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• Children Educate Themselves II: We All Know That's True for Little Kids - Homeschooling in Sweden - Annotated

  tags: education society culture status quo

  • Children Educate Themselves II: We All Know That’s True for Little Kids
  • how much children learn in their first few years of life, before they start school, before anyone tries in any systematic way to teach them anything? Their learning comes naturally
  • children put enormous energy into their learning
  • Physical Education
  • toddlers at the peak of learning to walk spend, on average, 6 hours per day walking
  • they are just walking for the sake of walking
  • especially interested in walking when they are exposed to a new kind of surface
  • we certainly don't have to motivate them. All we have to do is provide appropriate safe places for them to practice
  • Language Education
  • children growing up in bilingual homes acquire two languages by the age of four and somehow manage to keep them distinct
  • the specific words and rules of every language are different and clearly have to be learned
  • Infants and young children continuously educate themselves about language
  • By a few months of age
  • they regularly follow the eyes of older children or adults, to see what the others are looking at, which helps them guess what they are talking about
  • Language learning, like learning to walk, is play. It is absorbing, intense, done for its own sake
  • Science Education
  • Six-month-olds examine every new object they can reach, in ways that are well designed to learn about it's physical properties
  • Once they have learned how to control an object and have exhausted all the possibilities for action on it
  • The fun of science lies in the discovery, not in the knowledge that results
  • Nobody goes into science because they like to be told the answers to someone else's questions; they go into science because they like to discover the answers to their own questions. That's why our standard method of training people in science never turns them into scientists. Those who become scientists do so despite such training
  • Social and Moral Education
  • They also want to play with others. Social play is the primary natural means of every child's social and moral education
  • We can't possibly teach these lessons to children; all we can do is let them play with others and let them experience themselves the consequences of their social failures and successes
  • What Happens to Motivation at Age Five or Six?
  • I've seen developmental psychology textbooks that divide the units according to age and refer to the preschool years as "the play years."
  • It is as if play stops at age five or six. The remaining chapters largely have to do with studies of how children perform on tasks that adults give them to perform
  • when young people beyond the age of five or six are permitted the freedom and opportunities to follow their own interests, their drives to play and explore continue to motivate them, as strongly as ever, toward ever more sophisticated forms of learning

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