A
few weeks before Thanksgiving, my family and I were discussing the
upcoming holidays during dinner—the round of visitors
who’d be staying in our home, the kinds of things that were
okay when it was just immediate family but wouldn’t be so
okay around guests.
You know, the usual nakedness discussions, reminders to close bathroom
doors while guests are over and to knock and wait for an answer before
walking into bathrooms and bedrooms, and requests to ease up a bit on
the potty humor in front of the grandparents. The freedom and openness
of my family’s unschooling lifestyle inevitably bumps up
against more conservative cultural mores, and I find advance
specificity crucial in preventing hurt feelings all around.
Throughout our discussion, the kids all jumped in with different ideas,
and the conversation gradually shifted from consideration to a more
general exploration of what “host” means. Sam began
talking about setting out snacks, saying he’d seen that on Ed,
Edd n Eddy. “Hey,” he quipped,
“who says you can’t learn manners from
TV?”
Who indeed?
Though Sam has seen me pull together snack plates and hors
d’oeuvres for guests on countless occasions, something about
the way he received that information from Ed, Edd n Eddy
stuck. Whether it was the rapt attention being paid, or the cartoon
child’s reasoning process made visible, or something else
entirely, Sam had internalized the idea that putting food out for
guests was part of being a gracious host, and as far as he was
concerned, he’d learned it from TV.
Truth be told, we learn countless tidbits from watching television, and
we make even more learning connections, which always seem to come in
waves of serendipity. Kind of how once you buy that red Nissan,
they’re suddenly all over the roadways—learning
moments are always there; we just don’t always see them until
we’re ready.
Not long ago, the girls and I were reading The Half-Blood
Prince, so cauldrons and spells were on our minds.
We’d made wands from polymer clay, and the girls were in the
process of creating incantations to use with their new wands. At dinner
that night, I began reciting the witches’ lines from Macbeth:
“Double, double toil and trouble;/ Fire burn, and cauldron
bubble.” The girls loved it, and soon we were jumping online
to find the rest of the spell, my trusty Riverside Shakespeare tome
still boxed away from our move. The girls were so taken with the scene
that we ended up reading all of Act 4.
Within the next week, Emily and Julia encountered that spell at least
twice more: first while they were playing Where in Time is
Carmen San Diego? on the computer, and second while we were
watching Jimmy Neutron on TV. (Not to mention the
references within Harry Potter movies: in the song sung by the choir at
the beginning of Prisoner of Azkaban, and in the
“Weird Sisters,” the band who plays at the Yule
Ball in The Goblet of Fire.) There was Macbeth
repeatedly put in front of them at a time when my girls were not only
interested in it, but also attuned to it, leading to memorization and
private performances—usually sprung when one least expected
it.
I can still recall learning lines from Romeo and Juliet
when I was around Emily’s age because I had connected with
them so deeply while watching the 1968 film production with Olivia
Hussey—a memory I shared fondly with my daughters as they,
too, found a connection to lines written 400 years ago.
In their rendition, the girls have one line slightly wrong, chanting,
“Belly of a fenny snake” rather than
“Fillet of a fenny snake” because that’s
what their ears picked up while learning the lines. Some day,
they’ll read the play and realize the difference, or they
won’t. Either way, having the exact lines won’t
really matter—only that they enjoy the play and share a
broader cultural reference without the tedium and alienation most
school kids associate with learning Shakespeare.
Media plays a huge role in our unschooling lives, from online research,
to computer games, to television, to film—all of which links
up to literature, history, geography, science and any other subject
school could dream up and reduce to dull, abstract words on a page.
While in so many ways my family and I find ourselves returning to a
simpler life, that simple life for us is ironically quite wired.
Whether we’re curled up in front of a movie, or the kids are
watching TV, or I’m jumping online to research food
preservation or livestock breeds, media enriches our lives.
Because of their media explorations, my kids have become quite adept at
catching the allusions and picking up on the many parodies in the shows
they watch. Within the Jimmy Neutron-Macbeth
episode alone, there were several lines the girls recognized from the Reduced
Shakespeare dvd we’d rented, along with references
to Star Wars, Twister and The
Matrix. Media has opened our lives to play and learning and
puzzle-solving in glorious and valuable ways.
Mythbusters and Dirty
Jobs are part of our weekly repertoire, exposing the kids to
scientific inquiry, problem-solving and behind-the-scenes information
on the way things work, exposure evident in their play and their own
approach to exploration. We gobble up documentaries on the Discovery,
History and PBS channels, learning about topics as diverse as shark
evolution, the Hun invasions, Roman gladiators and Lincoln’s
rise to power. But not all our television learning comes from
“educational” shows, by any means.
The television show Survivor has increased my
kids’ awareness of history (the Cook and Pearl Islands),
geography, world cultures, psychology, strategy, critical thinking,
nutrition, reading and writing, just to name the most obvious learning
connections the show has created. We watch; we run to the map; we
critique; we analyze. The kids create their own games, write names on
slips and read out the votes. We followed Survivor
lovebirds Rob and Amber over to The Amazing Race,
through 10 countries and 5 continents.
Commercials, too, hold loads of learning opportunities, as the kids
analyze subtle advertising strategies, critique ad campaigns and
re-create their own commercials for a family audience. Then, there was
the time when Em wanted the Bedazzler™ more than anything for
her birthday, so Jules and I ordered it for her from the television
website.
Em’s birthday came and went with no Bedazzler™.
When she and I called to determine a delivery date, we learned that not
only had our order been lost, but the Bedazzler™ had been out
of stock for 6 months! The kids were furious each time that ad came on
with Tana, who’d “searched all over New York for
just one Beddazler™.” How could a company continue
to sell a product they no longer had in stock, my kids demanded. What
an incredible life lesson in economics, consumerism and corporate
strategy—way better than any curriculum could have delivered.
Media studies foisted on parents are misleading—designed more
to account for a failing educational system without looking too closely
at the system itself than to reveal how television really affects
children. Critiques like Marie Winn’s The Plug-In Drug
attempt to link increased television viewing to declining SAT scores or
reduced attention spans, scapegoating television to explain why kids
don’t seem to be learning or excelling in schools. Other
studies indicate links between television viewing and childhood
obesity, again scapegoating TV rather than questioning the kinds of
foods kids are eating both in schools and out or the amount of time
available for them to move their bodies.
Television is an easy target because it takes pressure off education,
food, and other industries and parents as well. TV-Free America, for
instance, a national non-profit organization, cites that the number of
minutes American parents spend in meaningful conversation with their
children averages to 3.5 minutes per week while the average child
spends 1,680 minutes per week watching television. Statistical
questions about that data aside, even at face value, these numbers
overwhelmingly indicate the alarming lack of parental involvement in
children’s lives.
Unschooling parents who make an effort to connect with their children
through television and other media clearly demonstrate involvement that
would likely average to 3.5 minutes per television show or video game
rather than per week! Not only do unschooled kids tend to be active
rather than passive TV viewers, they also tend to be active learners
while watching television according to overwhelming anecdotal evidence.
Perhaps the biggest difference in the stories told by unschooling
parents lies in the fact that these parents are present to see the
learning happening, present to engage in dialog, to provide context and
perspective, present to offer interesting alternatives to electronic
media as valuable options alongside media itself. Simply put,
unschooled kids and their parents engage each other and media in ways
that differ so greatly from the schooled kids being studied that the
conclusions bear little relevance to unschooler’s lives.
Active parental involvement, then, may make more difference than the
number of hours spent using electronic media when it comes to
determining positive or negative impact. Books examining the influence
of peer culture like Hold Onto Your Kids by Gordon
Neufeld combined with media studies like those by Stephen Johnson, Paul
Gee and Marc Prensky appear to weave just such a story.
Bottom line: engaged parenting that acts in partnership with children
may make far more difference than media usage itself. But unschoolers
already get that.
Danielle
Conger lives and learns
with her three children, Emily, Julia and Sam, and her husband, Jim, in
Northwestern Maryland. There they enjoy homesteading
adventures
together with their many animals. She stays busy playing, gardening,
laughing, loving and
writing and can be found online at the AlwaysUnschooled e-list or here, editing Connections.
