A Web of Learning
Since pursuing independent study I have experienced a subtle yet profound alteration in my thought pattern. With no linear, airtight program already outlined for me, I find myself pursuing a growing web of thought in which any subject might inspire the study of any number of other subjects. This approach has its advantages and its challenges.
It is a very rich and stimulating experience. I thrive on the excitement of always having something new to learn, and in the freedom and time I have to investigate anything that interests me. Still, I find that I must get used to a different definition of accomplishment. I don’t have a fixed, neat syllabus that allows me to tick off assignments. I cannot ever tell myself, “And now you are finished.” There is so much frustration and wonder in the acknowledgment that there will always be more to learn.
I am also finding that my self-discipline is not what I thought it was. The discipline and motivation that kept me faithfully to someone else’s learning schedule did not readily translate into the discipline and energy needed to create and follow my own schedule. How do you continue to pursue an ever-expanding network of thought, while choosing to concentrate and accomplish in a smaller area? I haven’t definitely answered that question yet.
One of the subjects I have been pursuing alongside others is education itself, its philosophies and methods. This lead me to read the excellent and thought-provoking book How Children Learn by John Holt, the father of the unschooling movement. While I do not agree with all of Mr. Holt’s perceptions and opinions (Charlotte Mason remains my favorite), I did identify with much of what he had to say about how children think and learn best. He has this to say about the holistic, fluid nature of natural, self-initiated learning.
[Children] see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do. It is natural for them to jump from one thing to another, and to make the kinds of connections that are rarely made in formal classes and textbooks. They make their own paths into the unknown, paths we would never think of making for them. Thus, for example, if we decided that it was important for children to know about the Trojan War, or archaeology, would we start by talking to them about scuba divers? [This last is a reference to the unexpected but logical sequence of interests pursued by a seven-year-old boy, outlined earlier by Holt.] Certainly not. Even if we did, there are many children for whom this would not be a good beginning, or even a beginning at all. Finally, when they are following their own noses, children go faster, cover more territory than we would ever think of trying to mark out for them, or make them cover.
People have often said to me, nervously or angrily, that if we let children learn what they want to know they will become narrow specialists, nutty experts in baseball batting averages and such trivia. Not so. Many adults do this; the universities are full of people who have shut themselves up in little fortresses of artificially restricted private learning. But healthy children, still curious and unafraid, do not learn this way. Their learning does not box them in, it leads them out into life in many directions. Each new thing they learn makes them aware of other new things to be learned. Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food.
Keeping their curiosity “well supplied with food” doesn’t mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food—like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).
John Holt. How Children Learn, Revised Edition.
Chapter Six: Art, Math & Other Things, p. 232-3
Tuesday, January 18, 2011