Real Learning

My daughter Jacqueline (age 7) is self taught on the subject of space/the universe. She's interested in learning about the universe, because she's interested in the universe, and that interest has taken her in many directions.

I've been re-reading Guerrilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn and I wanted to share this:

"Real learning requires meaning. Meaningless information can be memorized and repeated, but it's not learning. For information to have meaning, there must be meaningfull context for the information. That's why most people, unless they are really good at absorbing and retaining meaningless data, forget most of what they learned in school.
In school, subjects are artifically seperated from each other. It's as if schools believe that if you give kids one tree at a time, year after year, they will save them up and make a forest out of them. School can sap kids interest in learning, confuse them with so many meaningless "trees" that it may take years to recover and begin to see the "forest" again.
School can simply eat up so much of their time that there's none left for the real learning, for spontaneous exploration or free play. Instead of discovering their unique gifts and talents, many learn to see themselves as "disabled" if they don't keep up with the traditional school systems standards of measurement."

I love the tree analogy. School did that to my older two and it would have done that to Jacqueline, had I not taken her out. When I see my kids learning, really learning, it makes the artificialness of school much more obvious to me.