How Curiosity Revived the Cat
or: “the importance of inquisitiveness in my education”
A little over a year ago, I completed a BA Hons degree in Socio-Cultural Anthropology with Distinction. Okay, that’s fairly standard, what is the big deal? Well, for someone with no A Levels and only two GCSEs in English, it was a pretty big deal.
Especially, considering that prior to doing my degree, I had only the sketchiest understanding of what anthropology was all about. It’s weird to realise this when it was the world of human beings and their every day lives that had fascinated me, almost before anything else. My grandfather, who lived with us when I was a child, had a subscription to National Geographic, (anthropology for the masses) which I consumed as rabidly as my Enid Blyton books.
This anthropocentric inquisitiveness meant that I had an endless supply of questions, with which to their immense credit, my parents and grandfather all actively engaged. They openly discussed with me some of the biggest events of the 90s and early 00s including anything from Nelson Mandela’s release to the death of Princess Diana to 9/11 and the War on Terror. If my parents shied away from a topic, I would watch the six o clock news with Grandpa or read his daily newspaper, keen to be saturated with whatever was going on in the world.
This news addiction of mine must have been difficult for my parents to negotiate, who had recently moved to an alternative minded community in South East England and begun sending my sister and I to a Waldorf School. In Waldorf or Steiner Education, there is strong emphasis on protecting young children from the more adult topics to preserve and maintain their innocence as long as possible (Good Earth School, 2006). However, I was immutable when it came to my following my curiosity though and they could not prevent my insatiable appetite for information. Thank goodness, the internet hadn’t yet taken off, otherwise I would have been completely addicted.
Although I found much of my Steiner education enriching and engaging, there were many other aspects that I found limiting and frustrating. Most of my frustrations pertained to the cerebral, okay nerdy side of my personality, that did not get met with an education so focused on the Arts. I was excelling in English and languages and desperately wanted to deepen them and explore the social sciences far more deeply than I was able to at school.
Just as I had been privileged to have a family who took the plunge to move to the village where the Steiner School was located when I fell in love with the latter, I was also fortunate to have my their willingness and support to explore something even more radically different than Waldorf Education. That something was unschooling or home education, or really whatever terminology you like best. In September 2001, we only knew of one other family like ours, who were ‘educating differently’. During my teens, the community of unschoolers has more than tripled in size and is now a now thriving, normalised educational route in Forest Row and the surrounding areas.
For the first term or perhaps even that first year, my sister and I spent a lot of time ‘de-schooling’, an actual phrase to describe kids who have left traditional school and need time to decompress and essentially recover from many aspects of their education (Takahashi, 2008). When I look back, it makes total sense to me that my sister and I were burnt out from formal lessons and the constant social environment imposed by school.
To be contained in a physical space with twenty plus other people all of your age group, but not necessarily your sensibilities, on a daily basis for much of the year, year after year, without payment is hardly an expectation we would ever put on ourselves as adults.
I also realise now that that liminal (betwixt and between) space that we inhabited during this de-schooling period, is what began to restore my natural curiosity. It had definitely been dampened in some crucial areas by schooling. My parents decided with us early on that we would try autonomous, child-led learning, my sister and I would orchestrate our own education. Mum and Dad would be there to facilitate learning by helping us to get tutors or the resources, but we would be the driving force behind what we wanted to learn. We were often bored in the early days, which often led us to free play and into the realms of our imagination, something now broadly known to be vitally beneficial to human development (Mann & Cadman, 2014). Rediscovering our sibling bond, which the constrictions of school time had fragmented somewhat, was one of the most important things that came out of our new education.
Over time, my curiosity led me to immersing myself in English with a wonderful teacher who also got me thinking seriously about feminism and social mores in the historical literature that I loved. After completing two English GCSEs, I began a correspondence course in journalism and alongside managed to get work experience writing a regular column for an international parenting and alternative lifestyle magazine.
A life dream to get published in print media happened by the time I was sixteen!
It is hard to imagine how that might have happened if I had stayed at school. Learning so differently was giving me the confidence and courage to follow my own curiosity. Socially speaking, I formed a network of friendships online that I would later get to meet all over the world. I also had my school and home education friends, with whom I would form a local amateur theatre group and put on two fantastic plays.
As I reached my twenties, I began to trust in my curiosity and where it would lead me more mindfully.
Following my interest in early childhood and pedagogy, I focused on becoming a conscious childcare practitioner, with a variety of families who were bringing up their children outside of conventional nursery and educational settings*. Alongside, I developed my interest and skillset in communications by volunteering my for a variety of charities and social enterprises, both national and global.
This eventually led me to fulfil a childhood dream of working and living in Kenya, where I did an internship at an NGO specialising in building sustainable cultures and communities of peace.
The experience shook me up in a variety of ways and it was challenging to work out my next steps when I returned to the UK. My father recommended I consider applying to university as it would give me a new focus and it would be a place where I could fully own my inner nerd.
Reluctantly, I decided to fill in a UCAS application as I had never even considered University to be somewhere I wished to attend, I was so determined to continue being outside of the box. This process also led me to discover anthropology as an actual subject, as opposed to simply living life with an anthropological curiosity as I hitherto had. Ironically, I had even worked as a PR intern for an ethnographic and documentary festival, in the anthropology department at University College London while still only skimming the surface of the subject itself.
However, as soon as I began my degree, I knew I had found my ‘element’ as Ken Robinson would call it (2009). I threw myself into my modules with wholehearted abandon. It was a cornucopia of varied, enriching and broad information, while developing my more out of the box, original ideas and get rewarded for them. It was deeply satisfying three years, socially, academically and creatively, for which I am so grateful.
It is just over a year since I graduated in Canterbury Cathedral, my inner historical geek turning cartwheels of delight to receive my coveted piece of paper in that ancient place.
During the subsequent year, I have been developing a course in socio-cultural anthropology for secondary school students and reflecting on other ideas about how this enriching subject can be made accessible for those outside of university settings. I had so many conversations with friends and family during my university career, who lit up with excitement when I told them about my classes and research topics. I don’t think they were just being polite!
I had the opportunity to do a few classes to try out some of my course on a handful of teenage home educated students. The classes were so much more fun, exciting and inspiring than I had even imagined they would be. It was a delightful challenge to adapt my university learning into lesson plans appropriate for their age group, as there are very few available online resources, due to its scarcity as a non university subject. It has given me so much motivation to develop a more versatile learning platform for this critical subject that can do so much in engaging people with the world around them. Especially at a time when we face so many new political, social and environmental challenges.
My main motivation in how I develop these materials is always to find out how to best fan the spark of curiosity and to revive dulled or burned out imaginations into wanting to understand a little more about the world that we all inhabit.
Anna Durdant-Hollamby writes for Eequ.org, an education platform that connects skilled and passionate people in the community to curious children who are self-directed in their learning.
References:
Good Earth School (2006) What is a Waldorf Education? [online] available at https://tinyurl.com/y8toyy8k [accessed on 11th May 2018]
Mann, S. & Cadman, R. (2014) Does Being Bored Make Us More Creative?, Creativity Research Journal, 26:2, 165–173, DOI: 10.1080/10400419.2014.901073
Robinson, K. The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. New York: Penguin Books.
Takahashi, T. (2008). Deschooling Gently. Hunt Press.
