Value of Play, and other thoughts on education

There is an interesting thread going on at Real Learning called "do you consider yourself radical" meaning a radical unschooler. I started this blog in order to debate with myself (Smeagol and Gollum: )) about whether unschooling "worked" and whether I was cut out to be an unschooler. I sort of wish I could be more of an unschooler than I end up actually being, but sometimes I find myself making perfection into the enemy of the good, and try to fit myself and my homeschool into something that doesn't really work for me. In practice, I find that homeschooling is an art; the sum of it is a kind of "synergy" as Leonie said in the discussion. Cindy at Applestars calls it Collaborative Learning.

Two interesting articles from very different points of view:
What Does it Mean to be Well Educated? by Alfie Kohn
You Can Always Look it Up-- Or Can You? by ED Hirsch

I don't entirely agree or disagree with either of them. Hirsch makes a case for broad general knowledge providing a way to acquire more knowledge. Yes, this seems to be true in my experience. However, I think this broad knowledge is often best acquired in family informal moments. You see that children from homes whose parents talk to them and read to them go into formal academics with a lot of hooks to hang things on already in place, including a major hook -- that their fundamental needs have been met (according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs). This has nothing to do with finances or economic status, either, except indirectly as parents who are on the financial margin are often more preoccupied and working long hours so they don't have the time and energy to devote to family times. The kids who DON'T have this kind of language and context background usually have more difficulties acquiring new knowledge though formal education, though literacy is a key that can unlock a whole new world to the child. I was just reading about Helen Keller in Charlotte Mason's book and how she lived in a shadowland until she discovered how to read Braille and the connection between language and knowledge. This is an extreme example; but I think that for some people, books and other resources can fill a need that their family life has not provided them. In fact, I've met several people who found freedom and hope from books and learning.

But my main point is that often the schools aren't the best place to acquire broad knowledge if the process hasn't already been begun outside of the school walls. School may have its virtues but it is usually less efficient in preparing the basic groundwork than the informal, open-ended, responsive environment that children benefit from outside the school grounds.

Alfie Kohn makes some justified critiques of our society's too heavy reliance on standardized tests, educational certificates and other "objective" markers that are in many ways inadequate to really measure competency and human qualities. I agree with him there, and I think he raises the right questions: Don't we have to know what education is FOR before we know whether it has succeeded? However, the idea of some committee or person measuring my child's competency as a human being (not just in certain intellectual qualities measurable by objective tests) is truly frightening. I think we have to be careful about replacing objectivity with something with even more possibility for problems: pseudo-objectivity and the de facto tyranny of the "expert". And I think he doesn't deal enough with the truth that children, PEOPLE, usually want to learn if they have the opportunity and aren't stifled with inappropriate educational methods.

I do think though that more localization and diversity of resources and markers for achievement would be a good solution, as he implies, and as a homeschooler I think that homeschooling is one of those examples of localization and diversity.

Anyway, while we were talking on the thread, I realized that a lot of what I look for in measuring whether my particular homeschool is successful is in the quality of play. Here is the foreword of Anne Lahrson Fisher's book Fundamentals of HOmeschooling. A summary of the book's position on Play:

Parents who homeschool with the greatest success love to play with their children. They learn to protect children’s playtime. They appreciate how much learning results from many kinds of play. Play allows the spark of creative insight to flame – a most powerful learning tool.

To me this seems similar to what Mihaly Csíkszentmihály says about Flow -- he talks about a state of mind engendered by doing something that is both challenging and rewarding at the same time. When I notice that the quality of my childrens' play is high, it usually reminds me of his description of FLow.

How does it feel to be in "the flow"?

1. Completely involved, focused, concentrating - with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training
2. Sense of ecstasy - of being outside everyday reality
3. Great inner clarity - knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going
4. Knowing the activity is doable - that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored
5. Sense of serenity - no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego - afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible
6. Timeliness - thoroughly focused on present, don't notice time passing
7. Intrinsic motivation - whatever produces "flow" becomes its own reward

I'm using the word Play loosely to mean all the things that people do for the thing's own sake. I suppose another word would be leisure in the traditional sense of the word, not the same sense of today's concept of expensive and basically passive forms of recreation (though those have their place too).

It seems to me that this capacity to play richly is a great marker of human success in adult life, and it also has the virtue of being rewarding and powerful right in the present moment. It would be difficult to measure in schooly terms, however, and I think that's not entirely a bad thing. I think that this is what bothers me about both Kohn's and Hirsch's ideas -- they both seem to assume that the school system's role is to oversee the student's WHOLE life. I think this is part of our problem; that the public education institutions are usurping a role that should be more in the hands of the individual student/child, and his parents, and his church and community.

Kohn seems to fall more into the trap than Hirsch, probably with the best intentions. He wants education to be about MORE than just academics, and education IS about more than academics. But that begs the question of whether SCHOOL as a public (and secular) institution ought to be about more than academics. I think this is a relatively new concept -- that the state should oversee all aspects of a child's development and education, not just the intellectual branch. Richard Mitchell's Graves of Academe is an extended treatment of the dangers of stifling, bureaucratic tyranny which are potential in that scenario, and I like CS Lewis's The Silver Chair (the beginning chapters) as a literary example of a progressive school taken a horribly wrong turn.

I think that society's place is to empower the family and the individual child (the Catholic Church calls this subsidiarity -- the larger and less organic institution should not do for the smaller more organic one what it can do for itself -- but Society does have a responsibility to support and help the smaller units). Empowering does not mean taking over, even if the State thinks it can do a more efficient job. For one thing, it can't. For another thing, even if it could, that is not its role.