- Socialization. While it remains true that school is an atrocious (verging on evil) social environment, it remains true that the primary task of children between ~8 and ~18 is to become social beings that play well with others. The far and away #1 error made by homeschoolers everywhere is insufficient attention to the social NEEDS of their kids. By 14 or so, it becomes intolerable, and they frequently begin to attend school because of the gap. It's a reasonable assumption that a 15 year old needs 8+ hours a day of social interaction with peers, and that 15 is near the peak for most kids....falling to maybe 3 hours at 10 or 20. While online friends and interactions can substitute for part of it, it's very important to find ways to get kids in person with peers for LOTS of hours, most every day.
- Boredom. This is 100% essential to becoming self-directed, independent learners. I've seen it take a year after exiting the school system before someone got their hiney up off the couch and decided to learn something herself...but it happens. Boredom is the mind-expander. Allow boredom, and DO NOT intervene to prevent it. Interestingly, both video games and TV are significant boredom-mitigators, and seem quite able to make this process longer...while making folks more irritable. Especially, if someone has only limited access to TV/Video Games, they can eat HUGE amounts of boredom. It may be the case that unlimited access will eventually bore a person out of the approach, but both TV and Video Games are increasingly designed for addictiveness (Farmville, WoW, Lineage).
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Education counterintuitives -- Part 1
Having been in education and the homeschooling community for a long time...there are a lot of things that folks know that are HIGHLY non-intuitive to a lot of folks without that 20 years of experience. Here's a couple:
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4 comments:
"It's a reasonable assumption that a 15 year old needs 8+ hours a day of social interaction with peers."
Why?
And what counts as a peer?
Hello?
You pulled this out of your ass.
Justify.
Or at least bloody well define your terms.
Peer = Folks (some non family) who operate in peer function.
Not pulled OoA, but from observation.
Kids (10-20), need other kid contact, and not just family, in order to learn to function in the social world. Since functioning in the social world is that hardest task faced by a teen, you can watch them (especially when not in a toxic school environment) learning the system.
Can I justify with substantial research? Probably not. Can I justify by pointing to kids who don't get that? A lot closer to able to do that.
The fact is most kids put in the 10k+ hours needed to become an expert socializer.
If you're like me and didn't, you're at a substantial disadvantage in any non-loner situation.
I would say Aretae's budget is just this plus some arithmetic.
Aretae, do you think it's reasonable to entirely deprive kids of TV and e-games?
I don't have kids of my own, so I only know that my own reaction, as a kid, would be consistent with a cruel tyranny.
I became immune to addictive games because after a while I asked myself if I was having fun. It was suddenly very easy to stop.
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