How Schools Kill the Joy of Learning

Want to ruin your kid’s passion for learning?

Easy.

Ask them to explain their favourite thing in education speak.

“That’s a great story about the world’s most poisonous frog! Now, can you tell me what the verb is in that sentence?”

Congratulations.

You’ve just killed the moment.

We Didn’t Set Out to Homeschool

We didn’t have a curated lesson plan or a philosophical dream of alternative education.

We had two kids, Chalk and Cheese, whose love of learning was being quietly strangled by a system that wasn’t built for how they actually think, move, question, and create.

It broke our hearts.

How to Strangle Curiosity in 3 Easy Steps:

1. Make them stop talking so you can check their grammar.

2. Ask for a worksheet instead of a real world example.

3. Force them to regurgitate a term they’ve never needed to care about.

We’ve all done it.

It’s not malicious.

It’s just conditioning.

Somewhere along the way, we confused real learning with ticking the right boxes in the right format.

But here’s the thing no one really says:

If they’re using it right, they already understand it.

Our kids might not be able to name a verb, but they sure know how to yell one across the house.

They know how to tell a story, build an argument, persuade, explain, they just don’t always know the technical labels.

At nine and eleven years old, does it matter more that they can name a simile?

Or that they’re passionately creating worlds, arguing ideas, playing with language in ways that actually means something to them?

What We're Doing Instead

We didn’t become radical free spirits overnight.

(Total respect to those who do. It’s an art.)

We stumbled into a weird hybrid of setting the stage, following the sparks, and getting out of the way when magic actually happened.

Here’s what we changed:

We Gave Up "Subjects." We Focused On Function.

English? Became communication — reading, writing, speaking, listening, however it made sense to them.

Maths? Patterns, logic, and problem-solving — hidden in Pokémon stats, baking recipes, and Dungeons & Dragons.

We stopped asking, “What’s the content?”

And started asking, “What’s the point?”

Because asking a kid who’s just built a Lego city with full plumbing and an emergency alien invasion plan to now write a persuasive text with three paragraphs and a rhetorical question?

It’s like inviting someone to cook, and forcing them to write a five-paragraph essay about the ingredients before they’re allowed to touch the stove.

No wonder they weren’t interested.

We Realised: Stop Labelling. Start Living.

We realised we were labelling everything instead of living it.

A kid doesn’t need to define an adverb to tell a brilliant story.

They don’t need to name "narrative structure" to build an entire Minecraft world, complete with lore, conflict, and character arcs.

The doing comes first.

The labels, if they ever matter, can come later.

We Let Interest Lead

But Set the Stage

We didn’t abandon structure completely. We just changed what it looked like.

We set up the house like an inspiration trap:

Books, puzzles, dice, building kits, art supplies, science experiments.

Left in plain sight.

Casual but deliberate.

Curiosity baited.

Opportunity laid.

Then we backed off.

We made learning available, not demanded.

We Stopped Caring About Arbitrary Timelines

Some things clicked early.

Some things are still cooking.

Either way — they’re learning.

Their way. Their time.

Two Kids, Two Completely Different Learning Styles

Chalk and Cheese aren’t just cute nicknames.

They’re as different as north and south, destined to clash, but somehow, it still works.

Chalk:

• ADHD brain: thrives on movement, novelty, excitement.

• Needs learning to feel like a game or a challenge.

• Short bursts. Immediate rewards.

• "You’ve got 10 minutes to build a working catapult out of junk!" — YES.

• "Fill in this worksheet quietly for 30 minutes." — NOPE.

  
  

Cheese:

• PDA/Autistic brain: demands autonomy and control.

• Will deep dive into a topic for hours — but only if it’s his idea.

• Hates demands. Hates "tasks." Hates being told what to do.

• "Here's a pile of random science stuff if you're curious" = maybe.

• "Here’s a science assignment" = immediate shutdown.

  
  

We had to find a way that worked for both of them, not force both of them into one way.

It Wasn’t Our Kids Who Failed at School

School didn’t kill their love of learning because they were "difficult."

It killed it because, for them, education stopped being about lighting fires and became about ticking boxes.

Our kids weren’t broken. They were trying to survive an education system that prizes measurable outcomes over actual thinking.

A system where creativity, autonomy, and critical thought have been buried under behaviour charts, standardised testing, and political targets.

And it’s not just kids like ours.

Most kids are missing out.

School teaches kids to perform learning, not live it.

Analyse books they didn’t choose.

Write essays they don’t care about.

Memorise facts for tests they’ll forget by Thursday.

And all the while, real curiosity, passion and discovery are quietly buried under a pile of rubrics.

Schools Know Real Learning Happens Outside the Classroom

Here’s the funny thing:

Traditional schools know real world learning matters more than theory.

That’s why they plan excursions, camps, zoo visits, museum trips.

Because no matter how many worksheets you do, there’s nothing like standing in a museum, walking through the bush, building a robot, or getting your hands on the real thing.

They know lived experience is more powerful than theory.

It’s just that, somewhere along the way, we decided real learning had to be rationed out, a ‘special event’ instead of the everyday norm.

But kids?

Kids learn by doing, seeing, arguing, building, wrecking it, fixing it, feeling it.

Not by memorising terms for a test.

What Real Learning Looks Like

Sorting Pokémon cards? That’s data analysis, classification, and probability.

Minecraft storytelling? That’s narrative structure, spatial reasoning, and planning.

Ranting about why their plush Pikachu should never be put in the washing machine?

That’s a persuasive argument. A good one, too.

But none of those things look like school.

Which means, to the untrained eye, they’re not “real learning.”

And that’s exactly how we lose them.

Not because they’re incapable, but because we’re asking them to speak a language they never agreed to learn.

We’re not trying to win at education.

We’re just trying to protect the spark that was always theirs to begin with.

Because when you strip away the tests, the grades, the labels what’s left is what matters:

Curiosity. Connection. Growth.