An interesting thing happened the other day that affirmed my belief that learning happens best when driven by self-interest, when it's self-initiated, and when it's allowed to happen wherever and whenever the interest strikes. I was out with my wife R, son L, and two of his friends J (5 years old) and K (3 1/2 y.o.), and their mom. We were at an Upper West Side pizzeria, winding down after a nice afternoon in one of the playgrounds in Central Park. What follows is a brief description of a learning experience out "in the wild".

While we were eating, J, asked if you could get drunk from root beer. I said, "No, but you could get very gassy and burp a lot." That seemed to be a funny idea, and K gave us a nice demonstration of burping on demand, with J giving the commands to burp. Boys are funny. Once the excitement of the belching show died down, J asked what happens when you get drunk. I told him that alcohol makes it hard for your body to react to things quickly and you can get pretty giddy. I had to then define giddy, of course. He said it makes you dizzy. My wife R added that some people might say or do things they normally wouldn't do.

After a moment, J asked again, "but what happens when you get drunk." I paused for a moment and then asked him, "do you want to know what happens to your body when you drink so much alcohol that you get drunk?" He said yes. He seemed really curious, so I said that I thought that the alcohol produced chemical changes in your body, which effected your ability to do some things. I said I wasn't sure what happened specifically, so I took out my SideKick and suggested that we find out. I Googled for these terms physical physiological chemical effect alcohol. Luckily this set of results had some relevant looking pages. We found a page titled Alcohol, Chemistry and You: Effects of Ethyl Alcohol on Organ Function on ChemCases.com, a site described as a web-based resource of curriculum supplements for teaching general chemistry. I started to skim the page to get an idea of what happens when alcohol enters the bloodstream. Luckily the page included lots of illustrations I could use to point out what we were learning. The boys don't read yet.

I was able to understand enough after a skim to provide some high-level explanation of what happens when alcohol enters the body. I told them that it was describing what happened when you drink alcohol. I said it enters the blood stream in the body and that the chemicals in the alcohol act as a depressant, which means that it slows down your ability to do certain things. Then I pointed out the pictures.

I said, "this picture shows you the brain and the different parts of the brain. The different parts sort of talk to each other. This part of the brain tells you what the eye sees. This part of the brain tells your body how to move. If you see something and pick it up, those two parts of the brain are talking to each other in a way. The way they do that is by sending messages back and forth through neurons, which are sort of like electrical wires connecting the different parts of the brain to each other and to the rest of the body. I pointed out the next couple of picture.

This picture is showing you how your brain might talk to your hand to say, I want to move this finger. The message passes through those neurons from the brain to your finger.

I then skimmed a bit more and told them that special fluids in your body are used to help the messages get around in the brain. These fluids are changed somehow when alcohol is in your body. It sometimes becomes harder for parts of the brain to get those messages because other chemicals in the alcohol slow things down. I asked J if he "got it". He looked a bit confused and said "no". Then he had a glimmer in his eye and said, "it's like when a car that moves fast, has to move slower and slower," while moving his hands in the air, imitating a car. "Yes!" I said. It's like that car, which may have had all green lights, suddenly has all yellow lights. It has to slow down when it comes to each intersection, and it takes longer to get where it needs to go.

Of course, this is a major simplification, but the point was to help him satisfy his initial curiousity at some level with a high-level understanding of the effect of alcohol on the body. I told him that a lot more things happened in the body, and that we couldn't find out about them all in the pizzeria -- while skimming my Sidekick, eating a slice and having my son hang off my arm wanting to play games -- but that he could find out more if he went with his mommy to find books about it at the library. I was trying with the limited resources I had at the time to explain very simply the idea of alcohol as a depressant and think I was on the right track. But the amazing thing that happened was that J used the analogy of the car to further both of our understandings of "what happens" and actively engaged in a really interesting and meaningful dialogue with me.

How exciting it is to engage in an educational dialogue like this, both of us learning for the first time about the effect of alcohol on the body. Of course, we only focussed on one aspect of alcohol -- we didn't talk about the disinhibitory function much -- but we got to start our surface skimming of the topic. If the question were raised by my son, L, I think we could spend more time "finding out" more if he was still interested. He's only 3 now, so it's unlikely that this topic would mean much to him, but any number of topics could go the same route, e.g. how do steam engines work would be a good one, because we play with trains a lot.

This is the beauty of a participatory, self-directed education that happens outside of a school. Some people call it home schooling, others who teach at home but don't follow the rigors of such things as a curriculum call it unschooling. I'm not crazy about labels. I don't know if I would call it unschooling. I might call it "Life Education" or something. "Life-based learning" perhaps?. The idea of being an anti-schooler seems funny to me, although I know I participate in something like this. I'm not so much voting FOR Kerry as I am AGAINST Bush. I'm an Anti-Bush-Voter. Whatever. The idea for me is that with or without school, learning happens in life as the interest strikes you. It happens when you're reading, visiting a museum, watching a movie, playing a videogame. It even happens when you're drinking root beer and eating pizza with friends. This is the kind of stuff that makes learning fun. Well, one of the things anyway. And it needn't happen in a school!