Pinterest
has a reputation as a place to share beautiful photographs of impossibly
intricate crafts, failure-prone recipes, and trite quotations. I have also
experienced it as a wonderful source of art, food, and ideas. The people
I follow there pin great information about many topics, including life learning.
Lately, I’ve also been noticing a lot of photos of gorgeous learning spaces
pinned to “unschooling” boards, along with elaborate, parent-instigated
projects, often using specially purchased equipment (which is stored and
organized in those gorgeously decorated and purpose-built learning spaces.)
At the same time, I’ve also been reading some blog posts suggesting that
children require special learning spaces or whole communities dedicated
to learning.
All of this puzzles me a bit because children need neither special learning
spaces nor special materials in order to learn. In fact, for me, one of
the wonderful strengths of the life learning/unschooling philosophy is the
understanding that we don’t need to create separate learning spaces or learning
communities for our children (i.e. schools or learning centers). Nor do we need to plan and
create special learning activities for them (although inspiring them is
always helpful).
The essence of life learning is the recognition that learning happens all
the time, anywhere and everywhere, because children are both natural learners
and natural socializers (some more sociable than others, and some preferring
quiet more than others). The spaces and communities where learning happens
occur spontaneously, along with interest in some topic. And there is learning
in whatever our children choose to do, wherever and with whomever they do
those things. (That is only true, of course, if their natural learning ability
hasn’t been schooled out of them.)
I learned all of this very early from my daughters. When I was pregnant
with our first, we painted a room (months in advance so it would off-gas),
I refinished furniture and sewed curtains. We purchased (and were given)
a variety of toys and gadgets, and we generally had a lot of fun preparing
“her” space. If Pinterest had existed then, our photos would have been downright
inspirational. Once she was born, she seldom used that space. We stumbled
onto bed sharing one otherwise sleepless night. As she grew, she preferred
to play in the same room I was in…right under my feet most of the time.
When her sister arrived, nothing changed. They could each have had a
bedroom but decided to share one and use the other one as a “playroom.”
They spent some time there together, but it mostly was used to store their
toys, which often sat decoratively on the shelves. Their time was spent
playing outdoors, hanging out (doing their own work) with us and our employees
in the publishing office, sprawled on the living room floor with books or
puzzles or LEGO, playing with the cardboard boxes that our business accumulated
seemingly non-stop, and, as they got older, with friends or volunteering
and working in the neighborhood.
This understanding that the whole world is a learning space that kids
can explore with just a bit of help from us is, for many unschooling parents,
one of the most difficult aspects of the deschooling process. But it is
also one of the most important.
So enjoy those beautiful Pinterest pics and the blogs they link to. If
you want to do the crafts or decorate a room, go right ahead and have fun;
maybe your child will join you. Just keep in mind that they’re no more necessary
for your child’s learning than curriculum, text books, tests, or grades.
Trust your children’s curiosity and interest in exploring, and their own
personal socialization comfort level, and they’ll create their own authentic
learning spaces, communities, and projects.
P.S. I hope you’ll
join me on Pinterest!
Wendy Priesnitz
is Life Learning Magazine's editor, an unschooling pioneer, the author
of thirteen books, a journalist with over 40 years of experience, and the
mother of two adults daughters who learned without school in the 1970s and '80s.
