As my children grow in attention span and interest I am finding myself continually refining and adjusting our homeschool day. The latest shift is one worth sharing, I think. I have enlisted the help of the great minds of a given subject to teach my children. We use their writings, which I still read to them aloud as it helps build their vocabulary and drives their imaginations. We use their diagrams and pictures and methods. And we use audio tapes and video of these great thinkers.
I have found that nearly every great thinker who has lived since the invention of motion pictures can be found on YouTube or Vimeo or other private video repositories. This is a great addition for us as it gives my children the actual voice of the thinker in their head as they read on their own or think about a subject.
I have watched my kids over the past few months develop an understanding of Art with Sister Wendy, Physics with Richard Feynman, Math with Marcus du Sautoy and Benoit Mandelbrot, Logic with David Kelley, and History with Susan Wise Bauer.
And understanding trumps rote learning any day.
Richard Feynman has a wonderful story about having playing with a wagon with a ball in it when he was a child. He noticed that when he pulled the wagon the ball rolled to the back of the wagon and that when he stopped the ball rolled to the front of the wagon. He asked his father why this happened and his father said that although there were many ideas about inertia and momentum to explain the behavior of the ball, no one knows why the ball behaves the way it does.
The why is unattainable to us. What is within our reach as human beings is the ability to develop and test logic models for our world in an attempt to gain understanding. We can understand something, if only on a rudimentary level, even if we do not know why it exists or behaves as it does. Those ideas are central to a philosophy I developed after decades of work as a scientist. It is so important for my kids to understand that although they probably will never attain the why, they must be driven to try. That is what we are meant to do.
And learning lessons like this directly from the words of great thinkers is priceless. The words a person chooses to use, either spoken or written, reflect a lifetime of their own learning and experience as well as a measure of their own personal philosophy. Exposing your child directly to the words of the great thinkers gives them the opportunity to learn from them, rather than simply about them.
