“The learning loss that’s taken place since March when they left, when schools closed, it’ll take years to catch up. This could impact an entire generation of students.” NYT Coronavirus Schools Briefing 10/14/2020
I have such a hard time reading things like this because I don’t believe it. It is so alarmist. Years to make up four or five months of school? Get a grip!!!
If what they say here is true, then schools are not teaching kids what they should be teaching. They should be teaching them how to learn. You don’t want to just give them a fish, you want to teach them to fish. If children know how to learn they can continue learning, even when they are not in school.
When I started homeschooling, one of the most exciting concepts I came across was that we want our kids to be lifelong learners! We want to be lifelong learners! I used to go to these ‘curriculum fairs’ and often workshops were offered, and one speakers’ message was just that – become lifelong learners! Teach your kids to be lifelong learners.
Children arrive in this world with an insatiable desire to learn. Babies just learn and learn and learn. Toddlers too! I just can’t get enough watching my 4-year-old grandson learn. And I often fear what happens, when we send kids to school, is we squelch that love of learning, that amazing curiosity. They enter kindergarten and are immediately socialized into the schooling environment. How to sit quietly and listen. How to organize a desk. How to walk in lines. How to work with others. How to be quiet. How to complete certain tasks. How to transition from one class to another. Most of the ways they have been learning to learn at home are being altered.
The quote above suggests that we are a blank slate to be filled or a plot of earth to be gardened and that the only way the slate is filled or the garden planted is at school. It further suggests that only school can prepare the furrows, plant the seeds, water the garden, and if for one moment the garden is left alone, bull dozers will arrive and clear away swaths of the garden. It’s not a matter of the garden not growing larger or even what’s already planted continuing to grow, but that what’s learn will be cleared away, and one will have to go back and replant it all over again.
That kind of thinking clearly implies that students are not being taught how to learn. Students are passively receiving the knowledge schools deem important, and if that careful planting should be stalled, the student will become less than they were before. That somehow, teachers are in control and filling students’ brains with what is important. If this should cease, children will be at the mercy of ignorance. And, the value of what is taught in school is measured by testing.
“It’ll take years to catch-up!” To catch up to what? To what the schools test children about? Really, schools should be teaching children how to learn, and those skills and underlying knowledges will not just disappear.
Certain ways of life are being disrupted, but we are all being forced to examine those ways. Things we’ve taken for granted are being illuminated, allowing us the chance to think about our world in different ways. What is the importance of school? Is it really mostly a babysitter, a restaurant, or a safe haven? Maybe, and maybe it should be, but now we are forced to face what it is and not blindly accept what our culture has developed and set in stone.
The speaker at the curriculum conference also said that “a teacher should not be a speaker on a stage but a guide on the side.” This approach immediately allows your children many more teachers, not just the certified ones in the classroom, but the millions of people in the world with their own special skills and abilities, guiding them along.
If nothing else happens during this pandemic, help your child learn how to learn!
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