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Life With Joanne

#FloridaBlogger | Photo-taker | Native New Yorker | Wife, Mom to 3, Mom-Mom to 2, Pet mama to 4 cats + a 22 yr old iguana | #RealLife

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Real Learning (And Why Schools Fail At It)

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In 2005 I created An Unschooling Life, a blog detailing our unschooling experience after adopting our three children. Over time, An Unschooling Life became a hub for unschooling support and advice. The blog has been featured in print and digital media and was home to the popular Unschooling Carnival. I’m in the process of updating and moving all the posts to this blog where they will be housed under the An Unschooling Life section. This post was originally published on January 21, 2006. In 2020, I began unschooling my two younger children, so you’ll also see updated posts under this topic.

real world learning

My seven-year-old daughter Jacqueline is self-taught on the topic of space and the universe.

She’s interested in learning about the universe, because she’s interested in the universe, and that interest has taken her in many real world learning directions.

I’ve been re-reading Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn and I wanted to share this;

“Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it’s not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningful context for the information. That’s why most people unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.

In school, subjects are artificially separated from each other. It’s as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids’ interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless “trees” that it may take years to recover and begin to see the “forest” again.

School can simply eat up so much of their time that there’s none left for real learning, spontaneous exploration, or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as “disabled” if they don’t keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement.”

If you’re interested in purchasing this inspiring book and want to dig deeper into real life learning, here is my Amazon affiliate link.
Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn.

I love the tree analogy. The school system did that to my older two and it would have done that to Jacqueline, had I not taken her out.

When I see my kids learning, really learning, it makes the artificialness of school much more obvious to me.

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Filed Under: An Unschooling Life

About Joanne Greco

Joanne Greco is a wife, mom to five and pet mama to four cats + a 24-year-old iguana. On her family lifestyle blog, Life With Joanne she writes about Florida living, adoption, unschooling and more.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ronaldo says

    September 4, 2015 at 6:17 am

    A big congrats to Eli! I am happy to see the tcinsrrapt. My son is 8 but I already decided he will go to college, or join the Air Force, which both he likes! If I homeschool him through high school (that scares me now!) then I want to know he can further his education in college.

    Reply
  2. Home Schooling Grandma says

    December 8, 2009 at 11:16 am

    I loved this post on Real Learning and I couldn’t agree more!

    Reply
  3. Kez says

    September 3, 2009 at 5:20 am

    Great quote. That sounds like a good book.
    .-= Kez´s last blog ..Wednesday Weigh-In – Wk 22 =-.

    Reply
  4. Louise | UPrinting.com says

    September 3, 2009 at 3:21 am

    Your kid is smart. We rarely see kids take interest about complicated subjects by themselves.
    Here’s to hoping she becomes a successful spaceman someday. šŸ˜€

    Reply
  5. One of the kids says

    April 8, 2006 at 5:09 pm

    Let’s just say that I’m irritated about the fact that I have to be at work in 24 minutes and won’t be able to read anymore of the book until 11 tonight or sometime tomorrow. I never thought I’d read something like this, but I have a feeling I’m a “closet unschooler” LOL

    Reply
  6. Joanne says

    April 8, 2006 at 4:24 pm

    I’m surprised also. My library doesn’t have The TLH but I’m going to see if another branch has it. I’ve been wanting to read it for a while now. Let me know how you like it!

    Reply
  7. One of the kids says

    April 8, 2006 at 3:22 pm

    I’ll have to see about inter-library loaning around here. I was surprised they didn’t have it. Our library does have another one of her books “The Teenage Liberation Handbook” and I’m going to read it this weekend….then, I’m going to let my son read it.

    Reply
  8. Joanne says

    April 8, 2006 at 1:42 pm

    Hi Vickie!

    Actually, that’s where I got my copy. LOL I had borrowed it from the library once before and last time we went, I decided to take it out again.
    Can your library do a loan fron another branch? Jacqueline does that all the time with books she wants to read. Maybe also you can check ebay or amazon for a pre-loved copy.
    It’s a great book, I enjoy the way she writes. It’s like she’s having a conversation with you. šŸ™‚

    Reply
  9. One of the kids says

    April 8, 2006 at 1:04 pm

    Joanne,

    Would you be interested in loaning out your book? I can’t find it at my local library.

    vickie (aka: ambyryoshi)

    Reply

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