Every Waking Hour

Kevin, my husband, has gotten into model railroad building. Because the landscape he’s building takes up a floor space of 6 by 9, the enthusiasm has definitely put its footprint on our family life. Add in plenty of reading aloud from hobby magazines, DVD “how to”s, fascinating little boxes the UPS brings, and slow but discernible progress — yesterday he roughed out the landscape and today, to Aidan’s wild joy, he has a proto-railway up with a train GOING on it. You end up with a natural unit study that includes almost everything you could possibly want for adventure and imagination and craftwork.

Kevin was just reading to me about kitbashing, as it applies to railway model building. So it’s funny that this post at Dewey’s Treehouse, called Kitbashing, a Way of Life came up on my Google Reader just as I was thinking about my husband’s new
obsession, hmm, hobby and how it relates to our family way of learning.

Here is an article on Kitbashing as Philosophy.

Kitbashing started with model enthusiasts, who were eager to create models of things not already commercially available. So they would take parts of several commercial model kits and “bash” them together to make their dream model. This might be as simple as customizing a staid family car model with parts from a dragster, or as complex as creating something never seen before in any form. The original Star Wars X-Wings are an example of a rather involved kitbash, being made from pieces taken from model ships, tanks, planes and other pieces the fabricators had lying around. Thus, kitbashing is the art of taking elements of what’s readily available and making something of your own from it. Kitbashes on my webpage vary from simple repaints to major rebuilding projects.

and Mama Squirrel has some more links to other articles that explain the concept.

This reminds me a bit of an article I once read, that stated that one of the most important skills that kids would need in the new millenium were the skills to adapt and make new things out of components of the old. (It was similar to this article
Future of Education (pdf) but I don’t think that is the same one.

Anyway, this article has a progressive note but you could as easily call it a return to earlier days when formal education wasn’t quite as stratified and institutionalized as it is now. The basic idea is that classrooms need to change so that they more accurately reflect the “real world” that we live in, where synergy and synthesizing and evaluating are more crucial than the reflexive conformity and low-level utilitarianism valued by the German model of education that our public school system adopted early in the last century.

Of course, the homeschool is naturally a great laboratory for this “real world” learning and flexibility. You don’t have to change much in your homeschool to make it a great training ground for flexibility and creative cognition. Usually the major project is to examine your own internal model of education which is often a relic of the conformism and non-reflective assimilation of your own schooling.

The term “kitbashing” isn’t a very pretty. But it does describe something about the way I homeschool — call it eclectic if you want, and in some ways it is, but the bits and pieces I pull together have a design behind them. I pull in this and that, not randomly (at least, I try not to be TOO random) — but according to the result I want, which is to have kids who can reflect and learn throughout life, who can make good choices in the unknown future in which they will live.

Mama Squirrel points out that there is another aspect to this.

The inverse of this philosophy is missing out by not being able to see the parts, just the whole.

She goes on to give several examples of times when buyers of crafts will pass over a steeply discounted kit, for example, because they are looking for the pieces and don’t realize that the pieces they want are included in the kit at a better price.

I know that I tend sometimes to discard some educational method that might benefit my homeschool because I happen not to buy into the package it happens to be in. I am trying to learn to consider the “part”, whether it is valuable in itself, even if the whole shebang definitely doesn’t suit my family. Even some “schooly” ideas can be useful to my eclectic-unschooly goals, and contrarily, of course, unschooly ideas often have great value in my educational aspirations for my kids. The job is to keep my eyes on what is useful and valuable and not get distracted by the elements of the kit I don’t need right now, or somehow box myself into the kit, thinking I have to do it just the way it is laid out by someone else.

So as my husband’s railroad takes shape in our loft, it takes shape as a bit of a paradigm as well.