Why Natural Learning?

I’m always fascinated with people’s backstory. How they came to do what they are doing and how they came to believe the things they do. The world isn’t just random, and humans certainly aren’t. There’s always a reason behind what we think and what we do. I’ve been rather fascinated by my own backstory as well. That might sound a little bit strange, but it really is quite a curious thing to look back at my journey and see how I came to be where I am today.

I used to be a primary school teacher. The year before starting teacher’s college I had worked as a children’s worker at the Salvation Army and that experience along with my experiences of enjoying time with my nieces and nephews put me onto the path of wanting to work with children. It is somewhat unfortunate that in many people’s minds, the desire to work with children seems to necessitate becoming a school teacher, and that was my thought process at the time too.

So I became a school teacher and taught at a variety of schools over four-and-a-half years, mainly Christian-integrated schools and a private boys school. By the end of my time, I was very ready to leave it all behind. When people ask me why I left teaching, people usually assume that it was because the pay wasn’t good enough, that there was too much paperwork, and that I was generally overworked. Yet none of these reasons really applied to me. The pay in teaching is very good actually, especially when you consider the amount of holiday time you get, so no complaints there. There was certainly a possibility of getting caught up in all the paperwork, but there are ways of avoiding it. Initially, I put in a lot of extra hours until my first school principal pulled me aside and gave me some much-needed advice, “I appreciate that you’re working hard but I want you to go home at 5pm. You’re not required to stay here all night, and you need time for yourself. Just trust that even if you haven’t planned every detail, you’ll do the best with what you have planned.” Other than a few exceptional times, such as report writing, I’ve more or less stuck to that. I also found that flexibility is often more important in teaching than heaps of planning.

So what were my reasons for leaving? A significant reason was that I didn’t like what teaching was doing to me as a person. A keyword in school teaching is “classroom management”. Classroom management essentially means doing whatever it takes to maintain control of the children in your class. Or put more bluntly, control over another human being to act as you want them to act. When your job is to try and make people do what they don’t want to do, or have little intrinsic motivation in doing, it makes you resort to the two great extrinsic motivators; bribery and threat. I was tired of continually feeling I had to dangle the next goodie or threaten with an arbitrary punishment. I also found myself raising my voice and shouting at the children just to maintain control. It was after these moments occurred I would feel bad about myself. If this is what being in a teaching environment brought out of me, then I knew I needed to get out. I left and went travelling.

My views and beliefs changed a lot the year I went travelling, and although I hoped to find a completely new life direction, the area of education was somehow still important to me. I was somewhat open to the idea of homeschooling as my sister was homeschooling her children and a Youtuber that I followed would often talk about his own experience of homeschooling his daughter. A name that came up frequently was the name of John Taylor Gatto, a former two-time winner of the New York Teacher of the Year Award. In September of 2017, I listened to the audiobook by John Taylor Gatto titled “Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling”. I saw myself in the book, and I finally began to understand why we do school the way we do, why we have done school this way for so long. I also began to see how I had bought into the mindset of obedience training that characterises the schooling process.

In coming back to New Zealand from my travels, there were a few things I knew. I still enjoyed children and the best times I had had in the classroom were when I was working one-on-one with a child. So I started tutoring. But this wasn’t paying enough so I finally decided that maybe I should give school another go after all. What if I could work within the system and just be a better teacher? So I went back to teaching part-time at a school in Christchurch, New Zealand.

It quickly became apparent that changing a system is not the way to go. Despite the changes I tried to make, I found myself spending most of my time absorbed in discussions on curriculum, testing and comparison. A major thing that clicked into place was the recognition that the school system was based on a curriculum; in other words, a collection of things that adults have decided children should learn. If it was based on a curriculum, then children needed to be tested to see if they had learnt what the adults wanted them to learn. This data then naturally resulted in comparisons of children.

Our school system in New Zealand has a relatively vague curriculum, but it does have one. All this means is that the results of tests are rather vague and can more or less be manipulated into whatever the teacher would like. This doesn’t stop the constant comparison of children by teachers. Sometimes this subjective comparison reaches the parents, and sometimes not. Because so many of the results are subjective, results are regularly doctored to produce the results the school wants. In the end, everyone is a bit more confused, and children spend little time in enjoyable and creative learning.

I enjoyed my time as a tutor much more. I wasn’t forced into a curriculum, and so I had much more flexibility. But even here, I felt myself under pressure to “make a child learn”. I began to realise that you can’t make people learn. People will learn what they will. They may take value from what you do and say, but it is still ultimately up to the individual to determine what advice is worth listening to. At the end of 2018, I left both school-teaching and tutoring to work on my business as an educational consultant based on the new things I was learning about how humans learn.

I began to see that learning starts when we are motivated to learn something. When we are motivated by extrinsic motivators such as rewards or punishments, these become our focus. We begin to care more about rewards and punishments than skills or knowledge.

We must want to learn, we cannot be made to learn. This intrinsic desire to want to learn something comes when another person inspires us. As humans, we love copying and imitating. Many teachers usually encounter deathly silence when they ask, “Does anyone have a question?” But if someone really wants to imitate you yet also needs an explanation, it is more likely they will brave asking you for that explanation.

So what did this mean for my life? It means I could live more freely! Instead of focusing on the frustrating task of trying to force onto people what I think is good for them, I can focus on living my own life as best I can. To live my life in such a way as to be an inspiration to others, and to be curious enough about others that I can recognise the inspiration they can offer my life. If we are to inspire one another, we must also connect and keep having conversations. To keep spurring each other on to explore this world at a deeper level than ever before.

And this way of living is not just limited to adult to adult relationships. Children are incredibly interesting people too. Yes, there may initially be many more things that we can do that will inspire children; however, this is not exclusively so. Children are also able to inspire us and prompt us to new thinking through their own thoughts, observations, and motivation to learn new things. A child should not be seen as someone we must put up with while we “prepare them for life”. They are already living life and can be active participants in meaningful relationships.

One thing that children can inspire us in is to maintain a playful mindset in life. A playful mindset means to be continually showing curiosity, exploring with a joy for life, and being daring in our creativity.

So why Natural Learning? Natural learning means to live a freer and happier life. When we are not forcing anyone to learn, we are freer because our mind is not burdened by constantly finding new ways to escalate control. When we are not forcing anyone to learn, we are happier because our relationships rely on connection and conversation rather than bribery and threat.

So, what about you? Will you let go of dictating what others “must learn”? Will you join me in living a life of natural learning with your own life and open up the possibility for natural learning for your children too?