This post was inspired by an ebook I read today. Here's why.

The ebook is called Intelligence Accelerator: Unlock Your Creative Genius and its' written by a guy called George Hutton.

George Hutton is one of my discoveries of 2016. I'd never heard of him before but, having chanced upon his work through one of his YouTube videos, I've been following him this year and have read several of his books now. Intelligence Accelerator is his latest (I'll add a link to it at the bottom of this post).

When I read the blurb for the book at amazon.com, this sentence caught my eye:

"[If] you didn't do well in school, it's not your fault. Not only is classical education the worst environment for learning, it wasn't even designed to be a teaching system!"

When my son was seven years old (he's twenty now), his parents (my wife and I that is) removed him from the school system and for the next nine years he was self-educated under our supervision - that's probably how I would best describe it (generally speaking, it would have been called "unschooling" had I heard of that concept at the time; as it was, my son had already been "growing without school" for more than four years when I first encountered that term). What actually happened, in effect, was that we simply reverted to the free and relaxed lifestyle he'd enjoyed before he became 'of school age'.

I remember how difficult the decision to remove our son from school was.

We were parents who believed in (and who still do believe in) the value of a good education. We have a daughter, ten years older than her brother, who had excelled in the school system and who went on to become a lawyer. But the fact remained that, in his second year of school, our son had become chronically unhappy to the extent that he started to refuse to go. Because I was at home, I already had been bringing my son to school every day and collecting him at the end of the school day. Also, I was volunteering as a parent helper at his school up to three days a week, and for every extracurricular activity that needed parent helpers, as well as being there for every morning assembly. I wanted to watch over him as much as I could.

Eventually, consultations with the school's principal and student counsellor began, and during the time these were in progress it was impressed upon me that I must continue to make sure my son attended school or he would miss out on his education .

A personal experience came back to me from my past

In 1976 - eight years after I'd finished my own formal schooling and when I was living in the UK - I decided I wanted to obtain a mathematics qualification. I'd failed the exam twice at school. I had a full time job so I signed up with a correspondence college and studied outside of work hours. I was amazed to discover that the syllabus my high school had spread out over four years could be covered in three months; on top of that, and no doubt my emotional investment in the outcome had a lot to do with this, I passed the exam with an 'A'. That was forty years ago. Way before the unprecedented educational opportunities gifted to us now by the invention of the world wide web.

Remembering my correspondence college experience was probably the first seed of a change of perception with regard to my son and his education as his second year wore on.

Also, at the time, we'd had the internet in our home for about two years. I'd already observed during my time as a parent helper the contrast between the pace of my son's learning when he followed his own interests at home, whether it was while on the internet or playing videogames, and the pace of learning in the classroom, which - perhaps because of my own experiences with the internet and videogames - seemed to have slowed to a crawl. Some days it was like watching grass grow.

Then came The Fateful Day

I had been co-opted with two other parents into helping with a course of extra lessons intended to reinforce certain mathematical concepts - a "we want to make sure every child knows them" kind of thing.

One hour a week. I think it was the third week.

That day's lesson was odd numbers and even numbers. This is a class of seven year olds, right? First there was a two minute explanation of this particular concept from the teacher. I can't vouch for any of the other children present but I can tell you that my son understood odd numbers and even numbers way before he started school at the age of five.

Next, the children were split into three groups, each headed by one of the parent helpers and for the remaining 58 minutes we played a card game. You pick three cards from the stack in the middle (no picture cards), count up the dots and say whether the total is an odd number or an even number. Once around the circle - there were six or seven children in my group from memory, including my son - then you do it again. And again. And again. Until the bell rang for lunch. Every child in my group had a 100% perfect score. I did try to make it as entertaining as I could but ...

"This is basket weaving!"

That was my thought. And when I overheard the teacher telling one of the parent helpers she would be repeating the course of lessons before the end of the academic year, the decision to remove my son from the school system was made.

Since by the time the decision was made it was only a matter of weeks until the end of the academic year, my wife and I agreed with the school that our son would complete the year and even agreed to creating a lesson plan for him (which ended up getting ditched), though looking back on the decision later, if I could turn back time I would have taken my son home never to return that very day. But that's another story.

Perhaps I'll write more on this topic at some future time. For now, I'll leave you with a perhaps necessary footnote that my son grew up happy and healthy, smart, knowledgeable, his curiosity and eagerness to learn intact, and he's a charming, competent young man I'm proud to know (and a talented musician!).

Oh, and what of the ebook I read today that triggered the thoughts that led to this post?

You can read more about it here

There's a whole chapter on "The Perils of Modern Education".

Written with StackEdit.