“teach your own”: learning without teaching

learning without teaching

from a letter to author:
“…it simply isn’t possible to a lot about dinosaurs or anything else without along the way learning and using knowledge and skills that are intellectually prerequisite…Perhaps the reason that so many adults…find it hard to refrain from ‘helping’ kids is that it wounds our egos to see how well they get along without us!” p. 144-5

from a letter to author:
“…if people recognized knowledge as being important only in relation to actual goals — narrow or broad in scope — rather than being some kind of unquestionable goal in itself, they might better know how to go about acquiring it…a market exists for free schools offering not ‘teachers’ but the resources necessary for self-teaching.” p. 132

“…all human beings soon want to play Psychologist; no one wants to be the Pigeon. We humans are not by nature like sheep or pigeons, unquestioning, docile, happy to work the machine as long as it lights up its green lights or rolls out its food pellets…we want to find out how the machine works, and then work it. We want to find out how things happen, so that we can make them happen.” p. 154

learning a new language:
“Young children who come in contact with people who speak more than one language will learn to speak all of those languages…[adults] invent fancy theories about children having a special aptitude, or their brains being somehow different from adults’.
   ”The real explanation is simpler. The child, who in his home speaks language A, but meets outside the home of other children who speak language B, does not in any way set himself the taks of ‘learning language B.’ In fact, he does not think of himself as ’speaking language A,’ or indeed of any language. he just speaks. He tries to understand what people are saying, and to make them understand what he wants to say, and the more he does this, the better he gets.
   ”…What he wants and tries to do is understand those people, at least a little, right now and to make them understand him, at least a little, right now. That is what he works at, and since he is smart, tireless, ingenious, not much discouraged by difficulties, and not at all worried about ‘failing’ or looking foolish, and since he gets instant responses to tell him whether or not he is understanding or being understood, he very quickly gets good at it.
   ”His parents think how wonderful it is that he is learning language B so quickly. But he is not trying to do that…He is just trying to communicate with those people he meets.” p. 154-5

learning music:
“Five things made it possible for me to help her find out how to do this [learn music]:

1. It was her idea, her interest; she wanted to do it.
2. I was at all times ready to stop if she wanted to. She knew I would not, in my enthusiasm for teaching, push her into the confusion, panic, and shame into which eager or determined teachers so often push their students.
3. I accepted as legitmate and serious both her anxiety and her confusion. Even in the privacy of my own mind, I did not dismiss any of her fears or questions as sill.
4. I was ready to let her ask all the questions, to wait for her answers, and to let her use my answeres as he wished. I did not test her understanding. I let her her decide whether she understood or not, and if not, what to do about it, what questions to ask next.
5. I was not going to use her to prove to her or myself or anyone else what a gifted teacher I was.” p. 157

“To parents I say, above all else, don’t let your home become some terrible minature copy of the school. No lesson plans! No quizzes! No tests! No report cards! Even leaving your children alone would be better; at least they could figure out some things on their own. Live together, as well as you can; enjoy life together, as much as you can. Ask question to find out something about the world itself, not to find out whether or not someone knows it.” p. 162-3

“The most important question any thinking creature can ask itself is, ‘What is worth thinking about?’ When we deny its right to decide that for itself, when we try to control what it must attend to and thinkn about, we make it less obervant, resourceful, and adaptive, in a word, less intelligent, in a blunter word, more stupid.” p. 165

a jab at “teach your baby to read” by glenn doman:
the trouble with teaching babies tricks, even the trick of reading, is that the mroe we do this, the more they think that learning means and can only mean being taught by other to do tricks, and less they want to or can explore and make sense of the world around them in their own wasy for their own reasons. p. 165

“Intelligence, as I wrote in How Children Fail, is not the measure of how much we know how to do, but of how we behave when we don’t know what to do. It has to do with our ability to think up important questions and then find ways to get useful answers…We are born with it [this ability], and if our other deep animal nees are fairly well satisfied, and we have reasonable access to the world around us, we will put it to work on that world.” p. 166

learning difficulties

“‘How do you tell the difference between a learning difficulty (which we all experience every time we try to learn anything) and a learning disability? That is to say, ho do you tell,or on what basis does someone decide (and who is this someone?) whether the cause of a given learning difficulty lies within the nervous system of the learner, or with things outside of the learner — the learning situation, the teacher’s expectations, the teacher him/herself, or the material itself?…” p. 168

“…for many reasons it is very convenient to many people — to parents, to teachers, to schools, to LD experts and the giant industry that has grown up around them — sometimes even to the children [that false learning disability theories persist to exist]. The [theories] may not help anyone learn to read, but it keeps a lot of people busy, makes a lot of people richer, and make almost everyone feel better. Theories that do all that are not easy to get rid of.” p. 171