"Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions." - Alfie Kohn.
This is another reason why unschooling works so well. When you don't interrupt a child's natural curiosity and you help facilitate their right to choose, they will develop great decision making skills.
I am a horrible decision maker because I'm afraid of failure. I was raised in public school. Follow these directions and do it this way. Memorize these answers and I'll give you a test. You better score highly on the test if you want to please us. I will probably be forever deschooling myself, learning to trust myself.
I'm grateful my children are growing up differently. Within the boundaries of safety, they are given complete freedom to decide. Except for our expectations of love and respect they are free to fail or succeed. I know they learn from both outcomes, perhaps even more from failure.
They carve their own paths, using inspiration from the world around them, but always deciding for themselves the steps, the pace, the direction.
3 comments:
You are so right! At the lecture I heard this morning, about our economic forecast for 2011, Brian Westbury said that we learn from our mistakes. If we don't fail, or make mistakes, we will never learn. His example was the mining disaster in Chili. He said the lives of the men saved in 2010 have the thousands who lost their lives in past years to thank for their survival. We learned from our mistakes, and 32 lives were saved because of what we learned from past tragedies and mistakes. Failure helps us to learn. I believe this 100%! It's okay to fail - and then learn from it!
And, again, I am wishing I had been home schooled. :-)
I'm so glad we unschool
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