Adults are responsible for children’s learning. If you are a parent or teacher in the United States, take a moment and think about this claim. You may or may not agree with it, but I predict that you act as if you do. In fact, I think it is one of the founding notions of modern American* parenting. Consider some of these corollaries:
- Children learn because they are taught.
- And therefore, if we want children to learn, we must teach them.
- If children aren’t learning according to the schedule we set, there is something wrong with the child or the teacher.
- Children’s activities must be carefully curated to ensure they learn the right lessons from them.
- The most important learning happens in a classroom.
You may think you disagree with these statements. If I challenged you, you would probably flatly deny you agree with them. But I suspect your actions say otherwise. Let me draw an important distinction, and then it will be clearer what I mean.
Work, Play, and Learning Activities
In Montessori, we tend to draw a sharp distinction, between “work” and “play”, and I think similar distinctions are drawing throughout American* society. In this post, I’d instead like to draw a three way distinction between categories of children’s activities and give some careful definitions.
- Play is any activity freely chosen by the child and done for the child’s own purposes. This can include social play, pretend play, physical games, reading a book, studying a topic of interest, or anything else the child a) chooses, b) structures for themselves, possibly in collaboration with others, and c) can put down at any time.
- Work is activity done for the benefit of the family or community (this could include a classroom or school unit). For adults, this includes wage labor, but for children, it generally doesn’t. Work for children is mostly what we call chores, though it could also include helping friends sort out an argument or running an errand for an adult. It may be chosen or assigned, and its successful completion may be celebrated by adults.
- Finally, we have learning activities. I define these as activities arranged and guided, or imposed, by adults for the future benefit of the child. They offer little immediate benefit to anyone. Learning activities can include schoolwork, organized sports, toys or games designed to teach specific skills (if they are guided by adults), all sorts of lessons such as music, dance, and art classes, tutoring, and homework. According to this definition, guided “playful learning” is also a learning activity.
The relative proportion of play versus work in a child’s life varies by culture and age, but according to anthropologists of childhood, the proportion of learning activities in the majority of cultures is zero, or close to it. Formal teaching, and the variety of learning activities associated with it, are largely recent inventions. The more typical attitude in hunter-gatherer and traditional agrarian societies is, “They will learn it anyway, so why waste time teaching them?” In fact, it is a common belief that children learn better when left to their own devices. Even the original “school-like” structures, apprenticeships, involved little teaching, and relatively little room for practice that didn’t help the master craftsman economically.
At their heart, learning activities are about adults taking responsibility for children’s learning, and this is why I predict you act as if you are responsible for everything your child (or students) learn, even if you are not. Consider for a moment how often you let your children play without any interference (beyond basic supervision for safety) or expect they do chores. Now compare that to the amount of time you spend explaining things to your children, helping them with their work, picking out educational toys, or shuttling them around to lessons and activities.
The learning activity virus
Adult guided learning experiences aren’t necessarily bad. What worries me is the way that “learning activities” have taken over the cultural zeitgeist to the point where parents and teachers literally have a legal responsibility for children’s learning. Parents are reluctant to accept the value of anything children choose to do on their own, and schools deal with problems by introducing more teaching. Children are bullying each other? Let’s introduce a Social-Emotional Learning curriculum. Children are bored on the playground? Let’s introduce “play coaches” to teach the children how to play. Children have downtime after school? Sign them up for classes so they can learn something else! Summer break coming soon? We better give them homework for the summer so they don’t “lose” learning. Want to market a new toy? Tell parents about its “educational value” and it’s sure to be a hit!
In fact, the culture of learning activities has so infected Americans that it’s common for adults to conflate it with work, as in “learning is your work”, and even exempt children from contributing to the household, in the form of chores, in order to make time for homework and various organized activities. Learning activities have become so strongly conflated with learning, that it is hard to convince people that there is valuable learning to be had in play or work if they are not explicitly “learning-ified”. And so they take a back seat to school, classes, and studying, and may even be eliminated altogether, because “learning” is what children are supposed to do, and that has to happen in learnified activities.
And this is where we have a problem, because children learn plenty, even entire repertoires of skills and culture from work and play. They learn by observation, pretend play, playful practice, and “pitching in” (Gaskins and Paradise, in Lancy, Bock, and Gaskins, 2010). And these are tools that children have evolved to use for their learning, and according to both anthropologists and educators (Maria Montessori!), they do so joyfully, and with relatively little work on the part of adults. But as we take over more and more of children’s time with learning activities, we force them to try to learn in a way that is highly unnatural, and we may even take away their ability to learn in more typical ways. In his book Free to Learn, Peter Gray writes:
"Lancy and a number of other anthropologists have suggested that Western schools---by indoctrinating students with the idea that learning occurs through top-down verbal instruction from a teacher and that copying others is cheating--may be teaching children not to learn through observation. By way of illustration, Lancy told me of a recent experience he had while skiing in Utah. A boy of about eleven years old, who had apparently never used a Poma lift before, approached this unusual type of ski lift without paying attention to how others were using it. When it was his turn to board, he held up the whole line of skiers behind him while he asked someone to teach him how to use the lift. In any non-Western culture, according to Lancy, a child in a similar situation would have had the sense to hold back and learn by watching how others did it. It is far more efficient to learn a task like riding a Poma lift by observation than by verbal instruction" (Gray, 2013, p.194).
Explicit instruction is not always necessary, and sometimes it’s better for kids to figure things out on their own, but it can speed up learning in the contexts where the options for learning through observation are limited, or there is a “code” that the children can’t break (i.e. reading, for some children). But I worry more about the management of the activities that go along with this instruction. Here is where we get into dangerous territory. Rather that teaching to answer the children’s questions and then sending them back to their own activities, we build an entire edifice of control around the children’s learning in order to “force” them to accept and absorb the lessons we offer on the schedule we offer.
There is wonderful progress in creating learning activities that invite children to be active participants and thinkers. For example, there is an entire world of math teachers working to create opportunities for children to explore and invent mathematics. The Writers Workshop, invented by Lucy McCormick Calkins, gives children opportunities to actually be writers. Various forms of service learning and expeditionary learning give children a chance to make real contributions.
But fundamentally, all of these approaches are built around forcing the children to learn according to an adult agenda. Adults set the time for the learning to happen. Adults create the context where it will happen. Adults decide on the main activities that will be part of the learning. Adults observe to see if the children are “participating.” Adults judge the success or failure of the learning. Most importantly, adults decide what is to be learned. Children’s agency is limited to how they choose to interact with the learning opportunity carefully provided by the adults, unless they choose to reject the entire edifice and face the consequences of their rebellion. In other words, these methods are kinder and gentler than trying to literally beat lessons into children, but they still aim to manage children so that they learn on our schedule and produce something that adults can judge.
Again, there may be times when such management makes sense, though I think fewer than many imagine. But we should treat the management of children’s learning like an opioid medicine: it has its uses, but it is easy to abuse (by the teacher, not the student!) and it can create dependence. Every time we manage children’s learning, we take away their opportunity to manage themselves.
Montessorians, You’re Not Off The Hook
I’m sure a lot of Montessori guides are reading this and saying, “Of course, that’s how traditional school works. We don’t do that.” But I’m not letting Montessorians off the hook, because in my experience we do the same thing, just not quite as thoroughly as the best traditional teachers. You’ll have to return and read more though, because that is a story for another day.