Last week I said that this practice I call "family learning" is nothing at all like home schooling because the goal of family learning is to help children take better advantage of whatever education is offered them at their local public schools. But there are other significant distinctions as well, and one that must be constantly in the minds of those who create family learning activities for themselves and for others is that family learning is aimed at parents as well as children.
Parents who want their children to be learners must become learners themselves. It really comes down to that. This is a principle that operates in schooling as well, for you will notice that the very best teachers are learners, too, and so they are continually experiencing the thrill and adventure of learning, and they convey that excitement in their teaching.Now, the way that parents can model this learning attitude and convey this same excitement is to show their children that opportunities for learning can occur anywhere at any time, for those who are curious enough and eager enough to use them for their own self-improvement. When parents adopt this learning attitude in their homes, they initiate a chain of events that can produce a whole range of wonderful outcomes, including their children's success in school, their children's desire for self-improvement, and their family's togetherness in the pursuit of learning.
And all these benefits are available to every home and family - no matter what the conditions at their schools may be or what education the parents themselves have received. Family learning offers parents an opportunity to become interested in, and knowledgeable about, topics and subjects that they may have slighted during their own school years, or that they weren't ever exposed to in the first place. And so even if parents are unable to transfer any of this newfound knowledge to their children, their family learning efforts will be a success because family learning is aimed at the entire family, not just children alone.
The fact is, however, that when children see their parents reach for the family dictionary every time an unfamiliar word is uttered on TV, or when they come to expect that a mention of a country or capital or landmark in the news will result in the swift and certain appearance of the family atlas or globe, they begin to understand that "learning" is much larger than "schooling."
Parents who look for family learning opportunities throughout their family life will not think of themselves as "teachers" per se; instead, they will think that they are merely sharing their own learning, and the excitement of learning, with their children. And so those who think they wouldn't be competent enough to teach their own children should know this: Teaching isn't difficult at all; it's teaching school that's difficult. (And we have let our schools create that difficulty for themselves, but that's another matter entirely.) Parents must remember, too, that family learning does not require them to be teaching every minute they are with their children. In fact, parents who practice family learning tend to become very opportunistic in seizing (and creating) just those special times during ordinary family life that are ripe with learning possibilities.
What family learning is all about, then, is helping parents learn how to seize those opportunities and how to create those opportunities for themselves. This is what I have tried to do over the past few years; next week, for the final column in this series, I'll take a look at where family learning is headed in the future.