C is for Cat

There are many different ways to skin a cat. I understand this with a perspective that might be a little different from the one you have. I stood in my garage in Texas one fall morning and watched my dad, dear old-school redneck that he is, skin a road-killed bobcat for the children. They each got a claw to keep and a lesson in the parts of a cat's body. The skin, fascia, muscles, eyeballs, sockets, you get the idea. You can break an animal down into its parts. It helps you understand the way the machine functions as a whole. And its just plain coolio to see.

What is more difficult to break down into parts is a process, such as learning. Because we unschool, I find the institutional system for teaching children, which is based on building blocks of information, now looks strange to me. I had to unschool a long time before I began to notice this. The kids have learned to read in their own way, on their own time. I have pushed them, periodically. I have mostly learned to set a rich environment, to limit tv, and to back off. That's the philosophy and it seems to be working. I want to talk about this perception of the way schools teach processes like reading. My whole life, it seemed so normal. And now it seems impossibly strange. I don't see how one could get this vision if not through unschooling. So I want to share my perspective.

A teacher commented once, "your daughter has really great adjectives." I am accepting all compliments. And naturally I said, "thanks." But on the inside I was scrambling to remember what adjectives are. We don't do adjectives. I guess my girl has gotten them anyway.

It makes people uncomfortable when I talk about my son's reading. He has time to be a gifted reader because he is not busy in school, and reading is a passion of his. A teacher once asked me, "Oh sure he reads, but does he have comprehension?" I replied, "He is not required to read anything. No one sits around reading what they don't understand, for fun." This teacher wasn't being critical. They were thinking of the process of learning to read as something that is taught one block at a time. He had the "say the words out loud" block. Did he have the "understand what the words mean" block?

We don't study: parts of speech, handwriting practice, spelling, vocabulary, phonics, narration, oration, work sheets, tests, comprehension, drills, or any of the other tools of industrialised education. We read. We play. We talk. We write. We live. And somehow, through use of language in all of its glorious forms, we are learning to read and write and speak well. We are expanding vocabulary and improving handwriting. (Some of us spell with more authority than I.) This process is deeper than "parts to whole." Our children are learning to read in the same way they learned to walk. The see reading, they desire reading, they practice reading, and eventually they read. Just like they walked.

I know that some kids need extra techniques to learn to read. While institutional school craves proof, and attempts to measure the nearly invisible and deeply individual process of learning. They have to have a system, to teach processes like reading, that is quantifiable. I'm not judging other ways here. So much as I am noticing that we have all been taught to learn processes like reading by building one block at a time, for so many generations now, we forget this is kind of unnatural. We accept this as a preferable way to teach children, and it may be a preferable way to teach children en mass. But actually the system is simply familiar, indoctrinated.

Many kids don't require any of those blocks served to them individually. Worse, there is an implication that this building block theory of education makes kids smarter, in general. That not only are kids learning their topics (one at a time and piece by piece), they are getting smarter in general. Kids who happen to excel in the system and can prove it with their grades are considered "smart". So we infer that the system is producing smartness. That is the underlying assumption of institutional education, yet where is the proof?

I am reading a book called, "Merle's Door, Lessons From A Free Thinking Dog" by Ted Kerasote, about the way dogs learn. Spontaneously, every time Kerasote uses the word dog, I insert the word child. The effect reads like a handbook for unschooling theory. The book compares the intelligence of domestic dogs versus wolves. And it looks at various studies of educational environments using rats.

"Merle enjoyed an enormous amount of open space and personal freedom, coming and going as he wished through his own dog door. Yet what he taught me about living with a dog can be applied anywhere. His lessons weren't so much about giving dogs physical doors to the outside world, although that's important, but about providing ones that open onto the mental and emotional terrain that will develop a dog's potential. His lessons weren't about training, but about partnership. They were never about method; they were about attitude. And at the heart of this attitude is a person's willingness to loosen a dog's leash--in all aspects of its life--and, whenever practical, to take off its leash completely, allowing the dog to learn on its own, following its nose and running free."

"(Scientific) findings dovetailed with what the Berkeley researchers had come to understand through additional experiments designed to identify which stimuli had the most powerful effect on brain development. They, too, found that it wasn't exercise alone. Nor was it visual stimulation. Handling, petting, and love didn't produce large brains, either. Nor did pressing a lever for a food reward. The only thing that consistently improved rats' neural development was the freedom to roam a large, object-filled space."

"The really interesting question, though, involves how a dog's environment affects not its specialized behavior but its overall intelligence. Will the dog who has more experiential input be smarter? ...In other words, it may be impossible for dogs to become knowledgeable , and eventually wise, if they're not outside, being dogs."

While I have to admit than neither of my kids could diagram a sentence for you, and they may lack the ability to test well for various institutional blocks of information. (We don't know, since they have never been institutionally tested.) I believe that our unschooling life is richer and better for the development of their brains and their native intelligence, than a life spent sitting in a succession of classrooms for the next 12 years. And I really do want to nurture their native intelligence, more than I care if they can recite any given fact.