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“How do they learn math, language arts, science, and social studies incidentally? Without a plan and scope and sequence how do you teach them stuff? That is such a good question. I posed it originally in fall of 2013. Let’s revisit the idea.

How do I teach them stuff? I don’t. If they are interested in something, they take it in. I provide environment, experiences, resources, mentors, transportation, and support. They teach themselves. I’m staff.

What? What about teaching? You don’t teach them?

Listen, you may be “teaching” a thing and your child may be present as you are doing it but don’t confuse this with your child learning. Your teaching does not equal your child learning. I remember when BA put me that knowledge. He was little. We were in church and we had just finished some reading aloud but he wasn’t getting what I was reading to him. I asked him what method was most effective for teaching him something quickly. He said teaching him a thing wasn’t the same as him learning a thing. I was stunned.

There is a lot of confusion about this. People think ‘teaching’ at an unwilling child = learning. It’s not. It’s participatory performance art with an audience that is literally captive. The artist’s intentions don’t really matter. What the child is learning is how to avoid the wrath of the performance artist. ‘If I do this thing, she won’t get mad.’ That’s not learning math, language arts, science, or social studies. That’s learning how to avoid emotional pain.

Before I talk about how our children learn things without being formally taught, I will pose a few different questions for your consideration. Without waiting until the child is interested in a topic, how does anything stick? Do they not get tired of being the audience as you teach what they have no desire to learn? Don’t they find you tiresome? Don’t you find yourself tiresome?

How do you keep them from doing the memorize-it-and-regurgitate-it-and-forget-it-as-soon-as-possible-so-she’ll-stay-off-my-back thing? That isn’t learning. It’s not education. It’s malpractice. It’s harm. The thought of conditioning a child to go through the motions should horrify you. If it doesn’t horrify you, stop reading now. I can’t help you.

Teaching according to a scope and sequence makes us feel obedient and justified and successful and righteous and like we’re not being soft on our children and — here’s the money — like we aren’t failing our children. That’s the kicker isn’t it? It’s even a bigger motivator than the desire to collect parent credits for having children who can sing their times tables at three. If you don’t shove it down their throats they’ll be unprepared. Scary thought. They’ll fail. It will be your fault. You’ll blow it. It’s a threat. Your child is going to be UNPREPARED if you don’t do what I say.

Snap out of it.

It’s an assembly line. ‘All children should learn this thing at this time.’ It’s laughable. ‘All children should loose this tooth on this day.’ And it’s surprising what we’re willing to do to our children in order to not feel scared and to feel obedient and justified and righteous and like we’re the grown up.

It doesn’t have to be like this. You can step off the beaten path and go another way. Try it. You don’t have to do it this way. I just offer it up as one of a great many alternatives. What works for our sons works for our sons. I don’t know your children or what they need. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself.

What we do is keep things in front of them. Netflix has documentaries. YouTube has great videos. We love The Great Courses. LearnLiberty. The Ludwig von Mises Institute. FEE. Dirty Jobs. Mythbusters. Liberty Classroom. We listen to books on tape. We watch people working and ask questions. We get magazines and read online magazines like Fine Woodworking, Popular Science, Discover, Wired, Make. We go to museums, the seashore, lakes, woods, swamps, riversides, historic places, performances. We like to be at the symphony, the opera, the theater, concerts, lectures, discussion groups. We put ourselves out in the world.

The boys work. They make things. They pull things apart. They help around the house. They assist their dad with his three small businesses. We dig in the garden, can things, ferment things, rot things, collect things. We make music and art. We listen to Lynne Rossetto Kasper talk about food and we read about food science and we cook things and bake things and grill things and we built an earth oven once.

I read to them all the time. We play little grammar games and watch math videos that make us laugh. We have rock collections and we bird watch and listen for Canada Geese in the fall. We watch people and children and babies and read Maria Montessori, Truett Cathy, Dale Carnegie, and Malcolm Gladwell together. Listen to NPR and sometimes we agree and other times we groan. We are serious enough about economics, complex systems, emergent order, biology, human development, and philosophy that we have an ongoing conversation about them.

Somehow this kind of takes care of it. They learn what they want when they want and because it’s what they are interested in, it sticks. And sometimes they simply say, “I want to take an art class.” And I arrange it for them. And sometimes we don’t do jack. We just loaf around. And that’s valuable, too.

Are they well-rounded? No. They have strengths and weaknesses. I am not well-rounded and their father is not well-rounded but we are happy and he provides amply for all of us in spite of it or — more likely — because of it. We are not looking for well-rounded. Well-rounded is a story we tell ourselves to justify using force to make our children do what we want them to do. We let go of the mythology of the well-rounded at about the same time we let go of the mythology of teaching what they didn’t ask to learn.

I’ll leave you with a final thought. Some of you will say that we can do this because we have a child who knew very early what he wanted to do. We just got lucky. You have it exactly backwards. Children don’t know what they want to do because it is scoped and sequenced and well-rounded right out of them. We aren’t able to let the do what they will because our sons know their minds, our sons know their minds because we let the do what they will.”