Everywhere you go, always taking the learning with you

Well, today the weather was brilliant, a bit to brilliant, actually, but quite pleasant for an open-air reading club. In a shaded garden at a local bookstore, where kids were invited to meet a British writer, Claire Barker. A free event, with water, juice and drawing materials included.

Everybody was smiling, the lady in charge was personally welcoming every family as if she'd spent the last week wondering if you'd come and the children took their seats and started to draw as they were told the writer would like to take home some drawings made by Romanian fans.
The question that came to my mind is why are there so few events of this kind? Why is this not the standard of education?

Relaxed atmosphere, friendly staff, fun activities – this is what education should look like. What they did there for an hour is exactly the same children do at school – read something and talk about a character. Only in school, the text is selected by some cranky official at the ministry who hasn't seen an actual child in ages and the teacher has a list of points to cover, forced into the curriculum by the same official. In a classroom there's little time for free talk and children asking 'silly' questions.
The kids gathered for this event sat very quiet as the writer read the first chapter of the book, because that's why they were there for, of their own accord. (I asked my son several times if he wanted to go as it meant waking up earlier than usual and I was hoping he'd say no!)
After reading a few pages, the writer did not embark on a pompous speech about characters and personality traits. No, she invited the kids to help her create another character like the ghost-dog in her stories. Use their imagination, not give predetermined answers to set questions. A bit like reading and comprehension tests, but with an interesting text and fun questions.
I still have nightmares about the 'literary compositions' my daughter had to write when she was in public school. Like every autumn they had to write about the changing of seasons and describe the bloody Autumn Fairy all dressed in red and yellow as the falling leaves. Every year, the same thing.
A today's event, children were asked to decide how the ghost character came to die or make a list of 'happy smells' – like flowers or vanilla ice cream. (I was a bit hungry and I would've said doughnuts.)

Another striking difference – in schools kids spend most of their time waiting for the bell to ring. Not here – towards the end, kids were wandering around waiting for the book-signing to be over, as the author had promised to read a bit more from another volume, which was obviously not going to happen as they were obviously running late and the time was up.
Going back to my question – why aren't there more events like this, available to all the children? The obvious problem is money. Where would the money come from? The answer was not easy, but then it hit me. Governments already funds public education – why not change the face of that? What I have in mind is something similar to the free schools, the Sudbury type – pay teachers to host clubs and other less formal teaching activities. Everything can be made fun if you get a bit creative. And if they can't come up with a good and engaging format and kids drop out of their class, just dump them and hire somebody else. It's that simple!
I know it's wishful thinking at this point, but who knows with everything being decentralized, maybe we could apply that to education as well!

About the writer, Claire Barker – you can find some details here. The Knitbone Pepper series sounds fun, but we haven't read it yet.

Thanks for reading