From: Mischa_Sandberg@mindlink.bc.ca (Mischa Sandberg)
Newsgroups: misc.education
Subject: Don't beat on them. They DO learn by themselves.
Date: 3 Oct 92 20:56:46 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Distribution: world

> Geoff Tuffli writes:
> Practical experimentation with this idea, that yes, amazingly enough,
> children
> _do_ learn best when not being hammered at does exist. The most obvious
> example of this that I can think of off hand is the Summerhill school in
> England (running since the early part of the century.) While the
> circumstances
> there are certainly difficult to reproduce, the basic idea that children's
> native curiosity is usually the strongest motivator was fairly well
> documented
> there. (The school in effect did not force children to even go to classes
> or give out grades.)
>
> My suspicion is that the primary reason more research on this has not been
> done is due to the counter-intuitiveness of this - it is practically a
> paradigm
> of our civilization that a child must be forcefed or they will not learn
> anything.
>
>         Geoff Tuffli

I've no acquaintance with anyone from Summerhill, but I can speak from
experience with my own kids (homeschooled). Most people get the weird notion
that, unless you beat on someone (psychologically, scholastically, whatever)
they will not learn the things that are practically valued (mathematics,
grammar, "classic" lit, etc.). Worse yet, they get the notion that
some of this stuff is HARD.

My nine-year-old is hardly a genius. She's known for years that her
parents can multiply and divide in their heads; and so, two months
ago, she spent about a week practicing her times tables. She wanted to,
kept at both me and my wife to "try her" on them, until she has them
down flat. Last month, she worked out long division (on paper) and
a bunch of methods for doing division in her head, for smaller numbers.
She fished out the "Golden" workbooks for long division out of the
pile we keep, and worked through both of them without much head-scratching,
over a couple of days. On reflection, those workbooks must represent
at least a couple of months out of the lives of kids REQUIRED to
learn long division and fractions.

All in all, under two weeks work, including adding mixed fractions.
No, my wife and I are not hot-housers.

I have read about, and forgotten the name of, one of the free schools
where the kids learned all of K-7 arithmetic in twenty hours. If I
locate the story I'll post particulars. Food for thought, eh?

Anecdotal evidence (including my own family's story) is hardly evidence
at all, for those of you who are skeptical of teaching kids to respect
learning, then letting them get on with it. But, may I suggest that,
as you read stories like mine, that you consider what your own kids
are most certainly born capable of: learning without the blood, toil,
tears and sweat required in marching children lock-step through a
curriculum.

--
Mischa Sandberg ... Mischa_Sandberg@mindlink.bc.ca
                 or uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!Mischa_Sandberg
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Engineers think equations are an approximation of reality.
Physicists think reality is an approximation of the equations.
Mathematicians never make the connection.
Newsgroups: misc.education