What's wrong with this picture?

There’s something profoundly ironic about the difficulty professional educators have in accepting the power of an individual’s capacity and desire to learn.  I’ve even been in a seminar recently where the presenter joyfully produced a photo of a sign over a school gate:

“If you’re not here, you can’t learn!”

The teachers in the room loved it.

So, what's wrong with that?
What's wrong with that is that the real question is not if we’re learning, or where we're learning, it’s what we’re learning.

Would we accept a doctor telling us that if we aren’t in hospital we can’t heal, or a lawyer telling us that if we don’t have a defence attorney we’re not safe? I don’t think so.

[Thought: Perhaps everybody who works in education (or wants to) should be handcuffed to a 14-year-old for a fortnight or so to remind them what we're really there for, how hard and complicated life is, and how much our kids need us to help them find the things that will make their lives feel like a gift not a penance...]

Learning is what children do.
They can't help it. They sure as heck don't need us to tell them how to do it. Babies and young children are natural learners, natural scientists. They spend their lives conducting experiments - testing the world around them in order to understand it. Everybody’s first five years are shaped by a series of "scientific" experiments - an ongoing series of situations where you interact with the world around you in a purposeful way in order to refine or expand your understanding of it…Taste… Observation… Manipulation... Interaction…. An ongoing and vitally important process of trial and error. It may lack the level of verbal sophistication you would use now, but it's a robust scientific process none the less.

New Zealand's ECE curriculum by the way is a marvellous document - well worth a look as a model of how a genuinely student-centred curriculum can be created that works at a national level. Our school sector is moving towards a similar model, with the "revised" New Zealand Curriculum. There's a separate and parallel document for Māori medium education (Māori are New Zealand's first people).

If you want to understand learning - watch a kid 
 Back in Playcentre, my working definition of a scientist was "someone who finds out the answers to questions"… Now, doesn't that sound suspiciously like a definition of learning? [And I do mean “me learning”, not “you trying to teach me” which is something different]

So it's no wonder that children love science. It has been their constant companion since before they could talk.

And then they go to school, and we tell them that they can’t learn unless we let them...
 

So, let me ask you again - what's WRONG with this picture?

Things that get in the way

It's been a pretty stressful week one way and  another.

Work's been busy, home's always busy - just getting everything done that needs to be done. Making ends meet is a constant counterpoint to whatever else is going on in my life at any given time.   I may or may not be coming down with something - and to top it all off, I spent yesterday taking my son to the hospital for emergency surgery on his hand.

In the midst of all this, I'm trying to find enough spare time (and enough spare synapses) to process - and document - the thinking I'm doing about things educational.

One of the things that's becoming obvious is that it's incredibly difficult to assimilate anything new when you're already stressed. Hardly a unique or original observation, but one that's been reinforced again recently.

Timing is as important as time.

A number of years ago now I started learning Te Reo Maori. I really enjoyed it, and I have made several attempts since then to refresh and improve my ability to speak and understand it. So far I haven't got very far.  I'm not sure if the reasons I can identify are genuine reasons or just rationalisations. I feel guilty, frustrated and resigned about it by turns. But the bottom line is, there's more I want to do than there are hours (or kilojoules) available to do them all, and much as I want to do it, the timing just hasn't been right  yet. Meaning it hasn't got to the top of my priority list yet. 

One of the lessons I've absorbed on my way through life (social conditioning) is that this really means I lack the dedication, the genuine desire to learn Te Reo, and the intellectual honesty to admit those failings. In other words, there must be someone at fault, and it must be me. However much my adult rational self may know that putting food on the table for my kids, and holding down a job, being available to my friends and family when they need my support ...you know, reality... are legitimate priorities, part of me is equally sure that the only reason for not doing something is lack of trying hard enough.

I suspect we are still teaching our kids those same unhelpful lessons.

The reality is that life does get in the way sometimes, and we do have to prioritise what we do. Sometimes all the pieces fall into place, and we can make huge strides. Not only is learning not linear, but it's not constant either. It happens in fits & starts (the 'clumpy universe' again). So why do we insist on designing learning environments and curricula for our children that behave as if they are?