A Lesson in Self-Sufficiency
BevK February 16th, 2007
Shortly after I entered the fourth grade, my mother withdrew me from Minnesota’s public school system and set to teaching me on her own. For her, homeschooling was not an attempt to stall our inevitable separation, as it is for some parents. Rather, part of her competence as a teacher lay in her sense of when to leave me to chart the daily course, if not the greater trajectory, of my education on my own. Hers was a deliberate lesson in self-sufficiency: When the substance of my “homework” failed to satisfy, I was at liberty to educate myself at the local library. And if, on occasion, a difficult question perplexed even my mother, it was up to me to find the inspiration to move forward.
After five years at my dining room table, I enrolled at a formal high school. Certainly, I arrived deficient in some areas of knowledge, just as I was over-familiar with others, but I soon learned that my years of homeschooling, loosely structured and largely self-directed study had taught me early on the most important lesson of my academic career: that even the most skilled teacher is nothing without an able learner, and, moreover, that actively learning is miles away from passively “being taught.”
It is a lesson that the Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, whose report, released in late January, highlighted the sobering state of the College’s “culture of teaching,” would do well to note. By assigning the blame for Harvard’s pedagogical deficiencies wholly to the Faculty with scant mention of undergraduates and their own dismal culture of learning, the Task Force has failed to seize an opportunity of great magnitude.
Read more at the Harvard Crimson.
