They Just Do

In the last several years, I’ve made a radical shift in philosophy. Rather than seeing children as people who need to learn a checklist of skills by a certain time, I’ve begun seeing children as self-motivated learners, capable of taking in information as they need it to make sense of their world. This is mostly because I am a terrible student in traditional means. If I have a question about why a plant in my garden is growing poorly, or how to make my home computer network work together better, or how to conjugate an irregular verb in Spanish, I’ll read heaps of books and credible websites until my initial question is answered. Why would I be so egotistical as to assume that my brain is somehow special? Why would anyone expect that brains suddenly develop this capability at age eighteen or whenever compulsory education ends? People don’t stop learning because they’re not in school; people don’t stop learning, period. When was the last time someone sat down a three-year-old and intentionally taught him the name of every dinosaur that existed in the Jurassic Period, with flash cards and impromptu quizzes filling any empty moments? Yet we insist on drilling children this same age with letters and numbers, despite our information having less bearing on this child’s life than a Protoceratops (at least in the cases where the adult drives this exploration. For the sake of this entry, I’m writing about a child who sees no need to read or write on his own, although there are many people who are driven to read and write between three and five years or age, with or without concerted adult guidance.) Children will read, write, count, and discover mathematical functions as they see the need to in their lives, just as they began to gesture, speak, and walk.

This isn’t to say I don’t still feel the pressure of ensuring “adequacy” by these same checklists that are embedded in my brain. But when children are ready, they do. My favorite example of this is a four year old in my care who loved to paint, but did nothing with the materials but make mixed-color brown-gray blob after mixed-color brown-gray blob. I tried to honor the process and see the value, but I saw the blogs and writings of educators I admired whose four-year-olds all seemed to be creating accurate depictions of people, plants, and animals, and my four-year-old was creating heaps. Then… Easter came. And this child who would not paint a representation just days prior sat down and painted eight pages of patterned, distinctly colored Easter eggs, and rabbits, and grass, and baskets. Because SHE wanted to represent the excitement of the egg hunt, the love of being surrounded by her extended family for the holiday, and the buckets of chocolate. Prior to making the connection between a tangible representation of her excitement and the materials, she was discovering important foundational skills. How to ensure an even coat of paint, what happens when colors mix, what types of marks thick brushes make in comparison to thin brushes, how much paint a piece of paper can take prior to tearing, and on and on. Had she not discovered these independent steps, she would have had no practical knowledge base with which to build the ovals and circles and lines necessary to demonstrate her vision of Easter. 

Every action leads to changes in the brain- i.e. learning. It is probably fair to say that most adults don't have the meta-cognitive ability to notice their own learning until it hits a critical mass- and I suspect the same is true as we observe children. The child who has been spinning in circles for weeks on the ground suddenly climbs on a jungle gym as if it were nothing; she was developing the proprioceptive skills necessary to climb, even if no one around her saw the connection. And yet, how often do adults try to stop these developmental activities because they appear at first glance to be meaningless? What if, instead of redirecting what a child is doing, we do our own research into what connections might be forming? What if we took those opportunities to extend their experimentation and give them vocabulary to describe what they're doing sometimes? What if we left them to their experiments as we would any other scientist, present but only intervening when there was a true hazard to the child?