Education Can Be Fun & Easy

My schooling in childhood & even during my undergraduate college years having been unpleasant, my life goals eventually came around to making learning a more joyful, meaningful, & productive experience for everyone. Constantly surveying kids informally on the streets in recent years, I have found only 1, 2, or at most 3 out of 10 would go to school if it were not mandatory, & those willing to go would usually do so to be with their friends.

It’s easier to bear misery when with others. At least there are chances for occasional mirth, even though it often leads to rebuke or punishment.

Schooljails have been extremely successful in creating a competitive, violent, wasteful, disconnected, & chaotic world. The U$, with its most aggressive trend-setting consumer culture & brain-draining pedagogy, has even convinced the exploding populations of India & China that each individual must acquire one’s own car. Good luck breathing anywhere in a few more years as they ditch their bikes.

Bibliographies, More than Just Book Titles

In many of my writings, I share my experiences in education as well as my observations about children & child-rearing along with what I have learned from others that is vital & what works. The bibliography at the end of one of the 3 books I have written presents, & all future books will include, a list of the numerous educators, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, & others who have contributed most significantly to my awareness over the decades of what is best for kids & humans in general.

Instead of listing many particular books, I find that with current technology offering greater diversity, it is more beneficial to just list the names of those who contributed most to my insights & understanding of child development, parenting, peer relations, & the related realms of personal growth & human behavior. In this way, learners can focus one’s own interests & ways of learning to that which most appeals to them because the joy & self-satisfaction that comes with acquiring new skills & knowledge flows most steadily when the learner is doing it in their preferred manner rather than one imposed by a teacher or other external force.

Having the original resource person’s name, the student can proceed to select from a wide array of media available to listen, watch, read, correspond, or otherwise interact with others in the process of absorbing the knowledge, gaining the insights. It need not be a book or article by the cited authority but may be a discussion by others about the original source whose work may have been just the initial impetus to a whole realm of knowledge.

In the fields of psychology & psychotherapy, for example, many people never read a word that Freud ever said or wrote, but the countless others who have studied Freud & the work of those who came after him surround us in every corner of human curiosity & endeavor under the topics of motivation, creativity, personality, leadership, feelings, mental health, consciousness, human interaction, & the limitless subcategories into which these break down.

Because of the wider access to information & the freer sharing of it, books are read less & less than they were in the past. Even I, a lover of books & avid book reader to this day, spend much time listening to authors talk about their work & writings rather than actually reading them so as to employ my time in the kitchen more productively while preparing meals, eating, & cleaning up afterwards. Those living with others will have less of this, but they have the advantage of getting more varied perspectives about life & the infinite forms of experiences available to them that interacting over meals & the tasks of daily home life with others can introduce one to.

Avoiding the Classics & the Trodden Path

Expanding one’s horizons is the desired goal of those who refuse to take the recommended path, the required curriculum, the prescribed reading list. My escape from the confines of schooljails, culture, religion, tradition, & other inhibiting forces came through my hatred for & resistance to doing the required work & reading the so-called classics. Even now, my gut retches at having to learn what for all practical purposes were foreign languages in order to read & decipher whatever the hell it was that Beowulf, Shakespeare, & all the fancy poetry were about.

Poetry is often just a pretentious attempt at saying something in as complicated & secretive a way as possible so that one can keep it personal & accessible to only a tiny elite. It makes the poet feel taller than the unpoetic, feeds their sagging insecure egos, a problem too many people share. Instead, as a kid, I read murder mysteries at sea, Kon-Tiki, & the adventures of pioneers & explorers who inspired me to do more out of the ordinary myself.

If I hadn’t read these but had contented myself with the standard classics, I may have stood in the field that day & just watched the dust devil spinning from a distance instead of running across the field & experiencing the calm inside the whirling wall of dirt & leaves.

©Vytas Stoskus, 2024 www.stoskus.net/en/

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