Play, Learning, Unschooling: One In The Same

In this video, Joseph Chilton Pearce goes through each child developmental stage and illustrates how play is vital to integrating information, i.e. learning. In other words, play makes learning effortless. Play is the natural way we learn.....I just love that! Pearce also does a great job highlighting how emotional nurturing and safety are critical to learning. These concepts are the underpinnings of unschooling. Enjoy!

Joseph Chilton Pearce - Play is Learning from Touch the Future on Vimeo.

Unschooling Shakespeare

Justin is perusing the many books at the Saturday morning market one day when he asks me if he can buy the book he has in his hand.

“What is it?” I ask, as I glance down at the cover.

I do a double take. My contact lenses need cleaning, but still, the title has me discombobulated:

“Simply Shakespeare: Original Shakespearean Text with a Modern Line-for-Line Translation.”

“That looks interesting,” I comment, as joyeth overcometh me.

“I could write my own play with this thing,” he says, as he flips the pages in front of me. “Can I get it?”

I suddenly want to pinch myself. Was it not a year earlier he wanted nothing to do with Shakespeare?! It was two Mays ago. Auditions for the “Twelfth Night” were fast approaching at St. Petersburg Little Theatre. Justin wanted to audition for a part. But when he read the script of the contemporary re-telling of Shakespeare's comedy, he changed his mind.

“This stuff makes no sense,” he had said. When I tried to help him read some lines for practice, he exited stage left.

I was disheartened. Like a lot of parents, I had all these preconcieved ideas around how fun it would be to learn Shakespeare with a group of theatre friends.

Nope. Auditioning for a part in the play wasn't going to happen, Justin said. Plus, he argued, they were looking for males who were older than he.

"But you look older than you are," I countered. He disagreed.

So I did what I always do as an unschooling mom who still struggles with past conditioning around thinking I, the parent, knows best. I sulked a bit, released a heavy sigh, smiled and let it go. My job to see if he might go for it was done.

Now, a year and a half later, Justin was asking to buy Simply Shakespeare!

After we got home the book sat on the table all afternoon. I was so curious if he would ever pick it up. I can't tell you how many books I've bought that I've yet to read. Like the one on, "How to Let Your Child Lead," or something like that.

So while I was doing the dishes, I decided not to even expect he would read the book. Then, like all the other magical moments where his love of learning shines through, it happened again.

Justin sat down at the kitchen table and picked up the book. Within minutes some strange words begin to fill the air, complete with all the diction and inflection one would imagine from a cast of Elizabethan actors.

Hamlet: Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I'll go no further.

Ghost: Mark me.

Hamlet: I will.

Ghost: My hour is almost come
When I to sulph'rous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself.

Hamlet: Speak, I am bound to hear.

Justin looks up from the page. “This is fun,” he says.“You can really get into it.”

I'm standing at the sink, smiling. He starts to read again.

Ghost: I am thy father's spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood ...

Justin pauses long enough to comment: “This is crazy stuff.”

But the peculiar way they talked back then didn't stop him from reading on.

Hamlet: O, God!

Ghost: Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

Hamlet: Murder!

Ghost: Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

Hamlet: Haste me to know't, that I with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.

Ghost: I find thee apt;
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf...

Justin shakes his head. Dramatic pause. “This is really hard.”

He flips through a few pages, skimming through the text silently now.

“This is really confusing. If I'm ever in a play," he says, "I'm not playing Hamlet. He's got some long lines.”

To Thine Own Self Be True
I'm always amazed at how Justin knows what he wants and what is best for him. When he doesn't, he learns what is best for him through experience and imitation, or said another way, trial and error.

Since he was 12 years old and began auditioning for parts in plays, he was never in a hurry to rock the theatre world. More than once, he has turned down a bigger role for either a smaller one or none at all because he wasn't ready to have a major part.

Back then, and still today, he mostly enjoys just being part of the show. It's about friendship. It's about involving the family. It's about community. So far, he has been in seven plays: The King and I, A High School Musical, Pirates of Penzance, A Christmas Carol, A Hairy Tale, HMS Pinafore, and most recently, The Nutcracker. (At right, Justin, center stage, in Nutcracker)

The two-act ballet, which played at the Palladium in downtown St. Petersburg in December, was performed by the Academy of Ballet Arts.

When he was offered a role in the play, he asked what he would have to do. Mime and do a Christmas dance.

“Perfect," he said. "My kind of role.”

As if on stage, Justin starts to read out loud again.

Hamlet: Rest, rest, perturbed spirit! So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you;
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t'express his love and friending to you...

I look over just in time to catch Justin staring at the page he has open. He slowly closes the book. Lays it carefully on the table. He looks up.

“Hamlet is quite the play,” he concludes.

Unschooling A Teen From The Beginning

My son, Justin, has never been to school a day in his life. Nonetheless, he has spent the last 14 years learning all the time, every step of the way, without anyone making him 'do school.'

From the ABCs and 123s to reading, writing, and arithmetic, he has absorbed, almost like osmosis, a plethora of information around all of these topics--and more--from every day life.

As science, math, geometry, algebra, physics, geology, geography, language, biology, anatomy, sociology, history, politics, religion, music, art and any other area of life has been relative to his world at any point in time, he seems to have transfused the information through his veins to his brain – with little assistance from me or any other adult.

In short, Justin learns what he wants to learn, when he wants to learn it, at his own pace, and in his own way. My job as the full-time unschooling parent is to do the best I can to provide an environment rich in what interest him at any given stage of development. But it is up to him to choose what to learn from that environment.

The other important part of my job as an unschooling parent is to not make him learn what I, or others, think he should learn because I, or others, think he should learn it. This is, by far, the hardest part of my job.

Fortunately, for me, Justin quickly lets me know when I'm doing this. Then my job is to work through my past conditioning. As a result, there are many days when I don't know who is learning more, him or me!

In the 1960s this natural way of learning about one's world and the people in it was given a name by John Holt, called unschooling. Holt contends learning is an innate process that happens every second of every minute of every hour of every day. In other words, all the time and all by itself.

Learning is hardwired
Joe, my husband, and I learned this shortly after we became parents. During the beginning stages of Justin's life, it was so visible to us Justin was learning through observation, imitation and experience; there was never a stagnant learning moment.

When Justin was ready to learn something, he soaked it up like a sponge; as though it was the most fun thing to do in the whole world in that moment.

We also observed learning happens in subtle stages, on a continuum, often unobservable until all of the sudden it seems like it's magic that Justin knows what he knows, or does what he does.

In fact, it was during the baby and toddler years when we realized we didn't “teach” Justin a thing, except to model it. We talked and walked in front of him, and lo and behold he was talking and walking before we knew it.

It dawned on us one day we had not given him any instruction on how to put one leg in front of the other, yet there he was at about 11 months of age attempting to imitate what he had seen us do for the first year of his life - put one leg in front of the other.

The first day he actually walked, as all parents know, was like magic. “Holy moly!” I remember thinking, “He figured that out all on his own!”

It was the same thing with talking. The English language is one of the hardest languages to grasp – ask any foreigner – but at 2 years old he was on his way to mastering it. Yes, there were days of blubbering, but we could hear the traces of vowels and nouns under those beautiful sounds.

Studies show every baby's brain is hardwired to recognize the sounds of over 6,000 languages. All they need is to be surrounded by the language to pick it up.

When Justin was about three, I got proof of just how well he picked things up. One day, as I was cleaning the kitchen and he was in the living room playing, I heard him imitate perfectly the context, tone and inflection of a swear word I had modeled for him. Yep, he was learning all the time!

Research shows by 3 years of age, we learn 10 new words a day. That's a word every waking hour. And this is without flash cards or worksheets. We humans are truly a remarkable and brilliant species.

At 4, Justin continued to confirm this fact for us. He had a vocabulary that blew us away. We noticed he was continuing to learn his ABCs, 123s, and do-re-me's, simply because he wanted to. He was self-motivated, as all babies, toddlers, children and on up are, if there are no medical conditions or blocks at play-- sometimes even if there are!

The latest discoveries in human anatomy, biology and science continue to highlight this. By 4 years of age, we not only have an endless curiosity but we have a million new connectors made every second. Our ability to gather information through our sensors is amazing. By 4, our eyes are capable of picking out 7 million colors, more than we could ever put a name to. Our ears distinquish between 1,500 levels of sounds.

In short, we have an intelligence gathering system that is better than any computer. Research shows by 4 years old we're making thousands of calculations every millisecond!

Phenomenal from the start
Even though we didn't have this information at our fingertips when we started out on our journey with Justin, we could see it was true: we are an amazing and incredible species.

But this knowledge and understanding that learning is innate and easily occurs when there is freedom to choose what, how and when to learn is not the predominant belief of our current educational system. So we decided to not only home school Justin, but to unschool him.

For us, from the very beginning and to this day, this means there are no specific times to 'do' lessons. And forcing him to learn something isn't an option.

A couple of times I did cave to the predominant fear-based belief that 7 year olds should be able to perform on cue certain math skills, which I will share in a future post, because boy, did I learn a lot about who and what that was all about. Read: Me and my insecurities.

But other than that, Joe and I knew our cue to go on stage was if Justin asked a question or showed interest in something.

Still, there were many times, especially during the traditional elementary school years, when choosing this path wasn't easy because we felt so alone. No one we knew unschooled. But having the support of each other helped us stay the course.

And, yes, more times then we would like to acknowledge, we've droned on and on about something, refusing to exit stage right, even though the signs were clear Justin had lost interest.

But when we are more consciously aware, we continue to observe how all human beings have an innate desire to learn, how learning and living are interrelated, how we learn more by our mistakes and successes then test and instruction, and how it is never too late to learn more about ourselves and the world in which we live, which is exactly what Holt advocated.

In other words, learning is an incremental lifelong process that occurs everywhere, all the time. There is no need to hurry up and learn it all by 7 or 8 or 10 or 14 or 18. Or even 49.

Thank goodness for that because at 49, I have to admit I still don't know it all. In fact, the more I learn about the many discoveries made every day, the more I know I will be, forever, learning all the time. So will Justin.