Ian Wild
ORGANIC STRUCTURE

This article first appeared in the February 2006 EO Newsletter

A situation in which children are felt to be ‘without structure’ makes for a lot of tutting. When children are doing something adults have planned and set them to do, there’s a hum of approval about young people doing something ‘structured’, which has an aim, a purpose. Yet children I meet who get a lot of this adult-driven ‘purpose’ always seem lacking in vitality. Moping, sullen, resentful. All that purposeful structure seems to leave is a pile of rubble.

I’m not against structure in my life. I happen to like it. Just so long as it’s my own, or it is structure I have willingly entered into. If I go to a class, I’m happy to let the teacher structure the experience in any way they see fit. If I don’t like their approach I don’t have to go again. There’s the rub. If I don’t like a structure I can opt out of it. But a child often cannot. What if I had a learning situation imposed on me that I couldn’t see the point of or disliked? How much would I learn as my hackles rose up past my ears?

Conventional educators would say that as a grown up, it is fine for me to feel that way. But children are different. They need to have a curriculum and education structures forced on them or they won’t learn essential life skills. The three R’s at the very least. They would argue that these essentials must be ordered by a responsible adult (an expert no less) into a body of learning and fed to children in bite-sized chunks, until they have worked their way through it all. Without this structure, the child would wander off, like a wild goat, grazing on anything (Pokemon! The Beano! Gameboys!), leaving great gaps of knowledge.

One problem I have with this is that children learn things at different times, have different abilities, come from different homes and cultures, they are not all ready to receive this knowledge at the same time. In school, one body of knowledge is set out and is expected to fit everyone. Like some mass produced garment one size only. The child often cannot see the point of the body of knowledge. In trying to make sure that children get this body of knowledge, with threats, force-feeding, or boring delivery schools turn the child off learning. Or destroy the child’s ability and confidence so that even if they wanted to they couldn’t receive the knowledge. Imposing structure has the inbuilt problem that a child often cannot recognise the use of adult structures, nor interest themselves in imposed knowledge.

After fifteen years of being at home with my children without lessons or curriculum’s, I know that imposed structure is not the only way to learn those ‘essential skills’. The three R’s and more. Somehow, my own children absorbed those things with virtually no ‘teaching.’ I don’t even know how my youngest son learned to read. I caught him one day aged about nine, laughing at a Tin-tin book. I asked him if the picture was funny and he said – no, the joke is. And he read it out loud to me. I was astonished. He’d never asked for any help with reading. I would gladly have given it. I suspect he must have learned reading over his brother’s shoulder.

Children learning things in their own time, as they learn to walk and talk, learn things when they feel they need them. True, this sometimes happens a good deal later than schooled children, (making some HE parents understandably edgy), but it comes at less cost in terms of emotional damage. I’ve met home-learners who were not reading till they were twelve and thirteen. By the age of seventeen, these children were very literate. One is now in university, the other, on the way. With my own children, I gave them no lessons, only time. Whenever they needed it and as much as they wanted. In doing what they wanted to do, they learned all they needed to know. It was and still is fun. It might look like messing around to some. In truth it is children building their own vitally important inner structures.

The idea that a child will only learn things according to a planned curriculum in a classroom situation is very Victorian. That it is a poor method of structuring learning ought to be obvious by the high number of people who are turned off by it. One of the reasons it is still prevailing, despite evidence that children dislike it, is that it is very visible method. You can easily see what is being attempted. A curriculum can be mapped out for years ahead. There can be highly visible goals, targets, directives. With a teacher stood in front of rows of children, you can look on and say, ‘By golly there’s some powerful educating going on there.’ But just because somebody’s teaching, doesn’t mean anyone’s learning. Maybe that’s the biggest lesson the system has to learn.

Had conventional educators transmogrified into bluebottles and hung around on the walls in my house over the past few years, I dare say they would have frowned at the apparent lack of structure in a situation that allowed my youngest son to walk round the kitchen table like a monk for hours at a time apparently doing nothing (in fact doing an awful lot internally and meditatively). They might have buzzed and chafed their wings at my eldest son playing so much soccer in the garden – perhaps missing the training drills that he devised and carried out himself for improving his shooting, passing and co-ordination. A conventional educator might have come into my home and presumed there were no learning structures at all. Just because they were not visible. But it is not true to think that where there is no outside structure being imposed on the learner there is no structure at all.

Nobody can know the inner structure of a child’s mind. That is perhaps the scary thing for a parent. If you don’t impose a structure – which gives the illusion that you know what is going in to your child’s being – then you often don’t have a clue what is going on in there. For some years, maybe until a child’s mid-teens, it comes down to a matter of trust.

I don’t impose school-like ‘structures’ on my children, yet I believe there is a good deal of meaningful, positive structure in their learning and their lives. They have structures they have built themselves. Sometimes with my help, but more often not. I have let them get on with their own lives, doing pretty much what they want to do. Not judging, not interfering. I let them get on with Gameboy’s, Beano’s, Manga, Warhammer and many other things, as well as letting them share my own life and preferences. With no formal learning they are as literate and as educated as their peers – often more so. And unsurprisingly, they are not turned off learning things. Socially they are communicative and outgoing, well-liked by their peers. When they want to learn something, they are confident they can do so. They have created their own learning structures, organically. They have grown, much I guess as a rain forest grows, seemingly at random. Yet ultimately these structures are rich, varied, complex, strong. They are capable of extraordinary personal development and growth. In contrast to this kind of ‘organic structure’, an ‘imposed structure’ is like a pine forest plantation. Ordered in rows, often for commercial reasons. In the wrong soil. Degrading the environment in which it is sown. Dead inwardly and denying growth to everything else.

Children who develop organic structures, get continual practise in structuring their learning and so become very good at it. Imposing outside structures on children in the way that schools and National Curriculums do, young people lose the opportunity to build their own far more fruitful and relevant inner lives. To many children school feels debilitating and disempowering. And no wonder. How can young people ever learn to structure their lives when every second is spent fulfilling somebody else’s learning and life objectives? Universal education was supposed to help abolish child slavery. But when I look at what young people have to do in schools and the amount of time they have to devote to homework, all I see is children pulling 21st century coal trucks. What children learn from outside structures is a sullen dependency. Is it any wonder that when all this structure is removed in holidays or on leaving school, young people feel at a loss or bored. They are so used to other people structuring their lives they don’t have the foggiest how to go about it themselves. They are so turned off with everything, nothing seems interesting any more (except things that adults don’t approve of.) This imposition of learning warps a child’s inner being. What they are learning is that learning is a chore. A worry. A thing of league tables and tests. Of fists and punches in a playground. Of humiliation and torment. Throughout their formative years, they are being prevented from finding out what they really love and enjoy and want to learn about, and how to find out who they really are.

There are people who might be said to have poor ability to structure their lives and learning, who live moping listless lives without any interests and who don’t know what to do with themselves. These are people who have had enough of all the structures that have been imposed on them ruthlessly for years. Parents making them do things, teachers making them do things.

Young people can and will structure their own lives and learning. The two ought to be inseperable. School seperates them. Doing everyday things shopping, listening to music, chopping wood, looking after pets, answering the telephone, cooking, travelling from one place to another and taking in all that is going on whilst doing so, making decisions about what to do next when there is no pressure to do anything next, reading because the book looks interesting, being in positive emotional contact with other people rather continual negative emotional isolation. In doing this, children learn all they need. We may not agree all the time with the choices young people wish to make in organising their lives. It bothers many adults to see a child seemingly inactive lying on a bed, staring up at the ceiling, though many interesting ideas and thoughts come to me whilst doing this! Left to their own devices young people will not want to watch TV all the time or play Gameboy all the time. They might binge out on such things for a few weeks or a few months. But hang in there. In the end, balanced children, like balanced adults will find out there is more to life. Given time and trust, young people make pretty good decisions about what to do with their time. They may not seem to do very much that is overtly educational for months or years, yet somehow all the things that others spend years slogging over in school appear as if by osmosis. Being in control of their own time and activities is very empowering and provides a very solid platform for a lifetime of personal growth

The invisibility of this process means that some parents, who feel instinctively that the organic approach is the right way, feel more nervous about it than they should. Essentially this is what happened with us. Our children rejected formal educational approaches. No matter how softly, gently, kindly, imaginatively we approached formal subjects, our children rejected them (rightly) as a violation of our normal family life. It didn’t feel right to us because they didn’t want to do it. My instincts told me to wait until the children wanted to approach these things of their own free will – reading writing, numbers history maths etc. Sometimes I worried it might not happen. I needn’t have.

I’ve written this piece because I’d like to support people who are considering bringing their children out of school and who are discouraged from doing so by a misapprehension that they would have to be teachers in their own homes – with desks, workbooks and imposed structures. This is absolutely not true. To those who say: Oh I could never do all that, you must be so patient , I haven’t got the time, the energy, the commitment. I would reply you don’t have to do very much apart from enjoy being with your children. Be with them when they want you and help them do what they want. Sometimes put things in their way or take them to places they might be interested in. Nothing could be easier or more fun. As a loving parent you probably already observe your child with an affection no teacher could match. Find out what your child is interested in and help them find ways to engage with their interest – even if you disapprove of some of those interests. My youngest son was interested in Gameboys. This took him into Japanese culture. Then, he developed an interest in learning Japanese. This branched out into collecting porcelain dolls. Then to reading advanced adult books about Japan. I bought him endless magazines about Pokemon and Gaming software. He indicated the ways he wanted to go, I helped him go there any way I could. He went to lots of other places on the way.

The ideal conditions for learning are not found in schools or schooled situations, they are found in everyday life. Children who live around sympathetic adults who do interesting things for the love of doing interesting things, will build structures robust enough to stand elephants on. To do it for them, is like dressing a ten year old in a bib, squashing them into a high chair and cutting up their dinner before spooning it in. Humiliating. Disempowering. Ridiculous.