Tricotomania and more

I’ve decided to move over here from Typepad. Some things are still in boxes (like blogrolls) but I hope to get the place all unpacked and sorted out over the next week or so. I’ve imported all my old posts and the comments came with them so I’ll be closing up shop at the other place soon. Hey, I even managed to import all the posts from when I first started blogging as a guest over at Cate’s place.

Maybe I’ll even have something profound to say in the next day or so. Make myself worthy of that award Audrey so graciously bestowed on me.

There is a great post up at Survive the Experience about what is wrong with American education today. She (and I’m sorry I’m not sure what name to use) is responding to a particular argument but makes a fine concluding point:

I am also unconvinced that what the government wants is a "mediocre
middle". I rather believe that the government fails to realize that the
production of an educated individual is not something that can be
automated. Over the past century, automation seduced America and
altered our approach to solving our society’s problems. Monoculture and
factory farming have turned out to be unhealthy practices, resulting in
inferior products and collateral damage to our environment. I believe
that the attempt to quantify a body of knowledge that every single
American ought to know, parse it down into ever more specific goals and
objectives, and then test it using scantron forms is similarly
unhealthy. It pushes facts while stifling the educational impulse. It
produces scores while destroying thinkers. This is not about money in
exchange for diagnoses. It is about a flawed paradigm.

I totally agree. We can’t automate education. But automation and efficiency are very powerful cultural discourses. So powerful that even those of us who would wholeheartedly agree that education can’t be automated when put boldly like that will sometimes worry about things that are really only worries if we put a high value on efficiency.

For example, how many times have we worried about what our children are getting out of reading a particular book? What if they can’t read but spend hours poring over the pictures? What if they read it so fast we think they can’t possibly be understanding what’s going on? What if it has allusions to something else, like The Lightening Thief does to Greek myths, and our kids haven’t really looked at the thing being alluded to?

I bet we have all worried about those or similar things at various points in our homeschooling journeys. Those of us more prone to planning may even have tried to deal with them by making sure that our kids have been exposed to whatever it is that we think would make some other educational experience more educational. And those of us not so prone to planning may have worried that we should have done that.

But how many of us have read things again with our children and got something new out of them. I certainly enjoyed Winnie the Pooh differently as a parent that I did as a child. And I’m learning new things all the time as I homeschool. Things I had covered in school and forgotten; and things that I never studied before.

And many new experiences bring insights that I hadn’t had before. Things that sometimes make me think that I should have learned things differently. But really learning is all about bringing past experience to bear on new material and considering material in the light of everything else we have learned, however we have learned it. By definition then, every time we approach a topic, we will get something new out of it. New connections at least because we have learned other things since we last looked at this topic.

And we can try to make that process more efficient by creating "spiral" curricula but the bottom line is that education does not lend itself to efficiency and automation. The "educational impulse" is such that we are always seeking to learn. There is no fixed endpoint that we could arrive at by a more efficient route. It is an ongoing process. Well, ideally at least. And attempts to automate it are more likely to snuff it out altogether.

I know. I know. I haven’t posted since Brussels. No internet in the apartment in Amsterdam. Then Christmas and visiting friends in the UK. But we are home now. And I’m slowly working out what I want my life to look like now that we’re back.

The thing is that going away for 3 months, Llving in small spaces with limited possessions (we took one decent sized suitcase each plus one carry on — either a laptop or a violin; well we almost did but we came close enough to that ideal), and being out of the normal routines creates the possibility of change that might seem daunting in normal circumstances. So I’m reevaluating what we are doing and trying to add things in slowly. Blogging has not been a priority.

I have been reading some blogs, though not all of what I used to read. And I’m still on no-mail on some of my lists.

When I started this blog, it was about knitting (hence the title) and it got me more involved in a really great on-line community of knitters. And then I started homeschooling, and some of the knitters helped me find out about that and hook up with an online community of homeschoolers. And the focus of the blog has shifted in that direction. I’ve made new friends and learned a lot and I just need to sit back and think about what I want the blog to be and how to best achieve that. I should get to that sometime this month.

In the meantime, I’ve made sure that we’ve signed up for stuff that has to start at the beginning of term (fitness things mostly). And we’re getting a learning routine going. And baking bread.Tomorrow our little co-op is having a planning meeting. And we’ve been hanging out with real live friends who live in the same city.

Thanks for your patience. We’ll talk soon.