The Learning Pit

In mid-August my boys returned to school after an often glorious, sometimes trying year of home-schooling. or, as I preferred to call it "alternative learning". Overall, I hope it's for the best. Certainly, they get to play plenty of games in class, in PE and in the playground with other children.  For that reason alone I'm pleased.  Still, I have mixed feelings on many fronts. 

On Friday after school my younger son squeezed onto my lap in the large chair in our kitchen, telling me about his day.  I knew it was partly in the hope that if he made himself so lovable, so endearing, his request for screen time would be granted; but he is nine, these days are numbered and there are worse ways to get what you want. It was still lovely. 

"...we had to draw a picture of the learning pit" he was saying. A school lunch planner in one hand, a Sharpie in the other and a child between them, I had been trying to ask him whether he wanted a school lunch any day next week.

"The what?"

"The learning pit"

"What's that?"

"It's the pit that you go into to learn."

"What? What pit?! A pit - for learning?"

"Yes"

"Uh...no. Say again."

"You go down into the pit when you're learning." 

"Down into a pit to learn?!" 

"Yes. Mama," (He still writes it: "mumu". I have never been able to bring myself to suggest otherwise), "...stop interrupting. You go down into the pit. Then there's the learning. And then there are rocks which is like, when you get frustrated."

"Frustrated?" 

"Yes, like when you're stuck. And then you climb out the other side and there's a platform which is when you feel better and then you carry on up out of the pit and that's the end, your learning's done."

"I see...But you don't actually always have to go down into the learning pit every time? You just sometimes accidentally fall into it if you're stuck?"

"No, there's a sign near the top saying 'Learning This Way'." 

A sign directs them to a pit for learning? My god. Even if something has got mixed up in the learning, this seems like a scary takeaway.

"So you have to go into the pit if you want to learn?"

"Yes."

"You climb down into the pit?"  I shudder still. Pits, in our collective psyche are associated with snakes, entrapment and captivity.

"Yes, that's where the learning happens."

"No, that can't be right. A pit?"

"Yes, I keep telling you, a pit."

"With rocks in the bottom?"

"Yes." 

I still thought I must have something wrong. I asked him if he would redraw me the pit so I could understand better. He was reluctant. He had already done it once at school, but he gave me a quick sketch.

I tried a new tack. "Surely there's a bridge over the pit? So if you just know the learning, or do it quickly or don't get frustrated then you never have to go down in the pit?"

"No, there's no bridge." He was adamant. "To do the learning you have to go into the pit."

I sighed inwardly, feeling depressed. When I sent my children back to school I didn't expect to have to counteract the learning going on at school. At least, not within two weeks. It wasn't the first incident. 

"I don't think all learning's like that. Do you? I mean I really like learning. Good learning is fast and speedy and fun and just great. There are no pits. Don't you think some of the things you've learned, the ways you've learned are like that." 

My son, an often tractable, sunny, happy to please child who likes the fun and easy route when he sees it, full of pleasure, friends and goodwill said "Yes". 

"I mean when I think of learning like a place it isn't a pit. It's a new place you explore or a sunny meadow you discover or a wonderful river with views of the hills", I said, thinking of the community litter pick I had done by kayak on the river Tay that morning We picked up tips as we went of how to kayak better and about the local beavers. I learned about local history from my kayak buddy and about places to visit in Kent from a man who has family there. 

"Isn't learning sometimes like that for you: easy, or at least fun and...no pits."

"Yes", he said, easily, skipping away.

But the mind tends to give in easily to people in positions of perceived authority: teachers, anyone working for an institution. The power of people in those positions and what they do and say, things perfectly legal, is often unknown and underestimated. I don't say 'unknown' lightly. In our last school it was a consistent source of frustration for me and is the main reason I tolerate the homework I don't really believe in - not, anyway, at primary age. But I get to see what my boys are doing. I'm far from alone in feeling frustrated at being shut out of knowing what my children are doing at school.  Perhaps it's deliberate - the less you know, the less you can query. 

Many minds accept direction easily by such figures. A mind will often associate tone with direction and seems to make a decision quickly about who must be right and who to believe, just because it is told to. All it takes is confidence from the imparter. The Milgram experiment where people administered ultimately fatal levels of electric shocks to strangers just because they were told to reminds us to what extent people will follow instruction from those they perceive to be in authority.  The minds of adults do this. How much more then, the minds of children. Things like 'the learning pit' that children learn in school, or the general sense behind such notions, or simply that strong visual image can have a certain stickiness, more stickiness than the things you might think they are there to learn, like say, long division, or fractions. 

What is the counter to this? Simply, the urging of the roman poet Horace and later of the philosopher Immanuel Kant in that famous battle cry of the Enlightenment: 'Sapere aude!' Dare to begin, to know, to think for yourself.

Ironically, "the learning pit" concept is used as a resource by teachers to promote independent learning.