HomeCrazzyHome

She liveth!!!

PanKwake actually got out of bed. Other than running to bathroom. It might have been the first time since the Unschool Valentine’s Dance.

She spent a good long time in the gaming room playing Roblox with her friends Fairy and Jelly Bear…virtually.

I wrote the other day about the severity of PanKwake’s reading issues. About why traditional education methods which focus upon literacy would fail her…break her. About how home education and especially #RadiCoolUnschooling has enabled her to develop her strengths…including social skills.

In this #HomeCrazzyHome, literacy is about enabling PanKwake to think, reason, and learn…WITHOUT READING. That may seem like a completely off the wall idea to you, but let me explain…

As recently as a few hundred years ago, a millisecond in the span of human history, this proud land in which I lived, Wales, was ruled by lords and local kings. They judged disagreements among their people. They passed down the history and traditions of their tribes. They ruled: some of them well…and some abusively. But few if any of them read. That was the job of clerics/priests. Whom many of them disdained.

Then princes and lordlings began to be educate. Then the other noble classes…except women of course. Learning spread to the upper middle class, the merchants. Even eventually to women, upper class ones anyway.

But it was not until the Industrial Revolution that took people from the land and into cities and factories that reading became a ‘necessity’. This just happened to coincide with the ‘public/state school’ movement. Why? To produce better workers for the factories. So that people could read warning signs on machinery. Not to save their lives. But so that their body parts did not gunk up those valuable pieces of equipment and stop the production line.

And honestly, schools served their purpose. For a hundred and fifty years, they fed ‘educated’ working class slaves into the factories of the West. People who could read those warning signs, live their lives to someone else’s clock, and blindly obey orders.

But here is something to think about…

We don’t live in the Industrial Age anymore, folks.

In fact, we are several Ages past it. And here is a secret…

No one knows what the future holds.

• My partner is one of the top techie futurists. He speaks often of how the Tesla self-driving car will eradicate the taxi industry which is already under intense stress from other services like Uber…
• When you go into McDonald’s or most grocery stores, more often than not you do not deal with humans, but with self-service check outs…
• Heck, I complain to him all the time about going to doctors. About how I wish there was a computer program that would just go through my symptoms and diagnose me. He tells me that they are getting close to just such a thing…
• He tells me that even the arts, like musical composition, writing, and visual arts can be ‘programmed’. Though I admit I don’t want to believe that last bastion of human creativity could be duplicated by computers.

What then is to become of humanity? What skills sets do our #LittleHumans need for such a future?

By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.¹ (The Future of Jobs report by the World Economic Forum)

Yet, futurists like Alvin Toffler and Tesla innovator Elon Musk deride the education systems of today for producing generations of workers unsuitable for the needs of that future.

What is to become of all those, including many college/university graduates, incapable of thinking creatively and continuing to grow and educate themselves?

As we see today, the ranks of the unemployed and underemployed continue to swell. Talk is of a universal basic wage to re-distribute wealth and accommodate this change. At the same time, there is a war not on poverty but on the poor. Which path will humanity take? The higher, more evolved ground or class war? The future is uncertain.

But what is not…is that the definition given by Kirsty Williams, Education Secretary for Wales, when questioned in the Senedd about what is ‘suitable education’. Not only did she fail know that ‘suitable education’ was already defined by case law, but she hemmed and hawed, finally babbling that she was not sure but certainly all would agree that at least literacy and numeracy.

No, no, it does not. Not at the expense of Cognitive Death. Reading is NOT worth their self-esteem and mental health. Especially when we live in the age of Audible, Ask Siri, Google, and Alexa/Echo.

All of which PanKwake utilize to enable and empower her self-directed learning…autonomous education…minimally invasive education…or whatever the current buzzword is today.

The ability to read is NOT a valid indicator of overall intelligence. Yet our #LittleHumans are made to think that it is.

But I learned that the hard way…by listening to the educators, schools, and ‘experts’. As a result I truly did ‘disable’ one of my precious offspring…well into adulthood. But that is another blog…for tomorrow.