Lego of My School: Freeing a Child’s Education

Let’s be honest for a couple of minutes. School sucks! All the homework, exams, projects, reading assignments make school miserable. There is a reason that many of us did not or do not enjoy school and that is because we were forced to learn. As humans we naturally resist force. This can be seen simply by reviewing how many wars there have been throughout our history. We do not like to be forced to do something, but we are willing to force others even when we know it doesn’t work. This vicious cycle begins with educations. As children we were forced to get up and go to school. We sat down for 8 hours listening to lectures then came home and worked on homework for another couple hours, sometimes putting in 10 hours at the age of 7. There is another way and allow me to show with legos.
My son is 3 years old and one of the most creative humans I have ever met. I got bored a couple weekends ago and started organizing all my legos from when I was a kid. It was a huge crate. For all you nerds who argue about how to organize legos, I did it by color (feel free to argue about that in the comment section below). My son has played with the big lego blocks, but never the tiny ones. He wanted to help. I had him help me by sorting out the colors. He didn’t know the colors at the time, so it he wasn’t much help (even though he tried). He played and built his own masterpieces.
Yesterday, we were walking through Wal-Mart and he noticed that there was a lego section. I didn’t know if he was old enough, but he wanted one set and I had some extra money. I allowed him to pick whichever set he wanted. He chose from the new Superhero series: The Batman Riddler Chase.
When we got home he ripped it opened and asked for my help putting it together. I sat down with him and it took 2 hours. Our conversation included phrases like, “Could you hand me the red piece”, “Papa can I have the square piece”, “Landen do you see the black circle piece?”, and “I need two green, rectangles with 6 notches only 1 row.” He was learning his colors, numbers, shapes, and communication skills at an exponential rate. Common Core has learning shapes and numbers as a Kindergarten standard. I am not claiming that my son is smarter than other children. What I am trying to express is that there are better ways to educate a child than through lectures and worksheets.
This is not to say that all children should be sat down and forced to learn shapes, counting, and colors through playing with legos. Some children do not like legos and it would be disaster to force that upon them. Every child is unique and therefore to get the most out of education it will require a unique educational experience. If we try to factory produce education we will be met with an end product that we are not satisfied with. In reality, this factory process creates drones that follow direction and work long hard hours. If we want our children to be successful in the future economy, which is ever changing and unpredictable, then we need to teach our children to think for themselves, not be able to fill in a bubble.
Allowing our children to explore the world around them is the heart of unschooling. We should be heavily involved in our children’s lives and use every opportunity as an educational experience. I did not plan on the lego purchase to be about learning about shapes, colors, and numbers. It just happened. To build the batmobile my son needed to learn to obtain what he wanted. This isn’t about making our children the center of the universe, it is about helping them learn through the best possible way. People learn through experiences and they learn faster when they are passionate about what they are doing. In the end we as parents and educators have two choices. First, we can use force to educate children. This will result in resistance and if it is successful, an obedient person, that follows orders. Or we can give children freedom to learn what they need to succeed. We can allow children to savory and hold on to that creative spark they were born with. This will result in an entrepreneur who is passionate about what they do and blow away the world with their capabilities that they have fostered throughout their entire life.
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6 CommentsThoughts? Comments?
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Don Stacy October 20, 2014 , 11:22 am Vote0
Formal schooling definitely sucks.
Thomas Motyka October 20, 2014 , 11:58 am Vote0
If my parents had ever let me drop out of school and be “unschooled”, I would have spent many more hours building with the tubs of Lego’s I owned.
Michael Esch October 20, 2014 , 1:22 pm Vote0
I am an education major and I research different forms of teaching people the ways that they want to be taught. I found this a couple of weeks ago and thought it would be awesome for kids who love legos. It is using legos to teach engineering mechanisms. Kids get to build their own mechanisms like robots to perform certain tasks. http://www.play-well.org/
Audrey C October 24, 2014 , 7:50 am Vote0
I learned a great deal of apathy in public school. Learning wasn’t fun – it was a chore. Read this, test. Write this, test. Add this, subtract that, divide by a fraction, test. It was all so…boring. I felt as if I was being stuffed into a mold that I didn’t quite fit – I’m sure an authoritarian parent didn’t help, either.
Don’t get me wrong – I was good at it. But I wasn’t happy.The only valuable skill (read: applicable to real life) I really learned in public school was how to figure out what the teacher wanted. When people ask me how I excelled in academics, I tell them that I learned how to exploit the teacher’s personality.
Now that I’m typing it, it sounds rather evil. But that’s what I did.
I’m very much against compulsory schooling – the public school system was one that was designed to churn out factory workers and civil servants – people who take orders well, don’t ask questions, and follow the crowd with no complaint. It’s a mess. The world has changed drastically, but the model has stayed the same. I don’t think that there’s any redeeming it – it needs to be scrapped, for the sake of all those poor kids trapped in classrooms, told to sit down and shut up when they want to play and explore.
autonomous April 16, 2015 , 9:11 pm Vote0
I’m glad there were no legos when I was a child. I spent every minute I could either exploring the woods or swimming in the creek (mostly underwater.) Much like Audrey C, I did well in school, but not because I liked it. I spent almost all of secondary school reading, both in class and out, rarely about what was going on in class, which was not very much of value to me. I read at least five books every week. My favorite punishment was getting sent to the library.
I am totally opposed to compulsory schooling. It is very telling that up to half of boys are medicated with psychoactive drugs starting as early as kindergarten in the U.S. Closer to 100 percent of mental patients, institutionalized senior citizens and prisoners are drugged the same way. In fact, one sees almost identical behaviors among school children as one sees in mental facilities; either blank looks or manic, compulsive facial ‘tics’ and limb movements.
Leanne Baker April 17, 2015 , 5:52 am Vote1
Nice post! Wonderful to see your dual passion for education and parenting.