Why parents should learn to VCoL
Unless parents can afford to send their children to exceptional schools, the way their children learn in school is likely to slow or stall their long-term development and interfere with their natural love of learning.
Definitions
VCoL — VCoL is a cycle of goal setting, information seeking, application, and reflection. Its +7 skills include reflectivity, awareness, seeking and evaluating information, making connections, applying knowledge, seeking and working with feedback, and recognizing and overcoming built-in biases.
VCoLs engage the whole learner. By this, we mean that they engage learners emotionally, physically, and intellectually, leveraging both conscious and unconscious mental processes. They ensure that new knowledge is integrated into existing knowledge in a way that makes it useful and “sticky.” They also make learning lots more fun by recruiting the brain’s natural motivational cycle.
Conventional school—school in which (a) all students in a given grade are expected to learn specific mandated content, and (b) correctness is considered to be evidence of learning.
Exceptional school—school in which (a) content is viewed as a vehicle through which students build basic life skills, (b) curricula are designed to meet the learning needs of every student, (c) correctness is considered to be insufficient evidence of learning, and (d) there’s a whole lot of VCoLing going on.
Facts about conventional schooling
The evidence indicates that:
First, by grade 3, most students attending conventional schools have lost their inborn passion for learning. The mechanism that ensures we learn to walk and talk is recruited extremely well by games, the media, and advertising—not so much by education.
Second, by grade 12, students in conventional schools are up to 5 years behind students in exceptional schools, based on the complexity level of their reasoning as measured with the LRJA (a measure of the sophistication of people’s thinking and interpersonal skills). After taking economic status into account, students in conventional schools are about 2.5 years behind students in exceptional schools. Learn more.
Third, too many students in conventional schools aren’t learning deeply enough to apply, much less understand, what they’re learning. They’ve learned enough to get the right answer, but not enough to build the robust, usable knowledge that provides the foundation for future learning and development. After several years of memorizing without understanding, the development of many students stalls. This severely disadvantages both students and society. Learn more.
Fourth, conventional schools teach children many things that are not useful in life. For example:
- Understanding means getting the right answer.
- All that really matters is getting the right answer.
- Intelligence = knowing a lot of right answers.
- You will be punished (with a lower grade) if you get a wrong answer.
- Wrong answers are shameful.
- Learning is boring.
VCoL to the rescue
Teaching parents how to VCoL not only helps them re-connect with their own passion for learning, it also equips them with knowledge and skills they can pass on to their children to rekindle their love of learning while protecting them from some of the damaging effects of conventional schooling.
You can learn to VCoL in ViP (VCoL in practice) or by following the guidelines on LecticaLive, in the VCoL lecture, and in relevant Medium articles.
