Morgan talks about curriculum, history curriculum in particular;
"You know when we grew up we learned white people history, mostly wars, out of a text book, and it was very Western culture-centered, and history was mostly about who fought, who won, and..."
When Morgan said this I thought - The Trojan War, the Wars in the Bible, the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War 1, World War 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam War. She's right, at least that's what I studied in school, at least in middle school and high school. It never occurred to me that the history of the world didn't have to be followed in threads of fighting.
Morgan suggests other ways history could be organized,
"Why do we learn history by wars? How about we learn history based on science and invention, or from a women's point of view or from you know indigenous people's point of view or there are so many more things which in some ways makes, like I don't feel like I had a well-rounded education because it was from such a narrow point of view."
And outside of history, curriculum-guided content still dominates what a child learns in school. When I chose to homeschool my children, I searched out the local public schools for their grade-level curricula to make sure my children learned the "important stuff"; I so bought into the absolute sovereignty of the curriculum the public schools had created. Morgan had the courage to imagine something different.
“Like it doesn’t seem to me, in this day and age, that there is a particular curriculum that you need to know.”
Morgan unschools her children. She doesn't follow a curriculum. When asked what goals she has for her children she responded,
"I think my goals are for them to be confident that they can figure out stuff. Like I don't think you need to know this or you need to know that so much as more have the confidence that they know how to figure things out or know people to go ask or can go online and figure stuff out. It doesn't seem to me, in this day and age, that there is a particular curriculum that you need to know as much as the ability to learn what you need to know.
Morgan's personal school experience made a strong impression on her and the direction she steers her children.
"I feel like when I grew up you had to know Western Civilization and bloddy blah blah, and that a lot of the rest of the world history was just kind of ignored. If you tried to learn all the world history from forever, you could never know it all, and it would take up all your time. So I think you can't say you have to know these particular things.
I read some of the classics when I was in school, and there is other stuff that I haven't read. and I don't feel my life is ruined by the classics I missed and history I don't know."
Morgan reports feeling bored or angry when she went to school. She felt unable to do the things she was interested in.
"Well, I was super bored through all of school. and I was angry a lot of the time...I joked about Cuisenaire rods, because I loved to play with Cuisenaire rods, and I remember they were only something that got brought out for like two or three days in the school year. And I REALLY loved them. I really wanted to play with them and make patterns and do stuff, and we weren't allowed to. They only came out at that one time. That's just one example, but there were a lot of things that just made me angry...having to do what they thought was important, the way they wanted to do, and just being bored a lot of the time. I was smart. I got my work done really fast and I wasn't allowed to do what I was interested in."
These experiences in traditional classrooms led Morgan to try something different. When asked about how she plans school, without a curriculum, she laughs and says,
"I would say we have a lot of books in our house. and we have the computer. Ricky will be in third grade this year, and I do go through and look at what's expected of a third grader, and I will get lots of relevant books out of the library. The other thing we do is travel. We went to the mountains and there were like fifty million garter snakes everywhere. Ricky was capturing them. We were there when they came out of their den in the spring and had the mating ball. When we came home from the mountains, we went to the library and got all these books out about garter snakes, and Ricky looks at the pictures and we talk about it, and I read them and tell them about it. So that's sort of my planning, to sort of when something gets interesting and we get a whole bunch of books."
Going against the tide has not been worry free. Math is one example; her boys haven't studied math in a structured way. Some of this causes her worry. She's not sure that her choices are always the right ones, but she does the best she can. She talks about the math she learned in school,
"M: Like the times tables, any of them pops out of my head, like that (she snaps her finger)?
J: You mean you can't remember them?
M: No, I know them all. Oh, they were drilled into my head. 6x7=42, you know like, it's just there. And they (her children) will never have that. That immediate knowledge of 8x5=40. and I can't tell whether that's a problem or not."
I spent a lot of math time teaching math facts to fourth graders. When they didn't learn them I heard about it from the teachers in the upper grades; it caused problems in higher level math. It remains to be see how difficult this will be for Morgan's children. Maybe they won't ever use higher level math, or else use calculators. Maybe one day they'll decide they need to know this and learn it.
Curriculum holds a place in our culture that few people question. I'll share how some other parents in my study approached curriculum.
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