Rediscovering God’s Simple Plan for Learning

There are so many theories about education out there, and almost all of them are as dumb as rocks.

Why?

Because they take something that is already included in basic human understanding and turn a profit with it by some clever ad copy and redesigned packaging.

You know, when you create a bureau or a think tank or a government anything there are people earning salaries to keep the thing going, and in order to keep paying their mortgages and their children’s college bills they need to justify their paycheck. So, they invent all sorts of technical jargon for which they need numerous meetings to explain and define and so on. After a while the original reason for the entity disappears and the entity becomes a cause in itself.

This is modern education, and it’s a shameful sham.

The truth is much lighter and more hopeful.

We are all learners and teachers because God put it in us, not because of any expert training.

It’s God’s plan, we simply need to trust that He knows what He’s doing and step into it.

As I’ve stated before, learning is basically:

Observe

Think

Do.

Hints of this foundational idea can be found all over anything educational, although it is often shrouded in multiple layers of educationeze.

The basic functions of learning and teaching have been manipulated to fit specific needs and situations several times, such as in Ancient Greece, Friedrich’s Prussia, Horace Mann and John Dewey’s America, even Hitler’s Germany.

These last 60 years or so have seen a push to subjugate via pseudo education as never before. It has gone so far that schools seek to create an environment in which children question biological reality.

But this is not how the United States began.

At the founding of our nation, things were closer to the original idea. Our forebears did not over analyze education; they simply educated.

They presented information in a logical sequence, hopefully with kindness and patience, and people caught on (or didn’t).

And this produced the most literate population in the world at that time.

This attitude about learning is what inspired William Holmes McGuffey to compose the famous readers which have been in constant use for almost 200 years!

While the culture, inventions, and technology have changed and advanced, there are truths these founders discovered that we desperately need to return to which are universal and could be applied no matter what the era.

I spend a lot of my time thinking of ways to reconnect us with these universal values and procedures. I am able to understand these things because of all the years I have spent with our 15 children observing and learning, as well as my contact with other mommies and examples in media and literature.

I am motivated to share what I have learned because I want to bless others so they can benefit, and so the Kingdom of God will have made just a little more advancement because I have lived.

As you listen to me, or read what I have written either on my blog or in my books, I hope you will take these ideas and share them with others. You don’t need to give me credit, since what I speak about is not original invention, but rediscovery of what is already under our feet.

Anyways, one of the ways I hope to explain some of what we need is via a little chart I recently created.

We need charts and explanations like this because we are so far removed from what real learning looks like, and we’ve been trained not to trust our own learning and teaching instincts.

Of course, none of this is in stone, which is the genius of it all. If I were to claim this is the progression all children should take as they do in public schooling and classical education, then I would be just as dumb as they are and would produce the same rotten crops.

Here is the chart (if you click on it, you can download it as a PDF and print it out):

In closing, I would like to solidify these ideas with life of George Washington Carver.

As a former slave, Carver’s early education was sketchy at best. There wasn’t anyone around to test him and categorize him to make sure he was following the appropriate educational scheme; no logic, dialectic or rhetoric stages. He simply became a sponge and in turn blessed the world and especially the impoverished South with his accumulated knowledge and ability to innovate by his Spirit-led genius.

I’m afraid that if Carver was treated as children are in today’s schools his genius would have been squelched underneath layers of evaluations and categorizations. He would have had to become a drop out in order to make any headway.

However, thanks to the modern homeschooling movement, we now have other choices. We can remove ourselves from the failed system and open up more opportunities for our children, including all means of learning as they are needed.