As most readers of Seeing With New Eyes will know, we don’t have any educational structure at all in our house, and only a very loose daily pattern that we tend to follow to keep me sane, and even this is subject to huge amounts of flexibility and change.  So how do the children learn anything???  Occassionally I’ve written posts discussing things like this.  I don’t really like the idea of identifying learning taking place as I prefer feeling that the children really are just living and enjoying life and that they learn what is important to them, whether I can see it happening or not. 

I also disagree with some writers on autonomy in childhood (most notably Jan Fortune-Wood) who don’t feel that John Holt was right in his trust that true learning was somehow mystical and worked by some unseen process of absorption in a way we can’t possibly understand.  I see my children doing it all the time!  Who knows what they learn from a conversation?  I think it’s possible they even learn things other than the answer to the question they’ve just asked.  They wouldn’t be able to identify it, so how would I be able to?  Their minds are just constantly working, thinking, adapting, placing new ideas in context with old ones, consolidating things they already know etc.  I just think children and learning is like an ice-berg - we only ever see the very tip of it and have no right to see any more than the tip they choose to show us. 

And this is what is wrong with school - they just focus on that tip of learning - the bit they can see and test and check up on.  But the tip can be fragile and breaks easily so what is far more important is nurturing what is going on under the water - the bits that will be there for the child’s lifetime.  How on earth can that happen in school when so much importance is placed on ‘the tip’?  How can children really get to the depths of their learning under the water when they are forced to pay all their attention to the fragile and unimportant ‘tip’ throughout their schooling period - the bits they’ll forget as soon as they’ve passed the relevant ‘tests’ unless they happen to have a special interest in whatever it is?

Back to my own children, who are given the freedom and autonomy to focus on the depths of their learning that are important to *them* and relevant to *their* lives - not imposed on them by the powers that be.  On Friday the girls asked to do some cutting out so we got out some of our Guardian wall posters that we’ve been cutting out gradually in order to use the pictures for anything they fancy - posters/sorting/whatever.  Or maybe it’s just the enjoyment of improving on their cutting skills.  Who cares?  Not me .  As long as they are enjoying it then they *must* be getting something from it whether or not it fits in with a curriculum.  Anyway, we managed to get two posters cut up before we had to go out to a friend’s house and, my goodness, the conversations (and other things) that took place while we worked together!  We talked about the things we were cutting out.

“What’s this I’m cutting out now, Mummy?”

“What is a newt?”

“What do those words say at the top, Mummy?”

“Mummy, Cotton-tail has got her bit all wet under the tap!  She’ll get our bits wet too if she’s not careful and then they’ll be ruined!”

Cotton-tail had her own pieces of the wall chart to ‘cut out’ with her plastic scissors (normally I’d give her a normal pair, if she were any other toddler, but Cotton-tail does like to wave them around alarmingly opening and shutting them in a very scary way!  She started by having a go with the scissors, then decided she’d prefer to just spend some time putting the pieces of wall chart in and out of the folder we were storing our cut-outs in.  First of all she had to learn how to undo and do up the popper holding it closed.  After she’d done that a few times, and put her pieces of paper in and out of it a few times, she decided she’d see what happened if she screwed up her pieces of paper and then took them to the downstairs loo to see what would happen to them if she wet them under the tap.  Then she brought them back in and stuffed them in the folder again - hence the last comment above!  This game went on for some time.  Unfortunately she hasn’t yet learnt to turn the tap off so we quite frequently suddenly realise we can hear running water and have to rush to turn it off ourselves, hoping that it hasn’t been running and wasting water for too long!

Mopsy recognised a pike which features in one of her favourite books and was very pleased with herself. 

And so on and so forth.

What else have we been up to?  Well Flopsy has spent the last few months pretending to talk in French and asking me to tell her some French words.  We considered going to a local HE French class but Flopsy doesn’t really ‘do’ classes so didn’t bother in the end.  Yesterday my Grandad gave me a set of 6 ‘learn to speak French’ cds that he’d saved the tokens for from the Times and Flopsy was thrilled.  We listened to the first one on the way home in the car (a 45 minute journey) in the evening - four 15min lessons each very similar to the last to give plenty of practice - by the third lesson I could hear both Flopsy and Mopsy trying to repeat some of the French words and this morning Flopsy asked straight away if we could put the cd on again.  If this is anything like her recent dinosaur craze (which consisted of buying toy dinosaurs, getting dinosaur books for her birthday, buying Walking With Dinosaurs with her birthday money, getting yet more dinosaur books out of the library, visiting the Natural History Museum and more; and which was very, very involved and indepth and was joined by Mopsy with nearly all of it - alongside this, Mopsy’s also had a very deep interest in “Great White Sharks that eat people”!), then I can see us having the cds on in the car for quite some time, and ending up with a 5yo who knows a fair amount of French. 

Now, my pre-knowing-about-and-understanding-and-valuing-autonomous-learning head says to me ‘Great!  Something I can ‘tick off” but my new-improved-absolute-respect-for-my-children-and-for-them-owning-their-learning head says ‘Great!  Something to make car journeys more enjoyable for them!’ and the learning that may or may not take place becomes irrelevant.

Sandra Dodd recently got people to take part in a ‘Learn Nothing Day’ and the response was fairly unanimous - how can you learn nothing?  John Holt says that you’d have to shut away a child in a dark room for his entire childhood if you wanted to get him to not learn anything and even that wouldn’t work completely.  Just because we can’t quantify or test what someone has learnt, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, and in fact, the bits we can quantify and test are probably far less important than the bits we can’t because the ‘testable’ bits are the bits that won’t stick.  I’ve often thought that revision for exams is a bit of a daft thing to do - if you have to revise the stuff, then you don’t know it, you’re just memorising it.  If you really and truly *know* the stuff that will be in the exam, you’ll only need to revise a few specific things like dates, maybe, in a history exam for example - the bits you’d normally look in a book for.  But we’re told in school to spend weeks and weeks revising for exams - doesn’t that suggest that we don’t really *know* the stuff they’ve been feeding us for the last year?

Anyway, because of the inspiration and trust in the process I’ve gained from reading other blogs of autonomous home educators (or unschoolers as they’re known in the US), I will continue to jot down here little snippets of how it works for us because I know, from experience, that it is difficult to trust in a process that you can’t see happening until you’ve spent a lot of time with other people who do trust in it (both IRL and online).