Thinking about Readiness

On my other blog I collected the homeschooljournal conversations going on about readiness.

On a message board, someone mentioned Piaget and questioned whether it benefits a child to assign “accelerated” or above-grade-level work.

I’ve read some Piagetian theory in the context of special needs education…. just a very little. One very interesting book that talks a bit about Piaget’s theories is “When Slow is Fast Enough” . It is a thought-provoking book about the flaws in the way Early Intervention programs tend to be set up nowadays. The author Joan Goodman discusses Rousseau, Locke and Piaget in terms of their ideas of child development. She thinks that EI nowadays tends to be Lockean (”filling the vessel” or “writing on the blank slate”) with a thin and slightly hypocritical overlay of Rousseau’s child-centered theories.

She finds Piaget’s theories to be a balance between the two. According to the VERY little I’ve read on this, Piaget believed that children’s cognitive development was an interaction between their inherent developmental timetable and various triggers in the environment. The point of her book is that all the therapy tasks in the world cannot jumpstart or advance a child’s readiness.

Her solution is to create a rich environment both in terms of open-ended resources AND in terms of creative, warm personnel who are willing to play with the child on his or her own terms and be sensitive to the child’s developmental timetable. Somewhat like unschooling, in fact! and also quite a bit like Stanley Greenspan’s concept of Floor Time.

Momof3feistykids wrote in A Room of Her Own:
I once read (I have forgotten where … in one of John Holt’s books?) something that spoke volumes about what our culture does to children. The famous psychologist Piaget (well known for his research on stages of cognitive development) said that whenever he lectured in the U.S. - describing the typical stages through which children pass in developing cognitive skills - he was invariably asked what he came to think of as “The American Question.” The question was some variation of “How can I make my child progress through these stages faster?”

John Holt, whose thoughts I very much admire on the subject of children’s learning would I think go even further than Piaget in emphasizing the active role of the child in making sense of the world. The world and other people may have an immense influence on the child, but it is the child who is processing, sorting, assimilating, reflecting.
My Half-Thoughts….
What I have gotten out of all these theories is an essentially “real learning” type concept of learning. A continuum. You expose children to things that are above their heads but let them interact with the things in their own way and at their own pace. Of course, LIFE does that itself — babies enter a world of language, vision, motion — and what they do to adapt and respond is perfectly incredible.

At it’s best, education follows in that manner…. For example, the kids can listen to read-alouds that have rich, complex language — my 4yo loved listening to his Dad read Beowulf (the Ian Seraillier version) many years ago. Of course, he couldn’t have written a high school essay on it, but his enjoyment was real and vivid.

I believe Suzuki does this kind of thing with music (though I don’t know much about it) and I have read that the Japanese present math by letting the kids take part in solving very challenging math problems, way above their grade level.

John Holt recommended letting children participate in the real world and in real work, the meaningful kind that adults do. To me, this is another way to do the same thing. Apprenticeships and internships are based on the concept that being involved in a skill or profession — watching, helping, learning — is a great way to gain experience in a less stressful, richer situation.

And finally, John Madden and Bill O’Reilly in two books I read fairly recently, make a plug for the vanished world of sandlot sports where the children get to play a sport in a non-threatening, personal, informal environment. Again, rather the same type of thing.

On the other hand, when I give the kids a structured course where the material is “only one correct answer” and also too advanced for them, I find that poor academic results occur. They become experts at playing the guessing game, they don’t retain well, their understanding is second-hand and therefore artificial — all things I want to avoid in their learning process.

So much learning is consolidation, breadth and depth, not speed and height. advanced material has been worthless or even harmful when the readiness isn’t there, in my experience. But letting children participate in the world in all its complexity and richness allows them to take what they need and set aside the rest, without the opposite perils of fear of failure and boredom of too-easy material that John Holt described so accurately in How Children Fail.

Other References:

Continuum Concept — Jean Liedloff makes a case for the idea of natural discipline — children being brought up to participate in the daily work of the community.

My Five Year Old Knows Basic Interesting article– Will there someday be labelled “computer disabilities?” — “In summary, I have tried to present a basic outline of the ways children develop both intellectually and behaviorally. It is important to let a child work at his own speed and remember that not every child will take to computing, no matter how desirable a skill it is to learn. Understanding the child’s cognitive abilities and experiential world can help us construct the most meaningful teaching experiences possible.“