Un-learning? What’s that got to do with education?

Learning can happen any time, anywhere, any place

Funny to have a title un-learning on a blog that’s generally about learning, self-development and home education.

But the reason is that’s exactly what you have to do in order to learn. You very often have to un-learn something else. Adjust something you thought was true. Update your information and ideas. Often your values and principles.

For example, I had to unlearn quite a lot of stuff I thought I knew in order to home educate. I had to unlearn the things I thought were true, like;

• Learning only happens in school
• Teaching and teachers are always necessary
• Schools satisfactorily socialise children
• Children need to be tested
• Graded schemes, curriculum, daily structure, workbooks and lots of writing is essential
• And if you’re not ‘doing’ education the children won’t learn anything

Instead I learnt that;

Learning can happen anywhere, at any time, any place. Teaching and teachers are not always necessary. The school climate does not reflect the social climate of our society and you cannot learn social skills from other youngsters who don’t have them. Testing does not help children become educated. Lots of academic exercises don’t guarantee learning outcomes. And the children can learn even when they’re not doing anything seemingly educational.

What you will learn as you home educate is that there are a multitude of approaches you can adopt to facilitate your children’s education and the more you see how they learn by being engaged and active and stimulated the more you will realise that there are lots of things you have to un-learn about education in order to progress.

Parenting is the same. As a parent I had a load of stuff fed to me about parenting. Some of it was true. Some of it definitely needed un-learning. And the most important thing I learned was to keep an open mind and remain flexible – which works far better than any hard and fast rules people tried to push on me.

And we think it’s just the kids doing the learning! We all learn all through our lives.

So perhaps the most significant thing both you and the children can learn is the idea that the more educated we become the more we realise there is to learn. And this is true whatever and forever!