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Infinite Sky
By Pavlina McMaster
Imagine, if you will, that you are a child. You are intensely curious about the world around you.
As you grow, you explore the world around you; you follow your parents and family around and learn about how the world works. You observe what happens when you drop things from your high chair, and experiment with different materials—do carrot sticks fall faster than mashed peas? What happens when you flick the peas at the wall? How does sound travel from a parent when they are happy compared to when they are frustrated? And why do they take so many deep breaths? And does that work? Should you try it? So many observations, hypotheses, and experiments, every day. The world is full of learning opportunities!
You learn from every activity you do, every day. You are wired to learn, and nothing can stop you. Sometimes, you learn things that adults don’t want you to, but that is also part of growing up. You start to speak, which is one of the hardest things you will ever do. This usually goes pretty well, and is helped along when people speak to you throughout the day. Luckily, your mum and dad somehow innately already know this, and they chatter to you endlessly, and you chatter back. Sometimes, you will start to speak really early and surprise everyone, sometimes you will wait a bit, perhaps until you think you have mastered the skill. That’s ok, it happens in its own time, or sometimes not at all, and that is ok too. We don’t all need words to communicate.
When you find your words, whatever they look like, you ask a thousand questions a day – ‘Why are the curtains blue?’, ‘Who made the curtains?’, ‘Why do we have curtains?’, ‘Why is the window see-through?’, ‘What is glass?’, ‘Why did we paint the window sill that colour?’, ‘What is puce?’, ‘Who made the paint?’, ‘What’s in paint?’, ‘Can you eat it?’, ‘Why not?’, ‘What would happen if you ate it?’, ‘Have you tried?’, ‘How do you know?’, ‘But HOW do you know?’, ‘What’s an emetic?’ And on and on, ad libitum, ad nauseum …
Finally, you are old enough to go to school. But your parents have decided not to send you, or maybe they do, but then you all decide that school is just not for you.
You continue to learn as you did before. You are still intensely curious about the world, and you love learning. You keep asking your questions, making your observations and hypotheses, and running your experiments. Your questions change as you grow. They expand to include topics you’ve never even dreamed of, and they become more complicated. You learn at your own pace, when you are ready, and without the constraints of what someone else arbitrarily thinks you should be doing at any given time. Your learning is not linear, but organic, with pieces of the puzzle filling in as you explore and question.
You can learn however suits you best— by doing, or reading, or listening, or watching, or a combination of any of those. Learning is multi-sensory, and you can discover what works for you.
You are more curious about some things than others, and that is ok, because we all have our interests. What’s important is that you are learning how to learn, and how to question information, and how to decide if it’s valid, or if you need more information.
Sometimes your ideas about the world are skewed or don’t fit with reality. You might intensely believe that each minute has 80 seconds, or that all dogs are brown because yours is brown. Over time, you keep observing the world, and you realise that your picture of the world doesn’t fit with your observations—the digital clock only goes to 59 minutes, then ticks back over to zero, so is it broken, or do you need a new idea and understanding of time? You ask your parents, your older siblings, your grandma. You see these other creatures when you go on walks, and they are lots of different colours—black, white, yellow, spotty, patchy—and they might not look exactly like your dog, but your mum calls them dogs, and they are similar in many ways. So maybe not all dogs are brown.
So you make new hypotheses, you have a new paradigm and a new understanding of the world. You learn incidentally from things you do every day, like cooking, gardening and shopping, where you encounter maths, science, literacy, and so much more, all in context. You also learn from observing your world as you go—you discover braille from the sign on the public toilets, and you think about how other people experience the world. You wonder about how light bulbs work as you experience changing one for the first time, and you decide to spend the afternoon learning about them, then discover a whole world of electric currents, energy conversion, voltages, incandescent materials, vacuums, oxidation, patents, history, inventors, aggregate knowledge, experimentation, explosions, the judicial system, new technologies, geography… The list is endless, and you end up spending days, weeks, or months delving into it, and then become so immersed in one part of it that this takes you on another tangent altogether. Or maybe you just read the wiki page on incandescent bulbs and leave it at that.
You learn from conversations. You follow threads from frogs to hydrology to engineering, to trains, to distant lands, to weird deep-sea creatures and back to frogs. You cover more in a morning than you ever imagined. You have downtime, to read a book, and you learn to listen to your body—you rest when you are tired, you eat when you are hungry, and wake when you are ready.
Maybe your mum and dad worry about worksheets and sitting down doing book work, because that is what education looked like for them. That’s ok. You can do some of that, it only takes a couple of hours a day, and then you have the rest of the time to explore and build and play with your friends. Over time, your parents will make their own observations, and realise that you already learn all those things when you are cooking, and reading, and woodworking, and poking through the rockpools at the beach. They just have to let you be you, follow your lead, and help you explore your interests.
Your parents don’t have all the answers. No one person does. But you learn how to research, dive deep into the subjects that interest you, and gain deep understanding so you can use it to evaluate what you have learned, to meld it with what you already know, and to come up with ideas of your own. You find mentors, your parents facilitate your learning and learn alongside you. It doesn’t matter what they have done in their lives. They always support your learning, from walking and talking, to calculus and art theory. They don’t have to have the answers. They will just find someone who does.
You find resources through the web, through your community, through your local library. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Your community is vibrant, with people willing to help. There are so many groups all over the place, and you find one that suits your family. You meet up regularly. When you’re younger, you go to the park. As you grow, you do more teenager-y things.
You are part of a community of lifelong learners and friends. You go camping together, you visit the museum together. Your parents, or theirs, organise classes. Maybe these go for weeks, maybe they are once-off. You explore the world with friends of all ages, and from all walks of life.
Your family does it differently from other families, but you have a common thread—you learn in the world, and in your community. You might only have a mum, or only a dad, you might live with your grandparents. Your parents may work, from home or elsewhere. They may share the time spent on your education, or maybe you’re mainly with one person. Maybe you spend a day every week at a friend’s house while your parents work. However this looks, you will learn.
You learn skills—physical skills, real life skills, like cooking and cleaning, gardening and fixing your own bike. You observe your parents navigating the real world when you all go to the post office, the bank, the shops.
But you also learn thinking skills, like critical thinking and questioning everything. You decide you want to go to university, so you follow paths trodden by mature age students everywhere. Maybe you decide to go to TAFE, which a lot of your home educated friends do, too. Maybe you decide to do your VCE, or not. It makes no difference in the end. You just need to want it enough, and you will find the path through. Countless others have before you, and you will too. They are plumbers, and artists, and doctors, and teachers, and lawyers, and vets, and circus performers, and farriers …
And as you grow and learn, you come to understand that education is not about the accumulation of knowledge, because you cannot accumulate all the knowledge and we have Google. You realise education and learning is about curiosity, and asking questions, and exploring, and imagination, and creativity, and thinking, and thinking about thinking, and about all the millions of possibilities that we haven’t even imagined yet.
You realise that education has nothing to do with walls. It’s about an infinite sky.
Reproduced by permission from:
https:// magnificentoctopus.wordpress.com
Otherways 174 (nov 2022)