Our Beliefs About Learning Can Be Limited or Incomplete
We unschoolers kind of do experiements. One of the experiments many of us do is,
"What will happen if I do not teach basic literacy or academics (like reading, writing, basic maths) to the child proactively?"
"Will s/he learn it at some time? Or will never learn it when somebody (human, book or program) does not teach it proactively? Would s/he remain illiterate?"
And the result is,
Most (I am not writing All to avoid generalization, but almost all) are going to learn it anyway (some sooner, some later) if (and big If) they are living in an environment surrounded by text/audio//maths media or medium. The medium could be a book, gadgets .. yes the screen, videos, or interactions with humans.
If we unschoolers did not do these experiments, we perhaps would have lived with the belief that children learn basic literacy or academic skills only when they get it taught proactively through tutoring or schooling.
My son never went to school. I started with homeschooling kind of practices, trying to embed or integrate learning in the games we played.
But he used to resist, like, "Why do you need to put teaching or lessons in the game?"
And my response was, okay, let's see how it goes without proactively putting lessons in play.
And, he went on learning reading, writing, speaking a non-native language like English (our natural language is HIndi), basic calculations, etc sans any formal proactive teaching to acquire these skills.
If every baby gets a walker at the age of 7 months, we may start believing that a walker is a must for learning to walk for a baby. And who knows, maybe after 10 generations human babies would evolve to be unable to learn to walk without the support of the walker.
I am not proposing unschooling for every family.
Parents are valid in their beliefs that their children would need proactive teaching or tutoring or worksheets/workbooks or teachers or online schools or traditional schools.
Parents are right, There can be multiple contexts for the choices we make in our circumstances.
The purpose to write this blog article is,
- There can be multiple rights, not just one.
- There can be multiple pathways and possibilities.
- Our beliefs can be valid, but many times, they may be limited or incomplete.
More Unschooling and Deschooling related reading