Processing Time and Application: How Humans Learn

If you wanted to learn more about birds, or even a specific type of bird, what would you do? I’d use the internet, maybe read a few books, or possibly head to a natural museum of some kind; the opportunities for leaning about birds are endless. Did you ever stop to think where that information came from? How do we know all these amazing facts about birds, that we are able to record, store, and share that information? The answer is simple.

Observation and Experience.

Maybe we observed and listened. Maybe we even had the chance to care for a baby bird or an injured bird. However, we learned through experience. Deciding ahead of time how a bird should behave, conduct its daily activities, and learn to be a bird would only inhibit the bird’s natural, instinctual learning process. We learn about birds, by allowing birds to be birds, and do what birds do. Sure, there are trained birds, but do you think that a bird could be trained without knowing and respecting natural bird behavior? It’s still a wild animal and it could still peck your eyes out if it wanted to. (Nice visual for you) If books on birds are about birds, based on observation and studies, then why are most books on children about getting them to behave like something other than children? Why do we decide ahead of time, how a child should be, without observing who he is?

John Holt is an amazing researcher and writer and went on the most fabulous journey from school reformer to understanding that children learn organically. His own learning process is evident in his books if read chronilogically. He made these observations, by watching, listening, and being part of children’s lives. Sadly he died in the 1980’s and most people have never even heard of him.

If you wanted to learn about children, and you didn’t know how to find any to observe without looking like a creep, you’d have a problem. There are books, articles, and even a children’s museum! However, there is very little information out there on a child’s natural learning process. Most books out there seek to teach us how to control children. How to get them to do what we want them to do.  For a reason I cannot begin to understand, parents have decided that children should behave and learn in a certain way, without actually knowing a thing about kids. Just because you were once a child, doesn’t mean you know anything about being a child. That is dependent on two things:

1. How you were raised.
2. How much you remember.

If you’re like me, you were raised fairly traditionally, with rules and boundaries and punishments and a traditional compulsory education. If you’re like me, you remember all of it and all of the emotions associated with such treatment. However, not everybody does. Try suggesting to someone that the way they were raised might be wrong. It doesn’t always resonate positively with those who do not remember.

Why We Have a Honeybee Hive

We sure do like honey. I’ve heard honeycomb is the bee’s knees. I’ve also heard that backyard honey product making can be quite a profitable little business. However, none of those reasons is why we have a beehive. Our experience with honeybees has been the most perfect example of how children and how humans learn. Let’s recap together.

• We find ourselves with a backyard honeybee swarm. We all watch out the window engaged, amazed, and somewhat exhilarated! None of us had ever seen so many bees in our lives!
• They are LOUD. We can hear them through the window!
• They slowly move in a cloud across the sky. It seems chaotic, yet highly organized.
• Slowly they all trickle into the same place and the large bunch of bees becomes bigger and bigger as time passes.
• Have they found a new nesting spot? Will they stay there? Are they dangerous? What should we do?
• The Beekeeper comes to remove the swarm. We observe that honeybees are fairly docile. We ask him LOTS of questions and an interest in having our own hive arises.
• After this amazing experience we all become keenly aware of our surroundings. It’s spring. All the animals seem to be paired off, if only for a short time. We see a coyote, birds, bees, and raccoons! We also pick up a beehive.
• There is a persistent yearning to know more about honeybees. We get books and a documentary. We read internet articles and watch youtube videos.
• Within a week, we have our own hive full of 26,000 bees.

We don’t have a hive so we can make money or even honey. We have a hive because we have a need to know more and to get closer to our experience and apply our knowledge.  This is how humans learn. We observe and experience. I couldn’t imagine only learning about honeybees in a book or movie. It wouldn’t be the same.

Skylar has a personal honeybee memory that he has retrieved in this current experience. He was always interested in bugs. He would befriend them. He let them crawl on him, put them on his bike seat, and put them in the swing. TJ brought him along to a friend’s house and while exploring Skylar noticed that there were some honeybees flying around the mailbox. He wanted to check them out. TJ warned him that bees might sting him but Skylar just knew that they were “friendly bees”. After all the time he had spent with various bugs, none of them had bitten him so he deduced that the bees must be friendly as well. He went up to the mailbox and defending their nest he was stung in the face, twice. He learned through experience. Am I saying that children need to get stung by bees in the face to understand that they sting? No. I am showing evidence of a child’s scientific research and how sometimes you just cannot stop it, no matter what you do.

My Documents

I imagine the human brain being much like a computer in the way it saves files. Even more, like the Window’s Operating System in the way it organizes data into folders and files; or My Documents. A child in school is receiving massive amounts of information all at once, over the course of eight or so hours. Very little of this information is retained for very long, if at all. He has no time for creating folders and saving files into appropriate places. The files become a scattered mess intertwined with the things the child actually wants to learn. The more information that is forced upon him, the more difficult it becomes to access the proper files when he needs them. Children need application and processing time. When a subject becomes of interest to the child, there is often some sort of real life application. My son’s current interest in honeybees is the result of witnessing a swarm. He wants to know everything about honey bees his brain can handle. He is filing away that information into the proper folder.

He is going to file it away in the best way that works for him. In the same way Skylar retrieved the information he learned when he was stung, he will retrieve his new information in future dealings with honeybees. In traditional school, they say, file this information here:

Earth Science - Entymology

• Kingdom – Animalia
• Phylum – Arthropoda
• Class – Insecta
• Family – Apidae
• Genus – Apis
• Species – mellifera

Yet very little of this makes any sense to the child at all. There is no application. If the child is lucky happens to attend school the next day, there will be a test. They may learn that saying “King Phillip Came Over From Greater Spain” will help them remember all of the answers, only further making the information irrelevant to their lives. Rote memorization is meaningless. Henry Adams, American journalist, historian, academic and novelist , once said, “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance that accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Why would a child even need to know all of that information? How many children who learn these facts will actually use this information in life? There is no use in forcing children to learn information in advance, especially since we don’t know what information they will actually need in their individual futures. Schools tend to muddy the waters, giving children the impression that they need to know all of what they are being taught in order to live an adult life. Sure, a kid can learn about honeybees in school but, I think it’s a horrible waste of time when he might rather be learning about thunderstorms or dinosaurs.

John Taylor Gatto said it even better than I can articulate, “It is absurd and anti-life to be a part of a system that compels you to listen to a stranger reading poetry when you want to learn to construct buildings, or to sit with a stranger discussing the construction of buildings when you want to read poetry.”

I’ll leave you with this amazing story of children aged 6 through 16 who built their own playground with no help from adults and no safety regulations.  It is inspiring and sends just the right message.  Trust Children.  What Happens When Children Build Their Own Three-Story Playgrounds?