After the Pandemic, Children Need the Freedom to Learn
Extra time in classrooms is not the solution to this year of restrictions.
It’s been a tough year for children. Through repeated lockdowns, social distancing measures and school closures, they have been deprived of social contact and places to play. Most of their choices have been taken away as they have been confined to their houses and only allowed out for exercise. It’s not surprising that many of them are unhappy and worried.
It’s been a hard year for parents too. Faced with the reality of remote learning, many of them have come up close against the curriculum — and have, in the process, discovered just how far removed it is from their child’s interests. Several parents have told me that during the first lockdown (with schools unprepared) they planned activities around their children’s interests and everyone had fun. More recently schools have sent work home to be completed, and suddenly learning is a battle.
It’s not really a surprise when you think about it. We all know that we learn more easily when we are interested. In fact, most of us know from our own experience that interest-led learning is fun and enjoyable, whilst forced learning is tedious and often slow. The surprise is that we don’t apply this common sense to children’s education. We continue to think that marching through a standardised curriculum is more valuable than learning based on interests, against all evidence to the contrary.
There’s a substantial evidence base showing that learning is more effective when the learner is intrinsically motivated — meaning, when they are doing something because they want to do it. Think of a child you know. Chances are that they have various specialist areas of expertise which they have learnt about independently. In our house, my children are extraordinarily knowledgeable about quite different topics. My son can tell you all about Terraria, Minecraft and running a Discord server. My daughter is an expert in polymer clay techniques, Pokemon and Pusheen. No one has taught them about these things and no one planned a curriculum. In fact, trying to stop them learning about these things would be the more difficult option.
This time of remote learning has shown many parents how their children feel about the learning which they are required to do in school. It’s also given many of them a chance to see the difference when children are allowed to follow their interests — and many of them are asking why school has to be the way it is. Why shouldn’t an education be based on a person’s interests, when it makes learning so much easier?
At this point you’re probably saying, but children have to be taught! They’d never learn important and difficult things otherwise! It’s all very well to know about Minecraft, but what about Number bonds and Times tables? They’d spend their lives flitting from whim to whim, never settling on anything. They have to be made to learn!
The research on self-directed learning says otherwise (Fisher, 2021). Children who spend their entire education choosing what they do and who are never made to follow a curriculum, become competent adults who often go onto higher education (Riley, 2020). Children’s learning naturally shifts from the discovery phase of early childhood to the mastery phase, when they work on acquiring new skills intentionally. This does not have to be forced, it happens as children develop and grow. Self-directed children seem to make this transition around the age of 9 or 10. Suddenly they decide they want to learn to ride their bike, or write more neatly, or play the piano, and they set to. They start to choose what they do based on the skills they want to acquire, rather than simply what they enjoy most at any given moment.
When we realise that children are capable of learning without force, then the school model of education becomes a choice rather than an inevitability. It’s one way to learn, but not the only way; and necessarily not the most efficient way. Which is why the current narrative of ‘lost learning’ and ‘educational scarring’ makes no sense at all. Time at school is no guarantee of learning, and more hours put in does not equal more output.
In fact, it’s possible that extra ‘catch-up’ time at school will have the opposite to the desired effect. For one of the things which predicts how motivated children are (and therefore how effective their learning is) is how much autonomy they have. This means how much power they have to make important decisions about their own lives. Almost all children (and adults) this year have experienced a loss of control and power. The younger ones can hardly remember a time when they could mix freely with their friends or hug their grandparents. Helping them regain their confidence in their own ability to make choices needs to be a top priority. Otherwise we risk them carrying forward the internal restrictions they have learnt during this pandemic — maybe they will continue to believe that they are powerless, for example, or that their preferences don’t matter.
Extra hours at school won’t change this. For most schools are places which restrict children’s freedom, where essentially their choices are whether to comply with or resist adult demands. Schools, as they are currently run, are rarely places of free interest-led learning and exploration.
Our children have an urgent need to rediscover that the world is a place of opportunity where their decisions matter. We can’t do that by shutting them in a classroom and force feeding them fronted adverbials. Interest-led, self-directed education, by contrast, has the potential to help children recover their emotional resilience whilst continuing to learn. Our children need the chance to take back control of their lives and rediscover their passions. Their futures depend on it.
Further reading
Fisher, N (2021). Changing Our Minds: How Children Can Take Control of their Own Learning. Robinson.
Riley, Gina. (2020) Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom. Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education. Palgrave Macmillan
