I was driving my 5-year-old to kindergarten yesterday morning, and had just cranked the car when she asked the question:
“Daddy, why do we have to go to school?”
It’s an innocent enough question, but I’ve been down the Rabbit Hole with her questions in the past, and I knew there were three major pitfalls I needed to avoid:
- An endless string of increasingly difficult follow up questions
- Circular logic
- An incorrect answer
Instead of pausing a moment, I said “You go to school to learn things.”
“Why do I need to go there? Why can’t I learn at home?”
Well, she had me there. Time to avoid circles and holes in the reasoning.
“You go to school mainly to learn how to learn. I don’t want you to go there and have teachers tell you what to think – I want you to learn how to figure things out for yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was getting to that. Imagine that you had a round birthday cake, and you needed to cut it so five people could have the same amount of cake. If you didn’t know how already, you could use your learning skills to figure it out. Learning how to learn means being able to solve your own problems.”
Believe it or not, that seemed to satisfy her. I know it will take a lot of reinforcing over the next few weeks, but I wanted her focused as much on process as on result. 
Yes, there are certain basic building blocks that must go in the brain as rote. But a healthy appreciation for thinking, figuring, and reasoning will go a long way toward giving her the tools she needs to be successful.
Maybe my premium on learning is a bias on my part – a rationalization of the time I spend studying, hammering, and tweaking my code. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) It does make me wonder, though, how much more effective I am as a communicator now that I have an keener awareness of the “building blocks” that make up my explanations and descriptions.
[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, learning, education[/tags]
Wow. May I use this with my daughter. She turns two today, but I know the time is short before the questions begin.
Regarding the comment, “But a healthy appreciation for thinking, figuring, and reasoning will go a long way toward giving her the tools she needs to be successful.”, I agree wholeheartedly. I agree not just because I respect you, but because I worry about education in America as a whole.
Since we moved to Texas, I have been exposed to gross realities of how an entire state can support and fail students all at the same time. It was one thing to complain about the education system in my smaller hometown, but in Texas, well, you know – “Everything’s Bigger”!
Seriously, even before my daughter was born, it’s been distressing to see the continuing decline of an American education. With the world connected as it is today, we have to pull our heads out of the sand and to your point, teach them “how to learn” versus just having them regurgitating answers for a test.
I’ll stop and get off my soapbox now. 🙂
Daughter (4) and University teaching has educated me about education better than the papers on the wall reflect. My pre-schooler and adult students expect to have the information from texts regurgitated! Well that won’t fly in my classroom. I have found board games a perfect primer for class learning = reading, dicipline, sportsmanship, action, accountability, definite winner/loser.