Learning happens everywhere, not just in classrooms

During lockdown my youngest son was meant to be logged into school.

He wasn’t.

Getting him to sit at a screen was a battle. The lessons were slow, detached, and full of pauses that made time drag. The moment the call ended he would bolt for the garden and straight back to whatever the lesson had interrupted.

He built cushion forts, designed parachutes for his Lego figures, organised snail races, dug a pond, drew comics, and devoured books. The contrast was impossible to ignore.

The computer drained him. Real life lit him up.

His curiosity was still intact. His learning hadn’t been boxed in yet.

It was different with my eldest. He had become a school refuser, anxious and completely shut down. It took months of safety and connection before trust returned. Watching his spark fade was one of the hardest things I have ever experienced.

Through both my sons, I saw the same pattern play out in different ways. School had taught one of them to fear getting it wrong, and the other to disconnect when learning lost its meaning. Neither of them was thriving inside that system.

Their curiosity returned only when pressure was replaced by trust.

We’ve built a system that treats children as empty buckets and adults as the ones who decide what to pour in. We still talk about learning as something that must be evidenced and measured, when in truth the deepest learning is messy, emotional, and impossible to plot on a chart.

Real learning makes you angry, frustrated, elated, and proud. It’s stop–start and is definitely not linear. You quit and come back years later. You fail, try again, and suddenly it makes sense. That’s how humans learn.

When a child feels safe and seen, they can dive in, make a mess, and find out what they are capable of. When they love something, they will push through discomfort without being told to.

And when adults start paying attention, we begin to learn again too.

Through my children I have learned more about politics, ecology, and creativity than I ever did at school. Their interests became mine. Their courage made me braver.

We are surrounded by opportunities to learn if we stop assuming they only count when they happen in a classroom. Podcasts, books, nature, conversations and mistakes, they all teach us something if we stay open.

Maybe education isn’t about preparing children for life. Maybe it is life, the daily act of noticing, experimenting and growing.

What might change if we trusted that learning is happening all the time, even when it doesn’t look like school?