Learning Without Subjects

School subjects are one way of organizing and relating to information. Necessary for schools, perhaps, but not always conducive to deep learning outside the classroom.

This world is a magical and mysterious place. There is incomprehensible complexity to life. We need creative minds from each emerging generation to make new and exciting connections. There are discoveries upon discoveries yet to be made. Is breaking the world down into subjects the best way to help children discover the world? 

School takes children away from the real world and places them in cinder block classrooms. It breaks the unfathomable magic of life down into things called subjects. Math, Science, English, Social Studies. School operates under the assumption that each subject is a puzzle piece. Each year the teachers hand out various pieces to the puzzle, and the students collect them. If you put all the pieces together you have knowledge in its entirety, and you are thus educated.

School resorts to subjects out of necessity. It actually makes a lot of sense if you are trying to maintain order among hundreds of children of various ages, all while trying to be sure they acquire some semblance of an education. It all comes of a need to prove learning. Having grades in each subject lets the adults see on paper that the child has “learned” (or at least retained in short-term memory) a nice balance of knowledge. It makes a great deal of logistical sense for schools to do this, given the large numbers of kids they are trying to manage. Schools need subjects. You don’t. 

The thing is, your home is not a school, nor should be it be. If you don’t put your kids in school, you can choose to never utter a word about subjects. You are free. Free to make new and interesting connections with your kids. Even if you live somewhere that requires you to record your life in subject form for the state, that’s really all they can make you do. Go ahead and record everything by subject, and then live your life however you see fit. Feel free to reverse engineer the system. Live well first, and record second. There really is Math, and English, and Science (and more!) everywhere you look, in almost everything you and your kids do. It’s not hard to find. The basics are called the basics for a reason. If you live life well with your kids, they won’t miss them. Eventually they will need them, or want to learn them, and then they will learn them. It just likely won’t look like 45 min of math until the bell rings. Remember your teachers telling you, “You’ll need this one day!” It’s true. They very well might. And so, they will learn it when they need it. Because they are capable and interested human beings. And they will do so without ever having been forced through an arbitrary curriculum.

Perhaps your child is a deep diver. A specialist. They take a liking to something and go all in. Diving down to the bottom of the thing and exploring all the informational shipwrecks and emotional coral reefs they can find. They like dogs? Your life now revolves around dogs. The training of dogs, the medical care of dogs, the service work of dogs, the breeding and rescuing of dogs, dogs throuought history, drawing pictures of dogs, writing a story about a dog, cooking your own dog food. That’s math, biology, basic science, reading, art, history, spelling, P.E. and english right there. Plus about a dozen more subjects I’m sure. Maybe they deep dive for a month or so and move on, maybe they circle back to the topic later, maybe not. Let them dive, and come up for air in their own time. 

Maybe your child is a multipotentialite. They skim the surface of a dozen different interests at any given time. That’s cool, too. Do you notice an overarching theme in their interests? Maybe, maybe not. The key is to get really curious about your child. Get to know them. Maybe you will see in time that all of their seemingly dissimilar interests really had to do with building, or biology, or helping people, or animals, or water, or words, or travel or any other number of interesting things. And what a gift it is to give your children the time to explore all these different interests when they are young; the time to sort them in their own way, and to draw conclusions we might have never guessed. 

My own favorite way of learning about the world is through people. I enjoy a good biography, and I love getting to know people in person. In school I would avoid my work to read a biography under my desk. I was, of course, chastised repeatedly. Today, when I read my kids a picture book biography, are they learning history, math, art, or english? Does it matter? It only matters if I’m tracking their learning in order to prove that it’s happening. You can gain a deep understanding about all of these subjects by getting to know many individual human beings. And still, this is just one way to gather knowlege. 

Perhaps the best way to teach students is not to divide the day out into subjects punctuated by bells. Any teacher with a brain knows that locking children into cinder block rooms and force-feeding them predetermined information that has been broken down into subjects is not the ideal. Most teachers advocate for more time out in the world with their students. They strive to help the kids make new and interesting connections. But they too often fail, by no fault of their own, because the system will not allow it. I think most decent teachers would agree that the best way to educate a child is to take the time to become well aquatinted, and to work with the child on an individual level. This is a luxury not afforded to teachers in school. Take advantage of this in your home. Forget subjects. Get to know your kids. 

Once you stop seeing subjects as a necessary part of learning, a whole new world opens up to you. There are so many ways to learn about the world. More so than even the auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and literature based styles often touted in psychology circles. Zoom out. Dividing information into subjects is just one way of organizing information. And it it usually used for the ease of the person tracking the learning, not for the learner themselves. Your child could learn about the whole universe without ever coming across the idea that Math is separate from Art which is separate from Physical Education, which is, of course, entirely separate from History. And if they were to do this, they might make new, wonderful and exciting connections. Just imagine the depth of feeling in exploring the world in this way. Imagine the joy in discovery. 

Let us return the children to the world. Forget subjects. Let us trust the magic of their minds.