On First-Hand Experience

My friend Penny Barker was an unschooler long before anyone had thought to print such a concept in a newspaper or claim it as a label. Penny, however, calls what her five children did over the past three decades, and continue to do during their adult lives, "Organic Learning" She, her husband and her adult children share that style of hands-on learning with about thirty young visitors a week all summer long at their Country School Farm.

Recently, Penny and I had an e-mail discussion about labels as they pertain to herbs in our gardens. I had pulled up all of the labels in my herb bed in the fall and, now that they're bursting forth again, I have one plant that I just can't determine whether it's an herb or a weed (or if there's even a difference between the two). I was intrigued by Penny's response to my dilemma and found a bit of my own philosophies in what she said.

"In our present culture I always think we are much, much too big on "labels" and its secondary experience rather than the first-hand experience of the object itself! I think it's great that you're gonna' have to figure this plant out by other means! Neat!

I have a funny story about herbs and labels that I wrote up for an Australian homeschooling publication years ago: When J. was six and B. sixteen, it was their evening to prepare supper for the family. A potato-dill soup and homemade bread were what they decided to serve. No problem with the bread--the girls both learned that one early on--but the soup was a newer recipe. When it came to the time in the recipe to add the dill, which I keep in a mason jar like all my other harvested herbs, J., who'd taken the top off the pint jar, said "no!" when the B. reached her spoon into the jar labeled "dill." It wasn't dill, he told her; she said "nonsense,"--he protested to the point that she used her sense of smell on it and realized he was right! His first-hand approached as opposed to B's secondary one saved our supper! Don't you just love it?!

I think we may have gone a little overboard in our present culture with labels--I see it in our visitors time and again--they will often try to tell us how to do something because they've read about it rather than focusing on the actual doing right before their eyes. Sometimes I think we're creating a culture of "know-it-alls" who actually know very little! They'd rather read about something (second-hand) rather than experiencing it (primary). It's one of the main reasons we started out with pencil and paper with our summer visitors but soon gave them up realizing that kids were too hooked on the abstract!

Reading is, of course, the easier way to experience life and can become such a habit that kids learn to prefer it over doing. When our kids were growing up we read books for pleasure (not our research, of course) only in the evenings and Sundays. (This was not a "rule" but more of a tradition--it just evolved that way because we were so very busy with the farmstead, the outdoors and animals.) It was harder on me than [husband] R (he's not much of a reader for pleasure) since I've always been quite an avid reader but I was so busy "doing" with the kids, that I didn't really have time, anyway, except in evenings and Sundays! As a mother, you know the busyness of which I speak!"

I certainly do. While reading, for me, is a break from the tedium and a mental stimulant, I've long told my children that reading is simply living vicariously. If you have the opportunity, it's so much better to DO!