I\'m Summer, a mouthy, sarcastic bitch. I\'m passionate about natural birth, long term breastfeeding, and living naturally. I curse too much, love tattoos, and will some day be crushed to death by my book collection. I homeschool, dream of gardening, and swing to the left. 
Summer Vacation and School Days
What is it about summer that makes some people think more about school?
I think that for those of us who feel that school was something we needed to be liberated from, the magic of summer is almost tainted with dread. Sure summer vacation might not have meant building flying cars and super roller coasters in our backyards, but it did mean a kind of freedom we had to slurp up as quickly as possible before it was gone. Because all too soon we would be back at our desks, only able to daydream about the things we wanted to do.
Trish from TinyGrass forwards an article along on Twitter called Public schools stifle kids’ free will. It’s an obvious conclusion. Could you imagine a classroom of 25 kids, all acting according to their own free will? Teachers would skyrocket as the group with the highest amounts of alcohol use within a month. But, how many think about what that stifling means for each individual child?
The problem with children in public schools is not the children — it’s the public schools. It’s an artificial and coercive environment in which young children are put when they don’t know any better that they shouldn’t be there. The water is cool.
Then the water slowly heats with absurd rules such as sitting in one’s chair and not making noise when that is what children do and how children explore the world. Then the child is told to pay attention to certain information when the child has no interest in that information at that time. Then the child is yelled at or mentally manipulated by guilt-based recrimination from teachers and parents. The water slowly heats.
When the water gets close to boiling in elementary school or middle school, many of the potentially brightest and free-spirited children have almost completely tuned out in a natural rebellion against this artificial and needless education construct.
Any parent who has tried getting their kids to do something they weren’t interested in doing can attest to the tuning out. You tell them to clean their room then watch as the vacant stare washes over their face. Do we really want that same vacant stare happening when they should be learning? Vivian at MamNeedJava Tiffany of Nature Moms Blog has a great guest post up from Kirsten Olson, the author of Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture. The post is simple: in school children’s time may be occupied but not their brains. For too many they’ve tuned out, shut off their minds and walked away. The post lists 13 reasons why kids are tuned out at school, but I want to just point out two of the reasons.
4. You have to sit still too much in school. It’s hard to sit still all day. Few adults do it. We ask kids to.
5. You don’t get to choose what you are going to learn most of the day. Choice motivates! Lots of school assignments, even if they do offer choice, offer false, superficial ones.
It’s summer now, the season of swimming and biking and having fun. Kids who have been in a daze during the last nine months are waking back up, tuning back in to the world around us. Pay attention to how much your kids are learning in freedom, at their own pace, within their own desires. So far mine have chased frogs, and wanted to know everything about them. Collected rocks, and asked a thousand questions about what are fossils and how they are made. On and on and on, the learning never stops around here. Sure it’s disguised as play, but it’s learning none the less.
It’s when boredom gets disguised as learning that things because troublesome. That’s when tuning out happens, and learning stops.
