What if we started treating learning as eating?

I am happy to be writing again. A lot has happened in homeschool since the last time I posted; but it isn't expedient to share every important lesson here. My time must be spent doing the actual things that I write about.

Anyway, as per the subject of this short article, consider the reality of eating. Eating is a necessity for living. So is learning. And yet we plan our children's meals better than we plan their learning. Parents hardly allow people outside our homes to call every shot for what goes into our children's bodies, even when we eat outside the home and order takeout. Good or bad, every family is fully aware of its eating habits. I would even venture to say that most families would be incensed to have social systems run their cupboards, refrigerators, stoves, and dinner tables. Yet, we allow social systems into our homes via an unnecessarily porous mental space--our minds. Almost every intellectually shaping process in the lives of our children is made by people outside of the family. In the k-12 education system, the family becomes the support system that forces our children to comply with a revered system often ran by people who themselves failed at family and home life, let alone social life.

The people who are locked away in research cubicles, whether laboratories or university offices, hardly having time to socialize and interact with the general public (except for making use of us as research subjects), seem to have a great time positing ideas that are not a part of their reality. Statistics doesn't always spell realness in the hearts and souls of humans, because humanity is more complex than that. And so we must ask why the robotic scientific assessing of human learning? Why isn't the collective knowledge of parents and children and families enough to share among ourselves? Except for therapeutic aid for the disabled, there are no major educational institutions for learning to talk, learning to walk, learning to urinate, learning to bathe, learning to eat, and the who gamut of things human beings must learn to be and to stay alive. And we have done amazingly in general without schoolifying these processes, except for the aforementioned necessary cases.

So, it has occurred to me that just as there are food allergies for some children, there must also be intellectual substance allergies for some children. No wise adult would push a child to eat something that would land her in the hospital and endanger her life, but on every school day some children go through cases of intellectual allergic reaction, being forced to learn information or in ways that destroy them instead of build them mentally. Because it has always being this way does not mean that it has to be this way. It seems easier to discard the liabilities to our educational system and run with those who support its running. The same system that would disallow universalizing the peanut butter sandwiches in their students' school cafeteria lunch does not even bat an eye when forcing centuries-old mode of learning and content-lean that have not worked for many children, possibly harming as many children they help. To many, it is a necessary balance. But if we did the same when serving school lunches indiscriminately with known allergens, in 2024, would that not be considered barbaric?

So, after almost four years of homeschooling son, and after his formal autism and severe anxiety diagnoses last year and ADHD suspicion, and an epilepsy-like syndrome, I have observed and concluded that intellectual allergic reaction is possible in children. And in adults too. I know that for a fact. Next time someone starts a hostile religious or political or racial or gender-hating conversation, note your own reaction, even if all the points raised are factual or real. Some content simply might be reprehensible or plainly hurtful for some minds. In those cases, an otherwise intelligent mind is averted and goes into a mental anaphylaxis. And yet children must often endure an analogical situation almost daily. It did not take me many years to learn that my children responded better to what was more sequentially palatable to their brains than what was sequentially mandatory via the thought-laws of theorists, school boards, school districts, and even national departments of education.

So, how has this penned out in my homeschooling family, with children who still only elementary school level? I will use a few examples. Let's start with religion; yes religion is still important. As Christians, we go straight to the Bible instead of being purely conditioned too much by parochial leanings. In art, the children free-draw as freely as they would like to and make crafts and "clay" figures as they like. For music, we listen and include singing in worship; and do some ear training by helping them see where small momentary key changes can be built into song while keeping in the underlying key. No complete key modulation has to be done. In science, we go straight for the jugular: why just memorize when you can discuss and theorize? Recently we have been looking at atoms, electrons, protons, and neutrons. Last year, we studied systems like see-saws in physics. We discuss physiological issues as they naturally come up. The kids love animal science and are enthused by study or discussion of habitat in their entertainment videos. They love STEM and also enjoy block coding for computer science. For English Language Arts, we speak as we want them to speak formally, correcting grammatical errors as we go through our days. For writing, the keep a journal. Reading is as essential as it is organic. For health, we are mostly vegetarian. Socially, they are not hermits. We have church and relatives and thus see others; besides we don't have an only-child situation here. And so on.

The main example for today deserves its own paragraph (for me, it's either Christianity or mathematics for a main discussion of school content)--mathematics learning. When my son was about six years old, when the pandemic led to school shut down, my family like all others in New York was pushed into homeschooling. That is when I got to see that my son had some fundamental struggles in mathematics, though he is brilliant in the subject. Traditional algorithms, like addition with regrouping, were lost on him. So, in rebellion against the inflexible system, I decided to try something different while ignoring what he was not able to do. Ignoring in this case did not mean not caring. It simple meant I tried to see what he could actually grasp. I worked with his brain affinities instead of pushing him into intellectual anaphylaxis. Yes, I introduced integers to a six-year-old child who had struggles with adding two-digit numbers. I also introduced integers to my then four-year-old daughter. They both loved it; they still love integers today.

For the past four years, homeschooling involved a lot of play time, free time for child-led and independent explorations for my children who are seven and ten today. Staying with mathematics into the rest of this article, I can tell you that we have covered some fundamental skills stuff (underscoring the importance 0 and 1, properties in our number systems such as commutativity, distributive property, associativity), some algebra (integers, functions--comparing linear and non-linear; writing simple function rules from tables, etc.; adding linear expressions), a little geometry (shapes, and even conditionals (if/then stuff), etc.), a little precalculus/linear algebra (matrices and vectors), a little calculus (limits via graphs), a little abstract algebra (definition of a group, a few finite Zn groups), a little statistics (median and mode, and a little graph reading), etc.

Recently we started studying the binary system, base two, due to a block-coding computer science assignment. So far, it has been going well. To see how my children, especially my autistic son gravitates towards this stuff is just sheer intellectual joy for me and for them. God even blessed me to create a contraption using beens and small containers/slots to give them a hands-on approach to convert decimals to base two. They have even been able to remove some of this manipulative support, tough we are only one day into using it.

My message is simple: if we focus on what children can actually learn in accordance with their individual intellectual gifting from God, we would do them well, instead of robbing them of the joy of intellectual engagement. Not all intellectual engagement is considered to be formal school learning as defined by formal education systems. But the converse is also true: not all education system learning may be considered intellectual engagement in the truest sense. May we find that balance where our children may be engaged and not suffer intellectual anaphylaxis when issues of learning arise.