I have criticized public schools on this blog previously, usually staying away from the politics and focusing on the schooling process.  Not to worry, this is a continuation of that approach.  The difference here is that the brain science and the study of neuroplasticity is catching up with the argument for unschooling, or at least changing the school structure.

I recently finished the book The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge and I would suggest it to anyone wanting a better understanding of the brain science.

That said, brain plasticity and the associated studies outline three principles to how the brain learns best:

1.)    Learning is most effective when it is related to life

2.)    Learning should be done in increments

3.)    Learning should be concentrated and mass practiced

So based on these principles derived from studies of brain plasticity and learning, do standard approaches to schooling fit?

Learning done in increments?  Sure, this seems like a bit of a no brainer.  Even if you try to give someone an umbrella view of a topic, the learning is always incremental.  Stated simply, you can’t learn everything at once.

Is schooling typically ‘related to life’?  Schools and teachers try to make this happen with ‘examples’ but to me this is where the problems start to arise.  All of the attempts to create a fake reality which mimics the so-called ‘real world’ is known to be fake and does not have that same tie to ‘life’.

For instance, if a student learned about business and inventory and pricing by working in a store, that is far more powerful and that reading a book about business.  It immerses the student in the subject and it is not just related to life.  It IS life.

Now you may be thinking, “That’s nice Sean, but you can’t have every student working in a store.”  True, but my point is to point out why schools fail so we can move in a direction which makes sense, something no amount of ‘standards’ and ‘testing’ can do.

The third principle regarding concentrated and mass practiced learning is where schools fail most.  The whole approach of class subjects being taught for 50 minutes and then stopped so the student can go to a new subject is absolutely horrible in this regard.

For instance, when people learn French, who will learn faster and more thorough, someone who moves to France or someone listening to a French class for 45 minutes on their way to work?  It sounds ridiculous I know, but that is the equivalent of what schools do with a school day by design!

Schools chop subjects up into 45 minute segments and then wonder why it takes soooooo long for students to pick up concepts and why they forget them just as fast.  It’s because the approach is inefficient (to say it kindly) based on brain science.

But worse, this chopped up learning can actually create a sense of pointlessness.

If you think I am being extreme, how many of you want your kids to be ‘life long learners’?  How many of you have read a book or learned a new skill or taken up a new hobby in the past 2 years?  Why?

Even for myself, school and college was drudgery and it took me a number of years to re-discover my love of learning and creativity and sense of brain ownership.  Those had been destroyed, or at least put to sleep, by accepted school pedagogy.

So what would be better you may ask?  The real world.  This is why I find unschooling, as it is called, so compelling.  It is actually what people will do the rest of their lives after K-12 is over.  At the very least we need to re-think taking a bunch of subjects at once, and think it terms of 3 to 6 month projects or apprenticeships or even REAL individualized education.

I think there is a whole book which could be written on this subject and I will continue to mine salient points.  Hopefully, this can be a start to a re-thinking of exactly why schools are so terribly mediocre.

We all make mistakes.  The more we feel pushed and the more deadlines exist and the more you feel various pressures, the higher the likelihood of those mistakes.  Patience only goes so far at times, even for someone who prides themselves on the non-aggression principle.

That said, my oldest daughter got snapped at by me this morning.  My mistake, my pressure, my fault.  What was interesting is, now 10 and almost 11, she looked at me with compassion.  She knows that is not the norm from me.  When younger, she cower away or sulk or get mad at me.

Now those are all fine things to do and completely acceptable when a parent yells at a child.  Hence, I do not do it (hardly ever anyway).  In addition, I do not punish (no timeouts…ever) nor blackmail (be good and I will….).  When you parent with compassion versus aggression, you hope that the compassion is the thing learned.

So I have to admit a certain pride in seeing her, in the face of my pointless anger, practice compassion and understanding.  It dissolved my anger.

Being compassionate toward an aggressor or in the face of intimidation or when being attacked is a level of empathy almost no one reaches, at least consistently.  I know I fail too often to reach my desired goals in this regard.  Heck, it’s hard enough to stay level headed with normal pressures.

But if you choose to parent with nonviolence, it will pay off and it does work.  Compassion teaches compassion.  Violence teaches violence.  Guilt teaches guilt.  Openness teaches openness. 

Have you worked with your kids on their homework or observed them doing homework?  Have you had to beg and nag and coerce and blackmail, just to get them to spend 15 minutes on homework?  Is homework a lot of home work?

I would assume, for most, the answer is yes to the above questions.  Now, if that is the flavor and the process of homework, the assumption must be that it is extremely useful and is of the utmost importance to your kid’s world of intellect.

Yes, I just choked as I wrote it, just like you laughed as you read it.  Anyone who has spent time with a kid doing homework knows that they get very little from it and it is often just busy work.  But we fight and nag, and much home misery is created by this demand. 

This causes two questions to pop into my mind.  One, why do parents go along with this and continue to carry water for schools and teachers who demand it?  And second, why in the world would any education professional actually create this situation or think it is useful?

Why do parents do it?  Here are some answers I have heard and my comments.

“Teachers demand it.  What are we going to do?”  This is the old give away of responsibility move.  If you want your kids to be critical thinkers and to not follow the crowd, why would we stop thinking and follow a teacher in mindless obedience?

“Well they need to learn it.”  But you know that doing a task with no heart or mind into it is a waste of time.  A kid will be lucky to remember a fact for the test, let alone integrate it into their intellect.  If you want your kids to be smarter and embrace life to its fullest, why demand that they do things that make their world more boring and make life more unhappy?

“I did homework and look how I turned out.”  This is popular to justify almost anything we do to our kids, but it legitimizes nothing.  In fact, why would we justify a demand like that when we want our kids to be independent thinkers and not simply follow orders?

In reality, most parents will acknowledge the reality of homework but then say ‘meh’.

Why do teachers do it?

While there may be a small percentage of teachers who think the repetition involved is useful, I think most do it to look like they are doing something.  After all, if a teacher does not give homework, then a parent doesn’t see ‘something happening’ with their kids.  This can make for some uncomfortable talks at parent-teacher confabs.  After all, parents are paranoid that their kids are not going to be competitive in the ‘21^st century’ so teachers should do ‘everything they can’.  (even something pointless, apparently)

I think teachers are also under pressure from schools to give homework.  This happens for 3 reasons.  One is named above.  Two, administrators need teachers to prep kids for standardized tests (which requires a whole book to explain why that is nearly pointless).  And lastly, and this is the dirty little secret, it gets parents to have skin in the game.

Now what do I mean by that last one?  Well, it means that if you are required to oversee the extension of the school into the home, that means you de facto support the school.  It also means if something goes wrong with your child, a school can point the finger at you.

This is a similar reason to why schools make kids sell cookies and magazines and god knows what else.  The amount of money raised by these things is tiny compared to the massive sums brought in by taxes, so why do schools demand it?

They need the parents to have skin in the game.  They need to blackmail parents by the universal human feelings of responsibility and reciprocity.  If anything goes wrong, then YOU need to do more.  YOU are failing.  After all, a school can only do ‘so much’.  A school tries so hard and we are ‘a team’, right?  A school does everything for a child and all they are asking for is a little cooperation!

I would guess that 90% of homework is an absolute waste of time.  So are we going to question it or continue to make life more unhappy for little to no gain?  If you choose the later, please contact me.  I have some work that needs done and I’m sure you won’t mind doing it for free….

Syndrome: Oh, I'm real. Real enough to defeat you! And I did it without your precious gifts, your oh-so-special powers. I'll give them heroics. I'll give them the most spectacular heroics the world has ever seen! And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super... [chuckles evilly] … no one will be.

Sibling rivalry can run amuck.  Kids feeling constantly in competition with one another, scorekeeping your action and expenditures.  Watching each other for every little thing they can get mad at each other about.  Bickering and fighting.

You may think that all siblings are this way, but that is not true.  In addition, it does not have to be that way.  The major problem is that the reaction of us parents to comparisons between kids is often the opposite of what it needs to be to diffuse the bomb that is sibling rivalry.

Syndrome (from the Incredibles) gets it, but it seems that far too many people do not.  If you accentuate fairness in numbers and amounts, this is equivalent to accentuating comparison.  Even if what you want is EVERYONE to feel special, the reality is that NO ONE feels special when cosmic fairness is your aim.

Do you get your kids the same gifts or presents or things or gum?  If one gets something does the other child HAVE to get something as well?  If you think that, you are feeding the rivalry, not merely keeping the peace.

It is actually better (and makes kids feel more special) when you rarely buy them stuff at the time.  It is better, if you are giving both kids something at once, to make the items as different as possible.

Consider this exchange:

Daughter #1:  You got daughter #2 a toy.  Did you get me anything?

Me:  No, it was her birthday.  You get things on your birthday just different stuff.

Or perhaps:

Daughter #2:  You got daughter 1 a pair of shorts.  Did you get me anything? 

Me:  No, she needed shorts today.  We get stuff when we need them.

Or if I got them both an item:

Daughter #1:  you got me a Polly Pocket and daughter 2 a Lego friend.  Why didn’t you get me a Lego friend?

Me:  Well, daughter 1 really likes those and I noticed you had been playing with a Polly the other day, so I thought it would be a nice surprise.

I know some of you may find it hard to believe, but kids can handle those answers.  Second, those answers free them from focusing on the scorecard.  Third, those answers stop you from placing yourself in the middle of a sibling drama.  And lastly, read my final answer above.  That statement actually individualizes each child, showing that you are thinking of each specially.

Accentuating fairness creates, sustains and enhances sibling rivalry.  It can create a situation where nothing is ever good enough because kids don’t feel special.  In order to feel special, they will fight for every penny, nice comment, profession of love, trinket, parcel, widget, bowl of cereal, pencil, dress, or piece of garbage on the face of the earth.  When everybody is equal, no one has special powers.  Remember, Syndrome is the bad guy. 

Add into that our tendency of parents to have favorites, and it is a recipe for warfare. 

I think most parents want to be fair with their kids.  I know I do.  We need to be fair without it being obvious and without it being a focus of events, amounts and outcomes.  Instead, accentuate what is special about each child and allow them to see the other get presents alone, as a special individual in a special situation.  In time, they will be happy for one another versus rivalrous bean counters.

It is an honor and privilige to witness those wonderful moments where you see your children being themselves, being confident, and being compassionate.  All were on display at the Jimmy Buffett show last Thursday.

I saw my daughters making balloon animals, being friendly and confident, and having a blast as they also managed to make some 'tips' as well.  They are very proud of themselves and should be.

In the concert, my oldest repeatedly got beach balls for the younger and the youngest toughed it out for the encore even though she got tired.  The three of us worked together to have a great concert, great tailgating and managed to keep the ship between the buoys.  A wonderful time and a wonderful memory.