Cycle Two Post...

I couldn’t help when I read the cycle to introductory post that I begin to think about the different trends of homeschooling, and the trend of allowing children to follow their passions. I think, this is almost what a natural curriculum would look like; the fostering of children within the home and allowing them to follow their dreams without the interference of the “State” - in this case the political forces that drive how and why we look at and experience education in the way that we do.

I am going to talk about a colleague of mine that I work with in China. He is from the Soviet Union, rather the former Soviet Union, but he has an American passport so he has had the best of both schooling systems, and he homeschools his children because he does not want his children indoctrinated in the Chinese nationalistic system. But he lets his children do whatever the hell they want. One student is a budding Chessmaster while the other student is really interested in film and TV production, so the father lets his child pretty much run the gamut in allowing his kids to do what they want and to feed their interests.  When I met the oldest boy child, he was filming the Wuxi City Foreigner Spectacular or some such.  And when I met his children, I found them to be bright, intelligent, creative, articulate and just really neat kids to talk too.

When you speak of “natural curriculum” and I will be honest I am writing this introduction before I take a hard look at the readings though I have skimmed them, my first impressions are that a natural curriculum would follow the apprenticeship program that we used to have in days of old.  Where are you have the students follow their dreams and desires, however they deem necessary to fulfill their lives.  Now, to not be Marxist about this but you would have the fact that the more elite people could afford to hire tutors to teach their children in the classics, and these students would tend to have a leg up in the more learned arts of the day, but on the whole children of a bygone era were free to pretty much do what they wanted to do in terms of wealth and social class. If you had the means, you might be homeschooled and then be apprenticed out to be a lawyer or to be a doctor or some learned man of letters, whatever.

So it was with this lens toward free expression and natural creativity that I read the course readings in earnest this cycle.  Beginning with the Lepore reading, “Baby Food” I found that I read this in the vein of the trend to go back to the “natural” also tracks with a freedom from sociocultural restraints or societal norms put into place, that when humans tend to let things develop at their own pace and time, rather than forcing them unnaturally, then natural order, rather than the market, dictates the success or failure of certain ventures.  I find it no coincidence that there is a rise in natural births, breast-feeing, homeschooling, and healthy eating - all trends that find their roots in the traditional world of the American frontier, but more specifically, especially from a woman’s point of view, the cult of domesticity and that other historical notion (and it is totally escaping my mind right now) that women have the right to bring up their sons in the ways of the world - the sphere of womanhood, domesticity, or some such.  

And perhaps I am reading off the mark in what you mean by natural, but it almost seems as if the cult of domesticity and the trend to go back to the Transcendental era of communing with nature and having more natural and “spiritual” ways of doing things, seems to also track with the Back to Nature movement and the Silent Spring era; the precursor to this one.  I feel that it is no secret that Rachel Carson was a housewife with lots of time on her hands to be bored by the other wives and had time to dwell in the natural world.  I don’t know why it seems to be the case, but the more “traditional” the child-rearing in the ways of the frontier, the more intellectually curious the child is.

I found that the “Lost Child in the Woods” excerpt may have captured a bit in how I feel and the nostalgia of “playing in the neighborhood,” that on further introspection,  That my nieces and nephews aren’t as world savvy as I am because they never had the experience of breathing in nature; the pure unadulterated joy I got from exploring my surroundings and being in the woods.  Seeing dead raccoons in the woods behind my house showed me how decomposition worked; and I have never forgotten the blow flies and the maggots, and that helped me later in biology class.  This is not to say that none of these things should be use in place of formal education; maybe as a supplement, nay a complement to the “proper schooling that we now ascribe to in modern education.  

I also felt that the “natural curriculum” or the “free spirit ideals” associated with this course cycle all seem to have an interplay with each other.  While I define natural as letting the students be one with themselves and another, those students that are the most bright and precocious do seem to have a connection with the physical world and want to work within it.  I would even extend this connection between the natural world and the natural curriculum to all Scandanavian countries, as their liberal attitudes towards education, Hygge, environmentalism, and child rearing all seem to come to a head in Greta Thunberg, whose ability to work in the natural world is a direct result of her following her interests and her love.  

From a political side, this natural curriculum can be seen in practice in Finland, which I became enamored with while watch Michael Moore’s “Where To Invade Next,” which visits countries around the world that had similar societal problems as America and how they began to solve said problems.    Finland has shorter school days, shorter school hours, no homework; and yet they outperform American secondary and post secondary graduation rates with less per pupil spending.  Similar to my Russian friend and his sons, by not only fostering a love for education but also opportunities to explore and actually invest in those things students are interested in, helps their educational IQ more than pointlessly assigning homework and drills.  

But what also helps these Finnish students is that they are allowed to think and do out in the world, by exploring their world and becoming part of it, experiencing it.  While I have never been a proponent of homeschooling at the expense of taking away fiscally from public, tax-funder schools, I am intrigued by what happens when we allow students to become who they want.  I will finally give one more example, and this has to do with myself.

I am an only child and as such, had no playmates and was a bit spoiled.  My mother was a teacher, but she also moonlit at Montgomery Ward’s in the Lansing Mall from 4 pm to 9 pm.  While she couldn’t give me quality time, I did have many distractions, and one was a record player and the Disneyland Records on Tape (See, Hear, Read).  Well, I busied myself downstairs with those records for hours; putting them on and turning the page when I heard the chime.  Left to my own devices, I taught myself how to read.  I mean, sure it was sight reading, but looking back, some of those books were a bit sophisticated with a wide vocabulary.  Once I learned how to read, the whole world opened up to me.  My love for reading and teaching myself how to do things - my own personal self-determination - is tremendous and it is the core of my personality.  My mother, to this day, has never stopped feeding my love and hunger and my passion (though when I get on a tear, she calls me Charlie Brown’s teacher).   But, I am confident to try things and fail and to try them again when I don’t succeed.  That’s what I learned from those Books on Record; I mean, other than the lyrics to “Following the Leader” in Disney’s Peter Pan.    I think this is a natural curriculum in a modern sense just giving your child the space to discover who they are and what they love.

Finally, although I put this post to bed, as I was gathering up my materials to finish them off; I read the title “Teaching Social Studies Amid Ecological Crisis,” and though I did not read it, what it did make me do is to reflect on something that I have begun to do in the past five years or so of teaching World History and perhaps it is because of this trend in saving the earth, but I didn’t want to read the article lest it color what I write here first.  

Lately, in every World History class I teach, I incorporate portions of Cynthia Stokes Brown’s “Big History,” into my course.  That is, I put human history into the context of what is happening to the world ecologically around us at the same time in History.  My very first AP World Students didn’t understand why I was seemingly teaching Biology to them at the start of the school year; why I had them watch about continental drift and Climate change in NDT’s Cosmos; why I was teaching them about human evolution.  History teachers have missed the mark when we talk about the Paleolithic Age; that we just start with humans but how can we teach human history without talking about how we got where we are?  That the Little Ice Age may have prompted European Exploration and maybe that European genocide caused the Little Ice Age to begin at all (the ending of slash and burn agriculture by MesoAmericans that caused a temperature drop around the world due to the cessation of carbon in the atmosphere). 

This is true interdisciplinary study; the fact that we cannot exist in the human world without all of these other phenomenon or subjects, that to understand human history is to understand more fully Earth’s place in the Cosmos.