Homeschooling Young Children
Children are born learning—there's considerable proof they even learn to recognize voices while in the womb. No one must teach a healthy child to walk, talk, and socialize and no one thought to do so until modern times. Why mess with success? Yet we do—How To Teach Your Baby To Talk programs and their ilk continue to appear, as if children can't learn their Mother Tongue without a professional mediator or will learn better with one. Such are the fears of educated people!
You don't need to unschool children not old enough to fall under the compulsory schooling law because they're doing it naturally. Watch and appreciate your children's learning and growth during these amazing years and you'll see for yourself how much genuine, important learning occurs just by your child's engagement with the world and the people they meet in it.
GWS magazine is full of such stories, as is the work of John Holt and others noted throughout this site. I want to note these research studies, however, because they can be particularly good to overcome skepticism about children's abilities to learn, particularly among educators (isn't that a sad irony?). The first is a study, Young Children Learning, that quantifies and analyzes the depth and effectiveness of children's conversations at home and at school that "reveals the richness of the home as a learning environment and shows how much children can learn through the ordinary conversations of everyday life."
Young Children Learning by Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes (Harvard University Press, 1984; 2003). Turns upside-down the commonly held belief that professionals know better than working-class parents how to educate and bring up children.
The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Research from MIT published in Cognition, 2010. A study that finds "children restrict their exploration both after direct instruction to themselves and after overhearing direct instruction given to another child; they do not show this constraint after observing direct instruction given to an adult or after observing a non-pedagogical intentional action." In other words, exactly as John Holt observed in 1964 in his book How Children Fail, kids' curiosity and drive are dampened by unasked-for teaching.
Read More on This Topic by Pat Farenga
Young Children as Research Scientists
