Deb Lewis

***i am wondering how your children learn much when its just left up to
them?***

The best thing you could do right now is relax and enjoy your baby.
While you watch your baby learn to walk and talk and zoom around and
throw and climb and dress (and undress!<g>) and all the things babies and
toddlers do, you will begin to understand how and why kids learn.

Kids learn from living in an environment where interesting things are
happening. They learn because they are part of the human race. We are
creatures who are learning every minute of our lives.

***...seems to me like the kids wouldn't want to learn on their own due
to lack of motivation...***

I'm gently offering this as something to ponder; Why do you think a
person wouldn't want to learn? What about being ignorant and feeling
left out would appeal to a person?

When my son was very little he watched us and saw that we took a glass
from the cabinet when we wanted something to drink. He understood where
the glasses where and what they were for. He couldn't reach them, so he
surmised he could push a chair to the counter and climb for a glass.
What made him do that? He could have asked for a drink (he learned to
talk very early) so why did he want to find a way to get the glass
himself? It's because that's what humans do. We observe, think,
participate, learn and finally "do".

The bigger question in my mind is why anyone would ever imagine a person
wouldn't want to? Wait, I know! Because of school. In school we're
made to believe learning comes in categories with some aspects being much
more important than others. We're made to feel we're empty vessels
until an expert opens our head and pours the knowledge in. It's just
not so. Humans existed long before schools and if school was the only
way to learn what we'd needed to get along in the world no one would have
been left.

*** i cant imagine a 12 y.o. learning something "important" like math, or
spelling
, or whatever , without any structure.***

Conveniently, my son is twelve. <g> He's never been to school and has
always been an unschooler. This week he's learning to drive. He told me
he wanted to learn and we've been going out on the back roads and he's
been driving. He's doing very well. He's a kind of natural at the
wheel, maybe from all these years of playing video games and keeping
characters aligned on narrow paths, avoiding obstacles.

He's learning about the life in Iraq for military men as his uncle is
here on R&R.
He's learning more about Hitler after checking out "The Rise and Fall of
the Third Reich" by William Shirer.
It's an enormous book, and dry, and he's plodding through it and looking
up or asking about things he doesn't understand.
He's learning about Yellow Bellied Marmots because we pass a family of
them every evening on our walk and these are the first he's been able to
really observe. He's looked up everything he can find about them.

You don't have time to read everything he's learning about in summer of
2004. <g> But he made coffee for my mom when she came and I was in the
shower and they were happily chatting about hummingbirds when I came out.
He bought me a Chai when he ran into the store for a Coke yesterday. I
didn't ask for one, he just noticed them there in the cooler and knew I
liked them and brought one out to me, paid for with his own money. Last
night he did his own laundry and took out the trash. I didn't ask him
to, he just saw there were things needed to be done. All of this is
important life stuff and all of it came to him without lessons.

This is not a remarkable boy in any sense that would impress snobby IQ
testers or "educational" professionals. He can add and subtract and form
a complete sentence but there's nothing wildly spectacular about him
unless you consider his confidence and joy and fearlessness when learning
and his perfect understanding of what it is to be a free, capable,
learning human being.

***"important" like math, or spelling, or whatever ,***

I'm forty one and I couldn't recite the multiplication tables to you nor
could I spell "multiplication" correctly without the help of spell check.
<G> Yet I'll bet anyone who looks at this e-mail will be able to read
the words. (Whether it will make sense to them is a different matter.
<g>) I've owned my own business, worked for people who'd have me back
again, I can balance my checkbook and I've written letters to my senators
and congressmen. I'm getting by! I'm not a math wiz nor a spelling wiz
and I went to public school, had a structured education and somehow
missed those things anyway. Still, without mastering those skills I've
had a successful, happy life. I've lived all these years since school
and I haven't needed to recite multiplication tables once. I'm sure
it's on my permanent record somewhere that I'll never make it. <g>

***i understand that they learn thru life experiences, but they don't
necessarily learn every thing they might need.***

I went to school but I didn't learn everything I needed. Lessons are no
guarantee a person is learning, much less learning "everything". But
what you come to understand about learning is that it's not a thing
that's ever accomplished. It's a continual process. When we need or
want information we find it. When we need or want a skill we acquire it.
People go on from school to hold jobs, pay taxes, vote, buy properties,
find life partners, have babies, cope with illness, travel, explore,
climb mountains... how did they learn that? They learned by living.

***how do you get a child to want to learn instead of play video games,
etc?.***

Play *is* learning. Playing video games might be one of the most
effective ways to acquire skills I've ever seen. The player is
interested, challenged, but not beyond what she can eventually master and
encouraged to go on by the thrill of accomplishment and ever increasing
challenge. Just like life, only with pause, save, and restart. <g>

You don't have to get a child to want to learn. All you have to do is
avoid turning leaning into a boring, terrible experience. The way you
avoid that is by seeing your child as a whole and perfect learning
individual and then, helping that individual do the things he or she
wants to do. Don't give lessons, don't lecture, don't make learning out
to be something that has to be done *to* your child. Convince yourself
learning is what people are all about.

Read what you can about unschooling and let go of schoolish ideas about
what people need. Look at your remarkable child and watch how life
carries your baby along. Provide him or her with interesting things and
a happy mom and days full of play and you will very quickly understand
how and why kids learn - how and why we all learn, our whole lives long.


And ask lots of questions on lists like this. <g>

Deb