In school I was so tired of the "education" I was receiving. I couldn't breath because of the mold the school district and their standardized way of learning was trying to stuff me in. I felt as though they were putting my peers and I through a system that resembled Henry Ford's assembly line.
Imagine this, a room small and suffocating just like all the others in the building. Look around the room. What do you see? You may notice the kids silently studying the same textbooks or looking up at the same blindingly white board and sitting slumped in the same dirty, written on desks under the annoying hum of the fluorescent lights. Up front is the teacher, teaching the lessons that she has taught to all the other kids in the previous years. You know what I see? I see a factory and a bunch of unfinished products being put through a machine. Under the fluorescent lights in the small suffocating room this machine processes these unfinished products until they are completely pasteurized, no raw material is left.
The students may seem like they are harmlessly working at their desks but are they? They are more likely being worked on themselves. This process known as "learning" is stripping away kids' individuality, stopping them from questioning the world around them, and haulting them from figuring out who they are. But is this learning... or is it schooling?
If you walked in to any school and asked a handful of students who they think they are as an individual the most likely answer would be "Ummmm" or "I don't know". How do I know that? I was one of them for 9 years. I also know that school alters a teen's view on what qualities are important. I don't exactly know why but in school students strive to be smart, popular, funny, and athletic. I didn't exactly want to be popular but I yearned to be smart, funny, and athletic. I wanted to be accepted on some level. The day I realized that I should focus on who I am and not who other people think I should be, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. I took a step back and stopped trying to be the perfect student. I knew I was unhappy and that is when I decided to create my own education, but I am still working out the kinks. I believe it will take me time to get out of the mind set that there is a "right way" to learn.
Chickens and Tchaikovsky represents my expressive and individualized way of learning. Yes, this is what I consider learning. If I want to learn how to raise and take care of chickens I will. If I want to learn about famous composers like Tchaikovsky I will. The world is my textbook and no one can tell me otherwise. Sure you can work yourself to the point of exhaustion trying to get a good grade on last night's homework, but do you really want a number to describe your intelligence, to describe who you are? And sure you can block out the rest of your life, the parts that you love and actually care about, but why? For the sake of regurgitating information on a test sheet that you will completely forget about the next year. Learning should be something you get excited about, not something you are forced to do that makes you miserable.
I am a new homeschooler and this blog is my first step into a world where I am free to chose my own education. As Albert Einstein is credited as saying, "Wisdom is not the product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to aquire it." I am on a journey to aquire wisdom and I hope others like me will start their own journey to cultivate their own educational experience.
