Is Learning Fun? (Part 1)

What came first, the chicken or the egg?
If a tree falls in the forest, but no one was around to hear it, did it make a sound?
And now the next question of great importance:
Is learning fun? (Or should it be?)

I will answer it with a tale of two children.

The first child is two and she loves to climb stairs. She watches to see if the gate is open, and when it is, she makes a bee-line for the stairs and begins climbing them. Up, up, up, down, down, down. Only, she doesn't crawl up them on hands and knees, the safe way. Her tiny chubby legs put one foot in front of the other, and she scales those stairs upright. She hangs onto the wall, or the guardrail (if she can reach it). This two year old is working on a skill. She is learning to climb stairs like an adult. She works hard at it every chance she can get. She wears her mother out, who hovers, protects, and admonishes the last person who didn't close the gate. For this two year old, is learning fun? Absolutely!

The second child is six*. She knows her phonics sounds and can painstakingly sound out letters and blend those sounds into a single word. She is learning to read. Her mother brings out the phonics primer and the six year old groans. Not again! It's too hard! I don't like it. The mother tries to reason: don't you want to read books like a big kid? The six year old says "no". "Don't you know that you won't be able to make a living in this world without knowing how to read?" the mother asks. The six year old says "I don't care." The mother, exasperated, threatens "then someday you won't have a home and you will be a bum on the street because you didn't learn how to read". The six year old tells other people "I want to be a bum when I grow up, so that I don't have to learn how to read". For this six year old, is learning fun? Absolutely NOT!

So what is the difference? Why is learning fun to the two year old and not fun for the six year old? Does the mother have a responsibility to make learning fun for the six year old? So far, it doesn't look so good for the six year old. Her love of learning is being squashed, and any hope she has of finding joy in reading a good book is gone forever.

To be continued...
* this story is based on a real child, who is no longer six years old.