Videos, Books, and Learning
The following question is one which has become more frequent among
homeschoolers in recent years, so I have decided to address it here.
Q: Do you provide any educational videos in your curriculum
to help the children learn?
A: No we do not. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of
all it would be expensive. But secondly, and most important, I don’t believe you can learn from videos even half as
effectively as from a good book.
The problem with learning from a video, or even from a presentation by
a real live teacher, is how people learn.
When a person is watching a video, he is the passive recipient of whatever is put on
the screen, and played through the speakers. There is a lot of information being displayed; visual and auditory.
And all this information is given in a steady stream that pulls the viewer along at the pace of the video. The
student’s mind doesn’t have a chance to think on its own. It is a seductive method of ‘learning’, because it
is easy--- the students mind doesn’t have to work to get the information, rather it is poured in.
The problem is that this information which is so easily received is just as easily
lost again. The work that we do when we learn something helps us to remember it.
When a student learns from a book instead of becoming a passive recipient to a video,
the student is the only active participant. The book is inactive. It only sits there. The student himself must pull
the information from the pages of the book, and when he does he must interpret that information for himself as
well. If there is something that he doesn’t immediately understand he is allowed to think about it. The book does
not move on without him, it waits patiently while the student actively learns.
This is why homeschool educational programs like the Robinson Curriculum and the
Eclectic Education Series are proving to be extremely effective, despite their extreme simplicity. Some people are
almost shocked when they see the contents of one of these curriculums. “It’s only books!” is the refrain. But that
is the value of it. In almost every case, if a person is intelligent they love to read. I would argue that the
reason they are intelligent is because they have learned to love to
read.
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