John Holt, Unschooling, and Tom Sawyer

John Holt is one of the big (if not the biggest) names in the unschooling movement.  I have just opened up his How Children Learn, and very uncharacteristically for me, started randomly reading as I flipped through it.

Something to think on:  A lot of his "experiments" with first graders involved him sitting in the corner of a classroom and doing some activity (making a huge number line, building boxes from paper, playing with balances and weights).  Inevitably, a child would wander over and watch for a bit, and maybe ask a question or two.  "What are you doing?" was always answered with something like, "Oh just messing around with these numbers/boxes/balances".  Eventually another child, or a steady stream of children would begin to drift by, stopping to watch, mostly silently.

Finally, a child or two would pick up some of the materials, or ask for some if they were not available, and then begin doing his own similar project, occasionally returning to Holt's desk if he got to a sticking point or needed to observe again.  Soon, the entire class would be industriously working at the project, and some would modify it, making number lines into the thousands, building houses with peaked roofs instaed of boxes, figuring out the basics of torque using balances and weights.

It reminds me of Tom Sawyer tricking his friends into not only whitewashing the fence, but paying him for the priveledge!

And it makes me reconsider if unschooling may be for me after all.  I think my main opposition, that certain materials might not be covered, or covered in an order that doesn't respect a certain information hierarchy, could be dealt with.  And in a way, life itself is simply unschooling.  Could we unschool for a portion of the day, and tackle a more structured method for the rest?

Can I create Tom Sawyer situations so that the desire and fascination to copy my task is a natural thing, rather than saying, "Ok, today we are going to build boxes"?  The problem here, is that it turns unschooling into something that require significant thought on the part of the parent for younger children- it's just not quite as easy as letting them loose.  And so I think unschooling might get a bit of a bad reputation when people like me have just enough information to be afraid of it, but no more.  So I'll put it back on the drawing board.

Charlotte Mason's quote along these lines,

"A child will have taught himself to paint, paste, cut paper, knit, weave, hammer and saw, make lovely things in clay and sand, build castles with his bricks; possibly too, will have taught himself to read, write, and do sums, besides acquiring no end ofknowledge and notions about the world he lives in, by the time he is six or seven. What I contend for is that he shall do these things because he chooses (provided that the standard of perfection in his small works be set before him)."

Montessori's thoughts:

The "prepared environment" is Maria Montessori's concept that the environment can be designed to facilitate maximum independent learning and exploration by the child.

Anyway, just a brief look at what I'm reflecting on this week