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Modern schooling likes to box and structure all learning so that they can “measure” it, but there is a huge difference between a child and so many sacks of potatoes in a bin or cars on an assembly line.
One of the schooling ideas that is hard to break from is that a school “year” begins in September and ends in May. There are good reasons to follow a schedule, but the reasons to break that schedule can be just as good - to be spontaneous, to make a trip to the park a learning experience, to count vacation at Grandma’s as part of the child’s education.
Project-led learning in particular has no need to be fitted into a “school year.” Building a robot is building a robot, without caring what month of the year it is, or if building a robot corresponds with “what schools are doing this month.” Projects can begin at any time, regardless of other things a child is learning. The amount of time spent on any one project can be large or small from one day to the next without any concern for fitting some schedule. Yet all projects are easily adjusted to a schedule, if that is what works best for you and your children.
So if you have not added a project to your school year, there is no reason why you shouldn’t add one at any time. Once you get your own ideas for learning under way, then simply add “A Sewing Business” or “Visiting the Elderly” or any other project to your child’s learning experience. “Backpacking and Survival” is a project that just about any child would leap for at any time of year. What a great way to sneak learning into summer time or any other time of year – learn to build a fire and cook breakfast over it!
A child that knows how to successfully build a camp fire and cook breakfast for the family has incorporated skills and an understanding of the world into his or her own person that will transfer to many other needs in the future. Real learning is when vacation itself is both school and exhilarating to an energy-filled child.
Another way we are free of “schooling” is that the curriculum and expectations of modern schooling are not necessarily what our children need. Learning comes from doing what is important to the heart and mind now. Children don’t really learn what is important “for when you are an adult.”
A child who is eager to build a go-cart, or one who is hiking the park trails drawing pictures and writing notes, is learning principles that will remain permanently etched in his or her mind. Those principles will be more useful in college or in the adult work world than hours of time spent learning things found only on a text book page, things useful only for some far distant time in the future.
I do not believe that a child misses out when they don’t follow the standard modern curriculum. My own children continue to prove me correct. Abandoning those rigid requirements and allowing your child to do exciting and meaningful projects for their “schooling” will do more for their education than any number of textbooks or programs from the mainstream educational houses.
The discovery of interest should be the primary goal and guide of learning .
Daniel Yordy has worked with teenagers for over thirty years, both on the job, doing a wide range of activities with young men and women from construction to woodworking to gardening to milking cows, and in school, public, private, and home school. While obtaining his Masters Degree, he pondered the difference between the dictates of “modern education” and the practical reality he already knew produced far superior learning results than anything contrived in the modern (pretend) classroom. The result is Project-Led Learning, a weaving of the objectives of education into the actions of real-life, personal projects that contribute to a young person’s life and family.
