Names and Naming

Subjects: Fields of study, disciplines
OR : .......Underlings, subordinates, dependents

Well here we are on the subject of Learning and how that relates (if it does) to Subjects.

An academically-minded friend once said something that sounded very wise: When you can name something, you can own it. Or something to that effect. He was going to Wake Forest Seminary School at the time.

Since starting the journey of motherhood, I no longer believe many things that once sounded so wise.

Like most children, Karl learned to walk, sample a wide variety of foods, make choices about where he wanted to be and what he wanted to be doing, and to make his decisions well understood to others. All before being able to talk well or at all or to name anything. You don't need to say you're walking or eating in order to master the acts.

Since I began deschooling I found that I don't need to call something "Reading, 'Riting, or 'Rithmetic" in order to own it.

In list discussions, I've related the story about how grades and assessments dogged me during my school career in the so-called area of Reading. The final assessment for Reading when I graduated high school said that my comprehension was not up to my grade level. This with a great SAT score. I'm still wondering how I did well on the SAT with the reading comprehension I had. It's a mystery. Maybe that SAT was just a fluke. I could certainly think of it that way.

I can name the subject Reading all day long and think I was quite capable of reading almost anything in the English language and still not have it be "mine" according to someone else's assessment.

By the same token, I can do all kinds of things without once figuring out the exact category it fits into. How do we pigeonhole purposedly basking in the sun or going to the bathroom? Maybe those are things we can do without Learning anything.

Subjects are not evil. But they are fluid, relative and arbitrary when externally applied. Almost anything a person can know or do can be useful to oneself in lots and lots and lots of applications. We naturally may gravitate toward a lot of naming and categorization so that we can remember it later for something else. Other things, we don't bother tabbing or filing away because we use it so much.

In academic settings, you can put pretty much anything under tons of subject headings, depending on the viewpoint or the different kind of expert who is coming up with the name of something. When reading about astronomy in college or university, probably no one bothers to call it Reading anymore but instead it's named Astronomy or Stargazing or Mythology or Zodiac or Spirtuality of the Native American (or Greek/ Roman or African or other ethnic...). The subjects get more and more specialized the further beyond grade school we get. I took a course called Native American Art which could have just as easily have been called History or Sociology or Religion or any number of other things.

Some course names don't fit the content very well. An English course I once took in Irish Literature was almost totally about Politics and History with very little Literature referred to. Some students felt cheated of their literature.

In the same way, we may describe outloud our children's interest with numbers as Math. They might feel cheated of what they were experiencing as simply numbers or counting. When thumbing through a Dr. Seuss book, our children may not welcome hearing that they're reading or may treat such words as distractions, feeling that the subject Reading has nothing to do with thumbing through a book. Can we read the pictures or are we just looking at the words or just noticing how the pages land after being leafed through?

Often subject areas have more to do with credentials for learning than anything concrete. Defining the learning taking place is an attempt to feel that something is being accomplished. At home, we don't need a system to justify funds and such, a system that is the source of much stress and anxiety. Stress on children who want to learn and also, lest we forget, stress for those who hope to facilitate learning has a way of stripping the fun out and leaving a trail of dry boring words.

Talking about subjects in the home de-emphasizes the experience of the child who would rather play with anything and everything in life. No experience really needs to be categorized, unless you want to separate learning from not learning, which after all can't be done. Very much the point of Learn Nothing Day is realizing that it's impossible to avoid learning even when we think we're doing nothing.

Thinking of myself as a provider of specific grains and bits of information to cover required subjects for my child is daunting. By releasing myself from the duty of naming each piece of knowledge, especially in his hearing, what Karl gathers is his from the beginning and remains his to use and categorize (or not) as he sees fit. And I avoid interrupting his stuff with my stuff.

The silver lining behind this cloud of unknowing is realizing that I too can live my life without naming what I'm doing and still have so much that's mine, even if I don't call it Learning.