Lifelong learning together

So I’m walking across the living room with an open book, and my 11-year-old son asks me what I’m doing. I tell him I’m writing a blog post, and show him the picture of Elizabeth Eckford in 1957, walking to school amidst an angry crowd following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and as I’m trying to explain this history to a homeschooled white kid living in a (somewhat) racially mixed neighborhood and attending a (somewhat) racially mixed church, and talking about prejudice and laws and the problems of division of resources and the Court’s ruling that “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” his twin brother rushes in from the kitchen and says, “Hey, are you dishing out BOF without me!?”

BOF stands for Brain On Fire, and it is our family’s term for the state of passionate engagement with complex ideas. BOF happens when you try to communicate important, real world information to novice learners without oversimplifying its relationship to everything else, i.e. without dumbing it down intellectually or ideologically.

BOF happens when my kids ask complicated questions before bedtime so Dad will delay sending them to bed, or when a child can’t sleep because he is wondering how the spider DNA could combine with Peter Parker’s, or when a child’s passion for baseball inspires his mother to visit a museum exhibit that ignites in her a passion for the game. It’s part of the culture at our house, and one of the reasons we homeschool. It is the raw material of our learning, which we shape into unit studies, reading lists, and field trips. BOF powers our children’s education and our own continuing education. (As a family, we will probably be spending some time surfing the Civil Rights Digital Library year by year. As parents, and as friends of adoptive and non-adoptive inter-racial families, we will be keeping up with the Anti-Racist Parent blog. And maybe we’ll even read Blood Done Sign My Name out loud with the kids.)

BOF is not just for homeschoolers, of course; it can be nurtured between parents and children wherever they are willing to help one another learn. Kirsten Keller (over at This Mommy Gig) nurtures BOF intentionally with her son. And, yes, even the structures of the Educational Industrial Complex can’t stop a passionate, gifted professional classroom teacher from igniting BOF in his or her students.^[1] More and more in our networked world, BOF is an powerful guide for learning. When high quality expertise is just a few links away, why sit in a box and wait for someone to feed it to you? If you’ve got the passion, why not chase down the knowledge yourself? The homeschool community (among many others!) is figuring out how to properly support the pursuit of knowledge, even when it means letting go of the old “knowledge-transfer” structures.

Which brings us back to prejudice. Read More »

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1. “Star teachers have not come to rescue the system. Actually, they do not expect much from the system—except for the likelihood that it may worsen. They focus on making their students successful in spite of the system,” writes Martin Haberman in Star Teachers of Children in Poverty. [↩]