We are headed to Sesame Place! We are very happy to say that Scout has no idea what Sesame Street is or who Big Bird is for that matter. We are going because what is better then a water park for Sesame Street age kiddos?!
There always seems to be a lot of talk in the unschooling world about video games and TV..talk about how much they teach and how great they are. We choose a different path.
ONE reason for staying out of school is to learn through experience...by living in the learning, seeing it happen first hand, being part of it. Not sitting in a classroom being told about it or just reading it in an outdated text book. TV and video games are somewhat like that...we believe, anyway.
Scout has no idea who Big Bird, Bert, Ernie or Cookie Monster...what?! no more Cookie Monster...its Veggie Monster now. I didn't even know that until some one told me yesterday. But, she does know a lot of characters. We can hike in the woods and she will identify lots of things she sees there, mushroom, moss, pine cone, acorn, chipmunk, squirrel, hawk, lichen, robin, bluebird,chickadee, I could go on.
Maybe someday she will be interested in TV and video games..if so we will honor her choices. But for now we will continue to show her the wonder of the world and hope that passion stays with her...we know she has it now.
The photos on this post are a snippet of her life in the month of July, it is a normal month for us. Filled with wonder and adventure...and nature.
Scout, "do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail".
Well Lucy knows who cookie monster is and she loves him, but she's never seen an episode of Sesame Street. We have an old Sesame Street book from the 80s where cookie monster eats cookies in bed :)
ReplyDeleteI do have a couple of thoughts after reading this. We aren't big tv people, we don't even have a tv in the house right now. We do watch movies or play games on the computer, and Josh is definitely into some of these games right now. Anyway, I think an important thing to note is that an interest in tv/movies/video games does not mean there can't be an interest in the outdoors at the same time. A passion for nature and a passion for movies or games are not mutually exclusive. We can have many different interests, and honestly, I have a hard time finding time to pursue all of my varied interests. Life is full of so many interesting things, I don't think we have to limit ourselves to one course, or one thing, or one main focus. There is room for more than that in my opinion.
Also, I agree about experiencing life versus sitting in a classroom hearing about it through textbooks and lectures. In fact, there is a really cute Sesame Street/Grover book about "The Everything in the Whole Wide World Musuem", also a few decades old but still a great book. The whole point is that you can go to the museum and see all the displays, but there is so much more out there in the world, you open the doors and go outside and there is your museum.
But I also think that there are a lot of things we learn about in life secondhand. For example, I may not be able to travel the world to every place I'd like to see, but I can read about them in books, watch movies or documentaries about them, look at photos online or read someone else's blog or website about their experience in a place. Sure it would be awesome if I could take my kids to see the pyramids, but I might not be able to and I'd rather them be able to fully explore that interest as much as we can with the resources available to us than to say that learning about it from tv isn't valuable. And if we are going to look at things that way and say that learning about something through tv or a video game is like sitting in a classroom passively, then we could say the same about any book or about going to a museum. Why read a book about how the body works or constellations or volcanoes if it is better to go out and experience it? Why go to a museum and look at displays about history? Well, because books (and tv and museums and many other things) can take us places we might not be able to go physically at this point in time. There is value in that in my opinion.
I didn't play a lot of video games when I was a kid, but for a while as a teenager I really liked a game called Civilization and I really did learn a lot about different civilizations around the world throughout history that I had never been exposed to before through school or any other source. The knowledge I gained through that video game was limited for sure, but later in life when things came up I realized I knew things. Oh yeah, the Zulu warriors! Oh, Genghis Khan was the leader of the Mongols. And because of that earlier exposure to these things I was interested in learning more about some of them. I don't think that information is less valuable to me because I was first exposed to it through a computer game instead of reading it in a book or seeing a display in a museum or something.
Also, I think it is okay to do things just because they are fun. We don't sit down to watch a movie because I think it might be educational for Josh. We do it because I think he might enjoy a particular movie, maybe because I enjoy it and I want to share it with him. We read books together for the same reason. And we go outside and go on walks, spend time watching our chickens and watering the garden, and swim at the pond for the same reason too. And in the process, yes we learn a lot through all of those experiences.