I went to a talk in Pittsburgh last week. I got lost twice on the way there and then went around the block three times before I found the parking garage which was far more obvious than I was expecting. I told you real life was messy, especially so when you are me. I was there 20 minutes late but I was able to get the gist of what this very fancy educational guru was talking about.
Said guru’s name is Ted Dintersmith and he’s written a couple of books on education. I’m reading one of them now and it’s making me want to completely change the way we home school next year. I feel like this is a frequent thing for me to feel toward the end of a school year so bear with me if this is a passing phase.
Mr. Dintersmith talked a lot about empowering teachers to do what was necessary to engage their students passions. He said that our economy has changed and we need to teach students to channel their creativity through their passions to be the innovators of tomorrow. He explained that the way our schools were set up was to produce reliable employees who didn’t mess up and performed their job without complaint. Our country was in the middle of the industrial revolution at the time so we needed people who could reliably do a job. Our economy doesn’t look the same as it did back then but our schools use the same structure and system. Technology and automation have driven many of those rote jobs out of existence so now we need to find other uses for ourselves.
The way we do that is through creativity and innovation so we need lots of creative and innovative people. The problem is that our schools are turning out lots of graduates who would be really good at memorizing facts and taking tests but who’ve had all the creativity drummed out of them in the interest of remembering the answer to a series of useless tests.
The basics of our education system as it stands do not work for this new economy and policy makers keep coming up with silly ways of trying to patch this leaky boat. Now we have more and more standardized testing, our teachers are evaluated on how well their students do on these tests and larger and larger portions of the school day are taken up by prepping for and taking these tests on which we base so much.
Mr. Dintersmith posits that maybe the test doesn’t matter as much as we think it does. In the age of the internet when the whole body of knowledge for the entire human race is available at our fingertips, why do we need to have all that information stored in our heads to be recalled on a test and then completely forgotten about a moment later? If we need to know about the war of 1812 in our future life, we can look it up. Why would we need to memorize its starting and ending dates? Is this really the best use of our students time?
It’s what we do with the knowledge that we have that will make us successful later on. How do we take our knowledge of history or math or literature and turn it into something that is actually relevant and needed in our life today? So maybe what we need to be doing is allowing kids to show us what they are really interested in and then teaching them the full depth and breadth of that topic. This could cover may different disciplines and students would actually end up retaining more information than if they were just told to learn about these things.
For instance, every year our homeschool group does a project fair. The kids all pick a topic and do their own research and then have to present it to some judges (other people’s parents) who tell them what a great job they did. This year my daughter did needle felting. She takes wool and shapes it and agitate it until it’s the proper size and shape that she wants and creates all these cute little sculptures usually of animals. To do this for the project fair we looked at the biological properties of wool (each strand has microscopic scales, did you know that?), micron count (how soft and fine it is) and the history of felting (shepherds in the middle east stuffed wool in their sandals to give them some padding, when they finished their journey, the wool was felted and probably pretty smelly.) These things will stick with my girl far longer than if I’d read her something out of a text book or made her look it up because the curriculum said she was supposed to do that next.
I couldn’t help but think that I’ve missed a lot of opportunity here. I am already empowered to engage my student’s passions. I have the freedom and the opportunity as a homeschooler that most public school teachers can only dream of and I haven’t used it to its fullest advantage. I allow my kids to engage their passions (outside of extracurricular lessons) on one school event a year.
All this has got me to thinking, what would it look like if our whole homeschool was more like project fair? What if my kids were allowed to follow their passions and I was more their cheerleader and helper and less their teacher and taskmaster? If I am serious about wanting to give my children the best education that I can, why am I not taking advantage of the freedom we already have and turning them loose on the vast stores of human knowledge? Why am I worrying about my kids keeping up with a system that is failing the kids in it? Shouldn’t we be playing a different game here?
So, all that is a lot of questions and I’m working on answering them. They all seem like leading questions but I honestly don’t know how all this will look or if it will work for our family but I find myself more and more convinced that the way forward in our homeschool doesn’t look like our previous years of schooling. My kids need less of my educational priorities and more of their own for them to be effectively learning.
Messy Homeschool 