Schoolin' time... Playin' time

A couple of months ago the New York Times ran this editorial on its op-ed page. The author raises a number of good points critical of how we teach kids the things that we believe they should know.

Here are a few paragraphs I liked:

So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.

Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.

In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.

Children would also spend an hour a day writing things that have actual meaning to them — stories, newspaper articles, captions for cartoons, letters to one another. People write best when they use writing to think and to communicate, rather than to get a good grade.

In our theoretical classroom, children would also spend a short period of time each day practicing computation — adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing. Once children are proficient in those basics they would be free to turn to other activities that are equally essential for math and science: devising original experiments, observing the natural world and counting things, whether they be words, events or people. These are all activities children naturally love, if given a chance to do them in a genuine way.

What they shouldn’t do is spend tedious hours learning isolated mathematical formulas or memorizing sheets of science facts that are unlikely to matter much in the long run. Scientists know that children learn best by putting experiences together in new ways. They construct knowledge; they don’t swallow it.

One of the things that stuck with me about this is the continued realization we have while homeschooling that a good education is neither expensive nor terribly time consuming. We spend about 45 minutes (max) in the mornings and another 45 minutes in the afternoons on formal lessons (spelling, grammar, reading, writing, history, math, science, etc.). The rest of our time is spent just having fun, goofing off, playing games, reading books, watching TV, going to the zoo, park, mall, grocery shopping or whatever.

I'm sure the time spent on formal lessons will increase as the kids get older and their attention span increases, but I can't imagine spending anything like 6 hours a day on school. That just seems absurd. In any case it is hard to compare the amount of things the kids learn during formal lesson time vs. what they are learning during the whole rest of the day. All that free time is not just wasted time seeking out various forms of mind-numbing entertainment. That's the time for the kids to process things on their own, to explore their own world, to design their own art projects and to play with other kids.

For some reason our society has reached a point where we only really value those skills we imagine to be tied to future economic success. But, as the article above notes, we don't seem to really understand how those skills originate. And, along the way, we have forgotten that economic success is not the only goal in our lives. We don't seem to know anymore what it means to be a "whole" person or to pull from life anything other that a kind of competitive success to allow us to buy more stuff or have bigger houses or fancier cars.

Those things are nice, but for me education also means gaining an understanding of the whole story of humanity as well as a deep appreciation for the kinds of relationships we build with others or especially the mechanisms we use to define core philosophical principles that help us define what is "good" or "just" and which ultimately help us to define our political ideas.

I don't believe that these things can be forced on a kid by sitting them in a room, filling them with one kind of knowledge, ringing a bell, moving them to another room and repeating the process all day, 5 days a week, 10 months a year for 12 years (at least). Learning these things requires a deep curiosity and creativity. The way we currently design schools seems designed to stifle curiosity and creativity through years of repetitive busy work and a denial of personal creative freedom.

Ugh.