The other day i was in a discussion room with teachers where we were discussing about importance of autonomy for learning.
One of the teachers, who brings her child to school but is not necessary part of the classroom.
She was sharing her experience how his child has learnt alphabets without her teaching him any of that. She was telling she has started identifying alphabets while traveling and names of the shapes.
In her own words
“I used to think that teaching has to be done to a child, we have to tell him to learn something. Especially the academic and basic literacy. But I am amazed that by just being around an environment and free to observe when he wants to, he has learnt without any effort. It is automatic. I now believe that autonomy is indeed something that works. And children can learn without us asking them to. “
The science behind non-instructed learning
As human beings we do not like taking orders . Especially if those orders do not come with any context and immidiate rewards.
Now this is how we work automatically. We do not plan that “we won’t take orders”. the moment we get instructions we want to see the context or reward that will come out of it.
Now, for smaller children,
I also wrote in another article about The peeking method learning where you learn more when you are not in the classroom but peeking through the window.
Brain is not straight forward simple and does not work as we would think it would do. Fear, push does not work for real learning and is only making your child learn less, hate studies. And really making the lives of children miserable because they are living either being a slave or a rebel.