brave chieftains

I'll capture them fat I'll capture them scrawny.

I'll capture a scraggle-foot mulligatawny,

A high stepping animal fast as the wind

From the blistering sands of the desert of zind.

This beast is the beast that the brave chieftains ride

when they want to go fast to find some place to hide.

I found this really funny if you have read a war book where the general runs away on a horse and leaves his entire army to get captured when he is about to lose. like in the American Revolution,

Major General Heratio Gates' 170 mile retreat at the Battle of Camden, after 1000 of his men got captured.

-raised by sprouts

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

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.