more on teaching and learning

Yesterday I wrote about what teaching is to me. It was mostly in response to this radical unschooling notion that teach is somehow a bad word. The following was a comment on that blog post:

"But you aren't teaching if a kid is thirsting for the knowledge you impart...that is responding to that child's drive to learn....you can't "teach" a child whose brain is not there yet...it's developmental...one can't want to learn to read unless one is ready to read...and every child is different...."

So, firstly, I'd like to say that I'm not talking exclusively about children learning. I'm also including my own present experiences of being a 34 year old undergraduate student. I love learning, I love education. I plan to work in my chosen field for maybe 5 years, and then return to the ivory tower to earn a masters degree. I will graduate in a year and a half, which will make me about 40 when I plan to earn my MSW. I can also see myself pursuing a PhD. I can also see myself teaching at a college or university one day.

It's not just children who are learners. We learn all of our life, from formal academic teachers, from our bosses at our jobs, from workshops or conferences we attend, from our fellow employees, from our friends, from our relationships, from our children, from life. Education never ends.


Secondly, I'd like to respond to the statement, "but you aren't teaching if a kid is thirsting for the knowledge you impart."

This is, I think where I differ from the radical unschooling perspective, and I think it's a philosophical difference, that is, a matter of opinion, rather than truth. Or, that there are multiple truths out there, and no one has a monopoly on truth.

I say you can't teach anyone unless they are thirsting for knowledge, child or adult. It's like the axiom, "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." But why can we not consider the leading to be teaching? I think this is a distinction, a truth, shall we say, that I will never understand.

Perhaps the distinction really is between being and doing. Perhaps these radical unschoolers are rejecting aspects of the doing of teaching, the rote, mechanical parts that sometimes occur when the teacher is not inspired, when the teacher is not being teacher.

Often, when I find myself struggling to understand something (and, like Werner Erhard said, understanding is the booby prize!), I often find myself turning to the dictionary, thinking, "just what, exactly, does that word really mean?

So I'd like to share something from my dictionary about the word teach:

1. To impart knowledge by lessons; give instruction to: to teach a class.
2. To give instruction in; communicate the knowledge of: to teach French.
3. To train by practice or exercise.
   
4. To follow the profession of teaching.
5. To impart knowledge or skill.

synonyms: Teach, instruct, drill, educate, school, discipline, train and tutor mean to guide in acquiring knowledge or skill. Teach is the most comprehensive word; it embraces all methods of imparting knowledge, information, guidance, counsel.

And then from my dictionary about the word learn:

1. To acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, practice, etc.
2. To find out; become aware of: to learn the facts.
3. To commit to memory; memorize.
4. To acquire by experience or example: to learn bad habits.
5. To gain knowledge or acquire skill.
6. To become informed; know: with of or about.

Nowhere in any of these meanings can I see the suggestion that teaching cannot happen, that it is only learning that is possible. Thus, I will continue to reject the rejection of the verb teach. However, in no way am I suggesting that you can force a child to learn something s/he is not yet ready to learn. What I am suggesting is that, if there is learning going on, there is also teaching going on. If the child is not learning, then the teacher is only trying to teach, and s/he is clearly not succeeding.

Finally, to look at the argument of development, it is abundantly clear that development happens in distinct stages. For example, the normal range for a a child to learn to walk is 9 to 18 months. That is a huge range. Consider, too, that not all children fall into this "normal" range. My son, for example, never really bothered with crawling. He went from rocking on his hands and knees to couch surfing to walking at 8 months of age. He learned how to crawl, he just wasn't that interested in it, preferring to be upright as soon as possible.

So, yes, I can clearly see that some children aren't developmentally ready to read until they are 8 or 9 years old. But what I don't see is that those children cannot be taught to read. I really think there is a distinction between reading and walking. As a species, we have been walking for far longer than we have been reading. Also, there is only one way to walk - standing up, on your feet, placing one foot in front of the other - but there are many languages to learn to speak and read. I really don't think reading is something that can be learned spontaneously, I think someone has to tell the learner what these symbols we call letters mean. Even if that only consists of reading aloud to your child while they look at the written words, you are still modeling reading in a way that the child is learning to associate a specific sound with a specific symbol.

I'd like to end by paraphrasing something from the Bible: "give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." Can the man learn to fish by himself, can he teach himself to fish? Surely he can. However, if someone else teaches him to fish, might the process not be expedited? Might he not struggle frustratedly with just how to cast the rod, if someone explains the process, guides his arms, watches him practice and corrects mistakes in positioning, etc? I certainly would prefer to not reinvent the wheel, which is why I seek out teachers.

what teaching is to me

I've been thinking a lot about what a teacher is to me, and why I value the role a person assumes when they take on the mantle of "teacher." I have always admired teachers.

These are the thoughts that come to me when I think of a public education in BC: My sister is a teacher, my stepmother when I was a child is a teacher. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. I have admired several of my teachers. In first grade one day, they were testing the fire alarms, and I was terrified and crying. My teacher held her hands over my ears. I particularly liked Mr. O'Malley in grade 6. We had Russian penpals. My 10th grade English teacher made Shakespeare come alive for me. Not all of my teachers were great. Some were just okay, and some I didn't like at all. Like my 9th and 10th grade French teacher, who didn't seem to enjoy teaching.

This is also something I've noticed over my long and convoluted college career. My father pointed out to me that some profs are good teachers, and I should keep trying to take their classes if I could. My Social Work School has as many sessional instructors as full time instructors, and I really notice this distinction amongst the sessionals, who are professionals in the field with a masters level degree who teach one or two courses a calendar year. Some are excellent teachers, some mean well. The teachers that are excellent you try to work with as often as possible. Like my favorite political science dept prof, Rita Dhamoon. She has a PhD, she writes articles and speaks at conferences. I've taken a class in Gender/Feminist POSC, and I am currently taking her Politics of Multiculturalism class. She invites us to be radical, to deconstruct ideas and theories, to look at what's going on underneath. She is so inspiring!


But this is just the pathway to what I'm trying to distinguish. Teach is an important word, in my opinion. But I have noticed this thing in radical unschooling where people don't like to use that word. Like it's a bad word. Like learn is so much better a word. For example, I was reading a thread in a forum on radical unschooling, and people were discussing late readers, kids who were 8 or 9 who couldn't yet read, or at least not at the level that they were interested in reading. Kids who would get frustrated and stop trying. Some people commented that their kids didn't get reading until about 9 or 10, and one person said that by 15, the kid was reading at a college level or writing a story or something, and not to worry. However, there was this other element in the thread about how one girl was so frustrated, and her mom kept telling her it was like riding a bike or learning how to walk, that you couldn't be taught to read, your brain had to be ready and then you'd just get it. And another person commented that maybe the mom thought she could teach her to read and so she was subtly getting some message, but the mom said that wasn't the case, she truly believed she could not teach her daughter to read.

I don't get it. What do you mean, you can't teach someone how to read? Maybe I just truly have no experience with people who are not natural readers? I was chomping at the bit at the beginning of 1st grade. I couldn't wait to learn to read. I could probably have learned to read at 3 or 4, if I had been taught. My kids are like that too, both my son and my stepson. Natural early readers. But teaching was a big part of that - learning the sounds of the letters, learning some basic phonetic rules so you know when to use a hard vowel or a soft vowel, the teacher reading to the learner, moving your finger along under the words as you read, etc. Isn't that teaching someone how to read?

I guess I should explain what a teacher is to me. A teacher instructs you and drills you sometimes, yes indeed. But a teacher is also a mentor. A teacher requires compassion, an ability to see the world from another's perspective. A teacher is someone who creates a space for the learner to step into. A teacher holds that space, a space of the wonder and joy of education. So a teacher may not do anything, because it is about who the teacher is being. A teacher is passionate, inspired, a person who can communicate the joy of learning, of knowledge, and who can pass the flame to the next generation.

So this is why I feel that teach is too important a verb to dispense with altogether, despite any possible negative connotations it may carry. Because it is so much more than those.

some more thoughts on unschooling as elitism

I've been reading a few blog articles (and their comments) that discuss the distinction between teaching and learning. As I went to find all the links, I found a new post which contains all the links, and a chronology of the discussion. I wrote a comment on on of the blogs, mainly discussing my distaste at some radical unschooler's choice to not use the word "teach". I wonder, why is "teach" a bad word? It's not that the writers had poor arguments, rather, they were coherent and well expressed. But I can't escape the feeling that it is somehow an elitist perspective.

Like I expressed in my last post, which has been sitting in my drafts folder for almost 3 weeks, I wonder if the unschooling phenomenon is something that is only available to a small proportion of our global population. I wonder if it is a distinctly Western, middle class phenomena. It may not be exclusively Western, but my only exposure to unschooling has been through Western technology, and so that is all I see. However, when I think of my social work education on Aboriginal issues and history in Canada, it's pretty obvious that indigenous peoples were "unschooling" their kids before the Indian agent came along and forced their kids into residential schools. Thus, if North American Aboriginal peoples were unschoolers, it seems quite likely that other tribal peoples were, too. As well, when I consider public education's history, I realize it hasn't been around all that long, and we must have been unschoolers before this time, unless we were aristocrats who could afford private tutors (still not "school").

But I also wonder, what makes the public school system so untrustworthy? While waiting in a doctor's office yesterday, I read an article in a Canadian parenting magazine discussing the route public education is taking in Canada (I felt this to be false terms of reference; the federal government is not involved in education, it is a provincial matter, and it thus varies across the country). One thing the article discussed was a classroom in Ontario where the kids were able to choose their own method of learning on the teacher's topic. I think it mostly referred to social studies and language arts, because the example referred to either writing a letter to the editor or creating a poster, among other options. Still, in the 6 page article, I did not find one reference to my own province, BC. Regardless, the article did say that the days of teaching to the middle of the class are gone...

But what does it really take to be a homeschooling/unschooling parent? For one thing, money. Money to have one parent home with school aged kids, all day, every day. Sure, lots of unschooling moms talk about the sacrifices they have made to live on one income, but are they the same sacrifices a low income family can make? Or is that low income family already making those sacrifices, just to pay the rent and the bills? Many Canadians have to choose between paying their rent and buying food. Suggest to those parents the option of taking their kids out of the public school system which would require a stay-at-home parent and see if it's a viable option for them.

So, while unschoolers quibble over the connotations of the word "teach," I wonder, does it really matter, as long as there's respect, as long as there's choice? Although I'm certain unschooling is the way to go, and I really wish I had the financial resources to make it a reality NOW, I can't help but wonder about the inherent elitism in a system that is only available to those who can afford it. That truly goes against my values of freedom, equality, liberty and justice. On that list of my personal core values is education. So many revolutionaries have written about the importance of education in achieving freedom. How does one educate the masses in order to assure they can reach for freedom, if not in the public system? I'm still reading Paolo Freire's "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed," maybe I'll have some answers when I'm done.

Socialism, anti-colonialism and unschooling: a revolution for the elite?

A few weeks ago I read this post
Then I wrote the following comment:

This is a fantastic piece of writing, filled with amazing, subversive thoughts, especially when your sister is responding to the person who believes that if everyone was unschooled, it would unbalance our current society. Now, wouldn't that be a marvelous thing?!
I am a 34 year old social work student and mom to my 2nd grade son and my 1st grade step-son. I am teetering on the brink of taking them out of the public school system for exactly the reasons your sister discusses. While I agree wholeheartedly with education as a value, and as a necessary component of freedom, I am coming to see public education systems as an element of oppression and government/elite control of "the masses."
However, I balk at seeing sinister intentions in individual educators, just as I balk at seeing myself as an agent of social control as a future child protection worker for the provincial Ministry. Rather, I see myself as someone who will have the power to advocate for social change on behalf of vulnerable persons/groups. I see myself as an agent of social transformation. Because of this, I do somewhat hesitate to outright reject the public education system. If I am not a part of it, how can I participate in its transformation? However, this is a philosophical standpoint that must give way to the practical needs of my kids.
The kinds of thoughts you (and, in this post, your sister) articulate are thoughts that I didn't have words for until I began studying social justice in my 30s. To think that my children could also be as articulate and radical as teenagers, rather than simply rebelling against claustrophobic parenting and learning environments, is inspiring.
For me, the only reason my kids are still in public school is related to my socioeconomic status as a student. My husband and I do not have the income to pay for the necessary childcare while I am in classes and on practicum. Then, once I complete my degree, in 2011, there will be a significant debt repayment, and I will likely be working up to 40 hrs/week.
Unfortunately, I need to rely on the free childcare the public education system provides for the time being, unless I can work out something else to provide for their care. Regardless, if I cannot find some way to manage in the near future, as soon as they are mature enough to be home alone for stretches of time, they will be able to leave the public education system. No way will they have to go to high school :)

I've been thinking more and more about the points I made regarding who I see myself as being as a social worker: as a space of transformation, as someone standing for a new possibility. Especially when I consider that my clients will be involuntary. Then I've been thinking about those future clients, and their socioeconomic status. Most of them will live in chronic poverty. Many of them will be single parents or aboriginal peoples or immigrants. Most of them will not be middle class. Most of them will not have the choices I have, despite my own state of (temporary) poverty.

When I think about this, I realize that unschooling is likely an option only available to a small percentage of parents, especially when considering a global context. I realize that the majority of children who have the opportunity to attend public school, to be educated, are privileged, by global standards. This makes me think deeply about my longing to unschool my children. As someone who considers herself a feminist, an anti-colonialist, a socialist, I wonder, am I being hypocritical?

That is, am I espousing something for my family that is elitist, and out of reach for most people? This goes against my personal and professional values like social justice, liberty, equality, democracy.