Two thirds unschooling
(First of all, Mom, if you are reading this, please know that we love you and our hearts are with you always.)
I’m sitting here on my screen porch with my new puppy playing at my feet. I’m also eating Hagen-Dazs coffee ice cream (too much, I fear!). I went to hear Andrew Pudewa speak on Tuesday night and I’ve been mulling over his talk for a couple of days now. I still don’t think I can put my thoughts together very coherently. I just am not very eloquent of late. My brain is too scattered by too many things. But I do have some half-thoughts and reactions.
I think though I’ll stick with just one thing he said that really made an impact on me. He said at one point that after years in the education field and as a homeschooling father of seven, that he really didn’t agree with the idea of ’subjects’ to be taught. He said people always worried about these dozen or so different subjects: penmanship, science, math, writing, history, geography etc. He said that he started to see education as divided into three categories, not subjects. The three are: character, knowledge and skills. He said that character was THE most important and that the other stuff could be ignored or downplayed if there was a real character issue. He basically said having knowledge and skills without character creates evil people. So developing good character is essential to all else.
Then he said there’s the category of knowledge which is acquiring information and learning about the world.
And then there is the skills area, and these are the things you need to make you capable of performing or surviving in the world. Things like reading, writing, basic math, etc.
I can’t even really remember the point he was making here, except that for some reason that construct of what education is really clarified things for me.
I started analyzing what goes on in this home, in the name of education, and I realize I am still so caught up in the ’subject-think’ that I often don’t see the forest for the trees.
This morning I took the younger three on a very nice fieldtrip. We went to a farm that raises llamas, chickens, ducks, pigs, goats and sheep. It was really interesting and we had a good time. The kids got to gather eggs in the hen house and also feed the chickens. We learned a lot. While we were driving there I was telling the kids about the three categories of education that Mr. Pudewa discussed. I said I think we are okay on the character part, though we all have faults that we need to work on of course. But we try to live our faith. And I think we are fine with the knowledge part. You kids are smart and know a lot more than I ever did at your age. (I think this is the part where John Holt’s phrase “Fish swim, birds fly, children learn” really rings true to me. Children are like sponges soaking up all they can from the world around them. And this is where I am totally in line with unschooling,)
It has always been the skills area that has given me the most trouble! I think this is why I can’t ever seem to be a complete unschooler. Certain skills have not come easily to my kids and so I have witnessed the necessity of formal instruction in them. I try to make the formal instruction fun and interesting or at least not burdensome, but I can’t get around the fact that for MY children, they seem, in MY judgment, to need it.
I said to the kids, Josh especially since he was sitting in the front with me, so that’s why I really like just focusing on language arts, Latin and math in the morning and then just being more casual about all the other stuff. We learn so much from reading and from fieldtrips and TV and discussions.
Any they all were nodding their heads in agreement. Like it made perfect sense to them!
This probably shouldn’t be some break through moment for me. I think I’ve even said similar things in the past, but for some reason it seemed to really be meaingful this time. I seem to really identify with it in some stronger way. Maybe it was just the tidy way that Mr. Pudewa divided things up and I could see how unschooling fit with 2/3’s and how it didn’t with the 1/3. It made it much easier to see how formal instruction and unschooling can work hand in hand in our family. And realizing that made me feel much more on top of this whole homeschooling experiment I’ve got going on here!
