School

Recently I took a wonderful class on coursera!  If you want you can turn in participation and get credit for taking the class.  I think it costs something like $100 to get a signed certificate that you took the class. 


But I didn't have time to figure out how to turn in all the homework, and I didn't take it because I wanted someone else to know I had taken it.


I took it because I wanted to learn.


I would have to say, of all the classes I have ever taken, it was the most educational.


So what is school?


Is it a set of rules and tests to see if you followed them well enough to get enough credit to be looked at to get hired for a job?


To me, my learning, my reasoning for going to school was to learn.  And that is what I got from it.


If they had been teaching something I could have learned another way, from a book or a video game, or from talking to friends, then that is where I would have gone for the information, not to school.


I do not send my kids to school.  But I am very much for free public school!  I have often lauded the opportunity there is in this country to go to school for free!  But do we have free schools in the U.S.A.?  Are our schools places where  people can go to learn?  Where people go to get knowledge they can't get better and easier someplace else?


Do our public schools give us knowledge or tell us what knowledge to get?  Do they open our minds and help us discover new ways of learning we wouldn't have thought of on our own, so we can open the floodgates of the unknown and drink in the depths of understanding?  Or do they restrict how we are allowed to learn and tell us not only what we "must" learn, but where and how we must find that knowledge.  Are these really, by definition, schools?   Places to measure and keep track of learning?  Yes.  Places to create competition over limited types of learning?  To be sure.  But "schools"?  Places we can go to discover what we never would have known otherwise?  I think not.


Now, there are many schools in other parts of the world, that do serve this purpose.  Even here in the U.S.A.,  there are likely places where what a child discovers in school, cannot be had other places, given their situation in life. 


If the only person I knew who could tell me what the words on a page meant, was a teacher at school, I would gladly walk 10 miles there and 10 miles back each day.  Some kids do. 

             "there are no classrooms.  There are no desks.  It doesn't matter.  There is a teacher,"




Thankfully we have a place that is free to everybody no matter their age, that provides boundless information in increasingly innovative ways.  The Public Library.

                                                           That Book Woman

The Whole Big Family

I love alternative building books!  I have always loved building things and dreaming of building things.  For fun, I would spend hours and hours designing "my future house", complete with fountain/waterslide in the living room. 

The first substantial alternative building book I read was "The Hand-Sculpted House", all about building with cob (a clay mud, sand, straw mixture)!  Like I have found is true for most alternative building books, it was not only a book for building, but a philosophical book for life!  I love the things I learn from these books!




Then there are Michael Reynolds' earthships, made out of dirt pounded into old tires.  I love how his book starts out with beings of light finding incapatability with other living things in humans, and deciding to become human in order to influence us.  Beautiful spirituality.  I will never forget the picture I saw of divers in the ocean, completely surrounded by old tires, as Reynolds testified that these were the building materials currently readily available on earth.




Birdwings

  Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
    up to where you are bravely working.
  Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
    here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
 Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
    If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
    you would be paralysed.
 Your deepest presence is in every small
 contracting and expanding,
   the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
    as birdwings.

  From The Essential Rumi Coleman Barks with John Moyne - See more at:
http://allspirit.co.uk/rumibirdwings.html



And the poetry of Rumi, that I only accidentally found when looking for more books on  Ceramic houses by Nader Khalili.  I love Nader's writing as well, and found it very enjoyable to read "Sidewalks on the Moon" with my son.  It is a book about his life, including his upbringing in Iran.  It was so nice to be able to see into his life and culture (his writing really pulls you in), especially right now with all the people with guns over there. 

        

But my favorite architectural book, as far as spiritual philosophy, is not necessarily an alternative building methods book.  True, it does bemoan the state of affairs that have brought us to unused mowed lawns surrounding suffocatingly monotonous ticky tacky houses.  But it is not about building with mud, garbage, or even underground.  It is about what is built, the way the design of a building affects our whole lives. 

                            

Here it talks of the kitchen as the soul of the house.  How a large friendly kitchen is important for happiness in life.  How preparing food together is just as important as eating food together, and how the atmosphere a home creates around a table can make people want to linger, and turn eating food from a chore that is quickly done, to an experience that changes your whole life.  
Gordon Neufeld goes further to explain how parents being the source of food for their children, strengthens the family relationship.  This is hard in the culture of this time and place to imagine that we are the source of anything for our children.  Food, knowledge, entertainment, is all promoted as needing to be instantly available to everybody.  But missing in it all is love.  I used to think that I was indoctrinating my kids with a love of books and reading, because when I really sit down and spend time with them that we both enjoy, it is when we are reading books together.  But this is no more a means of indoctrination than mealtimes together are.  In the chaos of rapidly changing cultures that is accelerating in our modern reality, family naturally still finds its crevices to hold on to.  And the actions we perform, without need to analyze and judge them as healthy or not, naturally fulfill the roles our children need them to.

Yesterday we all got in the car together as what the toddlers refer to as "the whole big family".  It was just a short drive to the library before it closed for the night, but it was my most enjoyable experience of the day.  When we are all in the car together, we don't have outside distractions.  We talk and laugh and joke together, and a calmness and security settles over even the most begrudging siblings who have fought that day, and we realize how much we really like being together, how much we really love each other.

Exploring!

I have already managed to teach my one year old that exploring and curiosity are bad, or at least not things "approved of" by Mommy.  When I walked around the corner, he started and backed away from initiating an investigation of the myriad unknowns of his world.  Later, he looked up at me questioningly, recognizing I was there, before he reached out to touch something new.  Not in the beautiful hesitancy of trusting a parent, where a parents advice on something potentially scary, is sought.  Not using me as a partner to investigate and navigate the world that has taught him healthy respect and hesitancy, but gut wrenchingly a look for approval. "Will I be pulled hastily away from this 'danger' as well?  I might as well ask, as to reach out my hand for comprehension, only to have it pulled back." 

I dream of being organized enough that I have a large house and yard completely explorable by a 1 year old.  But then, as my child eats dirt and teeths on rocks (large clean ones he can hold in his hand are the best - they are hard and cold and probably taste good and earthy-natural-wild too), I think of all of the "safe" exploration toys on the market for his age group.  Long term safety of gnawing on plastic aside, is this limited bright colored exploration what I really want for my child?  Are bright colors better than what he could get by himself in his real, unpretentious world?  How do I define "better"?  Is it how much knowledge he can find, or what knowledge?  What would he prefer? 

Then words from my favorite book  (I know, I have more than one - or a new one every day, every moment), come back.
    How we want to mimic our parents.  We want to discover their world.  It is not some T.V. hyper plastic world that he wants to discover, that he is unsatiably curious about, but my world.  (Unless of course my world is a "T.V. hyper plastic" one.) 

I love books that capture this sacred longing of children to become like their parents.  This natural motivation that makes learning what they will need in the world they are and will be in, spontaneous.  This instinctual force that makes all play the best suited learning for that individuals life.

        

I just wish he saw me as an exploring partner, not the curiosity police of his domain.