What if they aren't interested in learning?
Joyce Fetteroll
I got an email about one of my pages on my unschooling site. I
thought the response might be useful for others too -- Joyce
I was excited to read what the answer was, but the question ended
up going in a different direction than I expected.
I can see that. I was answering from the point of view of kids who've
always been unschooling and whether they ever avoid learning. Maybe
I'll add this response for those people who are wondering about their
schooled kids.
(The page she's referring to is:
What if they lack interest in learning?)
My kids have been in public school most of their lives. I would
like to unschool but when I ask my son what he would like to learn
he says I don't know. If I show him something I think he might be
interested in I ask him and again get the I don't know response.
Simple answer: Don't ask! 😉
Rather than asking what he'd like to learn, just do things he
*enjoys*, expose him to things you think he might enjoy (as opposed
to things you think would be good for him!)
Rather than looking at him as a vessel you want to fill, look at him
as a person who is reaching out towards what interests him. Rather
than looking at what interests him through a lens of school that
filters out everything that wouldn't be done in school, look at
*all* that he's interested in: video games, cartoons, skateboarding,
swimming, playing with friends ...
Think about it this way: What if your husband were hovering around,
waiting for you to do something that resembled school and kept asking
you what you would like to learn? What would you say? How would you
feel?
How do you get a kid that has been desensitized to learning to get
excited again?
Schooled (and previously schooled) kids look like they aren't
interested in learning. All they want to do is play.
That's because:
1) The parents are looking at what the child is doing through a lens
of school. If it doesn't look like something a child would do in
school then it doesn't look like learning.
2) Kids need time and freedom to say "No thanks" to anything that
they associate with dullness, tediousness, difficulties of school.
3) They need time to fill up on what's been controlled or allowed in
small doses: TV, running around, "doing nothing" (ie, thinking about
stuff!)
Kids who have been in school or schooled at home need time to
deschool before they can look all of life as potentially interesting.
In the beginning they're going to do a lot of playing that looks like
pure fun. That's because school paints big swaths of life with a
brush of dullness. Kids associate "math" and "science" and "reading"
and "writing" and "history" with being forced to read about and
listen to and memorize and practice ideas that have the life sucked
out of them so that even if they had been interested at the
beginning, they soon want to avoid them.
Schooled kids' play looks like avoiding (school) learning. It often
is! (They can't avoid learning. They're *always* learning. But they
can avoid anything that reminds them of school!) They need down time
from being forced to learn. So parents assume that it's natural for
kids to avoid learning. It isn't. Kids *want* to learn. They—just
like adults—don't want to be forced to learn things that have no
meaning for them.
How many kids shut down when they see percentages in real life? That
isn't because percentages are hard. It's because *in school* they're
hard: learning the details of something you've had little experience
with removed from any context you could relate to is hard. It's like
memorizing grammar rules and vocabulary to a language you've never
heard. In real life percentages are just useful ways of presenting
information: resizing pictures in an art program, power left in a
video game, how much you'll save on a sale item, batting averages ...
Unschooled kids' learning looks like play too, but for them the world
isn't divided into learning and play. It's divided into things
they're interested in and things they aren't yet interested in.
Genghis Khan, Spongebob, spiders, playacting, drawing, baking
cookies, Midsummer Night's Dream, Lord of the Rings, good guys vs.
bad guys pretend play, model rockets, CSI: Miami, stuffed animals,
Hot Wheels ... they're all just part of life that they're interested
in or not right now. (You may have, as you read the list,
unconsciously checked off items as either "learning" or "entertainment/
play". That's a useful habit to be aware of and work on eliminating!)
Unschooled kids learning does look like play. The process is similar
to how they acquired English: They didn't decide they wanted to get
better at speaking English so they could live life better. They just
lived life and did things that interested them. English was a tool
they picked up occasionally to get what they wanted because it was
more efficient than crying. 😉 As a side effect of using English,
they got better at it. And the better they got at it, the more they
used it because it was more useful. And so they got even better.
Learning about everything is like that. We use things and we get
better as a side effect. Unlike the message we get from school, we
*don't* need to understand something before we use it. We just need
to understand enough of it to make it work. And the more we use it,
the better we understand it. We use a bit of knowledge and connect it
to other bits of knowledge and slowly build up an understanding of
the world.
If you go here:
SandraDodd.com/joycefetteroll
and click on "Transcript", there's a good
explanation of how natural learning works. (←Here's a link to that. —Sandra)
All that unfortunately makes unschooling sound like stand back and
let kids play. But, no, parents have an active role. More active
*after* kids are done deschooling. The best thing you can do while
they're deschooling is let them play. And help them play. Make play
dates. Make sure they have things they enjoy playing with. *Be* with
them. Find out why they enjoy something so much. When they feel free—rule of thumb is one month for each year they've been in school,
starting from the time when you last pressured them to learn
something—be more active about running things through their lives:
movies, TV shows, books, places to go: ethnic restaurants, museums,
monster truck pulls, walks in the woods, funky stores ....
Look for the delight in life and it will infect your kids. 😊 As long
as it's *honest* interest and delight! If it's fake interest to get
them to pay attention to something you think would be good for them,
they're going to notice and avoid it. It's the tactic they've been
awash in since Kindergarten: "Learning is Fun!"
There's another article on my page at Sandra's site:
Five Steps to
Unschooling that might help you too.
Joyce
Answers to common unschooling questions:
joyfullyrejoycing.com
Blog of writing prompts for speculative fiction writers:
Dragon Writing Prompts
