Guardian Article: “What a 200-year-old experiment can teach anxious parents about home schooling”

In August of 2020, as parents grappled with whether to send their children back to school in person, I wrote an Op-Ed in the Guardian (with gratitude to Rancière, about the joys of self-education and the possibilities for everyone to learn from the right resources.

“Learning often has nothing to do with someone older or better read pouring the right information into the learner’s mind. (Consider how often children and even adults learn from trial and error, from learning to ride a bike to using a new technology.) Instead, learning has to do with awakening in the student the desire to grapple with interesting challenges. It has more to do with asking a child difficult questions at the dinner table, with encouraging one’s children to construct treehouses or fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes, and less to do with filling in the blanks of workbooks. Modern experiments in learning show very similar results, for example Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall” experiment. The educational researcher installed a computer into a hole in the wall in a New Delhi slum and found that, left to their own devices, children living in the area taught themselves to use it, becoming as adept as office secretaries in using the device…

…as history and philosophy can demonstrate, learning does not only happen in a classroom and it does not always require an expert to supervise it. Jacotot’s discovery is that human beings are learning beings: they know hardly anything at birth but seek out and develop incredible capacities. It should make us less worried about children during this difficult time, and even more hopeful about ourselves.”