All Is Grace

more unschooling thoughts…there are always more, of course, but…in an effort to keep you up to date with my thinking…today my friend Ralph referred me to this article. Dr. Peter Gray, research bio-psychologist, has some wise, wise words. and while my children may be out of the official “play” stage as one would think of “play,” this is who they were when they played and played and played. this is how they learned. and the learning we incorporated in the midst of their play and the conversations i heard from the kitchen while they were in the depths of their play…learning definitely took place. if you can’t take the time to read this whole article, here are a few excerpts that really spoke to me from   “Give Childhood Back to Our Children“:

“Educators in East Asian nations have increasingly been acknowledging the massive failure of their educational systems. According to the scholar and author Yong Zhao, who is an expert on schools in China, a common Chinese term used to refer to the products of their schools is gaofen dineng, which essentially means good at tests but bad at everything else. Because students spend nearly all of their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative, discover or pursue their own passions, or develop physical and social skills. Moreover, as revealed by a recent large-scale survey conducted by British and Chinese researchers, Chinese schoolchildren suffer from extraordinarily high levels of anxiety, depression and psychosomatic stress disorders, which appear to be linked to academic pressures and lack of play.”

“The main focus of my own recent research is on the value of play for children’s development. All mammals play when they are young and those that have the most to learn play the most. Carnivores play more than herbivores, because hunting is harder to learn than grazing. Primates play more than other mammals, because their way of life depends more on learning and less on fixed instincts than does that of other mammals. Human children, who have the most to learn, play far more than any other primates when they are allowed to do so. Play is the natural means by which children and other young mammals educate themselves. In hunter-gatherer bands, children are allowed to play and explore in their own chosen ways all day long, every day, because the adults understand that this is how they practise the skills that they must acquire to become effective adults.

The most important skills that children everywhere must learn in order to live happy, productive, moral lives are skills that cannot be taught in school. Such skills cannot be taught at all. They are learned and practised by children in play. These include the abilities to think creatively, to get along with other people and cooperate effectively, and to control their own impulses and emotions.”

“All young children are creative. In their play and self-directed exploration they create their own mental models of the world around them and also models of imaginary worlds. Adults whom we call geniuses are those who somehow retain and build upon that childlike capacity throughout their lives. Albert Einstein said his schooling almost destroyed his interest in mathematics and physics, but he recovered it when he left school. He referred to his innovative work as “combinatorial play”. He claimed that he developed his concept of relativity by imagining himself chasing a sunbeam and catching up with it, and then thinking about the consequences. We can’t teach creativity, but we can drive it out of people through schooling that centres not on children’s own questions but on questions dictated by an imposed curriculum that operates as if all questions have one right answer and everyone must learn the same things.”

i realize these words are not my words…so it doesn’t really make this my blog post…but there is something to be said, obviously, for letting our children discover the world in ways that are not constructed or contrived by us. as they get older, it might look less like play and more like interest-driven-exploration…and it may look not-completely-productive in the traditional learning sense, or in our traditionally educated brains…but neither does play if you think of it only as childish.

and maybe that’s the point. none of it is childish. child-like, but not childish. and maybe there’s absolutely nothing wrong with child-like…just with our perception.