ourselves enough time to get to the questions that might inspire real change.

Einstein said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

We want solutions but we keep asking the questions we already know the answers to.  And the answers bring no revelation; they cannot surprise us, they are predictable.
But what if we asked this question instead of that one?  For instance, instead of asking how many windowpanes were broken, or how many counters were upturned in the recent Baltimore upheaval, the right question to ask is “why are young black men in the US being systematically murdered by police?”

The trouble is, we learn to ask questions that reflect our personal convictions and believes. We believe what we see and our interpretation of it, taking this as reality. But there are many realities: we have exhausted nothing.
---

We want change? Then we need to take it outside of our comfort zone.
In her book, ‘The Art of the Question,’ Marilee Goldberg said: “A paradigm shift occurs when a question is asked inside the current paradigm that can only be answered from outside it.”

Small children and scientists are good and doing this.
“If you meet a scientist, don't ask her what she knows, ask her what she wants to know. It's a much better conversation for both of you.” That's the concluding sentence to Stuart Firestein's Forum piece, in Scientific American (April 2012).

In 'What Science Wants to Know,' Firestein agrees that you have to know a lot to be a scientist. But that's not enough. "Knowing a lot is not what makes a scientist. What makes a scientist is ignorance," he writes. For scientists, the facts are just a starting place.
Every new scientific discovery raise new questions, so ignorance will always grow faster than knowledge. Firestein observes that one crucial outcome of scientific knowledge is to generate new and better ways of being ignorant: "not the kind of ignorance that is associated with a lack of curiosity or education but rather a cultivated, high-quality ignorance."
It’s the questions we are asking that we need to talk about if we are hoping to make the changes we want; trite, lazy thinking produces quick shallow responses—and that’s not going to get us very far.

Published in the spec.com  (The art of asking).

How talking to your child can improve development

A mother sits folding laundry, her baby in the high chair beside her. “Here are mummy’s striped pajamas. They're red and blue and warm and fuzzy,” she says in a singsong voice. The baby gurgles at his mother, responds enthusiastically by waving his arms and kicking his little legs. Look at me, the mother thinks. I'm so silly. She carries on anyway, describing the frilly pillowcase she’s about to fold next. But she need not feel silly.

Parents, What You Say Matters

What many of us need to appreciate is the extent to which words impact children’s learning – not only in developing their vocabulary but especially, the spatial world and their later ability to problem solve. University of Chicago psychologist Dr. Susan Levine and her colleagues found children’s spatial abilities are in large part driven by what their parents say. In her study published in the journal Developmental Science, she says that the amount of talking parents do with very young children that describe features and properties of objects (i.e. heavy, big, little, round) predicts children’s problem solving success as they near kindergarten age.

Oriane Landry, psychology professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, works with preschoolers and children with autism. He says “There’s a strong link between emergent language skills and how that leads into their abilities in other areas.”

Oriane expands on the work of the early 20th century Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, known best in education circles for his theory on scaffolding children (younger children learning skills from slightly older children). Vygotsky’s work supports the idea that language fosters all of our other thinking skills, and that for the most part, when we are problem solving, we are doing so with language. “The language of thought is in fact language,” Oriane says. “We tend to draw heavily on our language skills in order to complete other thought processes (using inner dialogue) even well into adulthood.”

There is some controversy about how the relationship between thought and language emerges and what comes first – the language in order to have the concept versus the concept, then applying the language – but especially in the preschool period, as children are gaining more and more complex conceptual ideas, they are also gaining the language to go with it.

“If you've got a word then you can build a concept around it,” Oriane says. “If you don't have a word, a concept can be flighty – like a dream you can't hold onto – you can't describe it to someone. If you talk about that dream, you can hold onto it. If parents are encouraging language growth by being highly verbal themselves and describing the things around them, then the child is going to have a more complex vocabulary earlier on and also the tools to think with more sophistication and in greater complexity about the world around them.”

The kids are all right:

Disengaged? Hardly. Today’s youth just might be the saviours of us all

Thank you for feeding us years of lies.
Thank you for the wars you left us to fight.
Thank you for the world you ruined overnight.
But we'll be fine; yeah we'll be fine.
MKTO Lyrics

Babies are brighter these days, am I right? Two month olds are staring intently into my face and cooing. Four month olds are rolling over and crawling.

Then there are these pint-sized three and four year olds on YouTube, being sassy and precocious and saying all kinds of startling things. Eight year olds are articulate and funny and teens are "calling us out," exposing our hypocrisy so that we squirm under the glaring scrutiny of fairness. By the time they are young adults … watch out. They are snappier, faster and cognizant of the issues — their issues.

I've heard quite a bit about the sense of entitlement that is used to describe young people today: Generation Y (people born after 1980) is "selfish" and perpetually dissatisfied. Generation Z (people born after 1995) is disengaged.

But this outlook is being challenged; it doesn't seem to be reflective of what is going on around the planet.

The world is vibrating with the voices of the young who will not tolerate its destruction, and who are confronting injustices and the indifference of the wealthy and privileged.

I was surprised at the sudden swell of emotion that overcame me, reading words in a 2014 Maclean's article from Toronto business executive Don Tapscott saying that Gen Z doesn't have a choice: "My generation is leaving them with a mess. These kids are going to have to save the world literally."

I think the young know this. Yes, there is the "live fast, die young" message that prevails in popular culture, but youth grow up hearing about the global issues and I imagine it is part of their consciousness.

And while the growing concern for extremism among certain disenfranchised youth populations is legitimate, I can't help feeling a sense of optimism: young people are shaking things up, seeking to create a more equitable, safer — just better society for everyone.

For example, everywhere, youth are saying "don't funk with my future" and getting down and dirty on the streets, calling on universities, colleges, faith communities, businesses and local governments to divest from fossil fuels (even the UN recently came out in support of divesting from fossil fuel companies).

In India, young people are relentlessly protesting rape culture. In Africa, LGBTQ rights are a major focus. All over North American youth of colour are demonstrating that black lives matter. Here in Canada, First Nations young adults are taking the lead and confronting neo-colonialism with the campaigns such as Idle no More.

Anti-Racism Education

Poo face.” “Dirty skin.” “Black chicken.”
It begins early. When her daughter was in Junior Kindergarten, Stoney Creek, Ont., mom Christabel Pinto says she would come home from school every day in tears. The kids were calling her names; they wouldn't play with her because, “brown people get diseases.”
I’d go into the basement and cry,” says Christabel, an accompanist and music director. The teacher’s response was almost worse. “She told the other kids ‘she’s just different from them,’” says Christabel, who withdrew her daughter from the school.

At this point you might be asking, what year was this – 1968? 1975? No. This was five years ago. Christabel’s other children Kambria, 10, and Krispin, 8, still regularly sit alone at lunch.

Kiera Silverglen, 14, of Hamilton, says she’s grown used to racist comments such as “How was the slave ship?” “How was it when you were a maid?” She copes by writing poetry and short stories (she received first place for poetry in this year’s Hamilton Public Library’s Power of the Pen – a prestigious writing contest).

Name-calling is bad enough. Far more insidious and harmful are the negative perceptions and derogatory stereotypes too often associated with people of colour.

“I was almost arrested in Walmart for looking at a DVD,” Kiera says. A salesperson came up to her and asked, “Were you going to steal that?” She had to call for her mom (who is white) to get the manager.

Kiera’s adoptive mom, Catherine Silverglen, is a teacher and anti-racism educator. Catherine shares an example of the sort of attitude her family frequently gets from teachers: “We met with the teacher because Kiera was having some challenges in a particular subject,” she says. “The teacher made a joke that went (with accent), ‘She is just a little bit slow. I don’t want to use the word lazy but I was in Jamaica once mon, and they are all so laid back, maybe it’s cultural.’” (Kiera was adopted from Chicago).

To combat negative perceptions in her classroom, Catherine introduces positive images of non-white cultural groups. “I’ll talk about the incredible histories and contributions of the African continent; Egypt, Benin, ‘the city of Gold.’ Why don’t kids learn any of this?” Too often, we only hear about these cultures in a piteous light – which is an unfair and biased view.

“I think as white people, we really need to challenge ourselves to get to know non-white people,” says Catherine. She suggests also reading a few books by authors from different cultures about their own experiences. Books like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird are about racism in the U.S. south, for example, but they are about how a white person stood up for a black person. They shouldn’t be the only books on our reading list.

Closing digital gap empowers students

Technology can transform learning into real life, relevant experiences.

Not too long ago, it was absurd to say that every Tom, Rashid and Baba should have access to the Internet. For what? Now, since 2011, the United Nations considers it a human right, "underscoring its unique and transformative nature not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole."

And while access to technology is not "the great equalizer," that Ontario Education Minister Liz Sandals proclaims will level the playing field for all students, it does close the digital gap and empowers students from low-income families in learning.

Take, for example, educator Sugata Mitra's experiment in an Indian village. In 2000, this professor of education technology at Newcastle University installed a computer in a wall and documented illiterate, slum children (with zero English) figuring out how to use it, and then actually using it to learn and share knowledge.

Mitra has since designed a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other — no teachers present — using resources and mentoring from the cloud.

Access to the Internet offers children from all backgrounds opportunities to work together and communicate and do research in areas that interest them. It's a platform for developing personalized education and even individual networks that go beyond a classroom setting, offering possibilities only dreamed of before.

Still, "Back in my day, we used paper and pencil!" is a common reaction to the idea of iPads, tablets or other technologies in the classroom.

Reality is, "back in your day" has vanished into the swirling mists of time.

It's a new era, baby. The times require that students be drivers of their own learning.

10 Unschooling Mistakes to Avoid

1.Comparing.

I believe that the root of all evil is comparison. When you find yourself about to do the "is my child keeping up?" or "her child is better at piano then mine, and they're the same age," just stop. Don't do it.
When you look at another unschooling mum and back at yourself and feel that you fall short, don't go there. Rather, allow her to inspire you; don't feel down.

2.Believing that everyone should agree with you.

This is the attitude of any newbie. I remember how militant  I was when I first became a vegetarian (I no longer am-a vegetarian).  I couldn't tolerate people who weren't. I must have been an insufferable 'know it all.' I know I certainly annoyed people.

3. Getting offended/feeling hurt when people don't agree with you.

The world owes you nothing. If someone tosses you a dubious look or expresses doubt in what you are doing, deal with it in a mature way.  Learn not to take yourself so seriously. Laugh.

4.If there really is a problem, being afraid of admitting it.

Your kids are unruly, or they really don't seem to be 'getting it.' There might actually be an underlying cause for it. Or they don't seem to have any interests. Don't panic.You can still  raise a child that is learning naturally. Get the support you need.

5. Expecting your kids to be best buddies and get along all the time (well most of the time) just because they're unschooled.

They fight. They say they hate one another. That's okay. We can't choose our family but we sure as heck have to learn to get along. That's one advantage of unschooling. They HAVE to work it out because they spend so much time together.

6.Expecting your kids to become educated by osmosis.

This is magical thinking. They won't. You have to engage them. You have to make sure they get exposure to a wide range of activity.

7. Thinking that you are their one and all.

You are not. Share them.

8. Over-protectiveness.

Let them venture forth according to their strengths, age and ability.
Be sensitive to the needs of the changing and growing child.

9.Having to prove that unschooling works-especially in BIG ways.

Funnily enough, BIG gets redefined over and over and you realize that they are doing BIG things but not in the way you and others might have envisioned it. And remember, behind a shining star, there might be an even brighter star shining so be careful not to block that light because of your belief in the first.

10. Immediate evidence of 'learning' taking place.

Relax. You will be amazed at how what you angst over last year is all but a distant memory this year. Learning unfolds, often with out us noticing.

Note: This post was originally written and posted here.

7 conditions for 7 things kids need to succeed

Thank you CBC for the article entitled ‘The 7 things kids need to succeed: Character traits include grit, self-control and social intelligence.’
This piece is based on the work of journalist and author Paul Tough, ‘How Children Succeed—Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.’

There were a few thoughts that immediately popped in my mind when I read the article. The first thought was ‘how do we define success?’  I appreciated the mention of what ‘becoming successful adults’ means, according to Tough and that is ‘being successful in achieving their goals.’
Great! We are on the same path here. But where our paths separate is in how to achieve their goals.


Don't expect school to teach the 7 personality traits for success, as outlined by Tough: grit, curiosity, self-control, social intelligence, zest, optimism and gratitude.

Failure is the new winning: Discovery, innovation and growth come from learning from our mistakes

Happy New Year! I have to be honest, I have neglected my blog, but I promise, I will post weekly from now on, even if that means reposting (it likely will until things slow down in a few months).
In the mean time, check out my latest article in the Hamilton Spectator on failure; a reflection for the new year.

Jan 12. 2015
http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/5251292-failure-is-the-new-winning/

Hamilton Spectator
By Beatrice Ekwa Ekoko

A running joke in our family goes that growing up, we were supposed to be born knowing how to do things well. At the family's "haute couture" tailoring establishment, mom would throw something random at us, like embroidering an elaborate design on an African boubou and expect it to come out perfectly, beautiful stitches evenly distributed.

"I can't" was not option. You learned, and quick about it. Sounds tough, but I believe mom's 'can-do' attitude, helped foster resiliency to cope with life's challenges and failures, keeping us trying and not giving up easily.

Failure. Everybody is talking about how failure is not a bad thing, it's the new winning: discovery emerges from failing, innovation comes from failing, growth develops from making errors. In business, failure can be a stepping-stone toward fortune. In education, we're hearing how kids ought to be encouraged to explore and make mistakes.

In fact it's got to the point that admitting to mistakes, especially as a public figure has been twisted into one cheeky way of letting yourself off the hook: "I'm sorry. I'm human." (I like to make a distinction between making mistakes and wrongdoing. Mistakes are made unintentionally; they are errors of judgment. Wrongdoing is intentional — like cheating on your taxes or having an affair).

At a Toronto conference last month, the keynote of a very successful British Columbia nonprofit shared his failure story, complete with the yearly "failure report."

"Canadians don't like to admit failure," he commented in passing, he himself a born- and-raised American.

Whether or not we take offence, it's worth looking at: what is the cost of focusing solely on good points? At all levels, be it personal, at work, in the community or in the country, by not examining when or where we fail, we give up opportunities to figure out how we can improve and be better. Hiding or ignoring our shortcomings, hoping they'll go unnoticed is self-deception. We end up stunting ourselves.

In our high-speed world of constant change, that price is too high.

We are still acting and thinking in a way that doesn't correspond to the reality of today — whether than means social justice, economy and work, environment, education. The two aren't jiving.

School is still largely about getting the right answer, business carries on mostly seeking to make maximum profit (screw future generations) and being right is better than doing right.

But now more than ever, with the global-size problems we face, remaining uncomfortable with failure is not an option; we need to practice "smart failure," trying over and over again, striving for the changes that need to happen.

For change to occur, we have to risk failure — which of course is at the heart of the matter. The feeling of shame that failure can bring and the desire to avoid shame at any cost keeps people from risking failure.

16 Cs of Open Source Learning

I had the pleasure of presenting at Hamilton's Function Keys 2 Conference last month. My presentation was entitled 'Open-source learning: education from a wider community perspective, technology, and culture.' For the occasion, I developed 16 Cs of Open Source learning and here they are:

karlsson on the roof

Characteristics

• Curiosity 
• Creativity
• Coolness  
• Challenge
• Complexity
• Context
• Conversation
• Collaboration
• Connection 
• Contribution 

Examples of Open Source Learning:

• Community and Communities of Practice
• Crowd accelerated Innovation (‘cycles of improvement’ driven by people watching web videos TED- Chris Anderson: How YouTube is driving innovation).
• Collectives and Cooperatives
• Clubs and Circles and Cafe
• Culture
• Commons

I won't put up the whole presentation here but if you are interested contact me.

The child's need for complexity.

My mum gave my 4-year-old nephew a stuffed toy snake—cute for his baby sister but certainly not for a sophisticated “builder” like he considers himself to be. Without a backward glance, he tossed it over his shoulder and asked me, “Where is that other snake? The one with moving parts?”

Complexity. Something with a bit of a challenge; something that will stretch the mind, get you into the zone, require a change in perspective even.
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I recall when my teens were little. With the oldest, I was reading the Lord of the Rings when she was..7. And she loved it. It became the defining book of her life for years. She memorized entire passages out of that book!
Gosh, even before that, she was 6 and her sisters 3 and 4 and they were all reciting from a beautiful children's Shakespeare film series, Macbeth (“Is this a dagger which I see before me?.....I have thee not...Or art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation!” I recall my then 3 year old lisping away).

It was fun and exciting for them, and I am pretty sure they understood very little of it. But they felt the grandeur, the rhythm, the depth therein, and this was enough; this was what they needed to suck on and grow a little more.

Literature was never basic. Winnie the Pooh was the original material, with all the nuances, reflections, humour and unadulterated language intact. Nothing predictable and trite--material we parents could enjoy as well.
This is what they could grasp--that there was something bigger than they, something to aspire to, some knowledge that they would get to by and by, and eventually understand.

The world was delivered to them in its entirety; there were no bit-sized pieces offered up. They bit of what they could chew—how ever they could manage it, no pressure, just their own personal interest and curiosity. They could ruminate over what they took in, they could find meaning and apply it within the context of their lives.

To my delight, I read in the Telegraph about research conducted by the University of Liverpool (Centre for Research into Reading, Information and Linguistic Systems) that shows how brain activity is increased by exposure to poetry or language such as Shakespeare’s.
For example volunteers read a line from King Lear: “A father and a gracious aged man: him have you madded”. They then read a simpler version: “A father and a gracious aged man: him you have enraged.”
The researchers report that Shakespeare’s use of the adjective “mad” as a verb sparked a higher level of brain activity than the straightforward prose. The study tested how long the effect lasted. It found that the “peak” triggered by the unfamiliar word was sustained onto the following phrases, suggesting the striking word had hooked the reader, with their mind “primed for more attention.”
Philip Davis, an English professor and research on the study explains, "The research shows the power of literature to shift mental pathways, to create new thoughts, shapes and connections in the young and the staid alike.”
The study also mentions that self-reflection is enhanced  and what is education without self-knowledge?
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And now when I hear about parents fretting that their 4 year old doesn’t know her letters, I cringe!
“She doesn’t know the basics!” the parent wails. “Everyone else her age does! She will be left behind,” wahhhh!
There is a reason why the basics are called basic—because they are just that. They are quickly learnable.
I try to reassure parents with young children that they are exactly where they should be--playing, being read to, been taken out into nature to observe first hand the complexity of their natural world, every leaf, every rock, every cloud, a miracle unto itself.

Challenge children with ideas to mull over; have discussions with them.  Many well known people have been raised this way; young Leonardo da Vinci hung out with his uncle, who spent hours with him, examining nature and discussing their findings.  Louisa Alcott's childhood home life was filled with evenings of Concord's most stimulating minds, and walks and talks with Henry David Thoreau.  Einstein's parents encouraged his questions (once he finally decided to start talking).

Seeking out and embracing complexity with children can be a powerful experience for the both of you.