Unschooling voices is up.

Tonight Andrea logged onto the chat program to say goodnight. Within a couple minutes, Emma also popped on. Yes, she’s 5 and has her own chat profile. So far as I know, I’m the only person she has chatted with. When I noticed her on, I sent her a ‘hello Emma’ and waited. A few minutes later she sent a full correctly spelled sentence telling me something that was important to her about her day. Before she was done she had sent me 3 or 4 more full sentences all spelled correctly.

Andrea told me after that she had asked for help with the spelling. You see, for quite a few months, she had been using her own version of phonetics to write things. But there were times when we misunderstood what she was writing. In the last month or so, she has changed her strategy by getting us to help her spell what she wants to write.

It’s come back to me again tonight how silly it is to set out to teach children a bunch of skills with the intention that once they have learned all of them they will be able to communicate. A child learns to talk because the child wants to communicate. When they are first learning to talk we don’t, “no, no, no you say that word this way and until you can say it that way we are not going to introduce the next word to you.” The secret to teaching a child to read, write and communicate is to accept the ability they currently have and understand that at some point their desire to understand and be understood will push them to develope those skills until they are every bit as proficient at them as the people around them. And for the abilities that they currently lack, compensate for them in the same way you do before they are potty trained, before they can dress themselves and before they can feed themselves.

Honestly, the only way I can imagine that someone seeking to understand child education could not see that is if they view the child as the object of education.