The Learning Race

BY KRISTIN SIMPSON

One morning this week, I opened my door to a big box on my front porch. It was the latest shipment from my good friend in Vancouver who has established herself as my daughter's honourary aunt. Amidst the sleepers and dresses was a package of teething toys, some water-filled plastic fish you are supposed to cool in the fridge and give to your kid to chew on. I had to laugh when I saw "Develops Communication!" promoted on the corner of the package. Flipping it over, I read, "Jelly Fish Stimulates Baby's Gums: Jelly Fish develops communication skills as baby explores textures and shapes while teething. Control of the lips and tongue is essential to the development of sound, and later, speech. Let baby hold the teether and explore the multiple textures...." Nice try, marketing department, I thought, but really, who is going to believe that babies need special gadgets to help them learn to talk? What on earth did we do for all those thousands of years before someone invented Jelly Fish?

I don't know if anyone really falls for this particular marketing ploy. But the fact that its creators thought this angle might actually be profitable is a testament to our obsession with all things educational. As the parent of a nine-month-old, it seems to me that every product remotely baby-associated has to come with its spiel about how it will stimulate this or promote that. Nothing can just be useful or fun anymore. It needs to help my baby learn, too, because even at her age, the learning race-- more and faster and better and sooner-- is on.

Of course a lot of this is just marketing hype, ad campaigns created to sell us more stuff. You can easily opt out just by not buying. Instead, let your child play happily (as mine is doing now) with a cardboard box and an unopened can of cat food! (Well, okay, we also own some toys.) But it is harder to opt out of the urge that the marketers exploit, the drive to do whatever you can to give your child the best start in life. And surely when it comes to education you can never have too much too soon, right?

I believe that learning is intrinsically a good thing. What is not always good is the way we go about facilitating it. It is easy to feel that, if learning is good, learning in a structured program taught by experts must be better. If a child likes to draw, shouldn't we sign her up for art class rather than just give her a box of crayons and some paper?

In Ontario, where I live, the latest manifestation of this conviction is a recent plan to implement full-day kindergarten. In announcing the program, Dalton McGuinty, the Premier, prefaced his remarks by stating, "Parents are the same everywhere. We just want the best for our kids... We want them to achieve their potential, whatever that might be." Are long hours of supervised, structured activities really the best way for our children to achieve their full potential? Might there be a downside to all this schooling?

While I agree that organized classes are great places for some people to learn some kinds of things at some point in their lives, I think that the stress we put on formal education from a very early age can cheat our kids out of another kind of learning, the kind that isn't packaged with pre-set goals, presented by a qualified instructor and regularly assessed with standardized tests. Young children learn constantly by exploring the world around them. My daughter spends her days crawling around, poking her fingers into things, putting things in her mouth, experimenting with her voice to find out what kinds of sounds she can make. She is determining how the world works and how she can interact with it. She is learning how to figure things out, how to stay safe while exploring, how to be part of the community of people in her life. She has learned all on her own how to crawl, and soon will be walking and talking.

This kind of learning through exploration and play doesn't stop once a child reaches school age. However, it can be squashed by too much formal instruction. Kids who are used to answering the teacher's questions can get out of the practice of asking their own. Kids who are told what to do, when to do it and how it should be done can find it hard to set their own goals and organize their own time. Kids who learn that success means scoring the highest level on the evaluation rubric can lose their own instrinsic motivation and the confidence to self-evaluate. And kids who are always presented with pre-set activities miss out on the opportunity to figure out how to challenge themselves.

As an educator working in an alternative school environment, I have seen kids flourish when they are free to learn according to their own timetable and interests. When they are empowered to follow their own paths, they are truly motivated. They gain life-long learning skills and attitudes that can be difficult to acquire when sticking to someone else's agenda. It seems to me that this is the kind of learning that can really help our kids "achieve their full potential". But this is not the kind of learning that most kids will encounter in their kindergarten class, where a standard curriculum, large class size, and the need for assessment limit the possibilities available to any one student.

If small children are scientists, constantly experimenting with the world around them, why do we have this urge to package, analyze and label their learning? I think, if we are honest with ourselves, the answer is often "fear". We are afraid to trust our kids to continue the learning that comes so naturally to them early on. Sometimes we are afraid that “their full potential, whatever that might be" might not match our ideas of success unless we push our kids. But we underestimate them if we think that exposing them to big dollops of formal education as early as possible is the way to ensure they will turn out to be responsible, fulfilled adults. Full-day kindergarten may prepare students to "do school"; some may have better test scores a few years down the line if they have more early schooling. But is being good at parroting back the standardized test answers what our kids really need? Or is it more important for them to be enthusiastic, curious, creative self-starters?

There may very well be situations where some young children (perhaps those with special needs or those from particularly difficult home situations) could benefit from more time in school. Many families also struggle with finding childcare while both parents work. Full-day kindergarten could be a very appealing option for them. (In fact, nearly all the positive comments on the topic that I saw posted on one major Toronto news website gave that very reason for supporting it.) Each family needs to make their own decision about what works best for them. However, I think it is important that parents have the confidence to say "no" to sending their 3-, 4-, or 5-year-old to all-day structured learning if they don't think it is in their child's best interest. I have talked with many parents who like the idea of keeping their kids at home, at least until they are a bit older, or sending them to an alternative learning environment where the pressure is off, but are worried that their kids will fall irrevocably behind if they are not exposed to expert instruction as early as their peers are. In my experience, this a needless fear. Their kids may not learn on the same timetable as everyone else, it is true, but in the meantime they are acquiring learning skills that they can use their whole lives. John Holt, the homeschooling advocate, once wrote that teaching does not equal learning. We don't necessarily want our kids to be taught, we want them to learn. And learning is something that, in the end, has to be done by the learner. Young kids are amazing learners-- why should we try to fix what is not broken?

It can be scary letting our kids guide their own learning. But with my daughter I hope to keep a few principles in mind:

1. Play is a great learning tool. Kids need space for unstructured play: physical space (Can they run around and make a mess--to be cleaned up later-- without having to be too careful?), time (Can they play for large uninterrupted stretches? Do they have a chance to get bored and figure out what to do about it?), and imaginative space (Is it okay to make up your own rules to the game? Should adults exercise their veto power when the sticks turn into pretend guns or is this an opportunity for discussion?).

2. Kids learn from independence and real responsibility. As parents, our instinct is to protect our children from all risks. But how will they learn to make good decisions if adults are always guiding their choices? The amount of responsibility a child can handle varies with age and with the individual. In each situation we adults can try asking ourselves what would be the consequence of letting the child make his or her own decision and live with the outcome. Clearly no one should learn how to cross a busy street through trial and error, but real learning can be worth disappointment or scraped knees.

3. Kids learn when they are involved in the larger world and can focus on what matters to them. Formal education tends to look at life, extract from it knowledge that is deemed to be particularly important (generally what we call academics), boil that knowledge down into key points or step-by-step instructions, serve it up to kids, test the results in a classroom, and then years later send the kids out into the world to try out all they have learned in school. The problem with this approach for many people is that either: a) much of the knowledge they were taught in school is not relevant to their adult lives (quick, when did you last call upon your grade eleven chemistry knowledge?), or b) much of the knowledge they were supposed to learn in school never sunk in in the first place, in part because they couldn't figure out what use it would be to them. Consider what kind of practical knowledge children can gain from real-life activities even at a young age. For example, for many children, cooking and shopping are much more meaningful ways to learn basic math than from a textbook or worksheets-- and don't many adults use their arithmetic knowledge primarily for those very activities, anyway?

These principles require us adults to get out of the driver's seat when it comes to our kids' education. They ask us, at least some of the time, to let our kids determine which road to follow, decide where they are going, and figure out when they get there. What, then, is the role of adult wisdom in our kids' learning? Maybe if we step back from controlling, pushing and measuring, we will be able to take on different roles in their education-- role models, partners, and resources. We will know our kids are learning not because a report card tells us so but because we talk and listen to them. We will know our kids are moving towards successful adulthood not because they are following a standard curriculum but because we share in their learning adventures. Because we are not pushing them toward pre-set targets, we will be able to see the pride they take in achieving their own goals, and we will be able to empathize rather than chastise when the going gets tough.

The marketing of education for young children is all around us. If we parents can keep our fears in check and resist buying into it, we can give our kids the gift of life-long learning, skills and attitudes they can use all their lives. As for those plastic fish, although my daughter may yet get some use out of them when she is actively teething, so far they have held her interest for a maximum of two minutes. However, the cat food cans, which she discovered all on her own under the kitchen shelves, have provided hours of entertainment and seem to be around for the long haul.

Kristin Simpson was a co-founder and staff member at The Beach School, a Toronto independent school that followed the Sudbury educational model of student-directed learning and democratic decision-making. She hopes her daughter can learn in a similar environment when she reaches school age.