Educating children

This topic may be where i am the most unconventional, but by the end of this post, hopefully i'll be able to present my case in such a way that you'll think its perfectly reasonable, and could be a new convention sometime in the near future.

Today, the vast majority of people, whether rich or poor, will have a baby and within a few months return to work, leaving their babies at daycare for most of the day. The child will stay in daycare until age 3, at which point they'll enter pre-school, where they learn shapes, numbers, the alphabet, colors, sing some songs, and spend the most productive part of their day running around the playground, but will be called in for more classroom time. At age 5 they enter school and begin to learn spelling, reading, addition, subtraction, natural science, and social studies or historical stories, mostly falsely patriotic or heroic or in some way misleading. The children sit in rows indoors, and listen to their teacher. As the years progress, the teachers teach increasingly complicated intellectual matters that sometimes they themselves have to review out of a textbook.

My understanding of child development is that the first five years are most significant for building the foundation off of which they learn. Children imitate their parents and people in their surroundings, so its important to be really conscientious about whose care your putting your baby under. They will definitely absorb that energy in some way and considering the possibilities of People in General, that can be a terrifying prospect!

Anyway, fear aside, here is my alternative approach to educating children in the first formative years. Since their brains are growing and they are sucking up knowledge like a sponge, it is easy to teach reading to a pre-5 year old child while they are still learning to speak. Speaking and reading can go hand in hand and need not be separated! There's a video called 'your baby can read' and i'm formulating a video myself that isn't as random and jumpy as that tutorial, but the basic idea can be applied to every day life, since written language is everywhere. The only problem with reading Everything is that a Camera might become Canon and a computer might become Macbook.... But that can be remedied with tape and a marker.

Before the age of 3, which is when they can be expected to be able to verbally express themselves sufficiently, they are completely musical, tonal, and energetic. If the caregiver is conscious of this tidbit, that musical start will blossom into further creativity later. After 3 until maybe 5 or 7, the child becomes very materially oriented, and sculpting and taking things apart and putting them back together will help them become empowered project-finishers, unlike myself, who was intellectually stimulated and materially deprived (!!) After that, the child wants to participate more in the adult world and is beginning to want to be welcomed into the adult world. They also begin to question the authority that they naturally imitated earlier, and now need more substantial evidence of the caregivers competence. If the caregiver is unworthy of their respect and imitation, this will most certainly lead to problems in the teens, but if the caregiver is worthy of respect and imitation, the child will be inspired to follow and reenlist their trust in the elder.

What does all this child development shit mean for education?
Well, since its not compatible with public school systems, it makes things very complicated for me if i want to do what i 'know' is best. Maybe i'll have to start a home-schooling group or a cooperative school and create a lesson plan revolving around sculpting, music, movement, and exploration of the natural world. My son is 15 months old. in 9 months he'll be nursery-aged, and in a year and 9 months he'll be pre-school age... can i get my shit together?

I think if my son gets through the first 7 years unscathed from the ordinary way of doing things, i may be able to put him in public school after that. I think it can be valuable in itself to simply be in that system, to compare and contrast it with his previous way of existence. That way, as he grows into adolescence, he'll be able to say what he thinks of the system and if he'd like to choose another method of school for middle or high school. Middle school can probably be completely avoided. Maybe i'll go out on a long roadtrip for two years during those years.

Who liked middle school, anyway? A roadtrip seems in order, with lots of unsheltering and experiencing the world, and growing into adulthood and maturity and understanding of the universe in all its abstract and concrete forms. Oooo that will be an exciting time!!!

And high school? Oh gosh... Besides the intense socialization that most people encounter, of being in such close proximity with so many people their own age and getting involved in meaningless, existentially questionable dramas, i think high school and clumping all those teens together like that is detrimental to their sense of belonging to society. High school creates its own mini-society with practically no relation to elders or youngers unless as an extracurricular volunteer activity. This may be a really great time to live in some form of community of all ages and really experiencing the different seasons.

Did i just plan out my sons life? It looks like i did. But plans get knocked off course by various effects and i'm open to that.

This was a really long post, and my initial intention of convincing the reader of my reasonable point of view went missing along the way of my fantasizing of the ultimate life-span for my growing teen. But maybe the point came across somehow... I need to test this on someone. Reader?