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Conventional schools wave a rhetorical baton at learning, but the overwhelming majority of them in this country are organized around a single fundamental principle: control. Students are told what to learn and when to learn it, and what to think and when to think it. Their physical movement is scrupulously managed. Their emotional selves are shuttered because feelings are by their very nature resistant to outside control, and so the entire focus of the educational process is on the mental life of the child.
The centrality of control is hardly incidental. It was carefully built into every facet by the model's designers…
But Mercogliano moves on, and rather than a screed against authoritarian schooling we get a nuanced, well-reasoned exploration about the role of play and solitude in children's' lives and how much it has changed for the worse in such a short time. Indeed, the problem is described broadly, implicating not just too much schooling, but the ascendance of behavioral psychiatry in institutional settings, highly-targeted marketing to children and anxious, stressed-out parents, the diminishment of opportunities to enjoy nature and the outdoors that children have been nurtured by for centuries, and overly-nurturing parenting methods.
Mercogliano is a wonderful writer, stringing stories together about the children he knows and his own childhood with research and history in a convincing argument that we are domesticating childhood and driving out the adventure, "the inner wildness" that animates child to explore and love the world when they are young. You'll find all sorts of great quotes and research in this dense but easily read book, but what convinces me about Mercogliano's ideas are not his data. After all, someone who supports increasing schooling and extreme child safety measures has their cadre of great quotes and research at the ready too. What's convincing is what is so often missing in academic research jousting - Mercogliano's honesty and passion. He isn't feathering his professional nest or pandering to the intelligentsia, he is genuinely concerned that we are infantilizing our children in the name of protecting them.
Unschoolers in particular will find support for the "benign neglect" attitude towards education that we are so often accused of. Allowing children to make mistakes and learn from them, to play as much as possible, keeping communication between adults and children open all the time, working with, not on, children: these and other ideas are described not only from research but from Chris' own experiences with children. All homeschoolers will find support for letting children of any age engage in real work, as well as benefit from pondering the research cited about too much exposure to television, the Internet, computer games, and after-school enrichment activities. Finally, taking Mercogliano's comments about "helicopter parents" to heart could help relieve some guilt and anxiety that many homeschooling mothers seem to feel if they're not making their kids do something "educational" or "productive." A quick summary of Mercogliano's advice to parents could be: Relax and work with your child's inner wildness to lead them towards becoming well-adjusted adults.
Mercogliano has some great insights in this book, and these two paragraphs capture the problem and the solution beautifully:
In order to rescue childhood from the onslaught of modernity, we have to create a world in which young people are free to be their autonomous selves, to explore, experiment, and learn from the own experience. At the same time, this has to be a world in which they enjoy enduring, nurturing, mutually honest relationships with adults—parents and otherwise—who can lend them the necessary support as they attempt to navigate their personal pathways to adulthood. They also need equally honest and enduring relationships with their peers, because, while inner wildness draws sustenance from solitude, isolation and alienation drain its energy and force it to retreat.
Young people today have an unprecedented opportunity to explore and express their unique reasons for being on this earth, and yet they can't do it if their inner wildness is in tatters. Yes, their ultimate challenge is to find their own way and to allow their personal daimon to guide them. But they need a kind of help that must be sensitively offered, a measured form of assistance that doesn't discount their ability to figure life out for themselves. Perhaps more than anything, they need us to patrol the perimeters of childhood and defend them from the invasive tendrils of control.
Here are two science books that I haven't seen mentioned in the usual round-ups of texts and materials for sale to schools and homeschoolers that I think are worth a look. — PF
101 Things Everyone Should Know About Science by Dia Michels and Nathan Levy (Science Naturally, 2006). This is a great conversation starter and point of departure for children to explore science questions that interest them. Younger kids may need the text read to them, but it is written in clear prose. The first section of the book has the 101 questions, such as '"Why do scientists wear white lab coats?" or "What was one of the things that helped Ludwig van Beethoven compose music even though he was deaf?" The rest of the book supplies the answers. Useful for car rides and impromptu "Trivial Pursuit" games about science at home. For more information: www.sciencenaturally.com
THE SCIENCE EXPLORER: An Exploratorium-at-home book by Pat Murphy, Ellen Klages, Linda Shore, and the Staff of the Exploratorium (Henry Holt and Co., 1996). The San Francisco Exploratorium is one of those places I look forward to visiting because I've heard and seen nothing but great things about it. This book is a wonderful presentation of not just science, but also of the fun and excitement that can happen when experiments are being done. And there are some really good experiments in this book; it's not your usual collection of optical illusions and do-it-yourself projects. This is a family-oriented collection of science activities, meaning it's specially designed to be used by parents and children together to do experiments with materials that are readily available at home or at a local store. Available in bookstores.
NOTE: For a site full of free toymaking and science projects be sure to visit Arvind Gupta's website. Click here for more information.
Unconventional ideas for teaching and learning.
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
IN DEFENSE OF CHILDHOOD: Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness, By Chris Mercogliano (Beacon Press, 2007).
This is an important book about education that is also a sharp social critique of our rapidly vanishing childscape. It is a book about schools and childhood that examines not only this tightening social construct, but also how we adults are an integral part of the problem and the solution. Written by an inner-city alternative school teacher with 35 years of experience, Chris Mercogliano of the Albany Free School proposes something rarely seen or heard in the education or social services professions: he advocates for less adult involvement in children's play and daily lives. The author makes no bones about his educational biases when he writes:
Support for Alternatives to School
Unschooling/Homeschooling in the Media
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